At the Edge of Nod #

20 December 2023 #

A story set in the mythological future #

First Published in Calliope Issue 185: Fall 2024

At the edge of the world the ground was black. The fury of the crimson sun was so great that the plants and the animals that once inhabited the forested earth had been gone for a millennium. A king of old walked on a road built by the Romans when he was a much younger man. Now both the king and the road wore cracks and scars inflicted upon them by the miserable passage of time. So too were his boots ragged and torn, but they held strong against the rising temperature of the ground. The sky was red and orange. The calm gradient of blue and pink that once graced the dusk and the dawn was as dead as the world had become.

The king took in a deep breath of ash and scanned his surroundings. Enemies were no longer a problem, but eons of facing them had taught him to be cautious nonetheless. When he was satisfied that nothing lurked in the murk and smoke that settled in the crevices of the land, he gritted his teeth and walked onward. He had sought out this fate and once believed it to be a great blessing from the gods, but had long since become certain that his divine resilience was indeed a curse. It was just as the old man at the edge of the great river warned him.

He came to the bottom of a hill and saw the crumpled remains of a highway. The asphalt was fragmented and splintered and decomposed to resemble the bones of a hundred nations. Off in the distance was the imposing silhouette of a once great city where the tall spires had scraped the sky in their opulent hubris. Now they only sagged in their failure to stand beneath the weight of the world. Miles off he saw the white billowing of a campfire, a sight so alien that the king rubbed at his eyes and gawked at the visage.

When the king drew near he saw an old man hunched by the fire. It smelled of cedar and pine resin and formed a ring of aroma warding off the stench of sulfur and iron that permeated the cracking atmosphere. The old man wore gray rags that wrapped into a robe and cloak. His dark skin was worn from the sun and there was a ghastly scar upon his forehead that forever marked him. He suffered from the same curse as the king: immortality.

“Come, great king,” the man said, warming his hands. “Sit with me and watch the fruits of my garden bloom.”

The king stood at the edge of the threshold of incense. He could have stood for a fortnight or for only a minute, but once all indications of harmful intention had been pushed aside by mutual placidity, the king gave into the man’s request and sat across him by the fire.

“You know me,” the king said, his voice a grinding stone after decades of silence.

“We have met before.” The man smiled as if he were speaking with an old friend. “On three separate occasions.”

“Remind me, then.”

“The first was ten years after you discovered the secret or our nature, where the great river flows into the underworld. Just before the fall of Urukhaven. You sat before my fire in tears and I listened to your lament. Then I only listened and I did not offer counsel, for at the time I did not possess the knowledge that I have now.”

The king remembered such a time now that it was mentioned. He nodded for the man to continue his recounting.

“The second was just before Alaric took Rome from beneath Honorius’s mangled nose. We met at a market and without revealing myself I sold you a golden apple.

“Ah, so that was you. When I realized that the apple would not cure my affliction, I raged and surged through the street so that I may hang you from your toes.”

“And yet you did not find me until much later.”

“I recognized you from the first time we met. We were in a gas station and I was buying a canned drink, complaining about the rising prices. You rolled your eyes from behind the counter and told me to stop fretting over things that are outside my control.”

The men sat in silence taking turns stoking the fire that was altogether unnecessary and simply served as a nostalgic comfort to them. The pulsing crimson sun feigned setting and dipped briefly behind the horizon before once again rising to high noon. Water from a nearby pond sizzled and steamed and then began to boil. Three elderly lobsters floated to the top and the man hopped to his feet with boyish anticipation.

The king watched the man prance into the boiling pond and throw the lobsters into a rusting iron cook pot when he returned. From a dry leather satchel he produced cutlery and fine dishes.

“Three years I have sat at this fire, my king.” The man set plates in front of them both. “And I have been rewarded with three great meals fit for one such as yourself. Please, dine with me.”

The king clutched at his abdomen which had shriveled and hardened to stone. His memory was poor and he could not remember the last time he had thought about food. Then his stomach growled and memories of feasts in his keep rolled in and out of his mind’s eye. Revelry and cheer and wine with friends by his side and lovers in his bed. A time before he was denied all further sensation that made the human experience worth living and dying for.

“I will gladly dine with you, friend. Though I must confess I am ashamed. You know so much about me and I cannot recall your name.”

“My king, I had hoped by now you would have realized names are irrelevant. Without civilization do the mountains and the seas have names? Do these crustaceans that feed our pleasure have names?”

“No, I suppose they do not. However, would you at least explain to me how it is you have lived so long when the majority of our species has perished?”

The man smirked and crunched the shell of his lobster with ancient silver crackers. He pulled the white tendrils from the shell and sucked his fingers clean.

“Long ago, I smashed my brother’s skull with a rock because God favored him over me.” Another crunch and pieces of exoskeleton split to splinters and the man passed the crackers to the king. “So God punished me with everlasting life. I was sentenced to innumerable years of walking barren and dying land, tasked to witness the rise and fall of countless civilizations.”

“I see.” The king cracked his own lobster and shivered as he felt the shell break under his strength which felt to him all too much like the fracturing of a skull.

“Will you tell me your story, my king?”

“Surely, you must know my story already. It is written upon tablets and was at one point a deft curiosity.”

“Of course, of course, and I was one such scholar that translated the cuneiform from the tablets which helped to bring it to modern understanding. But there is nothing in this shattered existence quite like hearing such a tale from the mouth of the man that lived it.”

