The Night the Gods Ran

The first thing the boy remembered was the sky breaking.

It did not break the way glass breaks, in a bright scatter of pieces. It broke the way ice breaks on a deep lake, with a long groan that began far away and traveled toward him. He felt it in his teeth before he heard it. Then a white seam opened from one edge of the world to the other, and the night peeled back along it like a lid.

Behind the sky was another sky.

It was older, and darker, and so crowded with stars that they seemed to lean down and look. The boy had once been taken to the sea and told the water went on forever. This was the first time he understood what "forever" might mean.

Below the wound, the city was running.

Men and women in bronze armor poured down terraced streets with spears reversed and shields slung. Some carried the wounded. Some carried children, and held them with the grim carefulness of people who had decided the children were the only things worth saving. A woman stopped to press a clay lamp into the hands of a stranger, as though light itself were something that might be lost. Then she ran on.

Every face was turned toward the mountain.

On its summit stood seven figures.

They were not men. At that distance he could not have said exactly how he knew, only that the air around them was wrong. It bent. It thickened, like the air above a fire. One of them wore a crown of living flame that did not seem to burn him. One had wings folded against his back, black and jointed like the wings of a machine. One held a spear that made the very light curve around it. The largest had a face the color of a storm cloud, and when he lifted his head the boy felt the entire hillside brace.

And behind them, deep under the earth, something enormous moved.

The boy could not see its whole shape. No one could have. He saw only the ground ripple the way skin ripples over a muscle, and then, in the mountain's flank, an eye open. It was slow and heavy-lidded, and it was larger than the house where he had been born.

It looked at him.

Not at the gods, he thought, with the cold clarity of dreams. At me.

"Close the Gates."

The voice came from the summit. It was calm, and that was the worst part. It was the voice of someone who had already made a terrible decision and was now only carrying it out.

"There are seven," said another.

"Then seven must sleep."

The ground shook. Somewhere a bell began to ring and was cut off mid-note. On the summit the fire-crowned figure turned his head, and the boy saw the god's face for the first time. It was young. That was what he would remember. Whatever the god was about to do, he was afraid of it.

A third voice spoke. It was quieter than the others, almost lost in the roar. Years later the boy would understand that it had not been meant for the gods at all. It had been a warning, sent forward through time to whoever would one day be able to hear it.

"The covenant is broken."

The mountain split.

Blue-white light climbed the sky from the wound in its roots. It swallowed the terraces first, then the running people, then the lamps and the bells and the bronze. It was almost gentle. The last thing the boy saw was the woman with the clay lamp, who had reached the bottom of the stair. She turned and looked back, and she was not afraid. She looked like someone who had finally been told the answer to a question she had carried all her life.

Then the light reached him.

And the boy woke.

Fourteen years from that night, Elias Vale would dream of it for the last time.

Except that this time, someone would be waiting for him when he opened his eyes.