Beginning of the End

Posted on 09 Dec 2021 @ 6:36pm by Commander Calliope Zahn

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Kalaran Seed Vault, Diplomatic Party
Timeline: MD08 ~1945
1545 words - 3.1 OF Standard Post Measure

Growing tired of being on her feet, Calliope looked around for Lance. Before she had realized it, much of the time had passed while she had been conversing around the room and she felt she’d neglected him. Hadn’t that been the one thing she had hoped for in coming to this party? A chance to share a meal with Lance? Maybe there was still time.

In spite of his being on the tall side, she couldn’t pick out Lance's wavy haired, disapproving head. The busy room had become too full to see across to where she had left him beside the grove of potted saplings. She felt daunted at the idea of pressing through the center, so instead she opted to move along the perimeter a little more. It put her against the far wall, where she edged into the narrow walk formed on the far side of the banquet tables where no one milled, making an easier passage for her. Probably it was meant for serving access, and she felt slightly bad about abusing the intent of the party planners, but she reasoned it only made sense, what with her added challenges.

As Calliope came to the center of the back wall there was a break in the layout where a recessed space led into a kind of vaulted nook full of paneled doors arrayed in an arc. The space was chilly and more enclosed muting the buzz of the party noise behind her. Between and above each door, running up through the peak of the ceiling, was a mural image full of gripping and confusing imagery crafted from gold leaf, glass, stones, ceramics, crystals, bone and other combinations of durable common, precious, and semi precious insets.

Awed by the rioting variety of figures, decorative patterns, symbolic forms, and landscapes, she traced her gaze along the mural beginning on the left and trying to ‘read’ along, taking in the breadth of it but not understanding. Some of the symbols and designs were familiar from the marketplace where she had seen the shapes in rugs and textiles. Others she had taken notice of in signage and tattoos on tribesmen. The most recognizable was the sign for Loki- that radiating solar mark almost every humanoid culture had. A few of the bizarre creatures could have been versions of the ones she’d seen in the book from the naturalist and much of the landscape on the wall mural reflected the familiar Obsidian mountain skyline, desert dunes, scrubland, and unforgiving glassy plains.

When she craned her neck upwards, however, Calliope discovered the alcove’s vaulted ceiling contained an *ocean* overhead. She wasn’t sure how people from a desert planet with the largest bodies of water being oases could have conceived of stormy seas, but the water forms were immediately recognizable to her, although heavily stylized. It wasn’t blue or green or purple like oceans from other worlds. This one was black, carved directly into the obsidian glass of the cavern wall, and it was inset with a multitude of embedded crystal “stars” crowning the stylized wave reliefs. Stars and sea monsters and repeated disk forms…like ufos. Or saucer sections… And from the turbulent sky ocean, six fountains flooded downward like a waterfall ending abruptly on the lintel of each door frame.

Each door was flanked by different humanoid creatures, many of them technicolored: gold, green, blue, turquoise, magenta… some alluring and some terrible or uncomfortably uncanny in their bodily configurations or their expressions. On the one hand Calliope wanted to chalk it up to the limitations of craftsmanship. On the other there seemed something very intentional or calculated about the almost-disfigurement. Just looking at them disturbed something inside her— was it her spirit or her soul that felt unsettled? What was the difference?

Before she finished scanning around the entire alcove, Calliope froze, her eyes locked with the inlaid ivory gaze of a crazed, nude green female figure encircled with a fiery mane, like an evil halo. It had a forked tongue and snakes around either arm like bracers. She took two steps back and lost her footing when she crashed into someone.

Collapsing, she lost her grip on her cane and splayed onto the ground infront of four men in russet red robes. From the foot of the one she had collided into she looked slowly up, making out only a sternly postured whiskered chin from below the heavy shadow of this hood.

“Rise, Djinn spawn.”

Before she could even collect a reply to such an address, she was lifted to her feet by two of the figures and struck sharply in the calf with her own cane by the third attendant. It wasn’t painful exactly. More like directing a creature of burden… or a child. Her face flushed with indignity. She was held up by either arm, supported, not roughly, but firmly and she decided not to cry out and disrupt the party unless she was injured or directly threatened. It would certainly touch off an entire outrage if she called out and made a claim of being struck or restrained, but what would it accomplish? Only the opposite of the entire intent of the event. Recognizing the pattern of their behavior from the other person of stature during her visit to the market, she chose to imitate Admiral Indri’s fiery acceptance— wordlessly she waited for the man to make whatever point he had to make.

“The ancient secrets are hidden from you, Star Djinn. You are blind to the forces, even as they compel you.”

“Nothing is compelling me to anything.”

He didn’t laugh, but Calliope sensed him breathing with derision. His hand gestured to the angry green snake wielding woman, and then around at all of the other forms. “You Djinn come making promises, soothing the people into their graves with miraculous signs and wonders, just as the mountain Shaman have warned us about for a century of centuries. I would not have thought it possible, but after many generations, the people of the Divine One forget the dire warnings with every blighted gift the Djinn shower on them, promising to remove pain and struggle.”

“But we can help. We’ve been here for over a hundred years and we’ve always—”

“A hundred. A hundred petty years in the face of all the sands of time. And what have you done in that hundred year but always make us weaker, more reliant on your lying wonders. That is the entire purpose, the reason for your presence, Djinn! To deprive us of our grit, until we surrender even our Faith in the Divine One's Wisdom in exchange for your false wonders.” He jammed his bony finger towards the mural. “And then you will open the flood gates of the outer dark through which the Devil himself will come with his devouring horde. You bear his deceit. You are his servants by your nature. You can not be otherwise.”

Calliope followed his index finger to the most terrible forms attending either side of the final door. They were formed out of black shards of faceted obsidian glass, cut and set in such a way which made their figures appear to shift formation in the light as you moved to view them. They had no faces, appearing eight feet tall as if they were made of pure, cold, spite right down to the tips of their vicious claws. Their bulky forms with powerful limbs and massive chests were outlined entirely in red flames and stood on piles of skulls. It was almost too much in the whole obvious symbolism department, even for a biker gang.

“That’s absurd.” she whispered.

“Is it? The end has already begun. The covering of the Divine is being retracted. The veil of his mercies stolen away from us,” the man said, pausing at one of the scenes just to the left of the final door which depicted a typically dark skinned obsidian woman and a green elvish man holding a strangely proportioned child between them. He had the high eyebrows of a Vulcan. Or a Romulan. “Now with the indiscretions of the Children of the Divine, the fate of Obsidian is sealed. The seed is no longer pure, but marred by your kind, by the Djinn of the outer darkness from which we were warned. We, having made pacts with the devil’s spawn, now bear his offspring. He will no longer protect us. We are no longer clean in his sight.”

He walked to the final panel of the mural beyond the last door and motioned for her to survey it- it was Hieronymus Bosch-like in the hellish, toonish torment of the figures, eaten by worms, impaled, gnawed on by beasts, roasted, quartered, suspended, twisted in long, hopeless agonies, and frozen in eternal screams. "You sky devils have made this our fate!"

The third attendant returned Calliope’s cane to her hand and they allowed her to yank herself free and stumble back the way she had come. It felt as if the great room was suddenly stifling; the sound of the crowded space she returned to crushed her from every side while bile was rising in her throat…