Authors: Brian Braden
“I have prayed that prayer every day since the Lord touched you,” a voice startled him from behind.
He turned to see Emzara staring beyond the wall. “I prayed to Him when you and our sons raised the Kupar Bridge. You built it without question. And I served. And I waited; even though I saw in that bridge a terrible purpose.
“I prayed to Him when you built the Black Gate and we walled ourselves into exile. I served and I waited, even as our cold prison rose around us.
“I prayed until my knees bled when you built the Ark. Each time the Lord was silent. I served. I waited. I prayed, but He saved his revelations for your ears. For me, He is mute.”
Noah reached out to tenderly stroke her cheek. “The Lord speaks to us all in His own way. Do not fear, wife. He has promised us safe passage.”
She pulled away, unexpected anger flared in her grey eyes reflecting the shooting stars above. “I am not afraid! Have you listened to God’s voice so long, my husband, you are deaf to all else
,
including your own wife?” She marched to the wall’s edge and jabbed her finger at the city below. “Listen! Do you not hear it?”
He paused and listened. There, just above the wind, rose the faint cries of the terrified throngs far below.
“I hear them,” he said flatly, unable to look her in the eyes.
“I am sad because I know there is still
goodness
down there!” She began to tremble. “There are children and babies in Hur-ar...” she swept an exasperated hand across the horizon, “...and beyond who are blameless. Their only transgression was being born into a fallen world. I can hear them crying! Tell me husband, does God?”
Noah lowered his head to his chest.
“Look at me!” she shouted.
“What if it were us? What if those were our babies about to die?” She placed her hands over her ears and began to cry. “I cannot reconcile the love I feel for my God and the suffering about to befall the innocent. Oh, curse my long life, I will hear their screams to the end of my days!”
Noah didn’t know how to answer her. In all their long life together, she had never once raised her voice to him until now.
“I...” Noah choked back the emotion.
Emzara’s eyes softened in pity. “Do not be cross with me, Noah. I will not curse God, but I am angry with Him. I must be angry with Him, because you will not.”
Emzara drew near and lightly touched Noah’s broad chest, “I am afraid, but I will serve. I will wait. I will trust.” Her fingers found their way under his bearded chin. She lifted his head until their teary eyes met. “I will love.”
The wind whipped her graying hair and made the crow’s feet around her eyes more vivid. For the first time in many years Noah saw his wife as she was.
Emotions so long suppressed by the weight of tireless duty threatened to break through. He breathed deeply, vigorously rubbing and considering his hands.
He hesitated, stumbling to find his words, not his God’s. “I wore callouses upon my flesh from building His Ark. I never stopped to consider those you carried upon you heart as you built our family.”
“Do not apologize for following the word of God.” She looked over his shoulder at the Ark. “We are about to exchange one set of walls for another. One cold, dark place for another. But, together we will wait. We will serve. We will trust and know the sun awaits us at the end of our journey.”
Emzara smiled up at her husband, and in her half-moon eyes he saw the maiden he loved all those years ago when the world was young and the Garden lived fresh in his people’s hearts and minds.
Emzara took him arm-in-arm and led him down off the parapet, but not before she took one more glance over her shoulder at the hell unleashed beyond the Black Wall.
“Did Aizarg tell you his wife’s name?” she whispered.
“Atamoda. Why do you ask?”
“It will make it easier to pray for her.”
The realm of angels lies along the boundary of light and mist, of dreams and death, of twilight and dawn. Their power is the whisper planted within the soul. The earthly plane is a mystery they can influence, but never fully comprehend...except for the Nephilim.
More than divine messengers, the Ten Guardians of Creation transcend spirit and flesh; creatures of two worlds and neither. Mother told me she drifted into our world like a snowflake from Heaven, settling gently upon the earthly plane the Nephilim called the Water. The Nephilim were never created to remain one with the Water, but destined by Grace to transform again into spiritual beings, once their early tasks were complete.
Like snowflakes, they melted into the Water and lost their way.
The Chronicle of Fu Xi
***
The world turned her emerald face to the east and pulled a milky veil over her gaping wound. The spirit felt the earth shudder under Heaven’s onslaught. The beautiful blue jewel suffered for her children’s sins.
Her macabre duties did not command her presence here, but this hellish womb gave birth to the Cataclysm.
It begins here. I must bear witness to this
,
even if I am only spirit.
The Angel of Death plunged into the maelstrom, flitting and twisting downward in the form that pleased her most - a golden, wingless spirit dragon. She passed through the loam of existence as a mote of dust transcends light and shadow.
But Nuwa’s memories carried substance, physical power almost too heavy for her spirit to bear. She knew what the black clouds should look like, what the sea should smell like, what thunder should sound like. She also knew what truly transpired in the human heart, and that knowledge carried a high price. The afterglow of a thousand earthly lives carried staggering emotional power; memories so raw they filled her with intense longing.
