PodCastle

* Author : Deborah L. Davitt
* Narrator : Karen Menzel (née Bovenmyer)
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by NewMyths #51


Content Warning for loss of a spouse


Rated PG-13
We Are All of Us
by Deborah L. Davitt
 
They wore white armor, sleek and chitinous — not the white of chalk, but the white of bone peeking through the skin of a mummy. The white of a grub writhing in black river soil. They dwelled in the deep desert, where few of the Folk dared to tread, in cities carved from the bones of the earth. No one knew much about them, yet everyone knew everything that they needed to know. That they crawled into rock-cut tombs to devour the dead. That their cities wended for miles under the earth, and that they could dig up into a house at night to defile the living.
As blue first-sun set, and red second-sun rose, Suvan went out into her fields. Shared with her husband Petemet once, their lands lay at the periphery of the village, as far from the River as the canals could reach. Here, the black soil brought by the floods each year waned into the silver sand of the desert, and they’d wrested crops from it each year by dint of back-breaking labor. The tales of the priests spoke of a time when the devices of the gods and ancestors, carried through the void between the stars, had broken earth and sown seed, bringing plenty and ease to all.
Suvan had never known anything but ceaseless toil.

The past two years, Petemet had worked long into the searing light of first-sun, when he should have retired into the shade of their mud-brick hut, struggling to ensure that they’d have enough both to eat and to offer in tithe to the priests and the Sepat. He’d died of those labors, of the burning sickness brought by first-sun’s light, blackness erupting from his flesh, from between the white scars left by bronze swords when he’d served the Sepat as a soldier.
As second-dawn stained the eastern sky, she found one of them in her field, crumpled and broken. Past the body, she saw spotted laughing-dogs skulking. A couple of thrown stones deterred the beasts so she could investigate the body. She poked it gingerly with her hoe. “Are you alive?” she asked, feeling the void behind her where her husband should have stood like a mountain.
But his body rested in a cave in the cliffs west of their farm, the stones of which provided a frail final barrier against the desert. His sepulcher boulder-blocked to keep the laughing-dogs and marble-cats at bay.
And them, of course.
The body stirred, and she backed away, holding the hoe aloft, ready to bring it down on the creature’s head. “Are you alive?” she repeated tightly.
Its head rose, white and gleaming, seemingly encased in armor. She could see its eyes through the holes of that white mask, glistering blue, like the sky when first-sun was at its zenith.
The creature didn’t speak, but it hummed a peculiar melody.
Looking down, she felt abashed — no, ashamed. Blue blood seeped from where the armor on the forearm had been crushed like a nutshell. More streaked down its back in thick indigo rivulets, as if something there had been torn away. It’s hurt. Nearly dead, and here I am, threatening to finish the job. Shame warred with prudence, however: Everyone knows what they are. Eaters of the dead. Defilers. Murderers. Safest to bash its head in.