When I was a child, my mother told me about the Monument. She spoke of a field of gargantuan black thorns embedded in black rock in the hottest part of the Great Desert. She spoke of messages from our foremothers carved into the stone that grew hot enough to burn flesh under the watchful eye of the sun. She spoke in hushed tones of great queens entombed under the slab, of treasures untold secreted away by a civilization long gone. Stories, of course. Nothing more.
Our predecessors blessed us with gifts. They left us their towers to shelter us and keep us warm. They left us their machines to magnify our strength a thousandfold. They left us their libraries, pictures, and art for our best and brightest to untangle the ciphers of their scripts and languages. They left us the Monument. Nobody knew why.
Two hundred forty cycles had passed after my birth when I first saw the Monument with my own eyes. It seemed to swallow up the sunlight it was bathed in, a jagged black shape like a fissure in the cracked ground. Upon its surface no plants grew and no beasts walked. As I gazed from the top of the tallest tower, its surface wavered in the heat like a great stygian darkness I could dive into and never return.
They called it a thing of ugliness, but I saw beauty in its dulled obsidian facets. There was beauty in the defiance of nature, of order, of logic. Where others saw wretchedness, I saw the work of a visionary. A testament to our predecessors’ triumph over the world and the sun above and the ground below.
I knew that blessings come in many shapes and sizes. This was a challenge posed by the ancients, a challenge to venture into the spiky field and claim their greatest secrets. With one hand wrapped around a beam and the other reaching toward the horizon, I took upon myself a solemn purpose, a vow with no witness.
The elders had always told us not to venture into the Monument. But they knew nothing.
At first, the seed of my ambition failed to find fertile ground. My people shunned me in the streets and turned me away at the councils. They would not let me speak in the halls of the universities, so I conducted my sermons under veil of shadow. It was in the moonlit husks of rooms long abandoned that I found my first pupil.
His name was Red-Mountain-Sunlight, and he was forty cycles younger than I. His eyes were bright and yellow and his fur was a brilliant red and I saw in him a kindred spirit. In the mornings, we would sit among the ruins and speculate on the nature of the Monument and the society that came before us as a whole. I must have been his closest friend as well as his trusted mentor, thinking back. He never spoke of where he came from or went home to at the end of the day.
He was a talented orator, and it was his advocacy that ultimately bore fruit. Young scholars, adventurers, and opportunists alike joined our ranks in at first a trickle, then a torrent. What had been an intimate mentorship swelled to a secret society of believers in a hollowed-out stone shell that might have once housed thousands. Red-Mountain-Sunlight did the talking, but I was the architect of our grand design behind the curtain.
Our first transgression was sending scouts out into the cool desert night to visit the Monument. They mapped the field, reproduced the ancient inscriptions, and took samples of the black stone. All things we would have been exiled for if we were caught. Rumors of our actions percolated through the dense city, but we maintained enough plausible deniability to shield us from the most damning accusations. It took a coordinated effort and a considerable portion of our resources to maintain the facade, but thankfully Red-Mountain-Sunlight’s charisma extended to matters deceptive. Without him, work on the machine would never have even begun.
We disassembled the rusting hulks of ancient devices and grafted them together like they were part of the same ramshackle body. We tore out their innards to harvest the jumbles of wire and a pliable, colorful material that smelled like death when it burned. Perhaps a hundred lesser machines came together to form that final, wretched construct. It nearly filled the complex we stored it in, standing as a lone sentinel among its eviscerated brethren.
We had taken what was only theory in the highest academic circles and put it into action. Lives were lost, but that was the price of repurposing old magic for our own ends. They had given themselves in service of knowledge, and we honored them appropriately.
They are still buried there, beneath the complex.
The sun rose in the east that day like it would any other. I was up before dawn, going over the plan one final time. My hands shook, but Red-Mountain-Sunlight steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. He smiled that radiant smile and shared with me an old adage about darkness and dawn. With the wisdom of the ancients, he quelled my pounding heart. He always had a gift.
