Short Stories
By Scott Niven
The Carrion Sphere
If not for the pummeling wallops of rain, Hest never would have stumbled upon the sphere.
He moped through North Wood, sword banging against his side, shiny, day-old armor sagging on his shoulders, and helm clasp between wet, soggy fingers. He sneezed once, then again. Lightning punctuated his body’s ailing with daggers of yellow-white brilliance, as if the Gods, in their finite wisdom, wished to view his hapless soul struggling through their wretched forest. Seconds after the flash faded, a peal of thunder quaked the land, its crackling cry unmuffled by the barren tree limbs that spiderwebbed the sky. A cold wind followed the thunder and nudged through the many chinks and crevices of Hest’s armor, chilling his arms, chest, and legs.
All in all, a miserable day for the Hunt.
Hest groaned. His friends were surely sitting inside a warm hut chuckling over him at this very moment. Mighty Hest, they were saying. Master of the Great Water Hunt. Protector of Puddles. Defender of Drenched Leaves.
But you couldn’t choose the day of your twenty-first birthday. No, the Hunt waited for no one. Hest included.
His friends had been lucky. Yeltsor had returned to Fourth Village after the required two days with a plump, six-legged deer in tow. And Tig’s Hunt, while not a magnificent success, had yielded a small dinner for five of rabbit and squirrel. Neither of the boys had dealt with rain, cold, or scarcity of wildlife.
Thus far, Hest had been plagued with all three.
He grumbled, slowed his pace, and listened to the rain slither over his bald head. He studied the gloomy sky, waiting for a subtle shading from dark to very dark to alert him night had fallen.
“Oh, Drox! Pox and Lomox, too!” Hest spit the names of the Gods into the downpour. The hungry spatterings of rain swallowed his words without answering. He moaned, shook his head, then kicked the ground with a heavy, steel-toed boot.
The ground kicked back, knocking Hest backwards.
A huge clattering of metal later, Hest stared up at the falling raindrops from his back. Now he really was Protector of Puddles!
He climbed to his knees and inspected the patch of earth he had swiped with his boot. The ground was rounded, bluish-black, and shiny. A needle of disappointment stabbed at his belly. If only the earth really had risen to attack him, a clever revenge for his careless defiling of the Gods’ names. What a wonderful hunter’s story the attack and, of course, his subsequent heroic defense would have made. Protector of Puddles, indeed!
Hest sighed. None of his imagined glory, it seemed, aligned with his true destiny. He hadn’t been attacked; he had slipped. And bumbling warriors rarely survived beyond the first few sentences in the tales he had heard.
He eyed the shiny mound once more. Its dark, curved dome beckoned his curiosity, urging the boy he still was to fend off the man he hoped to become. With a little luck, he could still pull some self-respect out of his recent oafishness.
He leaned forward and rubbed the object’s surface. It was smooth, hard, impenetrable. He scraped its outer coating, then pawed at the mud surrounding it, tossing wiggly muck, squirmy insects, and tattered leaves on both sides of his crouched position. His hands shoveled and scooped and dug and delved, over and over, faster and faster. A moat widened around the object. Hest rushed, exciting himself with his speed, furrowing the ground with swift rakes of his grime-filled fingernails. Finally, with the help of the loosened soil and cleansing rain, he pried and wrestled the object out of its burrow–
–and flung it into the air. The object’s feathery-lightness had surprised him. Once again, Hest found himself on his back as he watched the object fly over him and land with a gentle splash in a nearby puddle. A spurt of mud jumped to his face, adding insult to stupidity.
Hest stood, then squinted and scowled at his appearance. In his throes on the ground, Hest, Protector of Puddles had become Hest, Wearer of Puddles. His suit of armor, forged last week by Blacksmith Barsowen, crawled with caked mud and rotted leaves. And no amount of brushing, it seemed, would remove all the mess.
Then Hest gasped.
The object he had jerked from the ground stood revealed atop the rippling puddle.
A sphere. A perfectly rounded sphere slightly smaller than his head. The blackish-blue tint extended around its surface, wrapping it in a cocoon of midnight sky.
Hest crept across the saturated forest undergrowth. He huddled over the mysterious object, then lifted it, this time prepared for its lack of weight. He balanced it on a palm and marveled at its symmetry, its impossible smoothness, its shell of rigid permanence.
The sphere, he realized, weighed the same as one of Baker Jessica’s pies.
The cheerful memory of warm, flaky crust and apple filling did nothing to abate his hunger. He peered at the sadly inedible item for several long tics of time, wondering what to do with it, wondering why he was coveting spheres instead of hunting animals or foraging for fruit. The decision to keep the strange object happened quickly: one minute, the sphere rested on his palm; the next, he had nestled it inside his helm, safety stored away for future examinations. Then, his act of thievery accomplished, Hest continued wandering through the forest, slightly happier but no less wet, warm, or hungry.
