The Light House
Originally published in Strange Encounters: Tales of the Inside Out and Other Peculiarities
We thought we’d know when the apocalypse happened, but we didn’t. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t loud. It was just… different. A little more each day until nothing was the same anymore. No one even realized until it was almost over.
Kaoin couldn’t remember the first time he went to the Light House, and Jii had been too small to join the sky, so Tei carried her bones in a pouch he made from her skin so she could make the journey with him when it was his time.
Sometimes Kaoin thought he saw the pilgrimage in dream place – cragged stone and slick surfaces and the jumbled bones of all the unprotected who couldn’t travel the whole way. He thought he saw the bones move and shift; thought he heard their unbound voices whisper in his ear.
He never asked Tei if this were true, though. The Light House was not a spoken place. It was a place the past still lived.
Since Jii began her Sleep, Tei kept them moving. They kept walking even while they ate. And then they just kept walking. Tei said they had to fast before their next journey. Tei never lied.
Tei had changed after Jii.
It was in small things. Kaoin woke most nights with Tei’s hand on his chest, Tei’s ear over his mouth. Instead of hanging Jii’s bag from his belt like people always did, Tei carried it in his arms the same way he carried Jii before her Sleep. Sometimes he would just stand very still and stare at the sky, but whenever Kaoin asked him what he saw, Tei shook his head and told Kaoin there wasn’t time anymore.
And then one night, Kaoin woke up, and Tei wasn’t there. Not hovering over him, not wrapped in his skins, not hunkered down to read the stones. Kaoin felt the panic rise as he realised he was there, alone with the dark, but he tried to tamp it down. He was too old for useless fears; there was nothing in the dark, nothing in the grey, nothing at all but the Eidolon, not since the last weyami who remembered the last weyami who remembered the Day of Misfortune pronounced them all finally, truly, fatally alone, and then promptly died thirty years ago to this day.
Or so Tei said, when Tei used to tell him things still. Tei said he’d known the weyami personally, and saw the elder keel over on the spot with his very eyes. All the Eidolon had wailed and wept for twenty-seven nights, but on the twenty-eighth night, they each made a pouch for one of his bones, and vowed to continue the pilgrimages even though the weyami left no apprentice to keep the names.
There’s nothing in the dark.
That’s what Tei would always tell him when he got scared, but Kaoin thought that’s what made the dark frightening. It would have been nice to think of other things out there, other things that felt alone and worried, all watching over each other when they met in the dream place. That would be so much better than the empty dark that stretched forever and beyond. The empty dark that never moved or twitched; that coated everything it touched in its hallow guise.
Sometimes the dark would lift a little – just enough that shapes seemed hazy and unclear. You couldn’t trust your own eyes in the grey, but at least it never lasted long, and then the dark returned. The always dark.
Kaoin wrapped his skins tight as tight around himself and tried to think what he should do. Tei had never left him before, not since Tei and Paja had to run to the Light House with Mo on their backs, and then only Tei came back, and by then Jii had taken her Sleep. Kaoin was never sure how much time had passed since then; it felt as close as never, but so much further away than yesterday.
“There is nothing in the dark,” he said.
The ground was covered in ash – but different. Wet like water but still as death. Crisp, but softer than the soft, wispy hair on Jii’s head. Cold, but stinging his toes like embers all the same.
He wanted to run back to their camp, and his skins, and just wait for Tei to return – or not – but that was something only a chael would do, and Kaoin had already done his season ritual.
More ash fell from the sky and tickled his eyelashes and stung his cheeks. It slid cool and wet on his blistered lips and when he touched it with his tongue it made him think of the Pahtok River – fast and deep and roaring as the icy water spattered them as they hiked the winding river road.
Tei stood on a slight rise, Jii clutched to his chest as he gazed up at the murky sky. Wet ash speckled to his long, greasy hair and dusted his shoulders in white. His thin short-clothes clung to his narrow, bony frame so angular and sharp.
