The Last Human IV - 10 - A Long Way to Die (Patreon)

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***

The black sky was dominated by a great spiral. Thousands of glowing threads, or pulsing neurons, or something else entirely, stretched awesomely from every horizon, rising millions of miles into the black and twisting around each other until they all met at a single, far-off point. Poire could only crane his head up and wonder at the Great Spiral’s existence.

His feet slapped on a world made of glassy stone. Tree-things cracked and corkscrewed up from the ground, mimicking the Great Spiral’s shape with their own frosted branches and crooked, geometric thorns. Each one had its own shape, bending this way or leaning that. As he trudged past, Poire greeted the trees, though his mouth was dry and it hurt to speak. And, he gave them names. He named them after the caretakers from the Conclave, because all the adults had towered over him, just as the trees towered over him now.

When he bathed in the shadows of the crashing mountains, he named those too. And the rivers of blue flame that crawled off the face of this world and into the sky, and the endless snowy sands, he named them all—for there was no one else to do the naming.

First to see this, Poire thought, as he tried to swallow the last of his dry spit. First, and last.

The glossy stone groaned and creaked and sent snapping vibrations through his bare feet as the world started to turn. Poire groaned and put his arms over his head, too weak to fight against the sloshing tug that started in his gut. This time, he didn’t bother closing his eyes. Flocks of finned things erupted from the spiral trees, their bodies puckering and constricting strangely as they lifted and flowed together and interlocked the perfect edges of their fins, until they formed a great, air-borne colony. Like algae, floating on the surface of water, they rippled and stuck together, even as the sky pulled up the mountainous waves and turned the trees inside out.

He glared at the mountains, watching them rise and rise. How far away were they? Ten miles or ten thousand? Another cloudy fractal, a cloud or a whole emerald storm, caught in their rising teeth, and shattered like brittle glass. His ears popped, and the rising mountains pulled up rising sands, which folded over him, and buried him in dust as soft as snow. The pressure in his gut flipped. Poire clawed his way out and heaved out dry, choking coughs. He had nothing left to spit up.

The sky fractured into windows of color and the ground turned to sand, which slid over itself in great sheets. Bushes the color of glass pushed up from the sand, and when Poire went up to inspect one, he thought he was going blind from dehydration. His eyes couldn’t focus on their leaves, or thorns, or whatever they were made of—they blurred like rain drops on a window. He poked one with a finger, and he hissed when it stung him, leaving a smear of red.

He looked down at the liquid bead of blood on his fingertip. He tasted it. So deep was his thirst that it almost tasted sweet. Disgusting. He wanted to laugh, but his throat was too dry, and his head burned and he wasn’t sure what was so funny in the first place. Death was no laughing matter. Though, it did bring a certain freedom: he felt so light that he wondered, if not for the weight of his own heavy feet, would he float across the cloudy sands? And all the life he had wasted, all the days he had spent pitying himself and hating the world and wanting himself—or everyone else—to be different. And all the time he had loved his friends, had gone running and screaming and laughing through the Conclave. And when the Conclave fell, and his old caretaker shoved him into the cold chamber, saving his life...

How afraid he had been to wake up, all alone.

But now that he was alone, again, for the last time, he couldn’t stop smiling. Or maybe that was just his organs failing, and his brain shriveling. He felt a tug on his gut, as if the world was about to shift again, but it didn’t matter. He was lighter than air. He could go anywhere.

He was ready to make his last choice. Where shall I lay down and die?

Two mountainous waves had crashed into each other and, inexplicably, froze. They formed a piercing tower of black, glossy stone, embedded with millions of fracture lines that glowed like rubies. The many peaks stabbed at the color-drenched sky, like some human-made work for art, some abstract architecture built just because. So, Poire would summit that mountain, would dare its jagged faces, and climb to its highest peak, just because. And there, he would take his last breath.

But first, he had to get there.

His feet dragged thick lines through the powdery sands, leaving two dark trails that snaked drunkenly behind. The flocks of bird-things had already pulsed away beyond the monstrous waves, and the spiral trees were all gone, so Poire said his farewells to the blurring bushes and the great, white desert.

Something slithered by, and sucked at his foot. A river of mud, so pale that it was hard to see it through the sand. Slow and lugubrious, it melted the whiteness and dragged a layer of powdery silt with it. “Oh, hello,” Poire said, polite and delirious. “No, I don’t mind. Travel is always better with someone else. What do they call you?”

And then, after a silent pause, he said, “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Poire. The destroyer of worlds. Savior of none.”

It was good to be in company, even for a little. They walked together in pleasant silence, Poire’s feet whispering through the sand, and the river making those burbling, sucking sounds.

The foot of the mountain was red and black, and smooth as a gemstone. Shapes within shapes, complicated triangles and thin hexagons, glinted like fiery gold deep below the mountain’s glassy surface, so that it was difficult to tell where the air ended and the mountain began. The surfaces of the mountain cut at the sky, but Poire thought he saw a path up.

