West of the Hollow Sands

The shards lay nestled in their canvas wrapping—a tight parcel that stopped them from clinking together as I walked around the colony. I am not certain why I salvaged them from the infirmary, other than that it felt right to do so—that, on some level, I was preserving a precious fragment of our culture’s history. Their absence went unremarked—no one saw their importance like I did, though it is also true that there was much to preoccupy the other colonists; Deezle’s recovery, the treatment of the other members of the ill-fated search party into the Splinter Forest and, most pressingly, sightings of a strange figure around the Empty Bowl.

Deezle’s coma had lasted another two days, after which they had been placed under sedation by Karim—even then, we knew they would never be the same and, when they at last awoke from their medically induced stupor five days after returning to the Empty Bowl, our suspicions were confirmed. The old Deezle was in there somewhere—a flash, or a spark that would dart out into the open for but a moment, before retreating into the gauzy shade of their perforated brain-pan like a skittish rabbit retreating into a warren—but the injuries they sustained while protecting Esor had irrevocably changed them. The bright, wild, wired persona had mostly vanished from behind their eyes, replaced with a slow, sedate, indigence—an almost selfish laziness of being, quite at odds with the Deezle that had braved the Hollow Sands with naught but a head full of octopine and badly fermented tea. We were, of course, glad they had returned to us, altered or not, but in my darkest moments, I could not help but feel as though the person I once knew had died on the operating table and that the husk that remained was no more than that; an empty shell in the guise of my erstwhile friend.

The mysterious figure was another matter entirely. To my discredit, I barely recalled the emergence of Rotcod from his subterrain and, as such, failed to piece together this most basic of puzzles—much as the colonists’ preoccupations obscured my taking of the shards, so too did my preoccupations obscure this simple fact; Rotcod had, for reasons unknown, returned to the upper levels of the Empty Bowl. In this, the shards were, I think, a manifestation of what plagued me most; the loss of my friend and the failure of both search parties to find evidence of our missing children—in my weakness, I coveted them as a memento of Deezle’s old self and of our shared history, carrying them with me wherever I went. What inspired me to do as I did with them, I will perhaps never know—grief is in itself not an inspiration for irrational acts, only the catalyst for them and, like all catalysts, there must exist another suspension or medium to facilitate the subsequent catalysis.

A few weeks had passed since Deezle regained consciousness and I was alone in my quarters—my child, who had abandoned their temporary sobriquet in search of a better alternative, was with Elzeed, teaching them Forwardspeak and assisting them with the kumquat harvest. The matter of their mastery of Forwardspeak—which had only increased in the intervening weeks—was still not one of common knowledge, though they had confided in Elzeed, their being close friends.

It had become my habit in times such as these to unwrap the shards and inspect them—not an analytical inspection, wherein I determined to discover some hidden truth about their nature or composition, but a more holistic inspection, as a person might once have inspected a work of art on a wall. I would sit and stare at their facets and the strange sigils that marked their interiors and think of Deezle, for, to my mind, the shards and the lost persona of my friend had become synonymous with one another.

On this particular occasion, I did more than merely contemplate them. Throughout those early days of our colony, I had weathered all that our new life had thrown at us—having survived THAT WAR, there was, I think, a sense that we could withstand anything; that nothing could conceivably come close to the horrors that beset us during those eight days of hell that destroyed the future and ushered in the Now-Age. Nothing, not the terror of our infertility, nor the excruciation of the ANSEX process, nor still the disappearance of our children would bring us low when compared with the silent flechettes, the toxic miasmas, or our torments at the ENCAMPMENT. Yet, with the dissolution of Deezle’s personality, something in me had snapped—a pain unlike any I had known, even worse than that of my pregnancy, overcame me. It was not a physical pain—it manifested no symptoms, nor did it have a physiological root—and so I determined to change that. Taking up one of the shards at random, I rammed its point into my arm.

No sooner had I done so than I was overwhelmed by strange visions and sensations—images and thoughts and feelings that were not my own flooded my brain. A kaleidoscope of colour instantly bore me down beneath its hallucinatory mass and I felt a distant pain in my head as it collided with the side of my bedstead. No psychedelic has ever elicited such a reaction from me—even octopine, whose pharmaceutical architecture was hammered out on the anvil of the military-industrial complex as a narcotic for all seasons, capable of fitting the purposes of the user exactly depending on dose and setting, could not compare to what I felt when the shard entered my bloodstream. The life of Deezle, from their earliest memories to the moment of their undoing in the Splinter Forest, bloomed within my head in one juddering mess, following no particular chronology but flitting, as by association, from instant to instant, image to image, emotion to emotion.

I saw their life before THAT WAR, their schooling at a local comprehensive, their youthful, volatile love affairs, felt their homesickness on moving away from their family, their grief at the loss of a parent in their early twenties, heard the rush of traffic beyond the window of their house-share and the pounding of music on their weekly excursions into the decaying rave culture of a now dead city. I saw the outbreak of THAT WAR through their eyes and recoiled in horror, bore witness to their journey to the ENCAMPMENT and, knowing what awaited them, felt a wave of revulsion rise in my chest. I saw myself and felt what Deezle must have felt during our first encounter—a sense of relief so strong it was almost sacred in its purity; a feeling I am glad I shared with them, for I do not think either of us would have survived that place had it not been for each other’s company. In short, I lived out Deezle’s entire life, not only as an observer, but as an active participant.

I awoke some time later, slick with cold sweat, feeble in mind and body, feverish and aching all over, as though I had drunk a gallon of palm-wine the night before. I pulled the shard from my arm and inspected it. Its facets had grown cloudy and there was no sign of the strange sigil that had once lain coiled within its matrices. As I collected the rest of the shards into their canvas wrapper I wondered dimly whether it now resided inside me, piggybacking on my blood to take up residence inside my brain.

I was about to return the shards to my pocket when a shadow fell over me from the doorway. I looked up, half-expecting the return of my child—for I did not know what time it was—only to see the figure of Rotcod, stood on the threshold. Our eyes met and Rotcod’s mouth twisted upwards in a grotesque smile. I hesitated, wondering if I should cry out for help—for I was in no fit state to defend myself. As I made to rise to my feet, Rotcod surged forwards, raising a cudgel over his head—I did not get a good look at the weapon he wielded, but it seemed to be fashioned from a length of pipe, with large brass nuts screwed, or welded to one end. Before I could so much as utter a plea for mercy, the cudgel struck my temple and everything went black.