Category: Dark Sun

Chapter 2: Part 1. The Explorers

They call it the Million Year Rain. It is the clearest example of how the Zjheek implement their plans: they plan for eternity.

To the Zjheek, eternity is not a long time, as one of their most esteemed philosophers, Arkmontic Adamant Halting, says, “Eternity is right here and now. It does not have anything to do with time. Eternity is the part that cuts out time. It’s an experience of the moment. If you do not get it now, you will never feel eternity.”

When the Zjheek decide upon something it is literally for now and forever.

Which is why, when the Exploration Group enters System 7992, surveys it, and finds a planet orbiting slowly around its primary within the zone which allows liquid water to exist, they are very excited.

“The planet is arid,” says astro-biologist, Tattooed Windpipe. She pulls her feathers back from her face, where they fell while peering into her long-range telescope, and refastens the agate clip she uses to hold them. Wiping her upper hands on the front of her tunic to clean off the oil from her feathers, she bobs to the mission leader, Taupe Colouration and waits for his nod of approval to continue.

Chapter 2: Part 1. The Founders

As Tenvoice Desire made first dayfood behind the soft-fence surrounding the Zheek science mission’s compound, he listened to the morning cries of the flying creatures inhabiting the forest in which they pitched their laboratory and marvelled at the wealth of diversity their small expedition brought to fruition. In less than a Long Thought (8 x 10^7 orbits), his companions transformed the flora and fauna of their study world, elevating ferociously mindless, land-dwelling plate-backs into semi-intelligent avians, who were doppelgangers of the Zheek’s own evolutionary precursors, and carpeted the floor of the world with brightly coloured flowers. He hopped from foot to foot, joy spreading through his hearts, as their children zipped and zoomed through the canopy, chirping and cawing their delight at being alive.

“You look happy,” mate Timeless Wanderer said. She was leader of their clade, and the visionary mind behind their project to re-establish the slowly dying Zheek as the galaxy’s pre-eminent species. He glanced up from his preparations and noticed her back feathers were flat and the two red patches near the intersection of her hard-lips and wattle were vivid. She was in a mood to mate, albeit fruitlessly.

Prologue: Sede Vacante

When the dust of the universe finally settled, Father Vincente Mariani looked back at this day and realised he was mistaken. What mattered to him at the time would prove trivial, and what seemed trivial would in fact be a harbinger of peractum est. And the events of the day, as devastating as they seemed, were just the beginning of a long trail through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The day began brightly enough, with sun and fried eggs on the small patio at the rear of his cottage, a bracing walk around the shops; chatting and blessing as he wove through the women in their faded best, laughing with the men and artists in frock coats and football shirts; and penultimately, but gloriously, a celebration of Mass in his small church high in the Italian hills, just fifty kilometres north of Rome.