“Well, friend,” Poire said to the river of mud, “This is it.”

The river let out a wet gurgle.

“Me too,” Poire said, his voice scratchy and his tongue thick in his mouth. “But probably not. I’m going up there to die.”

The river said nothing.

Poire turned to the glass mountain. The surface was hard, and his fingernails couldn’t scratch it. It was smooth enough that, if he didn’t grip with his palms, his hands would slide off or catch on one of the jutting angles of the glassy surface. He wondered what would happen when he died. Back through the Mirror, his death would have destroyed the universe. The matter that made up his cells was incompatible, would begin a chain reaction that would expand infinitely, breaking apart atoms, rendering all energy inert.

Would that happen here, too?

He would never know.

He started to climb.

It took him hours. Or maybe days. Or maybe time didn’t pass at all while he was climbing, and the only thing that changed was the weakening strength of his muscles, and the pain in his joints and his mouth and his eyes and everywhere from his aching thirst. Every breath, like inhaling the burrs of a burning cactus. He thought about oceans, blue and bountiful. And of the lake beneath the Cauldron, still and calm and wet. And the warm rain on Thrass et Yunum. How he longed to open his mouth and catch just a few drops. Keep going.

He thought about laying down and going to sleep and never waking up.

Another step. And another.

Why am I doing this?

He lost his footing on a smooth, slanted ledge, and slammed to the glassy stone, cracking his elbow and his ribs on the surface. He started to slide. He clawed at the surface, feeling his fingernails bend painfully as they dragged through some frozen ripple in the stone. The edge dug painfully into his chest, and his arms were so weak and his legs hung over open air. He dared not look back.

One hand slipped, and he caught himself by raking his fingers into the glass, screaming as his fingertips burned with pain. Why am I trying so hard? He asked himself. Wouldn’t it be easiest to just … fall?

Poire gritted his teeth and strained with all the might he had left in his body—and maybe a little more. He didn’t care if his fingers broke, if his nails were ripped away, if the muscles in his arms snapped from their tendons. He was not going to die until he reached the peak.

One leg lifted over the edge, and he pushed himself up. And dropped onto the slanted ledge, panting. He didn’t know how long he lay there. Black lines raced through the fractured colors of the sky, bleeding fractal darkness through all that chromatic radiance.

Poire sat up. His fingers ached. His arms felt like  he’d dragged daggers through the muscles. He started to climb.

The higher he went, the steeper the faces became, until he could only crawl, clinging from handhold to handhold. He lost count of the times he slipped, and slid down the mountain. Each time, he rolled back to his stomach, and tried again. His gut clenched on nothing, squeezing and tightening and making his sight go dark. He wanted to throw up, but he had nothing left to give. So he kept it all for himself.

From below, the peak had looked sharp and pointed. But now, he could see that it was capped with a flat, perfect plane of glassy stone. And on that tiny plateau, there sat a clay pot. Smooth and round and formed of pinkish red clay, dusted over with white powder, as if it had been sitting here for quite some time.

A mirage? Or some other odd form of wildlife? On elbows and knees, he pulled himself up the last smooth slant, and threw his ragged body onto the flat top of the mountain. The clay pot taunted him. Begged him to drag himself just a little closer. There were no markings on the outside. It might’ve fit a small plant, and some soil. He half-expected it to feel wrong when he touched it—spongy, or blazing hot, or stabbing with a thousand needles, but it was just cold, rough clay.

And inside…

Dust.

He picked up the pot, and the dust jiggled wetly. Poire croaked his disbelief. He dipped a finger in the dust, and felt the lukewarm liquid inside. It’s water.

He lifted the pot up with both hands, and tilted it back, and let the dusty water trickle into his mouth, heedless of the sand. He had never tasted anything so sweet. Poire drank too quickly, and his stomach churned, and he almost lost all that water again, but he refused to open his throat. He forced it back down, and there it stayed. Filling him. Trickling down his throat, into his chest, and taking away all his pain.

And making him wonder: who put this here?

He had seen so many strange things in this world, but the pot didn’t fit. That left… madness. Poire imagined himself, lying in the sand, shoveling mud into his mouth. Am I still at the foot of the mountain?

He frowned at the horizon, at the slope of the mountain below, where rivers of gray mud streaked the valley. Hundreds of dark oval shapes floated on the mud. Poire squinted. They looked like bugs, lazily drifting on the rivers. Or leaves. Or boats.

But for all he knew, it was just more alien nonsense. Perhaps the clay, pot too—

Poire wiped his eyes. Nestled at the end of the valley stood a Tower, like the ones that lorded over the Cauldron.

A human Tower.

Gravity, or something like it, tugged at Poire’s gut. The world started to roll.

***

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