Only the dead, flat no-sound of millions of wings metronomically beating, beating, beating …
Bright Eyes shuddered, turned his face from the sight above, and finding himself unable to look yet unable to end the horror as he had the mad dogs or the water of corpses, sought surcease in his own personal vision.
And this, which had driven him forth, was his vision:
Sleeping, deep in that place where he had lived so long, Bright Eyes had felt the subtle altering of tempo in the air around him. It was nothing as obvious as machinery beginning to whirr, trembling the walls around him; nor as complex as a shift in dimensional orientation. It was, rather, a soft sliding in the molecules of everything except Bright Eyes. For an instant everything went just slightly out of synch, a little fuzzy, and Bright Eyes came awake sharply. The thing that had occurred, was something his race had preset aeons before. It was triggered to activate itself — whatever “itself” was — after certain events had possibly happened.
The fact that this shifting had occurred, made Bright Eyes grow cold and wary. He had expected to die without its ever having come. But now, this was the time, and it had happened, and he waited for the next phase.
It came quickly. The vision.
The air before him grew even more indistinct, more roiled, like a pool of quicksilver smoke tumbling in and in on itself. And from that cloudiness the image of the last of the Castellans took shape. (Was it image, or reality, or thought within his head? He did not really know, for Bright Eyes was merely the last of his kind, no specially trained adept, and much of what his race had been, and knew, was lost to him, beyond him.)
The Castellan was a fifth-degree adept, and surely the last remaining one of Bright Eyes’ race to — go. He wore the purple and blue of royalty, from a House Bright Eyes did not recognize, but the cut of the robe was shorter than styles Bright Eyes recalled as having been current — then. And the Castellan’s cowl was up, revealing a face that was bleak with sorrow and even a hint of cruelty. Such was not present, of course, for the Castellans merely performed their duties, but Bright Eyes was certain this adept had been against the decision to — go. Yet he had been chosen to bring the message to Bright Eyes.
He stood, booted and silent, in the soft-washed blue and white lightness of Bright Eyes’ sleeping chamber. Bright Eyes was given time to come to full wakefulness, and then the Castellan spoke.
“What you see has been gone for ten centuries. I am the last, save you. They have set me the task, and this twist of my being, of telling you what you must do. If the proper portents trigger my twist to appear before you — pray it never happens — than you must go to the city of the ones with hair, the ones who come after us, the ones who inherit the Earth, the men. Go to their city, with a bag of skulls of our race. You will know what to do with them.”
“Know this, Bright Eyes: we go voluntarily. Some of us — and I am one of them — more reluctantly than most. It is a decision that seems only proper. Those who come after us, Men, will have their chance for the stars. This was the only gift of birth we could offer. No other gift can have meaning between us. They must have our chance, so we have gone to the place where you now lie. By the time I appear to you — if ever I do — we will be gone. This is the way of it, a sad and inescapable way. You will be the last. And now I will show you a thing.”
The Castellan raised his hands before his face, and as though they were growing transparent, they glowed with an inner fire. The Visioning power. The Castellan’s face suffused with flames as it conjured up the proper vision for Bright Eyes.
It appeared out of lines of blossoming crimson force, in the very air beside the Castellan. A vision of terror and destruction. Flames man-made and devastating, incredible in their hell-fire. Like some great arachnid of pure force, the demon flames of the destruction swept and washed across the vision, and when it faded, Bright Eyes lay shaken by what he had seen.
“If this that I have shown you ever comes to pass, then my twist will appear to you. And if you ever hear me as you hear me now, then go, with the bag of skulls of our people. And do not doubt your feelings.”
“For if I appear to you, it will all have been in vain, and those of us who were less pure in our motivations, will have been proved right.”
Shimmering substance, coalescing nothingness, air that trembled and twittered in re-forming, and the Castellan was gone. Bright Eyes rose, and gathered the skulls from the crypt. Then:
Feet without toes. Softly-padded feet, furred. Footsteps sounded gently, padding furry, down ink-chill corridors of the place. A place Bright Eyes had inhabited since before time had substance. He walked through night, out of the place.
Night was a condition Bright Eyes understood. And he knew about day …
The bleeding birds were long since gone. Bright Eyes moved through the days, and onward. At one point he passed through a sector of trembling mountains, that heaved up great slabs of rock and hurled them away like epileptics ridding themselves of clothes. The ground trembled and burst and screamed and the very Earth went insane to tunes of destruction it had never written.
There was a plain of dead grass, sere and wasted with great heaps of desiccated insects heaped here, there. They had flocked together to the last resting place, and the plain of dead grass was poor tapestry indeed to hold the imprisoned pigments of their dead flesh, the acrid and bitter-sweet pervasive odor of formic acid that lingered like hot breath of a mad giant across the silent windless emptiness. Yet, how faint, a sound of weeping … ?
Finally, Bright Eyes came to the city.
Thomas would not enter. The twisted rope-pillars of smoke that still climbed relentlessly to the dark sky; the terrible sounds of steel cracking and masonry falling into empty streets; the charnel-house odor. Thomas would not go in.
But Bright Eyes was compelled to enter. Into that last debacle of all. From where it had begun.
The dead were everywhere, sighing soundlessly with milk-white eyes at a tomorrow that had never come. And each fallen one soundlessly spoke the question of why. Bright Eyes walked with the burden of chaos pulsing in him. This is what it had come to.
For this, his race had gone away. That the ones with hair, the men they had been called, they had called themselves, could stride the Earth. How cheap they had left it all. How cheap, how thin, how sordid. This was the last of it, the last of the race of men. Dust and dead.
Down a street, women pleading out of death for mercy.
Through what had been a park, old men humped crazily in rigorous failure to escape.
Past a structure, building front ripped away as if fingernails had shorn it clean. Children’s arms, pocked and burned, dangling. Tiny hands.
To another place. Not like the place from which Bright Eyes had come, but the place to which he had journeyed. No special marker, just … a place. Sufficient.
And then it was, that Bright Eyes sank to his knees, crying. Tears that had not been seen since before Man had come from caves, tears that Bright Eyes had never known. Infinite sadness. Cried. Cried for the ghosts of the creatures with hair, cried for Men. For Man. Each Man. The Man who had done away with himself so absurdly, so completely. Bright Eyes, on his knees, sorrowing for the ones who had lived here, and were gone, leaving him to the night, and the silence, and eternity. A melody never to be heard again.
He placed the skulls. Down in the soft white ash. Unresponsive, dying Earth, receiving its burden testament.
Bright Eyes, last of a race that had condemned itself to extinction, had condemned him to living in darkness forever, and had had only the saving wistful knowledge that the race coming after would live in the world. But now, gone, all of them, taking the world with them, leaving instead — no fair exchange — charnel house.
And Bright Eyes; alone.