Aur Child
Chapter 12

A few hours later, Alai found himself lost in the act of watching calm waves lap against his boots. He lifted his eyes and stared out onto the horizon. The early evening breeze pushing out to sea was building quickly. The dog nervously paced to and fro behind the little boat as its bow lifted slightly in the foaming water. Alai could not quell the fountain of uncertainties in his head.

What could I have done? He had heard Gallia say he had not done this. He felt the blood pulsing through his neck; his head seemed to be squeezing in upon itself. He recognized a wickedness well up inside him that he hadn’t felt since childhood, since before he had heard the Children’s Lecture of Our Order; after so much time, he again recognized that terrible idea that can creep into any mind and forever destroy its calm. Yes, he considered, albeit shocked at even having the thought, about who? Could there be any other person to blame? Gallia? Bemko? His stomach clenched with shame for even imagining such a suspicion. Could she be so angry? Had he taken too long in his deliberations? And there had been rumors flitting around the village about Apostates; he hardly knew what that meant but he bristled with the thought they might come here. Yet, again, it was all impossible. Whatever an Apostate may be, or however callous – and absurd – a revenge by Elder Tiul could be imagined, nothing could go entirely unnoticed past both man and dog. He had exhausted the possibilities.

And why? For tinkering? He had been given the warning; he was going to return it today. No, it couldn’t be. What about the Aur child? It was an obvious suspect. Gallia had said it was powerful. His wife had insinuated he return it. Bemko had warned him too. He defied them all. He had been so sure it was nothing more than a big power cell. And yet, if it was the culprit, how could he and the dog remain untouched? He couldn’t have known. No consequences were told to him, but of what little he did understand, he knew that he had done some wrong. He had known that he didn’t understand what the Aur child was. Yet now, there it sat in the boat: inert, unchanged, harmless.

Alai watched the molten orb begin its final descent towards the horizon. In less than two hours, it would be dark. He pushed the small boat towards the water and ignored the dog’s frantic dancing about his feet. It was hot and the boat felt heavier than ever before. The lines and sail were all there; the oars were also there. The Aur child was there. Meek waves lifted and dropped the stern, haphazardly pushing against the rudder. With muscles exhausted from shivering, the force required to move the boat into the water was immense. But still he felt compelled to not leave an uncertain outcome to any other. He could not leave the cause of so much harm, so much violence, to hurt anyone else. Whether it was himself or the power cell to blame, he did not know, so he would remove both. The thought of the pyre made him wince, but he chided himself for the thought that he deserved to be there.

The larger waves beat against him as he pulled beyond the sandbar. His back was quickly soaked with sweat and seawater. He watched the dog weave a scratched patch at the water’s edge, yelping in her panic.

I am on my own.

He pulled outside the bay and bobbed momentarily in the swells to release the mainsail. An increasing gust from onshore yanked at the sheet and set him firmly against the windward gunwale in a port tack run. The land reached far from north to south; it seemed to reach out for him rather than sink away, but he refused the thought.

In a few minutes, Alai-Tiul could no longer make out the tallest points of the village, nor the occulting tops of the wind towers. Above him, the brightest stars blinked in swirls of irregular patterns. The very stars that helped his fellow humans navigate across the seas once they’d lost sight of the wind towers were shy to appear to him. Only the bravest made those journeys, he thought. And soon, he would conclude this one. He had nothing but time to consider that fate. When was a journey a losting? Why is it that one is free to get lost physically yet not intellectually? He oscillated in new mediations.

The truths we are taught keep us fixed to the sturdy foundations of our homes and families, yet I submit they deprive us of some unascertained freedom to explore the infinite universe. An indulgence that I am certain is core to being human. Can the pursuance of a thought do anything but lead to better understanding? Can a longer stare in the dark result in anything but sharper vision? Can a step further take us anywhere but closer to a new discovery? May we but tie a lifeline around us before we begin such journeys? Recite the truths of our happiness; rest our gaze at some intervals lest we search too hard; ensure each step be surely placed lest it land uncertainly.

Now, he removed his hands from the tiller and stared at his faded palms in the starlight. The very hands that built, that inspected, that created. He would use them no longer. The deep sea chilled him from below, the black sky pulled at his body’s heat from above. He pushed himself up against the Aur child, using its cold hulk upon which to rest his head. He dismissed the thought born from the rumble in his stomach that he had had nothing to eat or drink since the night before.

It is of uncommon ideas that make others disgruntled with me. Or more so, sharing of uncommon ideas. And can I blame those who gossip about me for thinking of such ideas as threats? No, I cannot. But I can neither deny myself the hunger to know more without feeling somehow not whole.

He felt no gybe, although it would have been hard to notice in his growing delirium; the boom was no different from where he set it. He was far off from land now, from Hill Village, from all of it. No gulls appeared in the silvery skies. His vision was blurry. With the wind constant through the night, the dinghy had held to north-northwest. There would be no land for many days on such a course. His belly growled; he stared ambivalently across the glimmering sea. His throat was stiff. He was no longer sweating. He baked in the intense heat; his skin was glowing.

A thought came momentarily: without water it would take no more than four days, likely less. There was no one there to blame but himself. A puff of white swirled above.

Swept up into the clouds, I once met a woman who would fix my sights on one objective like no other good thing in this world. Ambitions discarded, dreams abandoned, ideals wasted. An earlier paradigm adjusted mercilessly to make way for the ultimate thrill. To care so deeply, to understand so clearly, to offer myself so recklessly. An emotion that began as an earthquake and only gained momentum over time, bowling over any practicalities that dared to oppose it. An emotion that would not dilute in time, would not yield to disagreements, would not falter under disparate pressures, but instead would blossom and flourish with every new faith entrusted. I held that vow never under duress, but ever with pride and joy. I have always known there could be nothing higher than the depth of our love.

