Rod M. Santos

         Young Uoaka floated, a being of psionic energy pulsing in the dark glory of space. Her attention was held by what loomed before her—a dead planet, lost, adrift. She felt a thrill, a sensation too gentle to be ecstasy, too lucid to be euphoria. Perhaps it was the simple joy of knowing her rite of passage, her Serejorn, neared its end.

         It was not just a heavenly body devoid of life that Uoaka needed. She had traversed the galaxy, had passed countless gas giants, ice moons, and other worlds of barren rock and desert. None were suitable. What she sought was a planet that had once cradled life, one which still held the building blocks to do so again. 

         She expanded her awareness, strummed the web of space-time, its ephemeral strands threading the ego to the infinite. She focused on the planet, brushed its surface with her thoughts, sweeping her mind's eye over devastated terrain, past streets of decaying cities. She saw an ocean of ice, and below it, a crater gouged into the planetary crust. Uoaka knew this scar marked a wound...the fatal wound that had slain this world.

         She glimpsed the past, saw the race that had once dominated the land, their cities gracing the valleys and hills, plains and riverbeds. They were elegant but primitive beings, bipedal, corporeal, azure-skinned and smooth. They had all perished with their homeworld, Uoaka knew, and the enormity of death moved her.

         No, the time for mourning is past, she told herself and sped forward. Though she could not resurrect them, she would do all in her power to bring life back to this world.

         She plunged into an atmosphere dark and choked with ashes. The inky sky upset her, reminded her of the Void. Here there were no stars, nor moon, nor sun.

         She weaved a phosphorescent cloak around herself, that her way might be illumined. The radiance immediately lifted her spirits.

         In a moment of whimsy, she changed her form. Her energy flowed, materialized, hardened. Will became flesh, and her spirit cooled into a body. The transformation was slow, but when it was complete, Uoaka assumed the appearance of the extinct race—a female, for it was the gender of birth, of motherhood. She would foster reincarnation on a planetary scale, as her people had done for countless millennia.

         Her hair flew wild in the freefall. The sound of her own laughter startled her. She stretched her arms, reveling in the physical sensations, exploring the novelty of limbs.

         When she broke through the clouds, her mood sobered. She paused, hovering. The face of the land lay in ruins, disfigured by chasms and sinkholes.

         She needed to see for herself how it ended. Her sight bent time, folded back the years, that she might witness the cataclysm.

         The devastation played out for her in reverse.  She saw the thick shroud of ash that darkened the atmosphere recede. Temperatures rocketed from subfreezing cold to infernal heat. Acid rain flew up from the ground to pelt the blue underbelly of clouds. Flaming debris, the spray of a high-magnitude explosion, shot skyward from burning forestlands. The global infernos that covered the world were snuffed out, and the immense shudders of the earth quieted.

         Tidal waves shrank, collapsed to an epicenter, while above, a vast fireball imploded in slow motion. With a roar, its flames were sucked into a vortex in the ocean. Uoaka watched the waters spew out a blur—a meteor perhaps, or asteroid—which whooshed from the waters, through the sky, diminishing to a shimmer, then a star-point, then a pinprick in the darkness.

         She blinked, and her sight returned to the present. It chilled her that so tiny a thing could bring apocalypse.

         Her senses expanded once more, combing through the continents. A light, dim but undeniable, flared through her mind. Her eyes widened. The light signified an impossibility.

         Something still lived on the planet.

         As she sped towards the faint beacon, a strange sensation—the racing of her heart—quickened through her.

 

 

         The city before her was a cemetery. Squat, stone buildings, like ranks of tomb markers, sat broken and crumbling. She wondered what life-spark could survive in this necropolis.

         A massive pyramid, plated with precious metals, dominated the cityscape. Its steps were cracked on all three sides, fractured by the land's upheaval. At its apex was a marble cathedral, magnificent in size and perhaps, long ago, in beauty. Its architecture differed markedly from the other buildings in the city, ornamented with flowing sculptures of strange animals.

         The gold-tiled path that led to its entrance was strewn over with earth and ash. The floors must have blazed, Uoaka thought, when sunlight still touched this world.

         Once again, her sight delved through the veils of the past. A throng of people knelt under the darkening sky. Their numbers covered the entire pyramid; their prayers and screams filled the air.

         "Save us," they cried. "Have we not served you faithfully?"

         When the ground shook, the pyramid began to break. Cracks swallowed the supplicants and silenced their wails. Uoaka wrenched her sight away, and the ghosts faded.

