Regisulben appeared confused and quite unaware of his sorry situation. Most likely, the temples had drugged him to rob him of his dignity. Without a word, he fell on his knees and bowed his head to the ground.
There was a moment of silence, cut short by Baila.
“Take him away! You’ll be the first to suffer the vengeance of the gods!” he exclaimed scornfully.
Two initiates grabbed him by his arms, dragging him back into the crowd.
His excessive humiliation was a message for the few remaining loyal subjects of the acronte, to show them that the Shindam ceased to exist. From now on, the future belonged to Baila.
“My sons, the moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived!” Baila raised his arms to the sky and crossed two murra staffs over his head. “Behold, I come before you,” he began, reciting the first words of the “Happy Pledge,” his eyes closed in the Sacred Trance.
Hearing the verses, everyone fell to their knees, bowing their heads in the dirt.
“I’m floating down on shiny rays, braided from fire and water. My children! Forsake your wasteful ways and look inside yourselves, in the corner where the star-seed made its nest… And you will find me… For I was there since the beginning of time, craving for your thirsty gaze. Let there be peace in your quest for ardor.”
The crowd suddenly exploded in loud shouts. Surprised by the disturbance, the prophet opened his eyes, not knowing what was happening. He glanced at the skies, and then he saw them: the huge bellies of the godly ships appeared through the clouds!
Slowly, one of them approached the ground, while the rest hovered above the plains. This made sense, considering that no matter how large the square was in the middle of the crowd, there was no room for more than one of them.
The ship looked truly otherworldly. Almost two-thirds of the body consisted of a thin tube welded over a thinner semitube, both having a strikingly irregular surface. The whitish rhomboidal texture of the hull resembled the worn scales of an old llandro, covered by bizarre veins twisted in all sorts of wrong angles. On its nose, it had six ovoid balls in constant motion and pierced by sharp spikes, connected by strange conduits.
The thin body gave way to a series of increasingly larger swells, the same veins running on all their length. At the back of the ship, another six shaking ovoids like the ones in the front, but huge, were anchored to the vessel’s body by several opal-blue metallic claws. A layer of prisms joined in complicated angles covered them.
From up close, the amazed Antyrans could see how the space continuum entangled in the deformation front was greedily torn by the smaller ovoids and turned into a green mist. The mist trickled along the veins of the fuselage to the ovoids in the back, covering them in a jellylike emerald cloud that grew or shrunk, became more intense or pale, fluctuating every moment to keep the ship stable under the morning breeze of the vardannes.
When the ship reached close to the ground, the irregular bumps slid one on top of the other and shrunk the ship’s length while the ovoids in the back rotated vertically, moving around the swells in a smooth motion. Finally, the long tube in the middle of the assembly rose vertically. The whole vessel looked like a strange plant from an alien world.
Baila’s spikes shriveled at the sight, and Gill shared his stupefaction. Of course, everyone was amazed by what was happening, but Gill and Baila’s surprise had a different cause because only they—in the whole world—knew what the gray ships of the gods looked like. And the ones in front of Baila had nothing to do with them or the Sigians. They were a different design, the messengers of a world that had to be stranger than any imagination could have conceived.
The vertical vessel landed in the square in deep silence. Everyone on the fields except Baila lay prostrate, waiting for the gods to appear. Also prostrate were the billions of Antyrans watching the events on the huge holotheaters installed near the pyramids, along with the ones still at home.
A decompression noise prompted a few tarjis to raise their heads, but they quickly bowed them again, ashamed for the haughty curiosity that could have tempted them to see the gods before being addressed.
A shiny crack appeared between two eggs, and a narrow ramp slid slowly to the ground, with all the grace expected from a godly device. After a brief moment, a floating, bone-white sphere, pulsing in reddish hues, hovered out of the door. Almost immediately, another two spheres jumped in a hurry to reach the sides of the first one.
To be fair, they didn’t quite look like the image the Antyrans had of Zhan’s children, but let’s not forget that the gods could take any form they wished. And indeed, what appearance could be more frightening than a white ball, an unforgiving eye sent to judge their sins?
However, before the crowd had a chance to glimpse them, a short silhouette appeared on the ramp, bearing some pretty obvious features of a biological creature. Then another one came, much larger this time. Father and son? Or rather, a wild dimorphism? thought Gill, intrigued by the difference. The third creature, larger than the second and double the first one, followed them closely. Their size had no logic.
The “aliens” looked eerily similar—except their size, of course—and no age could be read on their faces. Well, maybe it was a bit of an overstretch to call the bony structure covered in green skin-looking scales that Mother Mature had endowed them with a “face.” Their protruding brows outlined two yellow eyes placed at the sides of the head; from time to time, the semitransparent eyelids moistened them. Their mouths resembled a calcified opening with rows of blades instead of teeth—as sharp as a sarpan, no doubt.
They each had a large, stumpy trunk framed by two short, slender arms, and they were carried around in metallic vats with golden handlers that floated lazily about a foot above the ground. The strange transportation devices hid their feet—or any other lower extremities they possessed for locomotion.
A pair of curved horns grew from their massive shoulders—the ones of the tallest creature were the longest and thickest. The alien also had a keratin collar on the back of his neck, which the others didn’t have.
The gods didn’t seem to wear any clothes, unless the sticky goo shining on their skin was a sort of advanced protection and not a simple secretion of their godly glands meant to keep them moist.
Their only piece of equipment was a transparent helmet, which started from the oversized goiter and ended on their backs along the massive spine crest but, strangely, left the eyes outside it.
The floating vats moved silently in front of Baila’s platform, preceded by the three pulsating spheres. Once there, the three stopped and raised their eyes upward by tilting their backs to facilitate the motion, which was apparently complicated for their anatomy. The smallest god floated in front of his companions and broke the silence in an intelligible Antyran language, seemingly coming from the floating sphere in front of him. Whenever he spoke, the movement of his mandibles followed the sounds of another language, but the bony ball reddened in resonance with the Antyran intonation.
“We are the Rigulian envoys. We salute you in peace.”
The Antyrans from all the worlds raised their eyes at once, taking the god’s words as an invitation to look at him, and immediately had to restrain a scream of horror, seeing how hideous his shape was. The god resembled a grotesque mix-up between a giant warhok and a reptilian magoc. It was simply impossible for a god to look like this! Maybe they want to test our faith, many thought. The gods can take any shape they desire.
No one dared to answer their greeting, and for a good reason: the only one pure enough to let his voice be heard by the godly ears was obviously the prophet. But His Greatness couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate moment to remain silent.