Alai failed to recognize the difference between dream and nightmare. His body had stiffened considerably. His arms wobbled when he dragged himself into a new position at the bottom of the little boat. His mouth felt sealed shut, and even if he were to get it open, there was nothing to put in it. Beside the Aur child which took up most of his blurry vision, he noticed a piece of rope that had once been held so playfully by his son. How many times had he told the child to let it be?

Into my world, like a leviathan, once came a son smaller than a swollen fruit. Previously unthought considerations and measures overtake earlier goals, mixed with an obstinate determination to give no ground.

A man’s love for his child - or his son at least - is one of protector and provider, not nurturer and cradler. Teach him by mistakes where it is not too painful, shield him from the incomprehensible until it is time to share the petty, discovered secrets of an infinite universe.

Luscious as silk pillows are his cheeks; scintillating as a grounding charge are his inquisitive touches. Finding my bearing with when to introduce the lessons critical to survival is a discovery over years, yet never quite honed. He graduates from reaching to smiling, from sitting to grasping, from mobility to exploration, from audience to narrator, from dependent to participant; and what beyond? Only so young yet and still ages since he squirmed helpless and shocked in that wet, bloody film.

I would forfeit achieving the goals of all earlier periods of my life to know him as I do, yet he will always seem the creature that innocently stole my independence. Only a cognitive reminder can intervene with that primitive emotion; it was mine action and none other. He shall ever burst from the deep inexplicable sea and hold my gaze in awe.

Alai may have thought he had put those horrible events behind him. He may have thought that he had distanced himself from tragedy and, perhaps, consequence. He may have thought that he and the Aur child were now removed, disconnected, and would now expire. Yet he awoke from another stupor with the strangest of ringing in his head. Shimmering bells and a sharp tingle in his gut forced him to stretch open his eyes once more. Shivering, suddenly alert to all the errors he had committed, he realized then that he could no longer ignore the truth. They were dead.

A hint of pain birthed from deep inside; a reflection of the small cringe that had always lingered within him, revealing itself every time he left her for a long period, or whenever the boy attempted some risky leap or stunt in his presence. During those moments, when he had let his thoughts wander anxiously to the worst possible outcome of the situation, that hint of pain had tickled more aggressively inside him. If he had imagined some tragedy that might befall one of them, it would rise further up within his loins; a peculiar signal from beneath his core, that sharp sting threatened his unmanning. Like the lick of a blade it would say, these are your ward, your foundation, your progeny; protect them at your peril!

But now, the tickle became a trample. His efforts to avoid it had failed. A tsunami of dread and agony tore through him. He submerged into confusion and pain. Pain so awful he had never imagined its kind. Pain from deep within his core, behind his bladder, below his gut. Pain that seemed to tear him open from the inside, surge up into his stomach where it then exploded, eclipsing the early tremors of nausea, ripping through his abdomen and up into his throbbing heart, clogging his throat, and piercing his brain. Paralyzed! Crushing, engulfing, like the flames around a shred of bark tossed over glowing embers, reducing him to a charred lump. Her! Him! Gone!

He slumped deeper into the boat. From the dungeons of his soul, the fiery goblin gorged, gape-mouthed, on streams of misery spilling down through the rancid cracks. It raised its lumpy head, steaming and snorting, invigorated, and snapped the chains that had heretofore held it firmly against the floor of that godforsaken crypt. With each leap up the foul stairwell, its snarls and barks echoing, the goblin burst forward in wild flagellations through unguarded doorways, mold-encrusted chain of uneven lengths swinging wildly from its flesh-scoured wrists. Up, up the beast climbed, whooping at the unsullied air, infuriated by the lucid light, propelled by the freak chance of emancipation. Its objective clear and its rage at apex, the wicked fiend burst through the rickety rooftop. Alai goggled; his head thrown back in a violent jolt. A guttural roar like metal dragged upon metal erupted from his mouth, boring deep into the wooden hull all around him. The cascade of horror poured from within his convulsing frame like offal pushed off a butcher’s block.

Oh, Wife! A tender, kind, gentle soul. A love like no other. A steadfast connection in a world of uncertainties. A soft shelter in a rugged life. A partner who untiringly carried her share, untiringly carried the weight of their shared life together. Knew him, understood him, raised their son with him.

Oh, Son! That precious gift over which they both toiled every day to raise right. To teach and train. To guide and guard. To grow into something strong and good. Countless energy invested; no, given away unconditionally. A life’s dedication mercilessly squashed and swept away.

Gone! That early explosion of pain burst beyond him and began to suck the life from within, out, and away in a fireball of horror. Volcanic fathoms from an ocean trench. Incendiary depths of a black hole. A pyre within a vacuum of infinity. A world together violently deconstructed. A life disintegrated. A wholly unique organism callously laid low.

Alai buried his face in the bench as he cried out that agony. The pain plowed over him, buried him under waves of molten gravel. He ached from the intense sucking at his heart. In time, his eyes became so encrusted that he didn’t bother to open them any longer.

Into this ocean, she hath already so much to me given.

Part Two

YELLOW RESERVE

Beneath the waning gibbous of the Mud, that being the fourth moon of the two-hundred and twenty-fifth year after Cloudburst.