Genesis Zero

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

But then again, neither were there starships.

It was two months, sixteen days and five hours into the new year of 5209 AD that the first signs of trouble had appeared. I remember the exact moment as I’m sure everyone who is still alive from that early morning in the Valley does. How can one forget such a moment? It’s not the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of gravity. No, it’s something far broader, far more challenging in the ways that it demolishes your universe and begins rebuilding it at a frightening speed with which you can barely keep up. This was the moment everything changed. Not just for you or me, for our country, our kingdom, even at last for the entire earth.

This wasn’t just the moment Pandora’s box - or as we have known correctly for millennia, Pandora’s jar - was unsealed; this was the moment it was lifted high overhead and then smashed to a thousand pieces with little warning or care. The universe was playing a grand game of pickup-52, and we were the butt of the joke.

I had been working in the Valley for several months at this point so I was still quite new, though I was not entirely unskilled or inadequate in my abilities or knowledge. I had graduated from the University of Western Kristianstad, the Colleges of Historical Warfare, so I was well-versed in a variety of combat techniques, battle strategies, and warfare conventions spanning a wide period from the peak of human civilization at the end of the second millennia and following the subsequent rise and fall of our species over the next three millennia up til now.

Despite this I still felt I was the least qualified member of our team, and upon the passing of the first moments of the event, the most useless. The challenges we faced were much more suited to the acolytes, the alchemists, and indeed the one wizard of the group - Yilmeleh. She was beautiful and old, wise and arrogant. But oh, how we came to cling to her despite her defects.

Enough with my ramblings.

We had been working in the Valley as all the teams before us had for the last three centuries in what was a hybrid operation of excavation, dissection, analysis, and where possible, rehabilitation. It was this site that was the crux of humankind’s mysteries, and which could hold the answers to all of our most perplexing questions.

It was here that civilization had died, been reborn, and died again. It needed no geological specifics in its name; everyone on planet Earth and even Luna knew what and where the Valley was. From rough translations we knew it had been referred to by many names over the centuries, with the earliest records showing the old Englesz characters to be Khernobyla.

It was a cool, crisp morning, and by cool and crisp I mean it was absolutely frigid. This far inland it was never warm, and here in the shale valley under the shadow of the snowcapped mountains, surrounded by the dark turquoise forests, I was starting to miss the sweat dripping off my back on the warm coastline. I didn’t like feeling my extremities constantly fighting for sensation in the cold, competing to see who could get frostbite first.

I was heading to the main dig site which sat next to the shores of a glacial lake when I was joined by Yazia and Vedir, both of whom I was dismayed to see.

I can’t help but chuckle to myself as my interrogators, or “Historians” as they refer to themselves, look on, icy and annoyed at my level of sentimentality, but as always, composed and silent to record whatever it is that I have to say.

How happy I would be to see either of them now.

Ignoring the first rule of expeditionary guidelines, I had foolishly pursued Yazia upon arriving at the Valley, and a brief but intense fling had ensued. Now it was as icy as the peaks which watched over the Valley. Needless to say we would not be “flinging” again.

And Vedir, well, he was just Vedir. Not the worst, but definitely not the best. I think we all know someone like this, as mean-spirited as we may admit to it being.

I nodded good morning to them. “Brightest dawn Yazia, Vedir.” I said, clutching my drink as if trying to crush it. Yazia glared at me for a half a second before proceeding. It was as warm a welcome as I ever got from her these days. Vedir launched into some obscure morning rant about the socioeconomics of magic in the fifth century, but I was busy staring at the lavender-tinged portion of ponytail that had escaped from Yazia’s scarf…and following it south. I sighed heavily, quickly running through our most intimate encounters in my mind and wishing for the millionth time they were still a possibility. They most certainly were not. Yazia was set to leave at the end of this attachment; I would be staying on for two more. Not that that had anything to do with it.

We were just rounding the bend that entered the back of the Valley and overlooked the dig site and the glacial lake when we noticed our breaths becoming shorter.

It was 05:09 and the sky was only just beginning to show the first hints at maybe lightening, and we could see something was wrong.

We stopped dead in our tracks, unsure of what to make of what was in front of us.

