The World is Always Ending by Maia Brown-Jackson This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast. She’s thrilled each time the sun rises again. It’s not that she doubts that it will happen, but every single time, watching the grass change from blue to green-gold and the flowers turn their faces, feeling the warmth touch her skin—it’s a miracle. Which isn’t to say that she dislikes the nighttime. The bottomless, empty, black sky, the way the edges of everything around her seem to soften, the fresh breeze, it’s all indescribably lovely. She sits in a meadow. The grass around her is short and an idyllic green. Reeds whisper against each other near the walls. Red and yellow flowers are sprinkled throughout in little clumps. There is a small pond, empty of life and clear and the water is delicious and sweet. A bed of heather rests in one corner, even though there are no corners. She is content. As her day starts again, she stretches languidly, feeling the sun creeping from her toes up her body. Once it reaches her waist, she stands and goes to greet it. She can hear her own soft footfalls in the silence, and imagines the sun greets her in turn. She and the sun arrive together at the pond. She lets the sun settle in as she cups her hands, quenching her thirst and always dripping down her front. She doesn’t mind. The sun helps with that, too, drying her off as she wanders back and forth among the flowers, sometimes taking a break to lie down with them in the grass. She wonders sometimes, absently, if she’s one of the flowers, too. She didn’t have a house, but she didn’t need one. She spent most of her days lying in the grass, trailing her fingers through the slow-moving river, when it was there, creating sculptures out of flower petals that always disappeared when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes she slept, and sometimes she didn’t. She could drink water from the stream when she wanted, but it rarely felt necessary. She’d learned that some of the flowers had a sweet nectar in them, but she didn’t want to waste them. Around her there were walls, sometimes. They were made of bushes, tall and brilliantly green. And sometimes they were old and made of stone. They kept her from forgetting to stay put and trying to wander off. Sometimes they weren’t there. Her meadow didn’t extend endlessly, nor did it end abruptly, but sometimes it simply stopped mattering at a certain point. When she was in the center, the walls were there less often. It didn’t matter how long she had been there because her thoughts were slow and syrupy. She was vaguely aware that they repeated, that she had the same realizations about how beautiful the light looked on a certain daffodil or that she had told herself the same story about the lives of the flowers before, but it didn’t matter. Why should it? In the morning the sun rose and the grass and flowers were lit up. There was no sound but the soft trickling of water and her footsteps. Sharp black shadows softened as the sun continued its journey. They grew again as the sun began its descent. She had been weaving something from leaves and petals, she didn’t know what. It didn’t matter what. The whole day had passed, yet it could have been minutes, not hours. There was nothing but the meadow. She was content. Of course, she couldn’t stay that way. Keket was being hunted. Keket was the hunter. It was just a matter of who found who first. She had heard about the string, of course, the string that could lead you back out, but whoever started that myth hadn’t realized that the walls moved, that the corridors changed, and that if you missed that sudden silence preceding the shift, you could find yourself split in half and not much would matter anymore. She had seen the partial bodies. She knew. But she was determined. And she knew too if she kept running from that sudden silence that she would find the center. The maze was trying to keep her out. But it was also allowing the Minotaur closer. It was going to be very close, she knew, between her finding the center of the maze and the Minotaur finding her. She didn’t have to enter the maze. But she didn’t know anyone else who would. Cassandra and Keket hadn’t been born entwined. They hadn’t been born in the same city, the same country, not this time. In this lifetime, Cassandra had grown up behind ivory walls, tutored to become a mathematics prodigy. But she read stories of adventures. She read that there was a secret, a great secret, and it was somewhere to the west of Eden. No one was allowed in Eden. There were armed guards, dressed like angels with machetes, securing the perimeter for miles around. No one knew what was inside the space they guarded. It was rumored that not even the guards knew. They were selected young, the children who didn’t show a particular aptitude for anything, the ones who could stand and be quiet, who didn’t ask too many questions. That was critical. Cassandra learned not to ask too many questions as well. The people who were too curious, sometimes they would go away and come back very quiet. So she trained herself to be quiet already, to find answers on her own, to wrap everything in a better understanding of how the accountancy skills she was learning would one day be more finely honed if she could only see past examples. It took her some time to learn about Eden. There were whispers around it, holes in the texts where there should be something solid. That was where she probed as she grew older, at what was missing, at what no one would say. She would still take long walks in the garden, meditate to soft lyre music, and attend her lessons. She studied slowly, so she wouldn’t raise suspicions. Sometimes she thought her father, or someone like her father, had told her a story when she was little. But as she grew older, she had trouble remembering. She had trouble remembering anything clearly, except the intricacies of statistics, calculus, trigonometry, and a bit of quantum mechanics. So she trained herself. She thought, consciously recounting everything she could about Eden every time she heard the lyre. She did not try to clear her mind any longer, she focused, she let the music be an anchor. And it worked. Sitting quietly, eyes shut, no one suspected a thing as she began to plan. Cassandra didn’t want to