There was fire in the heavens. The aurora blazed overhead, bathing the frozen Baja peninsula in vibrant colour. It was somewhat beautiful. But for Rob Reynolds and Dana Sentrosi, it conjured up frightful images. The stories their parents had told them, of when great missiles streaked across ever-darkening skies to sow the sickening fire of nuclear detonation, came to their minds. For all they knew, this could be an omen, a harbinger that the past they knew as distant could very well come around again.
“It scares you,” Rob said out loud, both to Dana and to himself. “But, strangely, it’s not a frightful scare, more of an awesome one, I guess.”
Dana nodded. “In it’s own horrible way, it’s beautiful.”
“My mother would always make the sign of warding at it when it appeared,” Rob said. He held up two fingers in a V and moved his hand back and forth to the sky. Dana did the same, though the webbing between her first knuckles made her effort a clumsy one.
“Did it work?” she asked him.
Rob put his hand down. Dana did as well. “It worked. No harm ever came from the aurora anyways. Just from the leech pools.”
Dana nodded. “Your mother was wise then.”
Rob looked over at Dana. She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were gazing out at the dark ocean. It rolled bible black beneath the eldritch light of the aurora, slick and sinuous in its movements. Rob could not imagine why Dana dwelt there. The waters held the worst sins of their fathers. The depths were filled with radiation, while the shallows were filled with fierce predators. But her kind was at home there. The air dried out their skin and made them overheat. Each new generation was more like that. In time, they might not be able to leave the sea. This made Rob sad, though he didn’t know why.
Dana looked at him. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m missing you, but you’re not the one that will leave.”
She smiled a little, her whiskers tilting up. “Is the future worrying you?”
He nodded. “Where I came from, my people were few. Here, they are even fewer.”
“The True are fading.”
Rob shook his head. “We aren’t true. If anything, the True are false. Your people are more true than me.”
Dana put her hand on his shoulder. “You are the heir of the past, not the past itself. Your fate belongs to you alone. The same is true of all of us.”
Rob looked out at the sky. Through the aurora and the thick clouds. He could see tiny bright pinpoints: stars. They shone on in the blackness. How far out where they? All the old books that still survived told him they were a great ways off. He thought that was because they were windows into heaven, ways for God to look down upon the world. The stars were few, but like humanity, they had once been many.
‘God doesn’t want to see us,’ Rob thought to himself. ‘He’s shut most of the windows.’
“But there are still a few open,” Dana said. Rob turned to her.
“Did I say that out loud?”
“No. But it was heavy on your mind.”
Rob smiled he looked back up at the sky. There were a few stars that were still open.
“I guess He still cares,” he admitted. “Someone has to.”
Dana put an arm around him. “Even if no one out there does. I still do.”
Rob smiled and put an arm around her as well. “ I like that,” he said, holding her close against him.
High above, the clouds shifted in the wind. Slowly but surely, more stars shone down.
This is for Cal's Chorus Contest. The song is Beneath These Waves by Demons & Wizards. The word is Episode.
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