He and I and the quickest and craftiest of us, a young, amber-furred woman called Brush-Fire-Stoker, sat in the thorax of the machine, looking out from a large window on the world below us. It stood on spindly prehensile legs and carried a colossal drill in its abdomen to break the rock. It would lead the expedition to the Monument and the rest of us would follow in ancient wheeled machines we had borrowed under dubious conditions from the local university. They would notice us now, of course, but at this point they could not stop us.
We set off in the early hours of the morning, the sun still muted and distorted in the gray sky. The machine dodged and weaved through the streets and squares as the doll-sized people below looked on in horror. It felt so easy to ignore them, small and insignificant as they were. They tried in vain to stop the convoy from exiting the city with a makeshift barricade of rubble and wood. Too little, too late. We left without incident.
Soon enough, the city began to grow small behind us, and the Monument loomed. I suspect we all expected to be hailed as heroes when we returned. We were the bold tradition-breakers, the vanguard of a new, greater society. We could be as great as those who came before us. We could prove it.
The convoy stopped at the edge of the Monument. Those on the ground dismounted their vehicles and wished us safe travels into its black heart. While I was transfixed by the almost crystalline protrusions of the black spikes, Red-Mountain-Sunlight opened the back door of the machine. I still remember what he said, clear as day.
“Now we must go where you cannot follow, towards all we’ve been working for. Fear not, my friends, my colleagues, my sisters and brothers. We left as outcasts. We return as gods.”
The steely whine of the closing bay marked our first step into the unknown. Whether it heralded the beginning of an ascent or a decline was anyone’s guess.
There were many times I was sure we would impale ourselves on the spikes. I squeezed my eyes shut every time we brushed past a jagged rock, waiting for a catastrophe that never came. We made not one error on our trek to the center of the field. And in the middle of that black stain on the desert floor, we began to dig.
Every one of us cheered as the great drill extended down from the abdomen of the colossal metal arachnid and began to bore through the rock. The earth-shaking rumble of the machine was nothing compared to the anticipation we felt as it chewed up the black stone just as we predicted. I was pacing back and forth, back and forth across the floor while Red waited with bated breath at the window. Many others accompanied him. Some blinked tears from their eyes. Others remained stoic to the very end.
And then the rumble stopped. We had found something.
Most people cheered. A few sat dumbstruck on the floor or in their seats. Red looked at me with a small, warm smile that said more than the rest of the raving crowd combined.
“Ready, Wind?”
I remember nodding faintly, still numb from the weight of our accomplishment. At that moment, I was walking on air. Whatever we found down there, I was ready for it.
One by one, we climbed down the hollow drill shaft into the yawning darkness. I went first, followed by Red, then the three other members of the exploration crew. I looked down what felt like a thousand times on that slow climb down the ladder to see nothing but impenetrable blackness. Our lights only stood any chance of illuminating what we were climbing down into when we were already at the bottom.
A gray stone hallway greeted us once our feet were safely on the ground. Some gagged on the thick, stale air, but we pressed on. Ancient markings of black, yellow, and red adorned the walls, unmarred by countless cycles of erosion. We looked upon them with wide-eyed reverence, all thick lines and simple black shapes on the otherwise featureless wall. This was no cave; this had been wrought by the hands of our predecessors. The linguist with us, Dew-Slicked-Grass, peered at the ancient writing while others scrambled to reproduce the art. The simplicity of the pictures on the wall struck me as odd, but the ancients were capricious in the style of their works. I thought nothing of it.
Suddenly, Red-Mountain-Sunlight called out to us. He was standing at one end of the visible hallway, pointing into the darkness. I squinted at what he was pointing at. I took several steps toward him, and that’s when I saw it.
A blue glow unlike any light I’d seen emanated from farther down the hallway. I rubbed my eyes to assure myself of my senses. It remained.
All of the ancients’ lights had gone out by the time our people rose. We discovered how to repair some of them, but many of them remained dark and dull. Yet here was a light untouched by our hands, a wonder of the past. Red and I looked at each other. He was beaming. I must have looked dumbstruck.
It would have been wise to wait for the others, but we were foolish and eager to investigate the blue glow. Red and I set off down the hallway with our flashlights lighting the way. As we progressed, the blue glow grew stronger, until it was a source of light on its own, its magnification parallelling our rising anticipation. On our sides, the hallway grew wider and wider until the walls curved outward to form a grand room ahead of us. Soon enough, we stood on the threshold, looking in on the indistinct source of the glow. Red spoke, although I barely heard him.
