The First Sighting

by Brett Davidson

Under the seal of her shell, a dream came to Meyr. As dreams are not image but knowledge, she knew in this dream that she drifted not through her own memories, but the vast landscape of a mind far, far beyond humanity. She dreamt that she knew the thoughts of a Watcher.

The Watchers were slow beasts, as slow as aeons, but their lives spanned aeons as if they were diphae. About them the land itself heaved like a sea in great oily swells as the natural hills rose and fell according to the dictates of mundane geology. They swam through the crust of the earth as one would swim through a thick, viscous fluid, raising bow waves and wakes about and behind them that twisted and knotted in strange patterns. The deeply sequestered magma that they felt beneath them and which they drew up about them in frantic ventings and spurts by their motion, was like a superfluid, almost a like current were it not for the real current of the earth singing its high song at an even greater depth. They barely noticed the eruptions that sported about them, save as an ambience, and then their size was so great that even vulcanism was a trivial thing. One phenomenon only they truly noticed, and this occupied their perception to the almost complete exclusion of every other feature of the darkling land.

Before them, at the centre of their converging paths, there arose a great spire, greater in scale even than they. Sublimely regular and grey and steadfast in outward form, where all else was mutable, this towering Pyramid blazed with the emissions of life. Channeling the Earth Current, it sang to them with harmonies that were intoxicating, arousing, hypnotic.

The beasts lusted after this thing; they began to sway, they began to love it and they began to hate it, they wanted it and it burned them. They howled and there was no living entity that might hear or replyÉ but they somehow sensed that there might be yet be the shape of such a being that would know them. Myriad bright points were flickering within it, too ephemeral to apprehend, but collectively they constituted a bonfire of spirit and some form of emergent order was apparent in their ceaseless dancing. That possibility stirred atavistic feelings in them that they struggled to describe, but that too became clearer and then they knew the name of this thing and called out.

And they were not heard by the great collective soul of the Pyramid, but their voices left echoes in the structure that began to take on a life of their own and continued to speak for them. They had seen within the pyramid themselves and they remembered their true mission now: to take from this thing the rich spark of quintessence that it created in its furnace heat. It would yield to them. They pressed on against its defences and felt them begin to give. They sent forth fragments of themselves that could insinuate themselves into the very metal of the hive and opened windows into the tiny spaces of months and years.

They wondered if they should hate this thing. Fascination infuriates and so for a brief age they exercised their fury. Abruptly, as they perceived events, barriers were flung up before them by the deeper beings of the Land that did not care to be disturbed - a ring, a beam, a fiery pit, twin torches and a glowing dome. This halted them for a while. The spire was apparently unaffected in essence. The forces that they had exerted had wounded it for sure, and deeply, but in a few hundreds of millennia, it healed itself. Curiously, the strength of the thing seemed to lie in the willingness of its own components, brief flickering sparks that they were, to be beholden to each other. These dancing motes, little sparks of soul, created tiny capsules of sensual flesh for themselves, which wove a unified tapestry across the span of time.

In their thrall to the furnace of souls, the Watchers learned of desire. Unlike all other creatures of the Night Land, unlike the jealous and chill Eaters, the humans of the hive had named the principle of unification Eros and made that Eros their motive. Thereby these beings achieved a peculiar synergy so that as the hills ebbed and flowed in the Millennial tides, the Pyramid stayed constant. The Pyramid was, the Watchers decided in their way, a place where thoughts transmuted rather than progressed, not unlike their own mental processes. It was their mirror, or they were its mirror and there an irreducible affinity.

They turned their eyes upon a few loose threads that frayed from the greater fabric and examined them with their transmuting gaze. This, to the humans, was a terrible thing, though the Watchers could not comprehend this. The mind of a Watcher was essentially eidetic and iterative, and what it saw was absorbed and changed utterly. Within them, ideas, concepts and experiences were cultivated in the manner of a garden, the various blooms of thought juxtaposed and hybridised. The lethal effect of their gaze on individual humans was no more of a concern to them than the effect a caress has on loose skin cells is a concern to a human.

As the greatest of the Watchers approached from the South, it cultivated its garden of perceptions and thoughts with a finer skill than its brethren and let its tamed Eaters taste the essences of the aether about it. It began then to realise that there was more than mere likeness between itself and the singing spire. This Eros, this creed was not unlike its own seeing. It caught for one flicker of an instant a glimpse of the soul of one unusually bright and clear node that seemed to reflect its own desires, as if it too was a weaver of experience gathering sensations unto itself and preserving them within. Once it had sighted her, even though she fled, it did not let the memory of her escape. Several of its senses corresponded to smell and it might not be too inappropriate a metaphor to compare the nature of its interest to the following of a particularly interesting scent trail. It knew that it did not have much time before this spark faded and died, but it had a trap ready to capture it. Thus, in the narrow moments of human years it struck.