u/ReferenceToWings

The first visitor came after one thousand years of solitude.

Ushered by his hollow-eyed mother, the boy fell before my throne and begged for my blessing. The time for consummation had not yet come, and he and his mother had managed to survive the Observant’s traps, though the dark stains upon her garment told me they had lost some in the coming. 

I granted the boy his wish. Teardrops traced my stone fingers as I blessed and bound the blade to him, and in return I asked only that he offer me his mother’s lifeblood, that I might be appeased. The child acquiesced. Her warmth flowed through me, and I was glad.

I watched the turnings from my throne. The boy grew into a dark young man. Black whispers followed him wherever he went, and raised his army, and kissed the flat of his blessed blade. Legions fell before their might. Ancient towers toppled, and from their stones he built effigies to me.

When his little land had bent to his will, he began to raise a city of white stone. He named  it Shega, for his mother. But his people were unhappy, and soon no power granted him could spare him their wrath. The boy was torn limb from limb. Hounds feasted on his entrails.

But the city was built. Five hundred years later, and worshippers still spoke my name in the temple. I heard not their prayers. I awaited the consummation.

Half a millennia more before the next visitor. Whip-thin, bald, with armor of bleached bone and copper plate, the young woman snarled at me about the mongrels that had stolen her tribe-lands. The white stone city had fallen, she said, and most other cities as well, and the world was a place of scorched devastation.

I did not like her. But she had made it past the traps, and done so without one scratch upon her.

I asked, “What do you want?”

She told me of her lust for power. They all had such fantasies, and this one no different, and she pled with tears that I would bless her with my strength.

Begrudgingly I did so. But I made my touch dark against her, so that half her flesh boiled and turned a terrible crimson, so that the world would know that though she bore my favor, I saw what she was. She went howling from the labyrinth.

From there, she gathered dogs. Huge black dogs, by the thousands, and bred them for riding. In five years her ranks were ten thousand strong.

In the sixth year the marked woman rode down from the mountains and swept across the ruins of the world. With my favor coursing within, no man stood against her. The tribes were smote and scattered, and the marked woman's followers named her the Hellhound of Sa. She raised the white city in my name, forgetting the boy’s mother, and my temple was made more glorious than ever before. She lived to be old and crippled. I took joy in watching her bones fade into the soil.

Five hundred years later and still I was alone. I heard the tide roll in behind me. The time for the consummation had come.

I descended the steps behind my throne into the river. Thrumming, I submerged partway under the water. Ripples pulsed and shook the surface. I heard her before I saw her: a gliding swish below my thrum, a harmony, like rain and thunder.

Her black form surged from the troubled waters. Barbed whips snared my arms, my neck. I felt pain. Still I seized her slick form and thrust within her. Tendrils suctioned my chest. Rent at my face. My sister moaned. I thrust again, exulting, and when I thrust the third time I felt my son race forth.

Sister cried. Her whips unwound from about my ribs and legs. She fell back into the river with a great splash, her lithe form swirling into the murk. I watched her wake glide toward the sea. The deed was done.

I ascended and took my place on my throne.

The boy was found by a knapper at the sea’s edge, and raised at the bottom of a slate quarry. My wrath was in him from the start: at no more than two he sharpened his first stone blade and drove it into a rat. By five his frightened knapper sold him to a legion of soldiers. They trained him in the ways of war, with bow and sword and elephant, and by the time he was twelve he led an outfit of his own, outriders that stalked the edges of the land and cast back the mutant hordes that troubled the realm’s borders.

By fifteen they named him the Second Hound of Sa. Fretting over my boy’s growing allegiance, the young, sickly emperor commanded him over the mountains to claim the mutant land for Sa.

And so my boy took his outfit, women and men and dogs and elephants, and led them forth over the mountains, and he claimed the lands for Sa. He hung the mutant emperor from the highest spire of their wet city, and ravaged his wives, and brought forth unholy children.

I could have smiled. He returned to the emperor at the age of nineteen, his numbers one hundred thousand strong. And when the emperor reached out his hand to anoint him in birth water, my son took it with a blade and slit the feeble boy’s throat.

He became known as the Hound Emperor of Sa-Von, Son of Sa, Binder of the Vast Lands. A god may not see their own reflection, but from my throne I saw how terrible I could be, in him, and I knew what pride was. Would that I could create another. But the consummation was done, and my future now uncertain.

I watched him grow, and his city with him. It sprawled and spread. In one hundred years my boy still ruled, eternally strong, his black eyes hidden behind a mask of titanium. Four hundred years more and the white stone was torn away for towers of steel and smoke. His mutant progeny melded astride machinery dogs, and devastated the world. Men took to caves and tunnels. The Hound Emperor slept in crystal chrysalis. His dreams were of labyrinths beneath the earth.