“We did it. We found it.”
I think I must have nodded mutely. He took my hand in his and we stepped into the great chamber.
Oh, and what a great chamber it was.
There were a thousand points of ethereal blue light, like stars brought down to the surface of the planet. Each of them was a glass cylinder with something unidentifiable and luminous within it. There were rows and rows of them, stacks and stacks, hundreds upon hundreds of ghostly relics. Red walked up to one and put his hand on its surface.
“It’s warm.”
“Really?”
I joined him and felt the warmth for myself. It was comforting, like something that had sat in the sun for a while, but not too long. Red tried to pick up the cylinder, but he misjudged the weight and dropped it on the ground, shattering the glass casing.
“Red!”
“Oh gods. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He shouldn’t have been sorry.
Encased within the cylinder was another cylinder, this time made out of a dull metal. It was warm to the touch and mottled with patches of different colors and textures. Red examined it closely before putting it in his pack with another mumbled apology.
Our companions must have either followed us or heard the crash, arriving soon after. We shared a short, indignant exchange before separating once more with a grumble to explore the chamber and take samples. Red and I went together, of course, oblivious to our slight against our comrades. We were too busy chasing the blue stars around us.
After we had scoured the depths for relics and knowledge, we began the laborious process of returning to the surface. Some of us had expected to find buried queens or repositories of wisdom, but every room contained only multitudes of those blue lights. Of course, I argued fervently against the thought that this was any sort of disappointment. With the help of many hands, we even managed to lift one of the glass cylinders and move it to the base of the ladder. One of us climbed back up to deliver the news and request a rope, and came back with a cable and good tidings from the aboveground crew. It was time to go home.
Naturally, I was the first to emerge from the pit we’d dug, followed by Red and the rest of the crew with the cylinder bringing up the rear. In the noonday sun we celebrated, and we hugged and congratulated each other all the way across the field and back to the waiting convoy.
They received us like we were emissaries of the gods themselves, sent from the heavens with gifts in hand. Drinks were unsealed, food was brought out, and triumphant cries pierced the dusty air. The line to touch the cylinder was long and winding. I sat in the open door of the machine watching people venerate my accomplishments with the same zeal they would worship those who governed life and death. It stoked a kind of perverse pride, the kind that both unsettled and empowered me. Red looked up from where he was sitting next to me and fidgeting with the metallic rod he had extracted.
“Something wrong?”
“No, no, just… everything. All we’ve done. It’s a dream come true.”
“It’s only going to get better.” He smiled, eyes nearly flashing in the light.
We re-entered the city with little fanfare, but we were too focused on our own accomplishments to notice. They watched us from the balconies and the streets, sunset glinting off their hard eyes. We made our way to the great central square where a crowd waited for us. My soul soared in anticipation of my vindication. It lasted until the rumbling convoy finally came to rest and the door to the great arachnid opened with a metallic squeal.
Red-Mountain-Sunlight was the first to exit, throwing out his arms in a grand flourish. Yet his radiance was unfit to break the crowd’s solemnity. I saw people I knew in the grave assembly. Some of them friends. Some of them with tears in their eyes. Red’s presence dimmed as his arms faltered.
“What’s wrong? We bring long-lost treasures.”
A gaunt man with blue-white fur stepped forward out of the mob after a few seconds of uneasy hesitation.
“Do you know what you’ve done?”
I was standing behind Red and I could still feel his smile die on his face.
“We-”
“The elders expressly forbade it.”
“I know, but-”
“You constructed this machine in secret. You stole those vehicles from the university. ”
“No, we-”
“You disrespect the city. You disrespect the ancients.”
I couldn’t stand by while Red suffered this onslaught. I stepped forward onto the ground next to him.
“I was the mastermind behind our expedition. Take it up with me.”
The pale man turned to me.
“Then your transgression is graver, Wind-Among-Reeds.”
“We did what you would not. We found what the ancients left for us.”
At that, those still in the vehicle brought our prize out to the light. In the fading sun, its blue glow became perceptible again. Lavender rays of light percolated through the glass like meandering fish.