More than anything else, she wanted to see her sons again, especially Fu Xi, and hold him once more.
No sunlight penetrated the enormous mushroom cloud’s boiling cauldron. From its hellish belly, it spawned countless storms that piled one on top of another, until they flattened into anvils against the vault of the sky, casting shadows over the emerald ocean. The storms fed off of one another and began to swell outward in all directions. By nightfall the entire southern ocean would be covered, and then the storms would march against three of the seven continents. In a matter of days they would engulf the world.
Even through the storm clouds, Nuwa sensed the turbulent ocean below. It tumbled in over itself as it rushed to cover the scar in the earth’s crust. She broke out of the clouds only a few hundred feet above the hole in the ocean. Though she could not smell it, she knew the air reeked of sulfur and fire.
Swaths of exposed magma at the bottom of what was once miles-deep ocean, painted the storm’s underbelly a ruddy orange. The bedrock instantly melted to lava where a heavenly body the size of a mountain hurtled from the void and slammed into the ocean. The impact vaporized countless billions of tons of seawater, which quickly formed storms, now spreading across the blue sphere. As the ocean raced back over raw lava, more vapor erupted into the sky to engorge the malignant storms.
She skimmed inches over the boiling lava, pursued by a wall of water two miles high roaring toward the center of the crater. Cool water smothered superheated rock and released megatons of energy in a continuous wave of explosions, rumbling for thousands of miles.
The Golden Dragon plunged into the lava without so much as a ripple in the fire rock. She wanted the searing heat to burn away the memories. Instead, she felt nothing, and
emerged into the shimmering hell at the crater’s center. She coiled up like a snake as titanic walls of water converged from all sides and collided; sealing for eternity all evidence of where heaven and earth touched for a brief, terrible instant.
The Golden Dragon rode the explosion of steam high into the heavens, until she emerged from the cauldron and hovered at the edge of cold, silent space. Curtains of boiling white slowly concealed earth’s gentle blue curve as tens of thousands of lightning bolts illuminated the clouds from within.
She peered beyond the expanding line of clouds, to where the ocean still basked under the sun. There, a shock wave rippled through the deep water at almost the speed of sound. Fated to circle the globe several times before it died, the mega-tsunami would scour the world’s coasts clean of all hints of mankind. This was only a taste of the destruction to come.
Fu Xi dwells down there, condemned to suffer for my sins.
Heaviness tugged at her, sapping her strength. Much work remained before she could lay down her burdens.
Nuwa sank back below the clouds and raced ahead of the rising tidal wave as the illusion of her dragon form melted away. She willed herself north, beyond the ocean and the continents, toward the top of the world. There, she would break the seals on damnation’s pit and unleash a new scourge.
Haughty, foolish Hur-po! You stack your bricks a few feet higher above the dusty ground than other peoples, and think yourselves gods.
– Scythian Proverb
The Chronicle of Fu Xi
***
Only a few farmers remained west of the Hur River working the hardscrabble soil amongst the stumps and irrigation ditches. These diehard few took their chances against the strange omens. The stink and confinement of the city held no sanctuary for them. They chose to fight the enemy they knew and understood...hunger. Winter loomed, and grain remained to be gleaned among the stumps. They kept their eyes downcast on their work, afraid to look up at the shooting stars. Whatever doom the gods had in store, these peasants chose to meet it with full bellies.
They paused swinging their scythes as the earth began to tremble. At first they thought the deep, bass rumble only another earthquake. The stump farmers and their slaves shielded their eyes and gazed over the western ridgeline, the gateway to the steppe. That’s when they saw the dust cloud building in the late morning sun.
They knew this sound, though never with this intensity. It was the thunder of hooves, the dust stirred by a horde.
“Scythians”! They screamed and dropped their tools, fleeing to the bridge.
Unknown to them, the Scythians tribes also fled, but to the west and without their horses, trying to outrun the icy waters invading the steppe.
***
For the first time since the ancient days when the Narim walked among them, the great bronze horn rang out from the southern watch tower, signaling enemies approached. A hush settled over the refugees outside the gate and the mob within.
“Thank Ba’al almighty, something has shut these people up!” Bal-eeb shouted as he drew his sword. He turned and addressed the masses inside packed against the gate and extending down the central avenue.
“The Scythian horde rides this way!” he shouted, so all could hear him. “Go back to your homes. If you stay, you die. Rest assured, if you clog my avenue, I will kill you myself.”
Amidst screams the throng quickly disbanded, scattering into the city’s bowels.
Bal-eeb felt much better, like he could breathe again. He motioned for his lieutenant as he made his way down the parapets toward the southern tower. He pointed the length of the wall. “I want every available archer deployed. Bring up the barrels of oil and tinder. Reinforce the gate as well. Send word to the Commander. I’m sure he heard the horn, and I don’t want him showing up here without knowing what’s going on. ” He stopped and turned, raising his finger to the lieutenant to accentuate his point. “And send a runner to recall those troops I sent with that boy lover, Hecktar. I need every sword and spear on the wall.”
