Chapter 242: History
The information Anansi gave was plentiful.
The massive ancient spider loved to talk. It had spent a thousand years floating alone in the dark with no one to talk to, and now that it had someone, it poured out everything it knew with the eagerness of a being making up for ten centuries of silence all at once. The words came in floods, doubling back, branching off into stories within stories, and Damian sat in the vacuum and let them come, sorting the useful from the eccentric as the spider filled the silence of space with its voice.
Through it all, he assembled a picture of the Amenta Lands of Stone.
The world he had been born into was, as his Primordial Perception had already begun to show him, far larger than anyone living on it understood. The empires and tribes and Sacred Mountains were a thin skin across the surface of something vast. Above them floated the Ancestral Celestials on their landmasses, divided into factions, the High Mountains and the Skies of White and others Anansi named in passing. And above even them was the vacuum, the heavy space, the road toward THE Primordial Source where only Stellar Lifeforms could survive.
The Amenta Lands of Stone produced Stellar Lifeforms rarely.
But it had produced them before.
Anansi spoke of them with reverence, the ones who had risen across the long ages and walked out into the dark. There had been Mami Wata, who rose from the deep waters of the world and became something that could swim through the vacuum the way she had swum through her oceans, and who left to seek Existence and never returned. There had been Nyami Nyami, the river spirit, vast and serpentine, who had guarded the dark for three hundred years before passing the duty along. There had been Adro, who rose from the high places and left scars across the meteorite fields that Anansi could still point to. Each of them had become a Stellar Lifeform. Each of them had eventually left to seek the resources that propelled a Stellar Lifeform’s power forward, to walk the road toward THE Primordial Source.
And before Anansi, the Guardian had been Eshu.
"Eshu was the one who passed the duty to me!" Anansi said, all its eyes bright with the memory. "Oh, Eshu! A trickster, that one, always laughing, always speaking in riddles even when a plain answer would have served better! Eshu held the dark for four hundred years before I rose, and when I finally swam out of the Amenta Lands of Stone and survived the weavings, Eshu laughed and laughed and said the same thing I said to you! Tag! You are it! And then Eshu was gone into the dark, off to seek Existence, and I have not seen that trickster since!"
WAA!
Damian absorbed it all.
And then he came to the question that mattered most, the one that justified the entire arrangement Anansi had described.
Why did there have to be Guardians at all?
Anansi’s many eyes lost some of their delight when Damian asked it.
"Ah," the spider said, and its voice grew heavier. "That. Yes. You should know that."
It settled lower on the dark of the vacuum, its legs folding, and when it spoke again, the rapid eccentric warmth had given way to something grim.
"Across this region of Existence, Stellar Lifeforms pass through from time to time," Anansi said. "Most of them leave a World alone. They are traveling, seeking their own resources, walking their own roads, and a small World like our Amenta Lands of Stone holds nothing they want. They pass us by and never know we were here." Its eyes dimmed. "But others. Others walk a dreadful road. The road they follow requires them to consume, to take, to devour the lifeforms of a World to feed their own ascension. And when one of those passes by and notices us, it does not pass us by. It comes down."
OH!
The spider was quiet for a moment, gathering the story.
"Long ago," it said, "before the Guardians, before there was any watch kept at all, two native Stellar Lifeforms of the Amenta Lands of Stone were down within the World, training. Oduduwa and Obatala, they were called. Powerful, both of them, risen from the World and not yet departed into the dark. They were within the Lands of Stone, refining themselves, harming no one." Its voice dropped further. "And a Foreign Stellar Lifeform came down."
HUUM!
"In a matter of minutes," Anansi said, and every eye it had was fixed on Damian now, "that Foreign Stellar Lifeform devoured one billion lifeforms. One billion! It tore through the Lands of Stone like a flame through dry grass, consuming everything it touched, the souls and the flesh and the very essence of entire empires, all of it poured into its own ascension! Tribes that had stood for ten thousand years were gone before anyone below understood what was happening! It ravaged the Land, and it would have devoured all of it, every last lifeform down to the smallest, if Oduduwa and Obatala had not felt it and risen to stop it!"
BOOM!
"They fought it," the spider continued. "They drove it off, eventually, the two of them together, though the cost was terrible and the World was left scarred for generations. And afterward, they understood what they had nearly lost. They understood that the Amenta Lands of Stone had no defense against the dark, that any wandering horror could descend and feed and leave nothing behind, and that the only thing standing between the World and that fate was whether a Stellar Lifeform happened to be paying attention at the right moment." Anansi’s eyes held Damian’s. "So they made the duty. A Guardian, always, floating above the World, watching the dark. Someone to ensure that what happened with that Foreign Lifeform never happened again."
The spider was silent for a moment.
"There have been close calls since," it said quietly. "Across the ages. Some Foreign Lifeforms slipped past or could not be stopped in time, and there were catastrophes, empires destroyed, hundreds of millions lost before the Guardian of the day repelled them. But for the most part, we held. For the most part, the World below never knew how close it came, never knew that something watched the dark on its behalf, never knew a Guardian existed at all." Its voice softened. "That is the duty, Brother Newcomer. That is why someone always has to stay."
...!
Damian listened to all of it grimly.
He floated in the vacuum and looked back at the distant glimmering sphere of the Lands of Stone. He owed this. Not Anansi alone, but every Guardian who had ever floated in the dark and watched for the things that would have devoured the world. Mami Wata. Nyami Nyami. Adro. Eshu. Anansi. They had kept the watch across ages he could not count, and because they had kept it, the Lands of Stone had survived long enough for the Vakochev Empire to rise, for his father and his mother to live, for him to be born, for him to grow and suffer and shatter and rebuild himself until he could reach up and grasp THE Primordial Source.
Their protection was the reason any of it had been possible.
His Baba had ruled an empire because a Guardian watched the dark. His Ama had lived to be captured and to suffer and to be saved because a Guardian watched the dark. He himself drew breath in the vacuum of space right now because, across a thousand years, a spider had stayed behind so that no Foreign Lifeform descended and ended everything before Damian ever had the chance to become what he was.
He had no problem paying that back.
In fact, he could be considered to have already started. This was part of his Scale, the thing he had pressed across the Lands of Stone, the principle that those who endured adversity would be rewarded for it. For all the adversity Anansi had carried across a thousand lonely years of watching the dark, Damian had appeared and rewarded it, pushing the spider further in a single tap than it had advanced across ten centuries. That was the Scale working exactly as he had meant it to work.
He looked at the dark around him, at the distant barely visible stars, at the road that THE Primordial Source had told him led outward toward itself.
He would need a body down there, on the Lands of Stone, with his family and his people. But he also had to send a body out, into the vacuum, along the road, to seek what was out there and to continue expanding his Scale across distances he had only just learned existed.
He thought about how to arrange it as he floated in the silent dark, stellar light flowing into him constantly.
There was a great deal to do!
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