         She flew to the cathedral's archway and entered. Candelabra of rose-hued metal lay twisted, their tapers spilt and melted about them. Shrines covered the side walls, and the far end displayed a huge altar table shattered in two.

         Directly behind the table loomed a magnificent idol, its arms stretched wide. It had once borne wings colossal enough to buttress the vaulted ceiling. Now, large sections of both roof and wings littered the tessellated floor.

         The statue's face was severe, unforgiving. It gazed upward, through the holes in the roof, towards the black sky and the memory of the sun beyond.

         Uoaka walked closer to the altar, stepped over rubble riddled with chalky holes and broken pinions. She moved towards the life-spark, and she gasped when she saw its source.

         Genuflecting before the altar was a golden-haired man, his head bent, his white robes filthy. A thick sash of deep cobalt-blue hung loosely over one shoulder. His countenance was fair, but a coldness deeper than the Void surrounded him. He was draped in a mantle of cobwebs.

         Uoaka ran to his side. She saw his lips trembling, heard him murmur in an alien tongue, lyrical, reverent. His eyes were closed.

         "Are you hurt?" she asked, sending her thoughts to him.

         The man made a sound like laughter, and a drop of white fire rolled down his cheek. The drop fell, and the marble sizzled where it struck. Only then did Uoaka notice the trail seared into the floor from the vestibule to the altar.

         When the man's eyes opened, a lambent glow surrounded him. The cobwebs wisped into smoke. Uoaka sensed power in his aura, power greater than her own.

         "My heart is wounded...beyond hope, beyond redemption. Do you not know who I am?"

         He ran a hand through his tangled hair, and when his fingers became snarled in the knotted ends, he brought them to his lips and kissed them.

         His mind is wounded, too, Uoaka thought. "I do not know you, but I sensed you from afar."

         "I am Alial of the Crystal Flame," the man said. "Exalt me now, that my face might shine upon you."

         He turned to Uoaka, and the corners of his mouth twitched as he saw her for the first time. His smile was desperate. He stood to his full height, his body slow from disuse. "My h-heart rejoices to find you. How is it you live when your Kohdai brothers and sisters have died?"

         She realized then how she must have appeared to him. "Your pardon. My name is Uoaka. I wear a Kohdai's form, but I am not one of them."

         Alial's face hardened, and Uoaka saw at once its likeness to the statue's—grim, unforgiving.

         "I mean no harm," she said quickly. "I sensed life here and came to lend aid—"

         "What are you? There is power in you, but mortality as well."

         "My people call ourselves the Orotuko, though we have been given many names. The Balancers. The Shepherds of Planets. On some worlds, the less enlightened even mistake us for gods."

         His eyes flared. "No! There is only one god. There is only me, the Living Temple, the Crystal Fire, Alial."

         Uoaka retreated. "When I came here, you seemed to be in prayer...?" She wondered to whom a god would pray.

         Alial's eyes shattered like mirrors, and silver flames leapt high from the sockets. "Are you a demon? Do you seek to poison me with doubt?"

         A prismatic sword erupted from his palm. "For demons, there is only one fate." He raised the sword high and every reflective surface in the cathedral shone with a stabbing light.

         Uoaka flew up through a large break in the ceiling. She would try to reason with him from a safer distance.

         Alial's shouts followed her. "My people. What have you done to them?"

         Black, fiery wings roared from his shoulder blades, and he leapt to the air. At first, his wings beat awkwardly, tentative as a fledgling's. But the memory of flight returned, and he was soon moving effortlessly through the air.

         Uoaka reached out with her mind, carved space, sculpted it to build a gravity storm around Alial.

         He closed his eyes, threw his arms back. A sphere of fire blossomed outwards from his chest, the flames growing till they crashed into the storm.

         For a moment, the opposing forces were deadlocked. Alial howled, and Uoaka's bones shivered at the strength of his anger. His fires raged more brightly. Against the onslaught, Uoaka's storm dwindled, then broke.

         Without pause, Alial lashed out with his sword. Fire whipped through the air. Uoaka spun sideways, would have evaded the attack, but the fire swerved, struck out like a living thing. It clipped her arm, burning it to the bone.

         She swallowed a shriek, flew high to put distance between them. With her mind, she grasped deep into the earth. Boulders, gravel, and sand curtained skyward to form a wall before Alial. She knew it would not last long, but its purpose served as a screen, not a shield.

         In a blink, Uoaka accelerated to the speed of sound, headed towards a mountain range she had passed on her way to the city. Looking behind, she saw no sign of her pursuer.

