“She is not gone,” he reminds them. “Can you hear her echoes? Do you see her bright voice roaming in your brains?”
But the old female is gone, and without that living breathing body in this world, something has changed.
The Creation feels diminished, feels a little wrong.
Young coronas grieve.
And the First only makes the suffering worse. “What she did did not need to do be done,” he says.
Everyone aches. Everyone is unhappy with this tale’s finish. The Egg-of-all-eggs died among the worst kind of strangers, and where is the value in that?
“It was a worthless waste,” he says.
Every waste is worthless, is it not?
But then he offers something unexpected, unexplained. “I don’t know why anyone should care so much about one old obligation.”
“What obligation?” a few ask.
The old fellow acts confused by the question. Perhaps he didn’t mean to speak. His thoughts leaked free of his skin, oblivious to his wishes.
“What old obligation?” everyone asks.
He pauses. He reflects. Then with all of his strength, he says, “Once and for good left-behind reasons, she made a promise to another. All of this nonsense grew wild from that one foolish promise.”
“What promise? Which other?” the coronas want to know. And not just the young ones, and not just the loud brilliant ones. Even the elders beg for details, knowing nothing about this pact.
“Details are not important,” the First claims with bright, defiant flashes of high-purple. “To act on a pledge after so long . . . under these circumstances . . . well, her judgment was rotted through.”
One of his daughters is just a hundred days younger than the world. To him and everyone, she says, “I don’t recall any obligations.”
He says nothing.
“This promise was hatched in the other world,” she guesses, every head gazing at the demon floor.
“Not in that world or in ours,” he says. “I was with her when it happened. The other Firsts were elsewhere. I alone saw the agreement made. It was during the earlier Creation, and ask me nothing else.”
But a singular opportunity is been exposed. In one voice, thousands say, “Tell us about the world before this world.”
“It is not important,” says the old corona.
His voices are solid, but his colors are less than confident.
“That world is gone,” he says. “What value could it possibly have?”
No one in the world is working now. Bodies hold still and no one speaks, the jungle growing wilder by the moment while every eye and mind is focused on that ancient man.
“Our obligations are aimed at this day,” he says. “This day reigns, and I will do everything possible to see your work fulfilled.”
Days are like flesh. Each one is dressed in the same kind of flesh, and likewise, every night looks like every other.
But when have the coronas not done their important, eternal work?
Suddenly the old one flashes with rage. “We should have attacked those brutes,” he says. “When the beasts came for my friend, we should have killed them. And we would have dragged her home again, and she would die among us, and that story would be finished.”
He sounds crazy and looks crazy, talking this way.
“Those little monsters are getting strong,” the First warns. Talking to himself as much as to the others, he says, “I won’t surrender. Not to those little beasts, those foul murderers.”
The world is silent, but for him.
“And I won’t honor promises made to the dead, certainly not for reasons that I can’t pretend to remember anymore anymore anymore.”
“You made a pledge too?” one child asks.
Then another wants to know, “Who is dead?”
“Everyone is dead,” says the crazed old corona. “Haven’t you been damn well paying attention?”
Days are like flesh, worn for their time before dying, and the soul of the day, what matters most, is what lingers.
The Egg-of-all-eggs is dead and the days continue much as those following behind. The coronas measure each one of the days, and the Count of All Days grows larger by very little. What changes is allowed to pass, almost unnoticed. What matters is remembered as echo and idea. Pilgrims continue to leave for the other world and return again, claiming enlightenment. Nothing changes in either realm. But there are stories, scattered and occasional and perhaps dubious stories, where an odd creature gets noticed. Something that isn’t known by sight or by scent is spied in the other realm. Then one young pilgrim returns with the tale about finding a tiny beast tumbling through the emptiest air. The pilgrim looks closely at the creature, noticing that it is young and small but in many ways different than its brothers. Tasting the boy with his smallest head is only reasonable. But then one of the tree monsters—a familiar hunter—falls through the air to fearlessly snatch the boy and claim him. The monster covers both of them with an intense drenching of fear, and the two creatures soon vanish inside a giant gas-bloated machine, and that day is made remarkable.
While telling the story, the pilgrim wonders if that odd new beast was falling on purpose. Maybe he was trying to reach this world. And if so, why did the hunter risk so much to stop him?
Explanations are invented.
Inventions are decorated in smart light and shared with the world. But no explanation looks true, and what is known is just enough to breed curiosity and arrogance.
For another four hundred days, nothing changes.
And then quite suddenly, for reasons that no corona can decipher, war comes to that mad, lesser world.
The battles are furious as well as beautiful. Burning forest and shattered pieces of the reef punch through the demon barrier, enriching the good world. War is an old story, something known and normally unremarkable. There have been many wars among the monsters, some as large as this and almost as fierce. Those in the trees and those on the reef are like siblings: they hate each other because they are too similar. Yet unlike the coronas, they have no good work that needs accomplishing. They do not have a jungle to cultivate or long days to cross. That is why they periodically fight until both sides run short of fire or hatred or willing bodies, and then the monsters weave a false peace that will last another dozen generations, or at least until the monsters again forget how horrible life becomes during war.
Six hundred days pass, and then the exhaustion arrives. Fights become less common, and big flying machines are scarce and fearful, and the coronas who have studied many wars can say with authority that neither side occupies any chance of victory.
Yet there is no peace.
The other world’s madness has never been worse. Both species fight on, and what matters to the good world, to the corona world, is that the monsters have to make new machines. And to build machines, they need fresh scales and skins, bladders and blood from the only source in the Creation.
Both species actively chase the pilgrims, and they battle one another before and during and long after each of these hunts.
And there are many, many pilgrims for the killing: six hundred days of war have spilled minerals into the coronas’ realm. Ash and reef rocks help fuel blooms of food, and nests are molded from fat and love, and every bright egg sprouts a child, and every new child grows to until they are slithering close to one another, fighting for the available space inside a jungle that cannot grow any larger.
Becoming a pilgrim, if only for a sliver of a day, helps calm the crowded soul.
Pilgrims leave by the hundreds, and some die.
Unlike earlier days, even the strong and swift can be slaughtered.
One day the Father-of-all-fathers holds council with the other Firsts and elders and certain important youngsters. Much is discussed. Nothing is decided. Every voice wants the normal ways to return, but the normal peaceful Creation seems impossibly remote. How can they ever fly so far?