Chapter 233 - The Birth of Death part 8

"The sun will shine in the night… The trees will lie like dead men on the earth," Minos had said as he lay dying. He also said, "beware the black egg", but Khronos remembered none of it. Not even when his father's prophesies came to pass.

Of course, you can't really blame the young man for forgetting his father's prophesies. When his father said those things, Khronos dismissed them almost immediately as the ravings of a delirious mind. They weren't even the craziest things his father said that day. He had talked about ghosts visiting him in the night. He had shouted at people who weren't there, and cursed the guardian spirits of the tribe. The only difference was, those things really were hallucinations, but his father's visions of a bright light in the night and trees lying shattered on the earth weren't.

I can't really explain how men and women can sometimes predict the future. Though I have roamed this world for 30,000 years, it is as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone else. I know that it is real. I have dreamed the future myself-- once, when I was a mortal man. Some say that time is not linear, only our perception of it. Perhaps that is why men sometimes glimpse the future. When we are dreaming, when we are delirious with illness or gripped by religious fervor, our linear minds fly free of the rails that guide us along through time, allowing us a peek of events that have not yet occurred.

It is only a theory.

All I can tell you is that Minos's visions were real. Thirteen years after Khronos's father passed into their ghost world, which they called the Land of Warm Days, three years after Khronos assumed leadership of the clan, the dead man's visions came to pass.

I call it the Event.

It was the birthing pangs of our species.

It happened at night, during a brief respite from the deadly cold. The weather had been unusually tumultuous that summer, with temperatures rising into the balmy seventies during the day, and many violent storms. Most of the clan had come in for the night, which was a lucky thing for them. If the Event had happened during the day, while the men were outside hunting and the women gathering food, the death toll would have been much higher. Perhaps total. As it was, several members of the Gray Wolf Clan perished that night, even sheltered inside the cave.

The light came silently, and struck without warning. One moment it was dark, the clan gathered around their various hearths, doing the ordinary things that men and woman of that era did: tending to children, talking, eating, mating. The next moment, the mouth of the cave flashed brilliantly, as if a stroke of lightning had lanced down just outside.

Only it was no stroke of lightning. The light wavered, growing brighter and brighter until it was so bright that they were all forced to shield their eyes from the glare. The women and children cried out in alarm and fear. Some of the men did too.

Khronos was near the back of the cave, allowing his mate Trava to shave his head. A new tribe of Neanderthals had been spotted hunting at the edge of their territory a few days earlier, and Khronos planned to make war on them. The warriors of the Gray Wolf Clan had taken to shaving their faces and their scalps because the Others found the look frightening and otherworldly.

Khronos squinted into the blue-tinted brilliance at the entrance of the cave, his lips peeled back from his teeth. Trava ducked behind him as the light grew in stuttering intensity, her fingernails digging into the flesh of his shoulders. Khronos covered his eyes, feeling the light on his skin like a physical thing. He pushed Trava away and started to rise, and then the light died away, as quickly as it had appeared.

A few moments passed.

The tribe blinked their dazzled eyes and looked at one another in confusion.

"Khronos?" Trava squeaked.

He shushed her.

The people of the Gray Wolf Clan had framed the entrance of the cave with wooden poles lashed together with leather thongs. They hung furs upon that wooden frame to block out the worst of the cold in the wintertime. As Khronos stood there, blinking his dazzled eyes, the frame began to rattle. An instant later, it vanished. The clan members nearest to the mouth of the cave vanished as well, sucked into the howling darkness. All their fires went out at once, the embers swirling in the screaming dark.

Khronos fell to his hands and knees, his ears popping, the breath snatched from his lungs.

The ground trembled next, leaping beneath Khronos's palms like a startled beast. Stones broke away from the roof of the cave and fell to the earth below. Some of the falling stones struck tribesmen. He heard them yell out in pain. Khronos tried to crawl forward, thinking to protect his mother—she was sitting near his hearth when the darkness grew bright, repairing one of his boots—but Trava was clinging to his legs like a frightened infant. He couldn't move.

Finally, the winds quieted. The earth stopped shaking.

Ears ringing in the sudden silence, Khronos got dizzily to his feet. Around him in the dark, the members of the Gray Wolf Clan moaned and sobbed, or called out for their loved ones. The only light was the dim red glow of burning coals, strewn across the floor of the cave.

"Mother?" Khronos called, fumbling in the dark.

"I am here, Khronos," Ona said nearby. "I am unhurt."

For a moment he went weak with relief, and then he turned his thoughts to the rest of the clan. Khronos shouted for order, commanded his people to quit their shameful keening and get their fires rebuilt. He stumbled toward the mouth of the cave to see what had happened to the outside world, picking his way between the glowing coals the wind had scattered. He did not know what he expected to see. Perhaps the world cracked open like the shell of an egg.

He peered outside, chest heaving, but could see very little in the darkness. The moon had been bright and full only a little while before, but an impenetrable haze of clouds obscured the shining orb now. The outside world was just as dark as the interior of the cave. He smelled dust and ash on the wind.

"Khronos," Tulpac, his second-in-command, called out, "we have many injured. And little Yimmi is dead." Nearly every member of the clan had sustained scrapes and bruises during the brief earthquake following the flashing light. There were a few broken bones, and one child had died when a large stone struck her on the head. Little Yimmi. His cousin Tulpa's youngest child.

Khronos turned away from the cave entrance. Some of the men had gotten their fires going again, and dim yellow light licked the walls of the cavern, making their shadows caper.

"What was that light?" Tulpac asked as Khronos strode past. "Why did the ground tremble? Is it over?"

"How would I know?" Khronos snapped. "Perhaps when daylight comes we will see what it was. Perhaps not. For now we must tend to the injured."

But Wali had overheard their exchange. Now that Old Zambi was dead, she was the eldest member of the clan. The medicine woman was nursing Umbra, whose arm had been broken by a falling stone. "It was Death," she said as Khronos moved past.

Khronos stopped and glared at her, his lips bowed down in a scowl. He considered striking her for alarming the rest of the clan—he could hear the others muttering nervously at her pronouncement—but they needed her healing magic tonight.

Encouraged by his leniency, the old woman rose. Wali gestured toward the dark entrance of the cave, her hands trembling, her wrinkled old face slack. "What we witnessed was the birthing pains of Death, Khronos," she croaked. "The god of death was born tonight. He has come to devour the world."

Her words sent a tickle of fear running down his spine, and that infuriated Khronos even further. "Silence, crone!" he snapped. "I won't hear your foolish talk tonight! Use your healing magic, or join Yimmi in the Land of Warm Days! The clan needs your skills right now more than your ravings."

The old crone scurried off, but her words stayed with Khronos all through the night. They haunted him like an evil spirit, and when daylight finally came—a weak, rainy daylight, the sky churning with thick, ash-gray clouds—he couldn't help but think that maybe she was right. Perhaps Death had been born that night, and perhaps it did mean to devour the world.