Ash
"All comes to ash. That’s the only truth..."
The blood had already evaporated.
Apparently, Hokkon thought, dragon flames cook sand into millions of tiny suns. These husks lying on an endless sea of red suns . . . these were my comrades? That charred heap down this dune . . . that was my king?
Hokkon rubbed the horse hairs of his ink brush between his forefinger and his thumb. He stood on the highest point of the highest dune of the Red Dusk Wastes, looking down the slim desert valley to the base of a mountainous dune directly across the barren way. Hokkon refused to even glance toward the top of that dune. He knew what monstrosity brooded there. He knew what madness would funnel through his body if he met eyes with that death of his nation. Instead, he looked at his quivering hands.
Royal historian. Chief conductor of legacies, the record of gods-among-men. That’s who he’d been just moments ago. Now?
Now I’m no more than a cloud without rain. All used up and never nourished. No more than a cloud.
Here, in the most important event of his empire’s history, Hokkon would not—could not—record what he’d just seen. What he’d just smelled. What was the point of history if there was no one left to read it? Besides Hokkon, only the god-soldiers and the gods-among-men were blessed with that responsibility, and there they were, thousands of black husks burnt to ash and smithereens.
Gods-among-men? Perhaps that is a more profound description than any of us had thought. Look at their pathetic charge into their own destruction. Hokkon’s heart skipped, and his fingers twitched, ached. His chest felt like it was collapsing inward, and he wanted to breathe, breathe, but all he could smell was the acrid smoke of human bodies and the ashes of his friends. Hot wind blew west, blowing sand into Hokkon’s eyes and blowing smoke further down the valley.
The way was becoming clear. The horror of clarity waited, Hokkon knew, waited for him. It was a black magnetism. It’d begun dully, when the orange-blue flames initially swallowed the royal army like a neon wave on a beach of crabs. The magnetism was a need now, and Hokkon could not withstand this tide.
He dropped the brush. He swept the standing scrolls aside. Loose, noon-day sand burned in his sandals as Hokkon stepped down the dune. He knew where he would walk, but still, he refused to look.
I cannot see it. I cannot see him. I cannot. I cannot.
Onward, he repeated his new-found mantra. Head down, he side-stepped and wound his way past the heaps of corpses. There was no blood to slip on. There was no steel left unmelted. A black-scabbed pole buried in sand was all that remained of the royal flag. Larger piles of ash may have been pure-bred stallions the price of castles a day ago.
But will any castle fare better? The flames may take five hundred years or ten breaths. All comes to ash. That’s the only truth: truth always changes.
Heat sizzled up from the sand and down from the sun. Hokkon’s linen robes and hood clinged to his sweaty skin. He could no longer feel the pain biting the soles of his feet. Numb. Forward. Gasping breath is all that breath could be. Head down, Hokkon did not know how long he’d stepped. He didn’t care how much farther his path would be. The shadow tide from the dune ahead pulled his soul’s rope one footstep at a time.
The wind ceased. Smoke hung in the air. Hokkon felt safe to look up, despite the burning in his eyes. Seeing no more than a few steps ahead, still, he knew the dune was approaching, and with it, his enemy. His destiny. He stepped over a smoldering carcass and continued his march. The way steeply sloped upward from here, so much so that Hokkon had to hunch forward, using his hands for occasional balance at first, then as make-shift climbing picks. Up, up, dig, dig, up, up. The sand would’ve burned his hands as he plowed them into the dune one at a time, but sensory pain was a thing of the past for Hokkon. There was only the sound of thin, melted steel collapsing on itself below. There was only the blank mind of a man who knew too much to know too little.
One more reaching step and the dune plateaued. Hokkon stumbled into an obsidian wall.
Not a wall—a claw.
He finally allowed himself to look up. And up. Until his neck was craned as if he were staring at the sun. Obsidian scales reflected glinting sunlight in white flashes, at off angles. The claw was one of five on this hand of the dragon, a hand the size of a merchant home. Another arm and two hind legs, a body propped up like a dog awaiting orders, two, sailing wings folded on the behemoth’s back. But Hokkon couldn’t see farther than the dragon’s neck—the sunlight was too strong any higher. Not that he wanted to see the dragon’s skull, the eyes that’d torn his world to pieces, the jaws of neon flame.
His dread must’ve been heard, for the dragon slowly shifted its body, retracting its claw and arm closest to Hokkon. The dune vibrated and began to throw its sand in wide bursts. Hokkon fell to his hands and knees. All he could hear was thunderous rumbling. Sand barrelled through the air like a desert blizzard.
Hokkon clasped his hands behind his neck and curled into a ball.
