The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [3]
She cleared her throat, veiling lightly a sneer, and put on airs:
“Once-noble creature, marvel of marvels, viceroy of your domain—pushed forth from a thin caul into this shrouded world—what do you feel? Between trembling thighs, as you’re pushed forth, or held aloft, above a steaming corpse, what do you see? Tell me, when you look out of those beady eyes?”
Stretching, like a huge green dog, butt in the air—and yawning while doing so—the fecund showed rows and rows of needle-sharp teeth. Then she settled, also like a dog, circling twice, and again, before finding comfort in the muck.
“I know you’re nothing but bones and flesh, with various combinations of blood or choler or melancholy in your veins. And you’re tiny things—mere mortals, as they say—subjected, from day one, to a host of calamities and infirmities. The list is endless. Pride, envy, desire, ambition. Plagues, insecurity. Raging disease. Loss. Factions and hatred among your own people! Ignorance and war. You humans fascinate me.”
Still no response, save the thrumming of insects and the quiet splash of an animal—a fish, perhaps.
“And yet,” the fecund continued, her unclear question devolving into a series of others, and from there into a customary ramble, “throughout these trials, time keeps moving, past your traumatic birth and childhood (which was most brief, spent hungry and snot-nosed in egocentric oblivion), past your self-indulgent adolescence (when you thought you could change everything, and that there was a small chance misery might pass you by), moving faster and faster, past your adulthood (if you were fortunate enough to make it that far), finally dragging the remaining few of you into old age and sweeping you along, toward eschaton!” As the last word echoed, the fecund shivered with what could only be mock dread. “Tormented race! Abandoned race! Oh, clouds have closed in, all right! (Or so they say: all I see when I look up is this damned stone ceiling.)”
Rolling again caused water to slosh against the walls.
“Do you know my opinion about this? Do you? Big deal, that’s what. Twelve gods once descended from the firmament. I saw them arrive. From my verdant home, I saw crowds gather around them as they touched down. Gods can offer many things, including salvation. But how did you people react? With suspicions and pettiness and incessant questions. Constant doubts. Backstabbing. Granted, the gods acted little better, in the end. There was stiff competition and vying for followers. There were fights, divisions. People killed each other. And the gods began to fight among themselves, too, brother against sister, sister against brother. In fact, there are the dead bodies of two of them—at least two, possibly more—out in the great desert, to the east. At least, I assume they’re still there. Long before the walls of your city were completed I saw them, scorched and pitted by sand, great polymer bones poking from the scorched earth.
“Who knows how many of the gods survived the battles? What was left of the pantheon took their cosmic balls and limped home, wherever that was.
“The bottom line is: humans had a chance to be spared life’s ailments and you blew it. You fought, you killed hundreds, and you built this awful city.”
Words faded softly down the long stone corridor. But the fecund’s eyes were not entirely open, as if she might even have been talking in her sleep.
“Now you are free again, in this place you call Nowy Solum. Free to scuttle aimlessly about, with only small expectations to live up to, arbitrary rules to follow, no agendas of a higher power to fulfill. You are created, you suffer, and you die. That’s it. Principal and mighty work—my little pink friends—you have fallen from the grace you so briefly attained.”
Here the monster chuckled and quickly snapped at a haspoid unlucky enough to get too close. Licking her chops brought in crunching chiton, legs, wings. Thick ichors dripped from the scales of her chin.
“For me, though—” she burped “—and for every other unfortunate soul of a more, uh, sophisticated nature (shall we