"It's in the cards..."
well I might as well post this here, since I missed the challenge deadline awhile back. :( Initially this would've been a simple 4ish page short story but after the first two pages I realized it would be much more than that. I ended up cramming half the story into 1 page where it doesn't really belong (but works anyway). Any comments would be delightful. :)
It was morning, somewhere, and wherever that morning was, a daystar shone radiantly, warming the damp ground and melting the lightly hanging fog of earlier-morning. Two voices, whoever they were, carried on a rather unusual conversation as the cool fog subsided and the warm day intruded. Their voices became silhouettes, then shadows before finally becoming figures. Their conversation, however, made no move from the darkness of confusion to the light of understanding, though one could argue it was as true as the daystar that revolved around the clump of dirt they stood on.
“It’s the cards,” the one would say while tapping against a tin jug. This voice remained steady, unconcerned by the tonalities of emotive response.
“What’s the cards?” the other would ask.
“It,” the one would reply, bored. This voice had a fluid serenity to it one might find in a slow-moving stream.
“What is it?” the other would ask in agitation. At first it had been confusion, though the time for simply being confused had passed with the dawn.
“It’s the cards,” the first figure offered once more, sending the second figure into a fit of annoyance. The fogs had lifted and the two figures found themselves shaded by one of few large trees within the limited view of the second figure. A thick collection of yellow grasses surrounded the tree, perfect for resting. A small brook ran not far from the tree and patches of the yellow grasses stretched towards it in triangular fashion.
“Providence,” the first figure suggested with a nod and small shrug. After the five hours of Blackness-Darkrise to Darkfall-this was the first break in the cycle of spoken word. “We need not walk far for shelter or water.” She sat cross-legged under the large tree, facing the brook. Her long, black hair draped over her shoulders in some places and attached to the bark of the tree in others. She scanned the area quickly before performing Nalshat, the daysleep. A thin layer of translucent pure-white skin-Angelskin, it was called-closed vertically against her black eyes.
“Selngni why must we spend days under the trees?” asked the other, “of the twenty hours given us, fifteen are starlight and five are starnight. It’s inefficient to rest for fifteen hours.”
“I’ve told you, Periden, my people are unable to survive long in the direct sunlight of your world. We require the shade of a great tree, of which your world has painfully few.” Selngni looked up from her Nalshat, Angelskin still closed. Periden shivered involuntarily at the look.
“So I must be the one to fetch us water while you Nalshat?” Periden’s slanted eyes betrayed her dissatisfaction with the arrangement.
“And Seed,” Selngni reminded casually as she faced the brook again. “Perhaps you forget, it is the Seed that has spared your life on our Great Walk.”
“Great Walk? Ah, pe roitsa, Selngni, I wish I hadn’t been asked to do the Walk!”
“I believe you begged the Elders, on your knees, to be allowed to Walk.” Selngni raised an eyebrow, her pale skin turning a yellowish-green in the heat of the morning.
“The stories of the Great Walk never included such drudgery as this!” Periden’s long brown hair danced as she jerked her head around and walked stiffly towards the brook.
“I wonder,” Selngni spoke softly so that Periden would not hear, “will you even remember the…drudgery?” She watched as the young human stopped halfway to the brook before turning around. Periden marched back to Selngni and angrily grabbed the tin jar from an outstretched hand.
• • •
Periden knelt by the brook and closed her eyes. The images from the Card’s shows, the pictures of Earth that Was, trickled through her mind. The green grass, hundreds of miles of trees! Were those called florists? Only the occasional stream or brook even half-resembled what she had been taught in her history lessons; what she had seen in the Card’s shows. And the sounds! When her family would go to the river she would close her eyes and dream. Are they the same? Surely they must be…water is water…right?
Periden opened her eyes and glanced at her surroundings. The patchy yellow pathway of grasses led towards her Guide, then spread wide enough to house the tree and all of its roots. That was it. Surrounding the brook, and everything else in sight was brittle, broken, but somehow sturdy dust. Where did we go wrong?
She returned her gaze to the brook. She’d yet to fill the tin jug she’d so rudely taken from her best friend. What a way to treat her own representative of the Cards, even if she refused to give up the answer to the only question Periden ever truly asked. She gently placed the jug into the brook, then without thinking, poured the water over her hands. So cold! How can it be so cold! She dropped her fingers to the running water, letting them dance and skip over and dive into the chill.
• • •
When Periden returned, Selngni’s black hair had taken a sickeningly greenish hue and her skin had almost turned gold. The Angelskin had only just begun to turn a yellow-green. “I brought the water,” Periden said as she sat cross-legged across from Selngni, setting the jug between them. “Where’s the food?”
Selngni looked at Periden through her Angelskin.
“You know that creeps me out.”