When the rumbling ceased and the sand stopped its assault, Hokkon flickered his eyelids open. Cold blue light surrounded him.
Am I . . .gone? he thought. Here? This looks like I fell into winter sky, but the heat . . . the heat . . .
He slowly sat up. It didn’t take long for him to find the source of the light: the dragon’s illuminescent eye faced him like a portal to another world. The rest of the dragon—its horns, jaws, snout, teeth—spanned out to Hokkon’s left and right. This time, Hokkon refused to look away. He refused to hide.
After all, who can hide from winter?
What felt like a shot of autumn air whistled into Hokkon’s mind, and try and try as he did to shake it out, a . . . presence . . . was in him. He kept his eyes locked on the towering blue iris, the reptilian pupil taller than he was.
“You are in love.”
It was a voice Hokkon had never heard before, yet it sounded more familiar than any voice he’d known. A voice, though, sonorous and grinding, right inside Hokkon’s mind, and there was no mistake knowing its owner: the dragon.
“What?” was all Hokkon could reply. He had to speak aloud. His thoughts were not something to share without a tongue.
“You are in love.”
“I . . . I’m a eunuch. I’ve never known love my entire life.”
“No. Not with a human.” There was a deep sigh, like old wind in a forest. “You are in love with history.”
“That’s my . . . my life’s work. It is—was my call by the gods-among-men.” Hokkon’s tongue and lips were as dry and cracked as his skin. Speaking brought blood to his throat.
“There are no gods-among-men. There never were. There never will be. Your love was not forced upon you by those pretenders. Your love is free, even now, even facing me. I have never graced a mortal mind with my own since the sun rose the first time from the Great Black. Yet when I saw you stay back from the suicide charge, when I watched you stumble toward me through the ashes of your life, I knew. I knew I must know what you, apparently, do not. Why do you love history?”
Hokkon blinked, blinked, clenched his fists closed, open.
“History is a secret only I can write, I suppose. A . . . power that only I can see. A power only I can speak. To my king, to my nation. No one else cared to swim through the past, not until the past shed light on the present. They only wanted history as a tool. I . . . I knew, I guess . . . I knew that history is perhaps more alive than our present moment.”
“An interesting claim, coming from a mortal.”
“Mortal, immortal—history swallows it all. History does not take sides, despite how hard my king tried to make it so. Bias is a perception. True history always spins around, unseen and unpredictable, but it always comes along. Its durability is unmistakable. Memory is a shadow of its light.”
“I remember the collapse of worlds beyond the one you walk on. I may be the last being here that remembers. If I fly into the Great Black, leaving you and all humans behind, will the history I know leave with me?”
“Does a fallen tree disappear when it’s cut and shaved down to form the handle of an ax that fells another tree? History adopts time as an infant, births it, then adopts another into itself in an eternal cycle. What time does outside of history is not its concern—history continues to birth, and nothing exists without being born.”
“You speak as one who knows love. Do you see?”
A shiver rustled down Hokkon’s spine. “Why do you care?”
“These men below us. They were in love with the future. Their desire for fame reeked. Their love for what did not exist killed them. Some loved the present, thirsting for the ever-leaving thrill of slaying a monster as monumental as I am. Their love for the present killed them. But you . . . your love for the past kept you alive. I have contemplated . . . I have yearned for . . . death. Perhaps you, small, insignificant, surviving you . . . perhaps you are the one who could slay me. Indeed, I know you can slay me, for after our conversation, I will fly to my doom. But what stirs in me now . . . you may be the only mortal wise enough to keep me alive, here on the precipice of time. So tell me: why should I not rush to my death too?”
Hokkon rubbed sand out of his eye, thinking, realizing he needed to feel now, not think. Death has laid claim to too many thoughts today.
“I remember the sound of my mother’s voice. She used to hold me on the porch at twilight, every night. She’d wait for the crickets to begin in the marshes around our hut. She’d sing in tones that matched their song so smoothly, it’s as though crickets have lost their chorus any time I hear them now. I don’t remember my mother’s face. I haven’t seen her since I was a child. But that feeling I get in my chest, the gentle, purple longing I feel pierce me like a crossbow bolt—I always remember that memory, whether I choose to or not. I remember it because it is true.
“As fathomless as your history surely is, dragon, you and I share one now. We both know the truth of today. And whether you kill us both, this really happened, and the ashes of today will always find another desert to blow through.”
No wind blew. Not a single grain of sand tumbled in the desert air. Hokkon and the dragon lived right then together, eye-to-eye. Perhaps they died there too. Only one thing was history:
In that moment, the world stood like Hokkon’s mother stood years ago, a baby in her arms, light fading on the swamp’s horizon, the song of her heart the only color daring to dance in the night.