“Tei?”
Tei sighed softly – a great exhale as if he’d been holding his breath waiting for Kaoin to arrive. “We are the last, you and I,” he said. “It’s time to make our journey.”
50. 100. 1000. People were shocked at first, but the numbers grew, and eventually 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 were just white noise in the background of every day. Resignation settled in. The firm, confident, “We must overcome,” diluted into a weary, dispirited, “What else can we do?” What else could we do?
For three nights they walked, only stopping to rest for an hour or two at a time. Tei strode ahead, strong and sure, while Kaoin struggled to keep up.
Tei did not speak, did not eat, did not sleep.
On the third night, with the grey firmly settling in, they came to a place like none Kaoin had ever seen outside of the dream place, and yet he felt it beyond familiar. It spoke to something deep in his bones, an imprinted message long buried by a previous self.
Everywhere was stone: stone ground, stone trees, stone cliffs rising high, high, high with little stone valleys cutting through. Everywhere was sharp and severe, straight lines and corners in a way that felt both aberrant and ordered. Safe. This was a landscape he could understand, even with its towering monoliths and their thousands of gaping black eyes. Even with the giants frozen in stone watching from platforms taller than any Eidolon.
“What is this?” Kaoin asked, but still Tei did not speak.
Tei led him through the valley paths, knowing the way so well he didn’t hesitate. Kaoin tried to capture everything in his eyes – the strange humps of boulders covered in ash; the debris, the bones, the crystal fragments crunching beneath his feet. So much of it was both glorious and strange, ominous but exciting. He had questions. So many questions. But the place made it clear quiet was expected. Kaoin hoped he would remember to ask Tei all his questions once they’d left and started their travels again.
Kaoin saw the Tower before he really saw it. The glow of it peered around the other shapes, leaving a tantalizing dread in his mouth. He’d seen fire a few times before in his life, but this was different. The fire in the Tower didn’t have the chaotic life of the fires he remembered; it didn’t have the iridescent colours woven through; it didn’t have the violent and persistent warmth.
It hurt his eyes to look at it directly, so he squinted through his fingers. The Tower rose high above all the cliffs and shone like the brightest fire in every place. This one wasn’t made of stone, though; its entire shape had been fashioned out of that slick, transparent crystal that covered all the ground.
Wide, crystal panels slid open for them with a hiss, and a voice burbled at them with words Kaoin didn’t know. The floor was a shiny polished stone; the walls crawled with the paintings of his people, their story from the Day of Misfortune all the way up to the time Paja and Mo never came back. Kaoin even saw himself painted there, and little Jii.
But Tei didn’t linger. He touched the wall, and a cheerful string of tones sounded before the deep whirring of a heavy object moving for the first time in a long while. The sound grew nearer and nearer until it finally stopped in front of them, and the same voice spoke again as another set of panels opened to reveal a small box.
Tei stepped inside, but Kaoin hesitated. Even when they sheltered in caves sometimes, the spaces were never so small. He couldn’t see a reason for entering the tiny box, but Tei beckoned him closer to Kaoin took a few careful steps across the threshold.
The panels sealed shut behind him, and Kaoin threw himself against the slippery surface. His fingers wouldn’t fit into the seam, though, and even with his knife he could not wedge the doors apart again.
Tei placed a hand on his shoulder and shook his head, and then the box began to move.
His entire life, Kaoin had trusted Tei with everything, and not once had the elder steered him wrong. Kaoin tried to remember this as the floor beneath him shook and his stomach made a sickening flip. He wrapped his arms around a pipe on the wall and crouched on the ground, eyes squeezed shut as he waited for the shaking to stop.
He had lived through many, many earth shakes, and he never got used to them. This strange, moving box made all those earth shakes seem like nothing in comparison, and he felt ridiculous for being afraid of them now.
