Stories of the Serpent (1,808 words)
Author: Plilt
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Across the skies of the Stormlands, they know nothing of serpents. The people there, the cloud-chasers, are vast filterfeeders, easily a hundred spans wide. Though they make few tools, they are wise scholars who watch the cyclings of the winds and the stars. They scar themselves with freezing helium rain to record their knowledge on their very skins. The cloud-chasers have demonstrated, with mathematical precision, that it is quite impossible for life to arise anywhere but on another gas giant. Terrestrial planets simply lack the volatility that life requires. They are too small for chance to favor abiogenesis.
Serpents, therefore, do not exist. The speculations by wild dreamers that, on other planets, long, thin organisms might burrow through solid matter are just that—speculations. The cloud-chasers who claim to have projected their consciousness to other worlds and seen these beings are delusional or liars.
But after the most violent storms—the ones that send dozens of cloud-chasers spiraling towards the crushing depths—pass, the cloud-chasers whisper tales of their compatriots' fate over electromagnetic fields. They have gone to the realm of the dead, they say, far within the Stormland's core. But there is no rest of them there. Instead, they are catalogued by the Lord of the Depths, who hoards all the knowledge of the dead. The afterlife is neither paradise nor hell, but a vast field of carefully arranged hides.
The brave—or the foolhardy, perhaps—sometimes plunge as deep as they can, before hydrogen toxicity kills them, to try and reach out to the Lord of the Depths and ask questions of him. Few return. It's said that most petitioners are taken by the Lord of the Depths and added to his collection before they can ask a single question. Only a few ask their questions and escape intact, and these report strange visions: Space twisted in on itself, pockets where the air is still, places where gravity is absent or turned on its side.
The cloud-chasers could, it's agreed, avoid being collected by the Lord of the Depths simply by keeping their skin clean. He's not interested in them, just the knowledge on their skins. But death is inevitable, and to the cloud-chasers it is better to fly beautifully for a brief time than to wander unrecognized for an eternity.
In the Lands of the Conqueror Worm, they say that the Worm once had a brother, one who whispered into its ears that its wants were folly. Over and over again he told it to abandon the path of war, for it would surely die. But never did the Worm listen. Indeed, they say, the Worm struck against its brother long before it created its kingdom of rot. It spurned his wisdom and supped on his flesh, thinking that by consuming his essence it could grow powerful enough to conquer a pantheon.
The brother survived, but only just, and slithered into dark lands beneath the earth, fearing what might follow. But the Conqueror Worm put its brother out of its mind and turned its gaze to the heavens. The rest, of course, is history.
Except for the postscript. Because they also say that long after the Worm finally died from the spear plunged into its back, when vast stretches of land had become inimical to life itself and it seemed as if the entire world would drown in the Worm's blood, strange springs appeared across the world, like venom bubbling up from the rock. There, and only there, the people found refuge. The rot never spread to the springs' shores, and their waters could return life to the wormlands.
The Emerald Hegemony have no legends of their own, not any more. Those they hear are, except for exceptional cases, swiftly forgotten. Most of their worlds are sterile; the only inscriptions are functional. But the core of their territory is littered with the remains of a long history. There are mausoleums and monuments, dating from long before their transformation into the present form. What remains is scarred by war and worn away by time. The Hegemony still inhabits those planets. Many of them walk within sight of those ruins every day. Yet they care nothing for them, and this apathy is the only thing that's preserved them. They could destroy them; the Hegemony is quite meticulous. But unnecessary destruction is a waste of time and energy.
If you could walk on those worlds, you'd see the same motif on many murals within great buildings of a long obsolete warship-grade alloy, with windows of diamond. A vast four-headed serpent, stretching across the galaxies towards the Milky Way. From eight fangs drip venom, and below are clustered each of the four species of the Hegemony. The Xevion soak in it, drinking the precious fluid through their skin. A great colony of Uthraan dwells in a basin, the venom running over them like a waterfall and pooling around them. Yhranc clamber up rocks to get even a little closer to the serpent's fangs. The Mkeun wrestle over each other to sip mere droplets of the venom.
If you could walk on those worlds, you might see that these buildings, though corroded and etched by acid rain, are the youngest ruins remaining, and a skilled archaeologist would know at once that they are millennia old. They're scattered throughout Hegemony cities, surrounded by modern buildings of bone and sinew. Perhaps what came after was replaced with the Hegemony's modern bustling metropoli.