The fire would not catch.
The wind whipped any sparks Hest summoned with the flint into swirling, darkened nothings that sailed away from his stack of twigs. After an hour spent sitting on a log, hunched over a meager fire pit, cloaked in a blanket of onyx nighttime, Hest surrendered. Why did he need a fire, anyway? He was growing into a man, after all. And a man could do just fine without a fire. Or shelter. Or any other kindness or comfort of the world.
Still, the thought of yellow-orange-red tendrils of flame leaping from his tiny teepee of wood, warming him, burning away the chill, soothing his aching, hungry body...
Hest had just grabbed the flint again when the woman spoke.
“Mind if I sit with you?”
He would have leapt out of his armor if he hadn’t already removed it and placed it in a neat pile beside him. As it was, he slid off his log and banged his shoulders and rear on the many, pointed pebbles embedded in the soil behind him. For the third time today, he found himself staring upward. This time, he saw parting clouds and several prickly needles of starlight.
“Who are you?” he asked, tilting his head at the shadowy figure standing at the edge of his clearing. He climbed back onto his log. “A Fourth Villager?”
“Your fire will never catch,” she said. “Not that way. Wind’s too strong. But maybe I can help.”
The dim figure advanced to the pile of twigs. Hest smelled cinnamon, pepper, thyme. He inhaled rose and lilac, breathed heather and poppy. His eyes discerned long, wispy hair attached to a woman’s bulky shape, but could pull no other details out of the darkness. The shape crouched over his fire pit.
“Now, then,” said the woman. “Let’s see what I can do.”
Hest heard a click, then another. He watched with wide eyes as a small glow flickered to life beneath the stack of twigs. The woman’s hand whirled magically inside the stack, waving and fluttering, before jerking away as the flame bustled to life.
Hest hurriedly added more twigs to the fire. “Thanks,” he said, unable to look away from the mystic flames that had sprung from the spot of his failings. “How did you...what did you do?”
“Gave your fire some heat,” the woman said. “That’s all.”
Hest finally raised his eyes from the crackling, busy fire. The woman settled onto a log opposite him, on the far side of the clearing. Her long, gray hair dangled in tangles around the sides of her neck and shoulders. Her wrinkles fought each other unendingly, battling over ever crack, ridge, or valley on her aged face. She wore a black sheet that looked frigid in the chilly air. Her eyes sparkled brilliant blue. Her skin glowed dove white.
Hest didn’t need his eyes to know what she was. The warmth spreading over his legs, chest and arms proved her identity: a witch. Perhaps even a sorceress. His hunting trip had taken an exciting turn indeed!
“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked in his most awed, respectful voice.
The old woman smiled. “No, it’s more complicated than that. I don’t have a name, because I’m not a woman. I’m an idea. A dream. Not yours, however. Someone else’s. From a long time ago.”
“An...idea?” Hest fumbled with the concept.
“I’m a memory,” she said. “A visual memory. That’s how I exist. As a thought, a history, and"–she sighed–"as a tool. I tunneled through the past, but I can also touch the future.”
Hest reevaluated his initial impression. She wasn’t a witch, after all. She was a soothsayer. Suddenly, he remembered the sphere. Perhaps it belonged to her, and she used it for divination. Perhaps she had blundered into North Wood tonight in search of it.
He reached for his helm, heaved it into his lap, then retrieved the sphere from its niche. He held the darkened ball over the fire. “This yours?”
“No, dear.” The old woman chuckled. “That is me. I’m inside it.”
Hest bit his lip as he scrutinized the sphere, searching for the old woman. “I don’t see you inside it.”
“No, but I’m there. Trust me. You are, too, in a way. But we’re drifting from the topic.”
“The topic?” Hest wondered if his oafishness was confusing the woman’s words, or if she truly spoke in riddles. He lowered the sphere to his side.
“Yes, the topic,” she said. “And the topic is now. Today. So, please. Tell me about your pile of armor. You wear it for protection from the evils of the forest. Am I correct?”
“Well, no.” Hest fidgeted. “That is to say, you’re wrong, ma’am.”
The old woman’s smile calmed his accelerated heartbeat. “Then why do you wear the armor?”
“For the Hunt.”
“Hunting? In that noisy outfit? What ever do you sneak up on wearing that?”
“Deer,” said Hest, embarrassed. He had no deer to offer her due to his poor outing, so hoped she didn’t plan on asking for a meal.
“Deer? But how can that be? Aren’t deer wary and quick? And don’t they leap and bound away when they hear you jostling along behind them?”
“No, ma’am. Deer are slower than pine sap. All you need is a sword to whop off their heads.”
The old woman flinched, then raised a hand to her chin and rubbed. The flames blazed higher, increasing the clearing’s circle of warmth.
“So how does the armor help you attack these...apathetic deer?” she asked.