The pale man and many others took long looks at the relic with eyes unmarred by rose-tinted lenses. Finally, he spoke.
“Was it worth it?”
None of us had an answer.
The shunning began at that last word spoken into the fledgling twilight. The crowd dispersed without a whisper more to us, but considerable murmurs between themselves. Soon, we were the only ones that remained in the growing dark. I turned to the team and looked for something to say, anything that would reassure them, but no words came. Of the faces illuminated by the blue light, every one wore a mask of disappointment.
From that point onward, we knew we were outcasts in our own home. We slunk back to our dwellings with troubled minds and hollow hearts. Red came in the night to comfort me, but I would not be consoled.
My fitful sleep that night was filled with fragmented dreams of blue stars.
The first few days were marked by silence, save for the splitting headache pounding like thunder in my forehead. A sickly heat, persistent day and night, settled over me. Sometimes I would stumble in the middle of the street, drawing attention from passersby. I garnered hard looks of pity and chilly distance from all but the youngest children, and even then their parents turned them away in my presence. Interactions with those outside my circle were terse and short-lived. Those within the group still looked to me as a leader, but I saw the resentment in their eyes, dark and glimmering. Being ignored altogether would have been preferable.
Those were the days when I still left the house.
Near the end of the first week, Red came to my home. He was in a bad way himself, but he insisted on being there for me despite everything. We convalesced together in that sparse house, him often confined to bed with bouts of severe nausea and frequent vomiting. He ate little that he did not send back up. Caring for him became my task, and so I saw less and less of the outside. Time blurred. A slowly settling blanket of bone-deep tiredness made it difficult to walk, talk, or even think.
Some days after, Red began to find fur and dead skin on his pillows and bedsheets. At first they were light patches of dust, but they soon progressed to disgusting clumps of cast-off material. Ugly purple welts formed on his mottled ash-brown skin where the fur had fallen out. He was bedridden the vast majority of the day now, and the state of his innards had only degraded. His bile was dark red with blood. The few healers who would dare to visit us were powerless to help. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.
It was late one night when Red finally voiced what we had both been thinking.
“Is this our punishment, Wind?”
I groaned and sat up in my cot, staring across the room at the small figure wrapped in blankets like a baby.
“Red?”
“Why would the ancients do this?”
“I don’t- I don’t know.”
“You said it was a blessing. For us.”
“I-”
“I’m not angry. It’s my fault too.”
“What?”
“We dug too deep. We thought we were gods.”
“Red, you’re not making sense.”
“I’m sorry, Wind.”
And then he was silent, and I sat upright on my cot with a pit of dread in my stomach until the fatigue finally overtook me and I collapsed.
The next morning, blood stained the sheets. I woke to find him unresponsive, his breathing ragged and uneven.
That lukewarm morning, I pounded on door after door until my knuckles were bloody and my fingernails were cracked. I screamed until my throat was raw and I spat blood. Nobody would lift a hand to help the woman who had dishonored her city and doomed her flock. Through it all, Red’s words remained at the base of my skull like a stone.
It was in the middle of the road my followers found me, tear-stained and incoherent. I had to be pinned down before I could be understood or coaxed out of a haze of blood and tears. Eventually, I conveyed the gravity of the situation to them, but by then it was too late. I had wailed through the streets at a breakneck pace, and for what?
Red was gone.
I shook his body — so light, or was I imagining it? — and he said nothing. I turned his face to me, and he said nothing. I looked him in his once-lambent eyes. Nothing remained behind them.
I did not cry. I did not scream. I let the body of my dearest friend fall back into its deathbed in its own secreted fluid. Not a soul made a noise, for it was just him and I and he was gone and I was not. I stepped out to the balcony to witness the sun rise over the Monument.
The dry, windy sky reflected the perfect clarity settling in my mind. I led Red to his death, one that would likely come for me. For all I knew, all of us were cursed the moment we set foot in that wretched place, and we would all reap the consequences. And as the world held its vigil for his innocent soul and the sun silhouetted the Monument in matte onyx, I, Wind-among-Reeds, realized the simple truth.
It was not a place of honor.