Fen's Bedtime Stories

Long ago, in a world not so different from this one, Urosi tended to a garden.

She did not create the garden - another had shaped the land, and another still had sown the seeds. Neither of them remained to tend it, and so the task fell to her. When she came upon it, it was growing wild, but she knew the land had been shaped and the seeds sown with intent. She could not control the land, nor could she create life, but this small thing - this she could do. And so the task of tending the garden fell to her in the absence of its creators, in this garden and many more besides, but most importantly for our story she tended to this one.

She applied a gentle touch. She tended to the plants, and to the animals, and all the other creatures. She learned about how they worked, and what they did, why they died and why they lived. She took some from one place to another, and she followed her favorites across many generations, and she shaped events, just a little, so that those things in line with her purpose were just a little bit more likely to thrive.

She did this for many years, many lifetimes, and more than once she thought she might succeed; only to have her hopes dashed and her efforts washed away; by storms, by drought, by fire or by flood. And she would begin anew, or not quite anew, since she always saved her favorite seeds and helped nourish them through these disasters; But truly her efforts were marked more by failure than by success, and even when she grew close her goal seemed distant and elusive. She began to despair, and in her despair she stepped back from the world; she went to focus on other places with other gardens, to pursue other opportunities, and left this garden to its own devices.

But influences do not merely fade away. A gentle touch can reverberate across millennia if applied to the right place, and all of Urosi’s touches were carefully applied. Even in her absence the garden loosely kept the shape she had been giving it, and the things living in it fought desperately to fill that space, to fit that shape, for the creatures that best fit the garden were the ones most likely to survive.

When she returned, at last, she was surprised to find that in a place she had carved for herself, a strange kind of animal now lived. It had broken in while she was absent. It had rifled through her belongings. It had been digging up things she had buried to keep safe. It had made a mess of her possessions, and imbued the mess with some mysterious purpose.

And then, the animals spoke.

For many years, this was the outcome she had sought, shaped, guided. And now, here, before her, the fruits of her labours, and already it was at work prying out her secrets.

Urosi was delighted.

She stayed for several days and several nights. She learned the meanings behind the creatures’ words. She saw the tools they had made, imitations of things they had pilfered from her study. Tools they now used to tend to their own gardens. She saw them hunt, how they interacted with the rest of the garden, and then, finally, she saw one die.

A great mass of them came together, then, and she had seen enough of them to walk among them wearing their face without being noticed, and as they brought out the body they did something they had not stolen from her, that she had never shaped them to do. They did something she had never experienced, and never foreseen. They did something entirely new.

They began to sing.

The rhythms of the world, to which she had before been dead, resonated in their voices. The dirge surrounded her, and passed through her. These animals were not mere mimics. They had truly inherited the spirit of creation, and the thing they created here in this time of mourning and darkness was one of the most beautiful things she had ever experienced.

There, at the foundations of the first city, the lost city, the city of Has, the cradle of civilization before civilization had even begun, Urosi fell in love with humanity.

As the people sang their sad song, they began to stamp their feet, and Urosi joined them. She stamped her feet. She let her voice sing out. She felt the loss, the love, the pain, and the hope flood through her. She became one with them.

And she stayed with them for many dozens of years, and she told them stories, and she taught them wondrous things, and they built a city, Has, that was strong and powerful and became a symbol of everything that humanity could be. Its bright towers gleamed, drawing in others from many miles away, a beacon of hope and potential.

Urosi ensured the people of the city were gifted with great plenty. They were kept in good health, and the crops and the animals grew mightily, and the people did not grow old, for Urosi’s hand rested on their shoulders.

They sang, and drank, and created new stories. They mingled, and created rituals, and jostled amongst themselves for mates, for friends, for status, for power, and created hierarchies, and pursued a great many pleasures, and grew fat. The people wanted for nothing, and as time passed they grew complacent, for there was nothing they wanted.

They still sang, for it pleased Urosi to hear them, but only the songs they had always sung.

They still danced, but rarely, and only in the ways they had always danced, and only at the events they had always danced at, and all the passion had gone from it, leaving only the forms.

They told stories, but their own stories fell out of favour, and soon they told only Urosi’s stories, and they told them unchanged. The stories of their own, the stories they had before she had come, and the ones they had made when the city was young, were forgotten.

They grew tired of the rigors and challenges and risks of love; of intimacy; even of pleasure; of any part of life where there was not safety and security. Eventually, no more children were born to those who lived in the city, for children were naught but work and toil, they were worrisome, they were unpredictable, and so they were unwanted.