Perhaps what came after was erased. For on some of the murals, someone's changed the imagery. The serpent is painted over, absent. The figures below are splashed with green and sickly yellow. If you could walk on those worlds, you might see that that graffiti is the most recent that remains within the territory of the Hegemony.
If you could walk on those worlds, you might have a glimmer of insight into how the Hegemony became what it is today.
But you can't walk on those worlds. No one but the Hegemony ever will, and they don't spare even a glance for their history. Eventually, the ruins will finally crumble, and all trace of them will vanish from the cosmos.
The Hand speaks a million stories from a thousand mouths. The Serpent is their leader, one says, and whispers to them from the depths of the Library. Another shouts them down—they have no leaders; the Serpent is just an exemplar, someone to emulate but not to obey, a Wanderer throughout the cosmos. A third tells both that the Serpent doesn't even exist. The Hand merely took an animal that's unfairly maligned as a symbol.
Many others sit in the corner, puzzled by the argument; they've never really thought beyond the name.
On Blorsk, they say that the Serpent dwelled in the ocean and was a patron to the people of the coasts. Her bulk offered them shelter from the monsoons. When she slithered, she carved paths through the mangroves for their ships to pass through. The fish sought shelter from her close to shore, becoming easy prey for the nets of fishers. When she stirred in her slumber, rough spheres of metal washed onto shore.
The people of the shore used these gifts skillfully, but not wisely. They built vast towers that any storm would easily topple. Their ships grew increasingly large and laden with goods until they could scarcely move. The fish were devoured with no thought paid to their numbers. And they used the spheres of metal to build vast machines of steel which poisoned the coast.
But the Serpent did not leave. She whispered secrets into the ears of the rulers of the steel cities, telling them of new alloys to reinforce their towers, of new engines that could send ships speeding across the sea, of algal farms that would grow enough food to sustain themselves while the fisheries regenerated, of new chemicals that would neutralize poison in both water and air.
The people of the shore turned these gifts to wicked ends. They warred amongst themselves, building vast fortresses and fleets. They kidnapped the peoples of the rivers and kept them as slave-armies, feeding them algal gruel while they ate fish themselves. They used poison against cities, sure in their ability to clean up the damage afterwards. They fought and they fought until only one city remained, ruling over an empire of wastes.
Still the Serpent did not leave them. She showed the people of the rivers the ways to hidden paths that crisscrossed the stars. She told them of grand cities, of eldritch plains of grass, of places where the stars are crimson, of places where forests shift before your very eyes. She told them of Carcosta, of the Wailing City, of the Immortal Empire.
The people of the rivers used these gifts as best they could. They scattered across the cosmos, seeking refuge for themselves and help for those back home. But the Immortal Empire held no mercy in their hearts for the people of the river. When the star-people descended to Blorsk, they only wanted the river people's dead.
Then, the Serpent did leave Blorsk. Her tears would have poisoned the ocean with salt, but there was no longer any life to call it home.
The Desert, that eternal backwater, has lots of snakes. But the Caravan only tells stories about one—Iyuda, Grandfather Serpent himself. Iyuda, it's said, crawls on his belly opposite the Caravan. When they're in Yearhome, he's near the plains. When they're crossing through the Pyandor Reach, Grandfather Serpent's in the karst fields. His square clay scales are scribed with words from across the Desert, across the sea, and across the plains, and as he rubs up against the pinnacle karst, against the badlands, against rock outcroppings, they're tugged free. Only later does the Caravan come across them.
None of the people of the Desert know what the words on the scales mean, but they're all ringed with the image of a serpent. It's said that if anyone could track down Grandfather Serpent, he could decipher the writing on the scales. But the Caravan is always on time. The Desert itself ensures it. So the Caravan can never catch up with Grandfather Serpent. They've hired the best trackers to try and find him, but they find nothing or vanish into the Desert.
They don't ever seem to die, though. No one's ever found bodies, and when they vanish, sometimes they leave behind trails. Tracks head across the dunes, fur is caught on karst, silk trails lead down mountains, but abruptly the trails just end. There's no sign of misfortune, no sign of disorientation. They must have gone somewhere, but no one knows where. The afterlife? The sky-world? Perhaps Grandfather Serpent himself spirited them away to some distant place.
All these legends are truth. All these legends are lies.