He looked out over the broad plain in front of the city, toward the twin towers of the Kupar Bridge and suddenly had an idea.
“Sneak a squad of twenty of my finest archers out the hidden door in the south wall. Give them a triple portion of arrows, and tell them to run as fast as they can to the Kupar Bridge.”
The lieutenant frowned and shook his head. “What good are twenty men against that many horsemen?”
“The river is flooded. The bridge is the only way to cross. Twenty good archers can turn the bridge into a bloodbath.”
“And when they run out of arrows?” The lieutenant raised an eyebrow.
“Draw swords and fight to the death.”
“As you command.” The lieutenant bowed and then turned to leave. He stopped and turned around. “And what of the people trapped outside the wall?” The lieutenant pointed to the hundreds of people pounding at the gates.
“If we’re lucky, they’ll absorb of few Scythian arrows,” Bal-eeb scoffed.
***
Captain Bal-eeb stood among a line of archers along the wall and watched the dust cloud grow. He’d fought the horsemen enough times to know the tell-tale signs of a mounted force, though he never thought they’d mount an attack on the city itself.
“They approach the Kupar Bridge. It must be the entire Scythian nation,” a young archer said in astonishment. “Why do they attack? Surely they know they cannot breach the wall?”
“Who knows what goes through the heads of those filthy animals,” Bal-eeb said, and motioned to the sky. “Perhaps they’ve seen the omens as a sign we are weak. They will feel our arrows and think differently.”
Bal-eeb felt much better. This was something he understood. The heavens may be falling, but battle against a flesh and blood enemy was real. Here he would earn his glory. While Hecktar played about with the mob, Bal-eeb would save the city. His only regret was he wished he had a larger force deployed at the bridge.
With the river so flooded, Bal-eeb felt confident the archers could slow the horde long enough for the Commander to reinforce the wall.
The stump farmers began to arrive, exhausted and screaming of the doom approaching from the west.
“Captain!” his lieutenant pointed to the growing cloud. “The dust turns black and moves against the wind.”
Bal-eeb saw it, too, though he couldn’t understand what his eyes told him.
***
The east and west approaches to the Kupar Bridge were almost underwater by the time the archers arrived, exhausted and out of breath. Only narrow strips of dry land about fifty feet wide provided access to the mighty bridge. The swift, black river was almost over the cliffs, which were beginning to crumble into the current.
The young squad leader gave them a quick moment to guzzle some water before he deployed them. He positioned ten archers far enough down the bridge to kill anyone approaching the western ramp. The next ten were placed in a line adjacent to the eastern guard shack.
Giant sheets of ice raced downstream and occasionally slammed into the bridge’s pillars. The bridge shuddered, but didn’t yield. With each impact the archers nervously looked about. The river, the falling stars, the Scythians... it was overwhelming, but the young warriors didn’t falter. They had little loyalty to the captain, but they loved their squad leader and knew their city counted on them. Here they would make their stand.
They didn’t have to wait long.
The men in the first line wiped the sweat streaming from under their helmets, the approaching thunder of hooves hurting their ears. They discerned enormous shapes emerging from the dust beyond the bridge.
The Kupar Bridge stood for over a century, patiently waiting for its purpose to be fulfilled. Now, that time had come as the first invaders reached the eastern ramp.
With a deafening buzz, a black mass of flying insects erupted from above the dust. Shocked, the archers watched as the living cloud ebbed around the bridge’s cables and towers above them, pausing only for a moment before descending.
Millions of flies, bees and hornets attacked the men, ruthlessly biting and stinging every exposed inch of flesh. The first line of men fled screaming, swatting at the air and covering their faces. Insects filled their noses and mouths and crawled into every nook and cranny of their armor. To the last man they jumped into the water to their death.
The second line of archers dropped their bows and fled across the fields. The insects did not pursue, but ascended into the sky toward the city. They were quickly followed by an enormous, screeching flock of birds of every feather. The birds and insects were not long gone when the first hoof set foot on the bridge.
A pair of woolly rhinoceroses, both massive bulls, galloped across the bridge. They slammed through the empty guard shacks on both ends, shattering them into tiny splinters, and continued at a full gallop toward the city.
The elephants followed several minutes later, flanked by hundreds of other animals bunched into a thick mass, cramming onto the bridge. Antelope, horses, deer, bison, sheep, bears, wolves, lions, pigs, foxes...the creatures of the marsh, steppe, and mountain filed across the Kupar Bridge. The din of their hooves carried all the way to the city gate.
