The Heart-Shaped Goddess

My eyes are full of dust as I wake up in No Mans Land on an old, threadbare blanket with Brick by my side. Brick, my best friend, my confidant, was exiled from our tribe five years ago for using tribe electricity to power a black box he discovered on a trip to the tech dumps. This was a forbidden action, but the sentencing was a stretch if you ask me. Then again, that’s why I’m here on a dusty bed of sand with beetles in my hair instead of waking to the rising sun in my cosy hammock in the searchers quarters, inside the earthly gates.

I am a searcher, one who is anointed to search for resources and land beyond the earthly gates of the Earth Tribe. My job is to forage in the desert lands outside of tribe gates for anything that might be useful to the tribe. What I actually do is ferry survival goods to the exiles living in No Mans Land. I can’t stand the thought of these people, my people, who didn’t really do anything wrong, being stuck in this muggy, shade-less chasm between the tribe lands, and it’s all because of one, stupid old heart-shaped locket.

The locket is the Earth Tribe’s goddess. She dictates sentencing, fasting, job roles within the society and just about everything in between. The locket is a piece of junk in my humble opinion. It’s an old, rusty thing, thick and bulky on a withering chain. It had wings on the front of it once upon a time, but they have since disintegrated into thick, red rust.

The locket has been hung at the worshipping alter for hundreds of years and swung like a pendulum during times of trouble, trauma and need. It’s never been opened. The legend states that the locket was stuck closed when the pioneers of the new world discovered it and after trying to open it, they decided she was better off as a deity than a piece of junk. Don’t ask me why.

I started to doubt the magic of the goddess locket after Brick was exiled. I doubted it even more when I was anointed searcher. I was useless at that time, just a clumsy child at thirteen with no sense of direction and only the makeshift map I was given on my first expedition to guide me. I’ve since learned the ways of the wild. My name is Calypso and I am at one with the wilderness, but had I not been chosen as a searcher, my tribe may have survived me. My tribe may have survived my actions.

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That morning, on the sandy slope with Brick, I had finally made up my mind about the goddess locket. Maybe it wasn’t my place to dictate who my people worshipped, but as a searcher who silently cared for the tribes broken and forgotten, I had to do something. I couldn’t keep watching children who made silly mistakes be left to the wilderness just because an old piece of rust swung in the wrong direction. I have watched young children die from exposure in the wilderness, just moments too late to save them, all because they stole an apple from the fields and the locket considered them irredeemable. Other children would be caught for the same crime and “saved” because the wind blew differently for them. It was sickening, and it made me realise how little we humans have learned since The Annihilation.

We are still at war with the two other tribes in our region. We are still using weapons against one another and sacrificing our children to the wilds for the sake of a damn piece of junk that a couple of pioneers found centuries ago.

I told Brick to meet me at an old, withered tree that sat atop a hill in No Mans Land, it was a small source of shade for Brick throughout the coming heat of the day and a good meeting place in the vast expanse of sand and nothingness.

I made my way back to the Earthly Gates, still covered in sand with only a small bag of nettles, beans and prickly pears to show for my night in the wilds. The guards snatched my satchel of goods and handed me an empty one for my next trip. I glared at the men with their thick, greasy beards and frazzled hair. They were older than most of the other guards, their names were Solomon and Port and they were vile destructive creatures. They were more like tyrants than guards, beating the exiles before the gates were closed and stealing what little survival supplies they were given. They were reprehensible, but the tribe land wasn’t all bad. As I made my way towards the searchers quarters, I skimmed my fingertips along the crops of the trading fields. We had an abundance of green rolling crops and a large chicken coop for our protein. The chickens always bothered me a little with their two heads and scaly tail areas. The older members of the tribe say The Annihilation caused animals to mutate, and whenever they mentioned that, I wondered if we should be eating them.

You may wonder why we need searchers if we have crops, but the truth is, the crops are for trading with the other tribes, and if the goddess dictates we will need the entire crop for trading, we have to gather what little resources we can from the wilds. The goddess often dictated that our crops were for trading only and many families and workers went hungry for months at a time. Just another reason I had to enact my plan soon. I had to get rid of the goddess locket.