“It doesn’t, actually. The armor’s more ceremonial than anything. It’s my twenty-first birthday, you see. My village, Fourth Village, sends boys on their Hunt so they can become men, and–”
“Ah-ha!” The woman’s eyes flared green, then misted back to blue. “Now, I understand.” She paused. “And that sword of yours? Is it...does it represent your village’s most effective means of attack?”
Hest shrugged. “Guess so, not including bows and arrows.”
“Bows and arrows?” The old woman giggled. “How delightful! Maybe I will accomplish something this time. And after all these years. The thought makes me dizzy!”
Hest cleared his throat. “Ma’am? You’re confusing me. What is it you hope to accomplish?”
“Ah. A simple enough question, dear. But the answer’s a different animal altogether. We’ll start with my home.” She pointed to the sphere. “All things have their names, you know. And the name for my home, in your tongue, is carrion sphere.”
“Carrion sphere? Carrion meaning dead, icky flesh?”
“Yes. But in this case, meaning dead essence, without the ickiness. You see, once you touch the sphere, your soul is linked with it forever. Not a bad thing, really, so quit making faces.”
Hest forced the contortions out of his face.
“Now, the link with the sphere,” said the woman,” means absolutely nothing while you’re alive. But when you die, a part of you – your memories, experiences, anything that made you into the person you were – merges with the sphere. The sphere becomes you, and you become the sphere. And you aren’t alone. Thousands have already been enveloped inside it throughout the ages. And thousands more will be enveloped in the future.”
Hest sputtered his words. “I don’t...I mean, I’m not ready to be enveloped.”
“Good, because you’ve got things to do. Important things.” The old woman frowned. “Last person to find the sphere found it too late. Too much had already happened. Too many ideas had already been discovered, created, combined, miniaturized, improved and processed. I told the person what to do, but he didn’t care to do it. In the end, his village – considerably larger than yours and capable of much more than killing deer – went to war with the other villages. Horrifying explosions heated and melted their homes, turning all they had created into wasted ash. No one, I thought, had survived.”
“That’s terrible.” Hest threw more twigs onto the fire to ward off his chill.
“Terrible, yes. But also incorrect. You’re here, which means someone did survive. You’re almost hairless, of course, and probably suffer from any number of unknown internal problems, but you’re alive. To me, and to the thousands of others inside the carrion sphere, that’s all that matters.”
Hest considered her words. “So what do you want me to do?”
“You’ve got to help me,” she said. “Help me stop things before they progress too far. We’ve got time. When my creator designed the sphere, it was in the final moments before the very first occurrence of massive destruction. He didn’t have time to use it. But we do. At last, after so many terrible misfortunes, the carrion sphere has been awakened at the correct time. You’ve got to bring it to your village and show it to everyone. You’ve got to let me talk to them. Teach them about the past. Instruct them about the future. Some things in the years ahead are good, and will help enrich your lives. But other things can – and will – destroy you. I know which is which. With my advice, we might prevent what has happened so many times already.” She paused. “So. Will you? Help me?”
Hest peeked at the sphere, then refocused his eyes on the old woman. Her words, though strange, had scraped through his clouded mind and touched fears in him he hadn’t known existed. If she knew his future and the future of Fourth Village, and if she knew they were headed for destruction...
“I’ll do it,” he said, forcing the tone of his voice into the firm deepness of a man’s.
The old woman’s face unwrinkled with relief. She smiled. “I thought so, I hoped so. At last, things have a chance – a chance, mind you – of changing.” She reached into the folds of her black sheet covering. “To reward you for your decision, let me give you something brought into the carrion sphere by the last man who entered it. Physical items are allowed inside the sphere, you understand, but only if I feel they’ll serve a purpose later. And this item now has purpose. Duplicating its power is beyond the abilities of your village, but it can still act as a token. A sign of the good that can come in the future, as well as a warning of the bad.”
She stood, stepped around the fire, then pressed a chill something into Hest’s hand.
“What–”
The old woman held a finger to her lips. “Shhh. I’m leaving now. Or rather, I’m staying. Going back into my home. Take the carrion sphere to your village. We’ll see what we can do.”
As Hest watched with a million questions frozen on his lips, she faded, a ghost disappearing into a ghostly night.
After she had vanished, he opened his hand and stared at the object she had given him. It was a rectangular metallic box the length of his index finger, with perhaps twice the width. An indented line wrapped around the top half of it. He shook the device and heard fluid inside, but decided to leave the rest of the exploring to the Village Council.
“Probably magic!” he said, spooking himself with his own words.
He tucked the object into his shirt and donned his armor. Then, after dousing the fire with water, he lifted the carrion sphere, placed it inside his helm, and darted off into the wood. At a fast walk, he hoped to cover the ten miles to the village before dawn. Then he would wake everyone and show them what he had found.
His Hunt, he guessed, would be deemed a success.
End
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