As soon as he managed to regain his balance, Cole jumped to his dome to call the authorities. He knew that speed was everything: if Zhan’s temples found out about this before Antyra’s Shindam,4 they’d grab the artifacts and erase any trace—including him and his large family.
***
The archivists had to dig in a hurry. A pack of armored chameleon trucks belonging to the Shindam’s security had already sealed off the area, blocked the nearby traffic, and chased away the crowds attracted by the wild rumors, which spread like wildfire. This time, however, the reality had a good chance of beating their craziest guesses, since no one really suspected what had happened in Cole’s backyard. The bulldozer workers were locked inside Cole’s dome, and the jure and his family had disappeared—presumably moved from the planet for their own safety.
As the bone fragments and the bits of a spaceship were unearthed, the archivists hurriedly packed them in crates and stored them in their nearby vehicles. Due to the haste, the usual care in handling such fragile artifacts was all but forgotten. The soldiers brought huge spotlights to enhance the night light and help the scholars work without breaks. In less than four days, the whole area was sieved. Cole’s dome was demolished to check the ground below it, and anything of interest was stored in chameleons. The trucks then drove to the nearest spaceport and loaded their precious cargo on an interplanetary spaceship belonging to the security forces.
As soon as the spaceship took off to Antyra I, the archivists began to rummage through the boxes. They had four complete skeletons and fragments from at least ten other individuals, together with six goldlike bracelets and a bunch of garment patches (most likely spacesuits) made from an unknown fabric. They also found remnants of a golden ship shattered into small pieces by a terrible impact, with only a few fragments surviving unmelted and embedded in the glassy sand. Yet the reason for the crash wasn’t a mystery, being obvious at the very first glance: one of the damaged fragments had a hole right in the middle, its edges torn inside, the layers of composite materials melted and fused together. Obviously, such damage couldn’t have happened from the impact. Something nasty had hit the ship before it came down: either a powerful laser lens or a different energetic weapon, unlike anything Antyrans had in the past and probably still didn’t have now.
As the findings were sorted and cataloged, Tadeoibiisi’s archivists became silent and worried. They instinctively felt that everything was about to change. What they held in their hands was the beginning of the madness, and they were its messengers. A madness that everyone wanted forgotten, buried for eternity in the obscure foldings of their history—in the same way that the gods’ bones stood buried in Cole’s backyard for so many peaceful centuries.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have much hope of hiding the secret from the temples. No one succeeded—at least not with a secret of such magnitude. Their lives were in great danger, but it hardly mattered. For the gods had returned. Dead or alive, it was of no importance. The gods were here, in their hands, and certainly brought answers to many troubling questions, questions that the Antyrans didn’t even dare to ask.
CHAPTER 2.
The morning was a bit cold for that time of the year, to some Antyrans’ slight surprise, for they all but forgot it was still technically possible to shiver in the middle of the summer—or even freeze to death, like their ancestors used to, during the horrendous glaciations of the past. And they particularly forgot the remarkable phenomenon, caused by the eccentric axis rotation of Antyra I, when about once every several millennia, the North Pole migrated near the world’s only continent. Not that the axis steadied in the meantime—far from it—but with the firewall around them, the prospect of another pole wandering was the least worry to wrinkle their spikes. Zhan himself had promised, when he whispered the Book of Creation Inrumiral in the ear socket of his first prophet, Baila I, that he would personally return before the end of the world and save the righteous from baking.
It was in fact this promise that brought millions of pilgrims—called “tarjis”—to Alixxor5 from all the inhabited Antyran planets. They came to climb the mighty pyramids6 erected in the central park and view the star-rise above the purple haze. To witness Zhan’s sacred light again defeating Arghail’s7 evil darkness.
Through the morning mist, millions of lights glimmered from the traditional lamps fueled with moulan grease, stretching a ribbon of fire along the streets of Alixxor. The candle carriers were poised to assault the grueling hundreds of stone steps leading to the top of the pyramids.
Karajoo, the feast of light, was about to begin.
The purple bioluminescent bacteria floating in Antyra’s atmosphere gathered in a dense layer about six hundred feet from the ground, creating a fantastic picture in front of the pilgrims’ awestruck eyes. Down the streets, a purple-red sky was the only thing visible above their heads, but from the heights of the Great Pyramid platform, the layer looked like waves on a stormy sea, pierced by the tallest city temples and by murra, the holy trees seeded by Zhan.
The tarjis were, of course, clueless about history’s wicked ways, but their final steps before the pyramids stirred the dust of another sacred road, a path followed by the ancient pilgrims during the old “heretical” religion before Zhan’s coming. For even before the times of the mythical Azaric, the winding path to the sixth mound was known as the “Path of Dreams,” where the believers gathered to be intoxicated by poisonous aromas and scary stories shared by the legendary aromaries. Then, they dreamed. They dreamed terrible nightmares, meant to scare Pixihe—the goddess of coldness—and chase away the winter from the island continent. Of course, where they failed, the new gods succeeded “in just a few days”—not only with Pixihe, but with Colhan himself, and all their stories were forgotten, crushed under the weight of the new religion. The sixth mound of the sacred road now lay buried under the colossal Zhan’s pyramid, destroyed like other pagan symbols. Because nothing was allowed to be more humongous than the three pyramids—a white-gold one for Zhan, a red-like-fire one for Beramis, and a blue-ocean-storm one for the goddess Belamia—nothing except murra, the tallest trees in the world. They were seeded by the gods some 1,250 years prior around the place where the three pyramids were supposed to be built. Baila I banned the Antyrans from trying to multiply the trees, and only the initiates were allowed to take care of them. They reached heights in excess of eight hundred feet, and their fleshy, juicy leaves overshadowed the pyramids with their whopping cover.
Dressed in his ritual robes woven with platinum wires, the Great Prophet Baila XXI greeted the pilgrims’ river of fire, perched on a platform atop the highest murra, a tree taller than Zhan’s pyramid. The tarjis raised their candles toward the twilight sky, muttering the “Sacrifice of Beramis” litany8 in a trancelike intonation:
“Hopelessly lost without his deep-blue eyes, ever since he gave them to us, Beramis wanders in the cave of death, forever slave of Arghail the Black,” they lamented, staring at the firewall that bordered their small bubble universe.
The morning breeze stole their dissonant murmurs, carrying them to the farthest corners of the city.