Cables tightened, boards creaked, supports groaned. From below, the river began to rise at a visible pace. Ice slammed relentlessly into the structure, sending shockwaves throughout the bridge. Still, it withstood the assault from below and the tremendous weight from above.
The weight began to abate as the larger animals cleared the eastern ramp. The scampering creatures crossed last. The final pair, two fat beavers, scurried across just as the rushing water washed away the western access.
Ice, driftwood, logs and flotsam steadily built up against the bridge supports, adding their weight to the flood’s already crushing force.
The beavers touched dry land and waddled up the eastern bank just as the access washed away. Now isolated and surrounded by rapidly rising water approaching the level of the road, the tops of the bridge’s support towers trembled. Suddenly, a sharp crack, quickly followed by a peeling, tearing noise filled the air. The span began a slow, sickening counter-clockwise lurch, like a boat trying to turn about in a narrow channel. Cables snapped and fell limp into the water.
As if knowing its purpose fulfilled, the mighty Kupar Bridge surrendered to the flood. With a series of wet snapping pops, it aligned with the current for a moment, before the mighty twin support towers fell inward on top of one another. With a crash the span snapped in two. The structure disintegrated into a pall of dust swirling over the river.
The herd pressed towards Hur-ar.
***
The mob at the gates turned toward the thunder and saw the bridge collapse. A sickening silence followed.
The warriors rubbed their eyes and blinked in disbelief. A foundation of their lives, something as solid and permanent as the mountains themselves, suddenly vanished.
“The bridge,” the lieutenant whispered. “It has fallen.”
“The two towers have fallen!” another warrior screamed.
A wail went up from the mob, “The towers have fallen! The bridge is gone! The bridge is gone!”
Freeman and slave, man and women, pressed against the gates with renewed energy. Those in the front were crushed by the weight of those behind. Arms and hands stretched upward in supplication, begging for entry. Dead bodies began to pile up against the gates, which became step stools for those trying to climb up.
Those at the rear of the mob heard the deep bass concussions of approaching hooves and slowly turned.
“Riders!” the lookout on the north tower shouted. Across the plain, well ahead of the main dust cloud, two smaller dust trails approached at a full gallop.
Scouts?
Bal-eeb discerned two large shapes, but they didn’t run like horses. They trundled, mighty shoulders lurching up and forward like unstoppable boulders rolling down a mountainside. As they drew nearer, it became obvious the two hulking beasts were riderless. At first he didn’t recognize the monsters. Even as they drew closer his mind refused to acknowledge what his eyes told him.
“This cannot be,” Bal-eeb whispered to himself.
Almost seven feet at the shoulder and seven thousand pounds, one woolly rhino galloped well ahead of the other. White foam spewed from its nostrils as its mighty heart approached the breaking point. An invisible force pushed it onward. It didn’t know why it ran; only that it must.
The rest of the mob turned around to see what the sentries along the wall pointed at, but it was too late. The beast plowed into the mass of human flesh, swinging its thick head and tossing bodies high into the air. Bones cracked underneath its stocky legs as it cleared an opening all the way to the gate. The survivors parted and fled screaming in both directions along the length of the wall.
“Archers, FIRE!” Bal-eeb commanded. Hundreds of arrows rained down on the rhino. It turned and trotted off, dozens of shafts protruding from its thick hide.
A clear path to the gate awaited the second rhino, more massive than the first. It didn’t slow, nor did it swing its head, or flinch as dozens of arrows found their mark. With full force, eight thousand pounds of flesh rammed head first into the wooden gate.
The gates convulsed and shuddered inward as a shock wave of dust flew up from the wall. The stone under Bal-eeb’s feet quaked. The gates buckled but held as the rhino retreated. Stunned and bristling with arrows, it slowly staggered away.
The men began to back away from the parapets.
“These are devils!” one of the men shouted and bolted. He ran past Bal-eeb, who hooked him with his arm and ran him through with his sword.
“This is Scythian witchcraft, nothing more! Return to your posts.” Bal-eeb shouted, and let the warrior’s body fall to the stone.
The first rhino returned and slammed into the gate. The thick wood released a deeper, more alarming cracking sound.
Desperate to rally his men, Bal-eeb snatched the dead warriors bow. “Come, men! You’ve been doing nothing for the last week except belly aching about the lack of meat. Well, here’s your meat!” He laughed and loosed an arrow into one of the beasts. His men found courage and resumed pelting the rhino with arrows.
After one more assault, which was nothing more than a bump, the smaller rhino stumbled to the side, blood pouring from a thousand punctures. Its eyes rolled into the back of its head, and it collapsed dead in the tall grass.
Just out of bowshot, the larger rhino huffed and pawed at the dirt. It panted heavily with wet, ragged snorts as it tried to catch its breath. Bloody flecks of foam shot from its nostrils and mouth. The rhino’s beady eyes locked on the gate as it summoned the last of its strength.