Too long after, the box shuddered and stopped. The tones sounded again, and the voice spoke once more. Kaoin wished he knew what it said; there was something calm and peaceful about the voice and the burbling sounds it made. Part of him hoped that somewhere in the Tower, more panels would open, and the owner of the voice would be there, in person. Real. Kaoin had not seen anyone by Tei since Jii had her Sleep.
Kaoin followed Tei out of the box, his legs feeling shaky and weird like the floor still moved beneath him even though he knew it was just a memory of the earth shake in the box. The place no longer seemed exciting; more than anything, Kaoin just wanted to leave. There was a smell here he didn’t like; a dark, muddied smell he’d never encountered before but made all the tiny hairs on his body prick up.
One last set of panels brought them outside again, only now they stood atop the Tower. The severe landscape stretched out farther than he had ever seen. As far as the end of the world, he thought, and maybe even farther. Perhaps if he looked closely enough, he could see all the way around until he saw his own self watching his own self.
He was afraid, yes, but there was also something so majestic about it. The way the cliffs rose up in irregular yet uniform patterns, the way the always fog drifted through them, the way, up here, the grey did not seem so very grey at all.
The top of the building was wide and flat, with row upon row of flat, black panels lined up in a grid. The smell was thicker here, dark stains scorched into the flat roof. And the bones. Not jumbled like the ones in the dream place, nor scattered and broken like the ones in the valleys below.
These bones were collected into piles evenly spaced around the roof. Some were browned and brittle, some lighter and smooth. Strips of fabric tied them into safe little bundles, even the newest ones weathered and faded while the oldest piles were bleached of all colour.
He saw the crimson stripe of Paja’s shirt and the pale, pale green of Mo’s scarf, and finally Kaoin understood where he was; not as a thunderous revelation, but a quiet confirmation of an answer he already held in his chest.
“The Light House,” he said, so, so softly the very words were snatched from his lips before even he could hear them.
We all stopped talking about “when it was over,” and “what comes next.” We all knew those things would never come, but none of us could speak that out loud. We got used to living with dread, uncertainty. We got used to living with the only right now. And there were the dead. The dead upon dead upon dead; so many bodies the fires never stopped. If you closed your eyes and really tried, you could imagine the smell that stuck in your clothes, your hair, the very cells of your body was just a neighbour’s summer barbecue. Some days it was the only way to get through.
They sat cross-legged facing each other, he and Tei. Jii rested in Tei’s lap, and the opening knife sat on the ground between them. Tei stared at the sky, the almost-white sky, speaking to the Eidolon who’d already flown to the sky.
Kaoin was restless and bored, but he also knew he shouldn’t show this. That would be a chael’s action. That Tei had brought him to the Light House confirmed his place as grown, even though he wasn’t sure why they’d come to the Light House in the first place. The Light House was only for ascending to the sky, and neither one of them were at that time.
Tei cupped Kaoin’s face in his hands – rough, cool, but also soft – and looked him in the eye – earnestly, forcefully, uncomfortably intimate. “We are the last, you and I,” he said, his voice thick and strange in a way Kaoin had never heard before. “I know the thing to do, but I didn’t have the will myself. The ones before will help me complete what must be done.”
Tei picked up the opening knife, his left palm against Kaoin’s forehead, tilting his head back. “Close your eyes, chael,” Tei said. He had not called Kaoin that since before Jii’s sleep.
Kaoin closed his eyes.
“We are the last,” Tei said again.
It took half of us in one night, but they’d stopped collecting bodies by then. We’d thought we could wait it out; the tower after all… They always said the tower was safe from everything. We carried the bodies up to the roof because we didn’t know what else to do. It seemed wrong to not do something. Someone suggested burning, so we did that. We prayed, even though none of us knew how to pray. We tied the bones up in our clothes and hoped that would keep them safe for at least a while.
As we left, the tower told us we should take an umbrella because it would rain between three and four PM, and it hoped we would have a very good day today.