If I count stories and not posts, this is number 50. To celebrate, here is a prequel character study visit with a major antagonist in Mother’s Light. He would say he is the main villian. He is wrong.
He slowly regained consciousness and, as always, he remembered his name first. Carroll was wrapped in something warm, lying on his back. He couldn’t yet open his eyes, but felt soft linen on his face. He was covered like a corpse.
Did they think he was dead? No one had made that mistake in a long time. No, there must have been some sort of physical damage to his body. They would have arranged for him to lie in state and be reborn as his younger self, as would seem to be the case today. Carroll flexed his fingers in his right hand and found no arthritic pain. It was before 3pm local time, then.
Her gift to him was to age through an entire adult lifetime every 24 hours. He supposed that was the only reason that he survived the Scrambling of Earth, that delightful mix of nuclear fire, massive flooding, and an explosive arrival of magic that ended the old ways. He found himself in a position of power for the first time of his life, as he helped other survivors rejoin the surface. New communities flourished under his guidance and wisdom, and the gifts he alone could bestow upon the faithful, penitent, or generous, as the sole ambassador of Mother Earth.
Once society started to reassert itself, however, Carroll found his attention wander. Was he doomed to live forever, be the single, solitary, only conduit for Her? That might drive someone a little crazy. Charlatans and scholars claimed prophetic visions from time to time, but those proved to be of equal quality, dead ends or vast timelines that were very annoying. Carrol was growing increasingly bored with his daily cycle, when he stumbled upon a Machine Elf with a refrigeration project centuries ago. A little push in the right direction, and the reinvention of cryopreservation had proven moderately successful. He could rest again, and when the chamber malfunctioned and he died briefly, he would know. He wondered if this was one of those times.
His lips were dry, but he tried to speak anyway. His men would have someone watching him. Waiting. “Waugh Aah,” said Carroll.
“Praise Mother,” answered a whisper. A chair creaked and leather soles shuffled closer.
“Water,” Carroll repeated.
“Sir, let me help you up,” answered a man. The light turned into a murky orange as the linen was pulled away. The heated blanket covering his torso loosened as Carroll sat up and dangled his bare feet over the side of a cool metal table. He was in the same room as the last time he took a break from living in a freezer. A bold and rather disturbing tapestry from his personal collection hung across the room. His favorite chair was nearby.
He smiled lightly at the striped robes the man was wearing. The hokey religion he had started to pass the time was still around. His acolyte poured into a tall metal cup and handed that over with a flexible straw.
Carroll rubbed his forehead as he sipped. Something is different, he thought. He sat upright. I am alone with my thoughts. That was another benefit of his long naps, the peace and quiet. “Brother, what year is it?”
“It has only been six years since we last woke you, sir. You told us to be vigilant for certain events. Last month, bearwolves were sighted in the tropics of New Morocco.”
“Oh, good.”
The acolyte shifted his weight to his other foot where he stood, fidgeting with his hands. “They were dealt with easily, but there were simultaneous reports of lightning in the clouds, above the place we can not go.”
“Not without the Key.” Has Great Mother found a new friend? “Finally.”
“Sir?”
“You had something more to tell me.” He realized it had taken nearly 1300 years for one of those prophecies to start to come to fruition. I wonder if that scribe has any descendents.
“Yes, sir. Great Mother’s scars have never been worse, not in the time since you first requested a survey.” The acolyte flipped through a pile of paperwork. “Physical damage to our interests has been severe.” Her scars, tears in reality that exposed Great Mother’s powerful light, sometimes explosively so, were never of much regular concern to Carroll. He tried not to linger on the question of whether that exposed light was Mother herself. This man was providing a very good distraction, though, little news tidbits adding up to something truly wonderful.
Carroll jumped off the table with a hoot of triumph. The acolyte shielded his eyes as the leader of his monastic order danced around the room naked, crying and laughing. Carroll eventually found a folded robe, still giggling. He muttered a few words and the robe rose in the air to embrace and clothe him. “Brother… who are you? You are not Nigel, from last time, thank Mother.”
“I am Brother Simon, my holiest Voice of Mother, at your service.”
“Give yourself a promotion, Brother Simon,” said the Voice of Mother, once known as Carroll Rivers, in his first life. He reached up and scratched at the beard that had grown several inches in the last few minutes. “This is precisely the moment that I –”
The Voice grabbed his head and groaned as Mother came roaring back. She screamed and hollered at him for leaving her alone again. Simon grabbed him by one arm and guided the Voice into his chair as Mother kept lecturing. He resumed the mantra in his head, the only shield left to him, but he also found himself listening. Yes, this time truly was different. Mother had other stories. Now, someone else shared his burden. He thought, Can it be true?
The Voice waved a hand in the air and produced a handrolled cigar. He only died of lung cancer when he smoked before breakfast, though not until there was time for a good evening meal, a sweet oblivion with no thought or dream or consciousness of any kind. Of course, until midnight. This was turning into one of those days.
Simon knelt at his feet. “Voice of Mother, what does she tell you? What are we to do?”
Mother slowly became a dull roar in the background of his thoughts again. The Voice snapped his fingers and produced flame from his thumbnail, like one of those cartoons from his first youth. He puffed a few times and grinned. “Brother Simon, we prepare for the second apocalypse, of course.”
“Sir?”
“Our Great Mother has met the Key, my boy. And, Great Mother has shown me where I must travel to meet her.” He looked at the backs of his hands. “Now, I see that it is still early morning, before dawn, if I am not mistaken.”
Simon nodded.
“Wake and assemble the council of elders, or the bishops. Or, the generals. The bishop generals? I can never keep your reformations straight.” The Voice blinked. “Go.”
Brother Simon fled with appropriate haste. The Voice of Mother hummed to himself as he stood and approached the tapestry on the far wall, his favorite of Vormyr’s detailed visions of the Scrambling. A giant bird of prey, feathers aflame, rained silver fire down upon a once great city. In real life, this magical interloper had been so powerful that it jolted awake the spirit of an entire planet. That was the Voice of Mother’s summation, anyway. She was not much help with anything like that.
Humanity had barely survived the last time a literal phoenix had risen. The Voice had no clue if it would ever come back, nor what to do when it did. Maybe, though, it was time to find out.