Keziah had always hated silence—sought to fill it with laughter, with music, with chatter, with anything at all. There were times when stillness was necessary, of course, but he was used to even that silence being filled with the sounds of the world around him.
Jörmungandr the Senshi was rarely quiet. Once upon a time, Jormungandr the world had been just as loud. The jungles had teemed with life, a chorus of birdsong and scampering animals and the hum of insects, and the cities had been bursting with people. There had always been something new to chase down, something to find, something to discover. Friends to meet with for drinks and swapping stories, politics and deals to be made, exploration parties to organize.
But the world was not that world anymore.
Jörmungandr was dead. Keziah had killed it.
Perhaps not with his own hands, no. He certainly hadn’t intended to unleash a poison that would tear his world apart. Hadn’t meant to make the sky go dark, the distant sun locked behind a permanent eclipse with its strange, oily halo. Hadn’t meant to let loose a plague that sucked all the nutrition out of food and water, that left people starving, desperate husks scrambling to find any source of food. He hadn’t intended to unleash the nightmare that consumed his world.
But he had. Carelessly, like in so many damned stories of adventurers getting their paws on things that should never have been touched. He’d blundered his way into something he never should have meddled with, and the end result had been…catastrophic.
It had seemed like any other journey of discovery, when he started. He’d hunted down lost cities on his own world and others a dozen, a hundred times—brought back artifacts and ensured they were properly delivered to the hands of people who would properly care for them. Protected them from thieves and mercenaries who sought profit over preservation. He’d always wanted to know as much as possible about what he was getting into, what might be there, what sort of traps or magic might lock something away…
And he’d thought he’d known enough. He’d thought he understood what he was looking for, in that old temple in that ancient, crumbling city. An artifact of great power, the stories said. Locked away, because it was too dangerous to use. Because the Sailor Jörmungandr of that era had believed it far too dangerous to risk falling into anyone else’s hands.
Keziah had expected something powerful. Something remarkable, even. But all the legends, all the tales, had failed to mention one critical fact.
The artifact—if it could even be called that, the strange piece of oily black stone that had resided in the old city—was more than just powerful and dangerous. Keziah knew powerful and dangerous. No, it was something beyond that.
He did not lightly apply the word evil. Many things (and many people, historical figures and modern) deemed such were simply misunderstood, or forgotten and left to fester with bad reputations and half-told stories.
But that thing he had found, when he and his team made it through the last layer of wards on the old temple?
That thing was evil. Truly, deeply so.
Sometimes, Keziah sought to comfort himself (to whatever degree it was) with the fact that the wards had been crumbling—that the thing, the force of Chaos, that resided within the oily black stone had been eating at the walls of its prison and would have freed itself regardless. And perhaps that was true. But he was still the one who had picked the lock and opened the door, out of stupid, blind curiosity.
He had hoped to restore a lost piece of his people’s history to them. Instead, he had brought their doom.
He’d thought they could fight it, or outrun it, or cure it, at first. Had done everything in his power to find a way top do so. But he should have known, when a shadow moved over the sun itself—he was one man. He wasn’t strong enough to stop something that could blot out a star. It had been the height of arrogance to even try.
And yet try he had. For so, so long.
He’d tried to get messages out, to reach out to his friends and allies on other world, and had met only silence. Nothing came to Jörmungandr, but nothing could leave, either—something in the eclipsed sky interfered with their signals and their ships, and ensured they were cut off from anything beyond it.
He had not let himself give into despair, then. They were cut off from the wider universe, yes, but they still had each other—could still fight together, if it came to it. He had believed, then, that he could lead his people into overcoming the curse that he had unleashed. It had been sealed once before, after all—he just had to find out how to seal it again.
He wasn’t even sure how long they’d all fought for, now. How long they had resisted the creeping, oncoming doom. But he knew they had put up as valiant a resistance as they could. That everyone he had fought with and helped to protect had done everything they could to escape and reverse the consequences of his foolish mistake. They had helped search for safe sources of food, sought ancient rites to try and purge the poison, done everything in their power and his to right what was wrong.
It had been his burden to bear, and yet so many had shared it with him willingly. They could have blamed him, Keziah knew. Some had, and he had accepted their anger, their hatred, but enough hadn’t. Or had been willing to pout it aside to allow him to help them, at least.
And as more people died, as the sickness that refused to touch him took all of them, he knew that he had become more and more desperate. But who wouldn’t, in that sort of position? Who wouldn’t do whatever it took to save even one person? To stop the steady march of death across their world, their home?
His own safety had fallen further and further by the wayside, the longer the slow collapse stretched on. It had mattered less and less what happened to him, as long as he made it back with enough to feed everyone else. He couldn’t die, of course, that wasn’t fair—he didn’t get to destroy everything and then check out as if it wasn’t even his responsibility—but anything else…
Whatever price he might have paid would have been fair, if he could have saved his people.
But there was no price. No deal to be made, no bargain to be struck, no great power to seek out and parley with. He could not lay down his life for his world’s salvation, because there was no one to grant that desperate, agonized wish.
The despair had been creeping, just like the virulent infection. It had come upon him slowly, and then like a wave, a relentless tide that threatened to drag him entirely under as the last of his people dwindled away, as he found fewer and fewer survivors, as the resources ran thinner and thinner.
By the time he had gone nearly a year without seeing anyone else, it crested and swept him away.
He had already become reckless in his efforts to protect others; it was easy to lose the last restraints, to throw himself into what danger he could find and hope that somehow, somewhere, he found some sign that he wasn’t alone.
But the year stretched into two. Three. Ten. Decades, centuries, piling up and passing him by until Keziah lost track of exactly how long it had been.
A person, he knew, wasn’t meant for this. Wasn’t meant for endless darkness and horrible, deathly silence, without another soul to reach out to and connect with. Sometimes, Keziah wasn’t sure he was even still alive. Perhaps some stunt or other had finally killed him, and the awful, endless misery of his world’s dying hours was all some horrible purgatory he was condemned to as punishment for his mistakes.
But he found that he lived, and breathed. That he felt hunger and thirst and exhaustion and pain. That, stubbornly, despite his own desire to be free of his burdens, he carried on.
And at last, there was something other than silence and darkness.
He had taken shelter in a ruined house in some long-lost city—once upon a time, its discovery would have delighted him, and he would have sought to map and catalog as much as he could, but now all of that felt worthless. There was no one to catalog for; what was the purpose fo knowledge that would die with him?
Except in that lonely, miserable moment, there was something in the distance.
A call. A light. From far beyond his world’s broken sky.
Keziah let it carry him away, and found himself in an altogether different place.
It was dark, yes. Late in the evening, perhaps; Jörmungandr could only really guess at exactly when, but it felt different than the eclipsed darkness he had become used to.
But there was so much sound. The distant roar of machines. The wind, blowing through trees. The feeling of something alive under his hands and knees, where he’d found himself sprawled.
Slowly, Jörmungandr pushed himself to his feet. Looked around. Took in this place where he had found himself.
And knew, in a moment, that wherever he was, the silence had released him at last.
[wc: 1609 words]