         Her thoughts raced. The wrath of the mad god seemed inexorable. She wondered how long he had knelt before his own altar and why he had not helped his people when disaster came. Had he slept while the world around him died, woken to find everything gone?

         A shaft of fire smashed into her. Enveloped in pain, she plummeted in a long, tumbling spiral. The horizon revolved around her, and she fought to orient herself. The world became a swirl of images. Mountains were circling. Alial was charging. Pain sliced through the vertigo, as broken bones shifted inside her.

         She shut off her body's senses, stretched out instead with her mind. Equilibrium returned, too slowly. The rising mountainside grew into sharp focus. There was no time to pull up.

         She shot out at the ground, blasted it into fine powder, but it was not enough to break her fall. The impact shattered her body. Through the agony, she tried to turn back into psionic energy, but the change needed concentration, needed calm, needed time.

         It had been foolish of her to become corporeal. All her energy was bent now to keeping herself alive, knitting tissue and muscle, mending bones.

         She sensed someone kneel beside her, embrace her in trembling arms. Feverish hands stroked her hair, her cheek.

         "What have I done, my child? What have I done?" It was Alial. She felt a new pain, the tears of fire upon her skin.

         Alial continued to weep. "All I ever wanted was to love my children, as the Father loved me. To be like Him...to be loved like Him."

         She let him cry, used the respite to rebuild her body, regain her strength. She could not guess how long this reprieve would last, how long before his grief returned to wrath.

         The thought of fighting him was anathema to her, but no other solution was clear. He was too powerful to restrain, too fast to outrun. He had called her a demon, but the only demons she saw were the ones that haunted his mind.

         His mind. Uoaka listened to her intuition. The only way to defeat him was to heal him, to repair his psyche. And the only way to do that was to find what had broken it.

         She stared at him through heavy lids as he wept. The moment withdrew, time slipped, reversed, and he was flying up, crying in dismay as she fell, her body smoldering from the fire of his sword.

         She pushed her sight further back, to when she had found him kneeling in the cathedral. He had been there for years, as still as the dead save for his lips in prayer.

         Then...he crawled backwards out of the cathedral, below the burnt sky, crawled down the steps amidst corpses and cracked stone. Through the city, through the land. To the shore of the frozen ocean. He tried to use his wings but they were useless then, extinguished.  He crawled back into a hole in the ice. At last, Uoaka thought she understood.

         She felt a hand on her throat. The fingers wrung deep bruises.

         "What are you doing?" Alial hissed. "Why do you look at me so?" He stood and lifted her high. Her body hung limp in his grasp.

         Uoaka sent her thoughts to him. "You have lost your way. I search to give you peace."

         Alial pulled her close. She felt the heat of his eyes.

         "Peace? Yes, and grant me knowledge, too...the knowledge of how you killed this world without my knowing. Answer me, demon." His grip tightened.

         "The peace you desire is inner-peace, the knowledge you need is self-knowledge. Let—"

         Uoaka felt herself thrown through the air. Her body hit the ground, skimmed and tumbled down the mountainside till it struck an outcropping with a sickening crunch. She lay face up, saw Alial rising in the air in fury.

         If she did nothing now, she knew she would die. The ground shook when Alial landed, the rock breaking at his feet. He stood over her, sword raised.

         She used her sight once more, but this time fed the visions back into the mad god's mind.

         The image began where it left off, with Alial crawling backwards into the ice. The tunnel wormed deeper and deeper, came closer to the planet's core, and the ice became water. Alial never paused. He crept through mud and silt, through ooze. All around him the waters roiled, but he crawled oblivious into the ocean depths.

         The land dropped away, abruptly, and Alial climbed down the sheer earth, down till he touched bottom, then crawled backwards again to stop in the center of an underwater crater. There he lay for many months.

         The waters suddenly boiled around him, and dark vapor solidified into rock. With a primordial boom, Alial exploded upwards, whirling out of the sea, through the sky, towards the heavens, to where a host of beings similar to him gave words of warning, words begging repentance, words that he countered with accusations of envy.

         Surrounding the host was a Light beyond light, a Song above all songs. They were the last things that Alial saw and heard before he fell.

         Uoaka's mind recoiled from the overwhelming guilt and sorrow. She severed her link to Alial, and the pain abated. She saw Alial curl upon the ground, his grief pouring from his eyes in smoky tears.

         "I never meant..." he began, but the words wouldn't come.