“You’ve grown up seeing it.”
“There are stories,” Selngni dipped the fingers of her right hand into the jug while Periden spoke, “of people who grew up with something but never outgrew their fear of it.”
Selngni put her right palm flat on the grass next to her and slowly raised it upwards. As she raised her palm, a stalk grew out of the ground seemingly attached, until it was about a foot tall and held two large fruits and several smaller berries.
“Earth that Was is called Earth that Was for a reason, Peri.”
Periden took one of the larger fruits and bit into it. Some of the juices slid down to her chin where she caught them with the fingers of her free hand. The more questions she asked, the fewer answers she was given.
“You, the Cards, know so much more than we do,” Periden sorted through a full mouth of fruit, juice and useless seeds. “Won’t you tell me, please tell me, why do you know so much more than we do?”
Again? Selngni poured half the jug of water over her hardening skin. “Because during the Era of Calm, the humans lived in the earth and the Cards lived above it.”
Periden took a drink out of the jug then wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
“Is there a world up there?” She took another bite of the fruit.
“You could say that,” Selngni glanced anxiously at Periden. “We lived in spaceships.”
Periden’s eyes grew wide as she gurgled out a bit of juice.
“Spaceships?”
“More or less,” Selngni offered casually. “Are you going to eat anything else before your rest?”
Periden shook her head and Selngni placed her palm over the stalk and slowly pushed it back into the ground.
“Humans tried their hands at genetics a few times,” Selngni continued once the Seed was gone. “At the time it was quite the cliché, you see, there was an explosion at a testing facility.” She moved her hand to one side, ”vials of this mixed with vials of that,” then to the other, just to show how mundane it really was, “and kaboom here we are.” She finished with the image of an explosion, then a shrug. “My race,” she offered in a different tone, “was created by what your people called cyberpunk clichés. It’s rather disappointing.”
“Disappointing? How can you call that disappointing?” Periden was on her hands and knees, eating the story out of Selngni’s hand. “That’s the most exciting thing I have ever heard!”
You mean since yesterday?
“What happened next?”
“You tried to kill each other. Now we genetically enhance humans to make them less likely to fall into moral corruption.” Selngni finished with a look of disdain for her own race. “In fact, the Seed is merely a way for me to implant you with the next level of genetic code and tonight one of our satellites will cross the sky and run the startup procedure from space.” Selngni’s Angelskin had turned a dark green.
“What!” Periden rocked back on her heels.
“You, of course, will not remember a thing, as the startup procedure will require a reboot of your entire mental system. It will be as if today never happened. You will think we have begun our first day of the Great Walk.”
Periden stared in disbelief at her friend, then learned forward with a grin.
“Oh, you,” she slapped her friend playfully. Selngni smiled mischievously.
“Go to sleep.”
“Very well.”
Periden took one last drink before handing the jug back to Selngni, who poured the remainder of the water over her forming scales.
• • •
The dream felt familiar. Periden was walking with a childhood friend she hadn’t seen in decades. They were both young still, dancing playfully in a grassy-green grass-meadow dotted with yellows and purples. Round and white objects swayed in the breeze, trying to hold on to themselves. Some broke, scattering wherever the wind would take the new parachutes.
A lizard skittered through the grass near Periden, looking at her through its beady eyes. Her friend looked into the lizard’s eyes with a passion for life Periden had never known.
“Okay, I’ve paid my twenty bucks. What do the cards say?” Periden’s friend grinned as Periden laughed.
“I know the answer is there,” her friend said again, serious this time. The passion for life remained but the grin had faded. “It’s in the cards, that’s where the answer is hidden, isn’t it?”
Periden ceased her laughter and looked cautiously at her friend who was now scowling at the little creature.
“It’s there! All the answers are there!” Periden and her friend looked at each other. “They’re in the cards, Periden! Everything you’ve ever wanted to know…is in the Cards!”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve told you before, every day for two weeks, now. Look inside, Peri, inside…”
The lizard scampred up Periden’s arm and whispered into her ear, “wake up, Peri, wake up.”
• • •
The Blackness had covered the earth. Selngni’s yellow and green hues were gone, replaced once more by her fair skin. Periden rubbed her eyes.
“You were joking, right?” Periden sat up and watched the stars in the distance.
“No.” Selngni also gazed to the heavens, waiting.
There was silence. Neither turned their heads from the sky. At length, a flashing light could be seen moving quickly across the Blackness. Silently Selngni prayed.
“What’s the cards?”
Selngni hung her head. Did they do this to torment her?
“It.”
She’d reprogrammed the startup code herself, who altered it? Why this loop?
“What’s it?”
Why this loop?
“It’s the cards…”
Approximately 1827 words
Made by The Prose Formatter