Urosi almost, almost, let herself stay there, in that city, content to be everything for the people of Has. As the people had changed, so too did the mask she wore, and she herself had grown fat and happy. But one of her other gardens had something terrible happen to it, to which she needed to attend, and so she left; and she spent time once more in the wild growth, shaping, cutting, guiding, and when she returned her face once more bore signs of struggle. Her clothes were soiled, her fingers were hard, her skin was scratched and raw. The city recognized her no more readily than she recognized the city, and in truth she did not recognize it, although it was nearly unchanged from when she had departed; but what she saw caused a horror to settle deep within her. Urosi had finally found what she had been looking for in humanity, and looking down now upon these creatures, she realized: she had destroyed them.

The people had barely noticed her absence. They still went to the stage every day where she had spoken the old stories, but now they only sat in silence for a short while before continuing on with the business of the day. Where once they had created, stole, changed, strived, fought, mourned, felt joy, and fear, and love, and misery, where once they had sang songs and passed on stories newly made to children newly born; now their eyes passed over things of interest without catching. Their motions were simple and repetitive. Their faces were calm, their lives untroubled, their ambitions atrophied. The people barely thought at all. If there was any change at all from when she had left, it was this, that they had forgotten even Urosi’s stories, but as for that the forgetting had rendered in them no great change, and little had been lost.

And so she came to realize what she had done. She had killed them. She had killed them more thoroughly than any threats of the wild had ever done. She had killed not just a man, but the spirit of men. She had discovered the fledgling civilization she sought, and had smothered it with her affection such that all that remained was this corpse of a city, this “utopia”.

Urosi began to cry terrible tears. She sat at the stage where she had once told stories, and she cried and she cried for many days. And the people came, as they always had, and watched her, although they were unsure as to why she cried or what they should do. Finally, feeling her sadness and not understanding it, they grew angry. With one last bout of inventiveness, one last dying spasm of the human spirit, they decided there was a problem, and they did not like it, and so they would be rid of it.

They decided they would drive Urosi from the city. They did not need her, or want her. She was creating a disturbance. They pushed her to the stones, and the mask Urosi was wearing, already pitted with her tears and made thin by her despair, cracked and fell away.

And so it came to be that she met their anger with her own, wearing a new mask, drawing herself up and up, her face the terrible menacing visage of a storm cloud. And her tears fell upon the city as a torrent, and her sobs rent it with strikes of lightning. She stamped her feet, and the ground quaked and shook, and Urosi began to sing the song of mourning.

Her voice was the wind, and swirled around the city, and the city shook, and split, and the wind howled through its streets, and the rain became a flood, and when the song ended the City of Has had been swept away.

When the other humans came, the stranger humans, who had never known the city but were drawn by the distant and terrible song, overcome with curiosity; when they came, she did not go to them. As they dug through the rubble and plundered its secrets, she made sure they found only the weakest and the smallest. Secrets enough to learn from, but few enough to leave them hungry for more.

Thus did the first city meet its end. Even as I recall it now, I am overwhelmed by that same hunger that fell upon the strange men that picked through its ruin. The hunger to discover new secrets. The hunger to create them. The hunger to wring from them the pieces of new stories, stories to pass on to my children. The hunger to steal from the gods, and the audacity to improve upon their works.

The gods, you see, do not seek servants, or worshippers, or supplicants, or automatons. They do not seek the placid, the peaceful, the safe. And nor do we, no, nor do we, for we are the strangers, we are the scavengers, we are the free people!When our ancestors left that city, Urosi would follow them, and be carried along by them, and sometimes walk among them, and when their hunger slacked she would whisper new secrets into their ears such that it was born anew with all its fury, and the people multiplied, and did achieve many great things, and she may share these stories with us, but she has done so in the hopes not that we will remember them, but that we will create better ones! She implores us to surpass her, not to wallow in her gifts, and to do the things she can not!

We stole the secrets of her city, yes, but we did not do as she feared. We did not use them to build a new city of the same sort on its ruin, no. We cast our eyes to the horizon, and we went to many lands, and we built not a city but civilization itself!

And so, never forget the people of Has, for they were people just like you and I, and lest we are careful, we could become like them, and then we would be the living dead instead of the free people. If we seek an end to all suffering, to all strife, to all labour, if we seek a full stomach that at last quells our hunger completely and forever, then we might yet find it, and it would mean the end of us.