Eventually, I made my way to the searchers quarters where Creed, my future husband was waiting for me. He scooped me up in a hug, his huge, broad figure crushing my tiny frame as he did so. He told me he was worried for me, his deep, forest green eyes boring into my own as if he were trying to read to my mind. I ran one small, delicate hand through his mess of soft, brown hair and scratched his scalp with my gritty nails. I told him I was fine. I promised him I wouldn’t get caught, but he was afraid for me. He told me he’d heard whisperings of a traitor around the gates, he was worried the tribe knew what I was about to do. I was very fond of Creed, but his worry made me nervous, it made me doubt my mission, my intentions. I kissed Creed on the cheek and told him everything would be okay. He wasn’t my husband yet, but he sure acted like it. I liked the warmth of him, the kindness he showed me and the endless love in his heart. He didn’t believe in the goddess either, but he was also afraid of what would happen if I succeeded in my plan.

I spend most of the day by the river. I bathed, I washed my clothes and hung them on a tree branch to dry off and then I basked in the sun on the damp, warm grass for a while. Once it began to grow darker, I made my way back to the cabins and climbed into my hammock next to Creeds. I leaned over and kissed him goodnight, he silently wished me luck with those deep, expressive eyes. I laid awake then, listening to the snores of my peers until I could hear the chirp of cicadas outside, then I rolled silently out of my hammock, placed a light kiss on Creed’s forehead and tiptoed out of the quarters in my hemp socks. I placed my shoes on once I was safely away and stalked in the cover of shadows towards the worshipping temple. The goddess locket hung there, at the end of the room, on an altar, completely unprotected. Unprotected because the leaders of this tribe trusted us, their people, to protect the goddess always. My heart thumped against my ribcage as I approached our tribes' deity and then I swiped her from her hook with a swift flick of my hand and there she was, a heart-shaped locket made of rust, seemingly impenetrable, right in the palm of my hand. It was easy, but I guess that’s what happens when you trust a rogue searcher.

I scaled a wall of vines not far from the Earthly Gates, again, a flaw in the tribes' trust, and sprinted as fast as I could to the tree where I was to meet Brick. The locket was making my hand itch and sweat with the tiny shards of metal that were dislodging as I ran. I was terrified of myself. Was I a war criminal now? Had I betrayed my tribe over this damn locket for the right reasons? Or was I just selfish? But I didn’t have time to think about that once I reached Brick. He was standing on the hill, rubbing his hands together, worrying and pacing as he waited for me. There was relief on his face as I chucked the piece of metal towards him and climbed the last few steps of the hill. He asked how easy it was and I told him, “Piece of cake.” He wasn’t surprised though. He held the edge of the locket to a fire he’d built as night came and as he did so, he started to slice away the rust and debris with a sharp knife he’d made from a strong stone. Eventually, we could see the blobs of metal where the locket was held together, the tools might not have been available centuries ago to open this thing, but Brick made quick work of it. He managed to heat away the metal which held the locket closed and simultaneously broke the hinge on the other side. Inside the locket sat a small device, it had some plastic at the top and a square piece of metal coming out of it. Brick gasped in surprise as he explained that this was an ancient pen drive. If we could make it to the tech dumps, he might even be able to access the old thing. I wasn’t quite sure what any of this meant, but Brick seemed keen on the idea.

It took us hours to access those tech dumps, and a further hour for Brick to find a black box that seemed as if it might work. He took the black box to the edge of the tech dump where wires climbed poles which made the floodlights work, and there he opened up the black box, it revealed a screen and some strange buttons with letters on them. Bricks face lit up as he took wires from a tail of the black box and wrapped them around the exposed wires of the floodlights. How he got the thing to light up might as well have been magic.

He pressed the odd device from the goddess locket into the side of the black box and eventually, after quite a long time, the screen changed to another box filled with more little boxes which had images on them. Brick opened them up and read the contents quite quickly. The light from the screen hurt my eyes, but I had to look when Brick told me what I was looking at. On the ancient drive was a comprehensive guide of how to rebuild our world and our technology. Brick was excited, but I wasn’t. With the tribe wars, the exiles and the way our leaders ruled, I knew humans weren’t yet ready to reintroduce this technology to our society. I snatched the device from the computer and stomped on it, smashing the drive to pieces. We just weren’t ready.

That was the day I destroyed the goddess.