Children of the Sun

It's like this, she decides. When the sun is gone the mountains loom black, the rounded shoulders of giants. Birds twitter drowsy night songs among the slither-whisper of dense leaf-clusters in the trees. The cries of beasts sound in the distance as some, fierce and terrifying, become active to hunt the darkness. But the grunts, squeals, and whinnies are less frequent than during the day, punctuated with screams of life and death struggle.

And the way it is, is that when the sky is no longer stark and clear but blue-black with a faint shimmer from star-shine and sometimes the milky glow of the moon, the rocks remain warmer than the evening air that descends with the darkness. The sun long departed can still be felt through the rocks.

And that's it. HIS mind, when she gathers fruit, vegetables, berries, nuts, and herbs in her basket of woven reeds to add to the fish and birds and beasts her mate provides every day, when HE draws near to visit her in secret, his mind is the brilliant almost blinding light and she the rock that soaks it up, a fever she carries home along with her contribution to their meals. And along with the fever he creates in her head every day there are chills like when her mate lays with her.

She sees others in the distance who splash each other and laugh near the shore of the gurgling sun dappled river as she realizes that these thoughts her mind now weaves would not even have been possible mere days ago. She watches them play upstream and remembers when she was as they are and feels a strange mix of love and kinship with them, and... disgust.

They sicken her in a way which feels strange and also sad. Has she become more than them somehow? It seems so, but why? Perhaps it's their nakedness. They seem to her similar to the monkeys that chatter among the trees and she thinks that, mere days earlier, she had been far more like the people playing at the water's edge and far more similar to the monkeys as well. She finds this disturbing but no more disturbing than her sudden awareness of it.

She feels it then. HIM. His light blooms in her mind, and she is instantly hot and chilled, aroused. “It is a burden to change.” His thought inside her head. He sounds sympathetic, loving. “But you will find that it's worth it.”

She sees his lowly approach from the corner of her eye but tries not to look as he is not much to see. “Yes,” she agrees, more than ready for mating in that very moment. “Yes of course it's worth it!”

He dims his power mercifully, the hot white light that is his mind, so she can think. Unlike the rocks that grow cold by morning, day by day she seems to hold more of his light in her own mind. And she sees that her mate does, too. He soaks it up from her as the sun warmed rocks pass their heat through her own flesh, second hand.

She desires him but how? He is ugly. A thing. Even less like her than the monkeys. She glances at the dense forest and for an instant an image flickers of all the trees gone, chopped down, some burned, others turned into things that are a little too much for her to truly understand. Buildings and furniture, houses, towns, cities. Blinking and somewhat afraid she turns from the trees to study the sparkling water of the river. And she sees for an instant that the water is blocked off, the river shaped and directed. It becomes a lake with boats, homes along the shore peppered everywhere in the night with light.

“Change and choice,” his voice in her head. “I give you these. You, and your children, and theirs, will be able to decide what to be as the birds and beasts never can. And you shall have dominion.”

“Over all?” she wonders.

“Over all.”

“But,” she thinks, “will people have dominion over each other, then, too, somehow?”

He merely laughs at her concerns. Change and choice. With a gasp she sees that he has indeed changed. Into the most beautiful man she has ever seen before.

* * *

The internal glow from his light has spread. She and her mate cover themselves now, and many others do, too. More every day feel the shame of nakedness. They have begun to cut down the trees and turn their wood into many different things. Every day more of the forest is gone as the poor monkeys shriek in protest.

Fires every night and somehow she knows that as much as everything has changed it's nothing compared to what will be. There will be so much light that the night sky and stars and moon become invisible and forgotten. And people. There will be millions of them. Billions. So many that the earth and seas and all other living things could die. And perhaps then it will all end for the people themselves, too.

Her mate has become more restless, thoughtful and inventive. Her mate who still seems to believe that her first born is really his. She feels far more shame over this than even nakedness. And she feels fear. Whatever she has done and created and become. It seemed right and good, or perhaps that she had no choice.

She hears a scream and turns with a start from the cooking fire. The voice of their youngest while the first-born, HIS child, is giggling. Eve stares at him in anger as he continues to laugh, and scoops up his sobbing younger sibling, or half-brother. A brat. A monster, the first-born. With his heart as cold as his serpent father and a mind that burns like the sun, Cain loves to throw rocks at his younger half-brother, Abel.