forget, was the thing. She could barely remember why she was training, what mattered about her learning, except that it would prove helpful to Someone. Maybe it would prove helpful to her. She continued to learn and retain that specific information. And then, when she realized again that her tutor was someone new, was someone she hadn’t seen before, who she still called Tutor, something that was never addressed, she grew bolder. She went to the library at night, sneaking through the pale, empty halls, barefoot so as not to produce loud, echoing footsteps. And she stopped reading about Eden and started reading the Restricted Fiction tomes. This was where she got her idea. Cassandra began to study herself. She had never thought much about her body or face, and she still couldn’t tell you whether they were particularly pleasing, but she could accentuate the facets those tomes discussed. And she could take long walks, past the guards. And she could strike up conversations. It didn’t take long for one of these simple men to agree to abandon his post, to meet her for something he clearly understood better than her. And as he waited for something never to occur, Cassandra dressed herself as an angel and slipped through the ranks. Cassandra never saw Eden. She entered through the west, and came upon a stone maze, and she no longer cared about the garden. She cared about the secret. So she went inside, and the walls guided her to a small meadow, where she became tired, and she slept. The next morning, she awoke and there was sunshine, and she was content. In this lifetime, Keket grew up in a crumbling stone jungle. In one lifetime, Keket was a princess who ran away. She found the maze, and she was killed by the Minotaur. In another, she was training to be a nurse. She sought out the maze, and she was killed by a shifting wall. But in this lifetime, she was raised on the streets, and she was hypervigilant, and cynical. It may have been the cynicism that saved her. She had dreams for years about a girl in a meadow. She knew the girl. She might have even loved the girl. But they were dreams, and Keket put them aside, and grew up. It was some fairy tale she had heard when she was young, she told herself. It was a bedtime story she’d overheard at a window when she pretended it was herself being tucked into a warm bed. It changed when the maze began to grow. Keket woke up, and near half the city was crushed beneath gray stone walls. Bodies were strewn along the corridors, and the living wept and screamed and tried to hide. But Keket recognized these walls. She didn’t want to, and she resolved to sleep further away that night. If the maze wanted her, it would have to try harder. She wasn’t entirely surprised when she awoke among the walls, alone, but for the first time in a long time, not cold, and not tired. So she began to walk. Without direction or purpose. It was either minutes or days before she saw the Minotaur. It was in the distance, and she saw it, and it saw her, and it dropped the body it had been clutching to its mouth and began to charge. Keket ran, and thanked whatever gods she had never believed in when the walls closed behind her. Very well, she thought, I will find that damn girl and outsmart that damn Minotaur and this damn maze. It was a shifting wall that changed everything. She was twisting together petals in the sunshine and watching contentedly as they drifted away, toward where the meadow wasn’t anymore, only this time there was something on the other side of the meadow. There was someone on the other side of the meadow. Someone looking back at her. Someone who opened her mouth, was about to cry out-- The sun rose and cast everything into soft golden brilliance. Cassandra sat up dreamily and-- Cassandra? There. For just a second. For just a second, Keket had actually seen her in person, seen the girl in her dreams, and began to call out, just like she always did before she woke up. But instead of waking up, she felt a stillness, the girl vanished, and the wall behind her opened to reveal one angry Minotaur. For gods’ sakes. Keket cursed under her breath and began to run, hooves pounding behind her, growing closer. She was smaller than the beast, but that seemed to be her only advantage. Very well. She took one turn after another, tighter and tighter and tighter until she heard the silence again, jumped, and-- They had never promised each other every lifetime, every universe, every possible arrangement of atoms. Those are in infinite supply, and they are two girls. But they are two girls whose blood runs with the heat of exploding stars, even as it drips down their knuckles. They are two girls whose souls reach for each other and ignore probability and infinity. They are two girls who crash together and touch each other gently. They have each other’s names carved into their bones and each other’s fingerprints tattooed on their ligaments and they breathe in time with the other’s heartbeat. They would count the steps to hell and freeze it over to save one another and they would burn if there were no other choice. When the sun goes supernova and solar flares lick across the sky, they will see one another, even if only for an instant, and think, This is almost heaven. And with every instant they have they can read each other like braille with ink-stained fingertips and they are a force of nature if you dare to touch them, learning what happens when a hurricane protects its own. So two girls with hummingbird wings in their chests see each other for the second time. And it’s as if time has slowed when they meet, when their fingers touch, and the sound of the Minotaur thundering toward them is drowned out as the space between their lips begins to close, and-- 💀💀💀 Maia Brown-Jackson is a symphony of papercuts, banged-up knees, and stubborn determination. She believes in the altruism of strangers, the power of direct action, and the use of the Oxford comma. She strives to offer what she can; here, that offering is her words.
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About the HostLinda Gould hosts the Kaidankai, a weekly blog and podcast of fiction read out loud that explores the entire world of ghosts and the supernatural. The stories are touching, scary, gruesome, funny, and heartwarming. New episodes every Wednesday. |