The third visitor came around this time: a pale woman, her metallic armor strange and liquid. She had come alone. I sensed the hardness within her, that her life has been stripped of much joy and that she understood the way of things. I could have liked her, if not for what she asked of me.

She asked me my blessing that she might strike down my son. At that, for the first time, I knew anger. Not wrath, nor might, but anger. But what could I do? She had made it through the Observant’s traps.

I said, “This I will not grant you.”

The woman raged against me as if she were a god. She drew her blade, blue and ghostly, and said if I would not honor my promise that she would cut my heart from me and take the blessing. Would that I could accept such a challenge. Instead, I relented. I granted her my strengths, all of them, with one condition tied within: she would not lay hands upon my son. His blood, his subjects, she may do what she wished. But not my son.

She pledged this to me and flew from my hall. The anger would not leave me, so I bathed in the river, and did not watch the world, and called through the water for my sister. She did not come, and soon I regained my throne, solemn and unappeased.

The hard woman used my son’s increasing thralldom to his chrysalis as a handhold. Being clever and a warrior of renown, soon she had a place in the Imperial high council. With silver words she misdirected their attention, using false signals to separate their force and scatter their armies to the ends of the map.

One by one, other council members met strange ends. All the while she gathered forces in the tunnels and caves, and outfitted them from the Emperor’s own stores, and mined beneath the city to steal food and resource and weaken its foundations.

I fulminated from my cavern. I shouted her name, and my great voice echoed about me, yet I could not reach her. I could not change it. The anger took a deeper hold of me and in a fit of insanity I destroyed my own throne, smashing it to atoms.

I had been awake for five thousand years to the day when she enacted her plans and flooded the foundations from the sea. Sa-Von crumbled, as did my son’s tower, and he fell into the ruin, trapped within his cocoon and asleep.

Devastated, I repaired to the river and wept. I produced no tears, like the boy with his hollow-eyed mother had, but still I heaved and shook like they did, and I knew mourning.

I sank into the river until I touched the bottom. There I sat for one year and called every day to my sister. I felt her presence in the water but she did not answer. Empty, I walked the river, until I reached the sea. I climbed atop a mountain on an island and watched the sun rise with my own eyes for the first time. I wanted to take it into my hands and crush it. I descended back to the bottom of the sea and walked toward Sa-Von to see what had become of it.

I found a smoking ruin.

“Would that you cut my heart from me!” I cried to the empty bone plains. “I would not suffer such scornful sights!”

Weeping without tears, I fell to my knees at the edge of the ruin and dug for my son. I did not find him for months, and in the interim many people came near, but none intervened or spoke to me.

A fat moon shone down on the cold night when I found him. Still alive, still breathing, but unable to speak. Great stones had crushed his legs and his arms. The titanium mask was bent onto his skull, so that I could not pry it off and see his eyes.

I murmured to him. Murmured that I was his father, and that I was proud. If he heard me, I knew not. I saw his dreams, and they were of a labyrinth far beneath the earth.

So I crushed him in my hands, and laid him on the rocks.

I knelt in the snows of a cold world. I understood numbness, and the ways a man can hide from himself.

From there I journeyed into the mountains. Men and women and children would marvel at me as I passed. Some even threw rocks and arrows in an attempt to rile me. But I summoned no reprisal. My ire had died with my boy.

I slept in caves, on cliffs, in quarries. Beneath great oaks I slumbered and dreamt of halls teeming with shining children. I swam in oceans, baked dry my stone back in the sun, yet I took no joy in it. A father should not see his child die. I spent three winters in a windy mountain pass, and I grew to hate the world, and whatever had spat me into it.

Near the end of the third winter, when the goats began to stir from their mountain holds and the snows melted to rivulets of clean water, the fourth visitor found me. She was a shepherd, and she had lost a lamb, and she asked of me to find it for her, and bring it back. I saw the need in her eyes, and I closed mine own and turned the world over, and saw that the lamb had fallen into briars only half a mile back the way she had come. In return I asked that she reach into my throat and pull the crystal heart from inside me, that I might know sleep and watch the turnings no more. She returned with her lamb folded in her arms. She said she would keep her word to me.

I opened my great maw and allowed her inside. With trembling hand she obliged me. A warmth I hadn’t noticed before swept away. My limbs went still and cold and melded with one another. Darkness swallowed me. But still I could hear the wind, and the rains, and the birds, and I knew I was lucky for my blindness.

by Robert Benjamin