         Uoaka knew now that Alial was no god, only a messenger, who had succumbed to the adoration of the people he had been sent to serve, the people he later doomed with his fall from grace.

         For a long time, the two of them lay there, under a sky of ashes. While Uoaka regained strength with each breath, Alial regressed to the murmuring trance she had found him in at the cathedral ruins.

         Days passed, and when Uoaka could stand at last, she went to Alial, gathered him into her arms, and rose into the sky.

 

 

         Uoaka landed atop the highest peak of the tallest mountain. She laid Alial on the frozen ground, sat cross-legged beside him. His condition had not declined, but neither had it improved. If, at the end of her Serejorn, he had not gotten better, she resolved to bring him to her home and give what healing she could.

         She breathed in deeply. Not all her strength had come back, and she prayed she had the endurance for what was to come. She touched the white earth, sifted it through her fingers. Her mind expanded, began to suffuse over every particle of the land, from crust to core. How long it took—days or decades—she could not say.

         When it was done, the planet wobbled in its path, then left it, steered by Uoaka's will. It was the most arduous labor Uoaka had ever borne. The world became a ship, and she its navigator. A cosmic compass shone in her mind as she caressed the silken lines of space-time.

         The planet traveled steadily, a leviathan gliding through space. Uoaka widened her awareness, was careful not to damage the delicate order of other planets by straying too near.

         A vast nebula came into view, its mists intermittently aglow by the baby stars it nursed. An iridescent plume of hydrogen and dust projected from the nebula's edge, and Uoaka spied a newborn sun at its tip. She aimed the planet towards it.

         When it was close enough, she let gravity draw the planet into course. She coaxed it tenderly till its orbit became defined, stable. She had brought the planet here successfully. A wave of exhaustion swept over her.

         A hand touched her shoulder, and she turned to find Alial standing.

         "Do you hear it?" he asked. "The Father is calling."

         Uoaka heard a soundless music, the melody to which all heavenly bodies danced. She wondered if this was what Alial meant.

         She suffered a moment of panic when he raised his hand, and his fiery sword flared into existence. He pointed the blade to the sky, and a ray of light burst upward.

         The ash in the atmosphere ignited, and the sky became a riot of dancing flame. The roar of the fire rolled above them like thunder. The blazing aurora danced for hours, then flickered into stray curls that vanished one by one.

         "I see Him," cried Alial.

         Uoaka turned her face to the sky. She sensed something vast, a mystery beyond her sight. Her travels through the cosmos had shown her many wonders: planar labyrinths, sentient black holes that hunted to sate their hunger, creatures that swam in the tails of comets. But what she sensed now was beyond anything she'd ever encountered.

         A storm arose, primal, primordial. Veins of lightning flowed through the ether, bled energy into the waters it struck. The heavens wept pristine tears.

         "Forgive me," Alial said, and Uoaka was overwhelmed by the sorrow in his plea. For a moment, she thought he was speaking to her.

         Though the storm didn't break, a radiance brighter than sunlight lit the clouds from above. Alial stepped forward and was transfigured. Gone was the cold that Uoaka felt in the cathedral. Gone was the madness. His robes became pure and luminous. Wings, the color of diamonds, flowed out from his shoulders.

         He turned to her. "You are more than a shepherd of planets. You are a bringer of life. May you never stray from your path as I did."

         His feet left the ground. His wings grew, billowed, till Uoaka thought they would blanket the mountaintop.

         An enormous bolt of lightning lit the sky, and froze there like a rift in space. Uoaka sensed a reality beyond it, a serenity wholly alien to anything she knew.

         As he soared towards the gateway, it brightened, became too intense for Uoaka to look at. Then it was gone, and with it, Alial.

         She looked to the skies, to where Alial had vanished, and stared in wonder. Through the ebbing storm clouds, the sun was emerging. And then she sensed it. In a faraway ocean, a spark twinkled...the tiniest, joyful glimmer of light and rebirth.

 

 

Copyright 2007, Rod M. Santos

Rod M. Santos was raised in the Bronx, yet is surprisingly gentle by nature.  He currently works for a non-profit agency, but writes speculative fiction to vent off his excess quirkiness.

The Shepherd of Planets is his second sale, and quite different from his first, which can be found at The Town Drunk, a webzine for lighthearted speculative fiction.  He is an active member of Liberty Hall, a wonderful writing forum that has helped him grow tremendously as a writer.  He is a proud member of the Parakeets of Doom.

 

    

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For more information visit www.dkamagazine.com. This work appears as part of Issue 48, September 2007.

                                                     

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