“It has long since fled my memory.” The king took a bite of meat and his eyes watered as the taste took him back to a night almost forgotten. It was a night of merriment and grandeur and at the end he took only one lover into his bed. Remembering the feeling of his face pressed upon his own, the king wept as the man patiently stoked the campfire. He wiped his eyes and regarded his host with utmost sincerity and seriousness.

“You have given me a gift, so I shall humor you. My story is a bleak one. Though you deserved the fate wrought upon you, I did not. I was set on a quest by the Gods to travel with a man of their creation to the perceived ends of the earth. There we slew the mighty Humbaba and freed man from Nature’s grasp.”

The man raised his eyebrows and nodded, listening with rapt attention.

“There were other Gods who saw our triumph as a crime and so the man they had created,” the king paused and swallowed ash, “the man I had grown to love above all else, was taken into the depths of the Underworld. I became so riddled with fear that I left on a journey to visit the first immortals in order to obtain the secret of eternal life. They told me that it was not a gift one should hope to receive.”

“Very wise.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you sit before me.”

“That is because when finally the bitter Utnapishtim brought me the flower that would grant me my youth, it was taken from me by a great tiger.”

“But you did not simply give up and turn back as the tablets of old say you did.”

“No.” The king winced as he heard the screams in the back of his head and felt the hot blood burn his skin. “A frenzy overtook me and I stole the gift that I desired by way of bronze and blood. For this crime I have been cursed to walk the land until it is consumed by everlasting fire.”

The king looked up at the sky and the sun swelled overhead breathing slowly, each breath stealing another year from existence. The celestial body of life and rage and passion loomed overhead unerring and threatened to end everything with one last death knell. The king would wait in anticipation until finally it committed itself to action. The silver lining of this torment is that one will never see their annihilation coming, despite it lingering constantly overhead.

“And still you say that you do not deserve this fate, but I do?”

“I did not ask to ride the thirteen winds that destroyed the great guardian of Nature. I know not what possessed me to murder Ut-napishtim and his dear wife. I did not intend to fall so helplessly in love that I would reject all notions of sanity!”

“Hubris, my king, hubris! That is your crime above all else.”

“Is fratricide a mere trifle compared to the weight of my crimes? Perhaps so, but also you have chosen your crime. Mine was thrust upon me by forces that sought to oust me from my pedestal.”

The man cackled and hollered and threw his head back in a wheezing guffaw. He clapped his hands together and wiped a dry tear from the corner of his jaundiced eye.

“What if I told you that a snake in the garden urged such an inhuman action? That a black goat infiltrated my flock and told me that if I removed my dear brother from the suffering of humanity, I could know riches and leisure beyond measure? What if I told you that I beheaded the snake with a spade and sacrificed the goat upon a hill to the great and merciful Yahweh, and still He rejected my offering! That night in a blind rage I bashed my dear brother’s head in with a stone and came back to consciousness only to find his gray matter spread brutally between my fingers.

“Regardless of what may have influenced us, we are still responsible for our actions. There comes a time in each person’s life when they are issued a choice; atrocity or death. You could have stood before the Gods and allowed them to smite you down rather than destroy the only spirit left in the world that cared to preserve what little life remained. You could have accepted the death of your cherished lover and joined him again in the afterlife after living a full life on your own. I could have fled to the parish and told the wise men and women that the devil was speaking to me and allowed them to stone me as a heretic.

“But no, my king, we did none of these things and in our rejection of death we have ensured that we will not know its embrace until every other aspect of the mortal world has known it first. We made our bodies vessels for hatred and destruction. In our willingness to harbor these forces we are sent into a purgatory, tasked with the weary duty of standing vigil and witnessing the history of our species. You are not cursed, great King Gilgamesh, you are in denial of your true purpose and for one who has been regarded as so wise and so capable, I am surprised that after three million years you still have not seen this.”

The two men sat listening only to the crackling of the dying embers between them. The wind howled between the blackened hills and the king’s unfinished meal had become encrusted with debris and gilded with dust. There was a distant rumble in the city beyond as an ancient titan of industry succumbed to gravity and fell to pieces in a heaping avalanche, sealing another vestige of humanity forever from the eyes that remained to observe.

“It is a lonely existence that you and I face,” the king said, his voice somber and weak. “Regardless of the origin of our plight, might it be better if we were to fall in step with a friend by our side?”

“Might it be more pleasant? Yes, surely, but would it be better? That’s another matter altogether. I am afraid, my dear king, that for you to come to terms with the duty before you, you must walk as I have walked: alone. If we stray from the debts that bind us now, surely we will be cast into the pits of Hell when finally we are allowed to abandon these earthly bodies.”

Long had the king yearned for the company of another, long had he lusted after the warmth of mortal flesh. So much time he spent wanting and now for him to learn that it was all wasted was almost too much to bear. If he had just accepted the pull of the tide, would he have already been reunited with the man he loved most? If he finally denied himself gratification, would the reward at the end of his penance be that much greater or had his envy spoiled everything?

“I see.” And with that the king rose and the man bowed his head and departed.

He walked across the barren wastes with the gorging and ever hungry sun at his back. In the distance he heard another falling structure and for the first time that he could remember, he quickened his pace. So much time wasted lamenting past wrongs that could have been spent correcting them. It occurred to him then that even kings became consumed by a limited image of the world around them. He was no longer a king and had not been for three million years. Now he was simply an observer and he swore to observe as much as possible before the sun fell beneath the horizon and at last devoured all that was left.