Everything was happening, and none of it made sense. The ancient, ancient power lines that ran like a disorderly spiderweb throughout the excavation site were beginning to glow like steel in a forge, but they were also starting to flicker with electricity. We could see fellow workers scrambling for the exit points, climbing up stairs. An alarm started to wail.

And still, it was getting harder to breathe.

We were alone on the pathway, roughly half way between the camp and the site, and we were too far from either place to do anything. Not that we knew it in that moment, but thinking back now, the futility of our situation is quite obvious. Try telling that to your survivor’s guilt though.

The next thing we noticed was that it was getting very warm. By this point the excavation site had begun to rumble and groan. It was a strange sound, like a simultaneous pushing and pulling, a tug of war of physics itself. As we understand it now, the stressing of the space/time continuum; the obliteration of the fabric of reality.

We had begun taking off our heavy winter clothes by now, and sweat was beginning to drip down my back just like I had missed. I wasn’t missing it now. My heart was beginning to pound rapidly in the way that it does when you know you have nearly avoided death, or have witnessed something so wrong, so transgressive that you wish you could erase it from your mind. Pulse skyrocketing the way it does when you get too close to a wizard at the tail end of an incantation.

At this point, my interrogators have finally grown impatient. One of them puts an arm forward to touch my hand to signal this, scaly skin the color of liquid mercury shimmering dully under the white light overhead. I meet their gaze and nod, understanding.

It was getting harder to breathe, as if the air was growing thinner by the second, and I noticed the water on the glacial lake beginning to shimmer strangely, almost as if the water was vibrating at a high intensity within itself. There were no ripples or waves, but it appeared as if the entire lake was a jar of angry hornets trying to escape their prison.

The ground was beginning to hum with energy, a humming I could feel in my teeth, and it was probably at this point that we knew whatever was about to happen, no one would survive. A pit began to sink in my stomach as we watched in horror all the people who had yet to clear the dig site; not that it would have mattered.

Thunder had begun to crackle and snap overhead with frightening intensity and frequency, like electrical static - I hadn’t even noticed the clouds forming - and small objects around the excavation site were beginning to float.

It was 05:13am when I saw the first anomalies.

By now the air had grown unbearably hot and we had stripped down to our undergarments. We were sweating profusely and struggling to breathe. I could feel the effects of hypoxia beginning to set in.

Around the excavation site and upon the surface of the lake, light was beginning to spill through cracks in what seemed like the earth and the water, but it was reality itself. The very fabric of physical space, the third dimension through which we had thus perceived the world, was starting to rip and tear under the strain of what was about to happen.

All over the Valley pockets of space were appearing in a distended fashion, jutting from various surfaces in irregular polygonal protrusions - and from them were various persons. I remember seeing my first extraterrestrials then, though I couldn’t have guessed it at the time.

And then, in the sudden moment before what we now know to be the Genesis Event, we saw Yilmeleh rushing towards us from the direction of the site. Her hair was floating as if in zero gravity, and her entire nervous system glowing, thrumming with magic as if she was a living X-ray image. She was a wizard, remember, and a powerful one at that.

She reached us just as it happened, shielding us with her magic.

If not for her, we would have been dead long ago. Yazia, Vedir, and I.

I feel an unwanted lump form too quickly in my throat, pressing against my vocal chords like a stone. I wipe the tears from my eyes.

We were the only survivors, and only thanks to Yilmeleh. Everyone else died that day.

It was at 05:14am when everything froze for a single moment.

They say the universe held its breath in that instant; the last time many of us saw our fellow persons, members of our species.

Then reality imploded upon itself, and in that fraction of a second, at the center of the blinding light, I could have sworn I saw him.

They lean forward, their psychically probing eyes intent on my own as I lie to them as I have many times. One of them nudges my hand again. I take a deep breath, remembering the figure silhouetted at the center of that terrifying flash of light.

I saw Kushim.

I saw Adam.

An alarm blares faintly in the upper levels of the containment facility and I am quickly ushered back to my cube. I relive the moments again. How I miss Yilmeleh, Yazia, Vedir. How I long for their closeness, their physical proximity to me.

I close my eyes as the tears well up again, hot and fierce.

Yes, there weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

Once, it was just Yazia and I.