The Eternal Ones

The Eternal Ones is a short story by ToaAuserv for the Spring Writing Contest 2014.

Story
This time of year, the trees get their leaves back and the grass is dotted with flowers, and everything smells sweet, and in the late afternoons Essek and Saia sit side-by-side in his garden and watch the clouds. Today there is only one, a wispy little thing, leisurely carried along by the warm breeze.

“It looks lonely,” Essek says.

“It's water vapor,” Saia reminds him.

“You're right,” he says. “The individual droplets will always have each other.”

“That's not what I meant,” she says, and she looks at him and laughs, and he shrugs.

He sticks out his arm and brushes his side. She grabs his hand and he closes it around her fingers. The cloud keeps drifting on by.

“You think anyone's noticed we're gone yet?” she asks.

“Who cares?” he says playfully. “We're here. Town is all the way over there.” He points his thumb over his shoulder. “Focus on what's in front of you.”

“If everyone lived by that philosophy we'd never get anything done.”

“That's why I believe in reincarnation,” says Essek. “You spend one lifetime 'getting things done,' you die miserable, and then you get reborn to actually enjoy life on your second go-around.”

“So you're saying you already spent a lifetime being productive?” she asks with a little chuckle.

“Well, either that, or I'll have to make up for enjoying this life in the next one.”

“So which life am I in? The productive one or the enjoyable one?”

“That's a decision entirely up to you,” he says.

The cloud has gone by now. The sky is just turning golden as the sunset begins.

Saia turns and looks at him. His orange Kanohi glints in the fading light. She can see his features through holes in the mask, but with the neutral expression he's wearing right now it's easy to see the mask as his face. An angular, rigid face with a gaping mouth and huge round eyes. It's grotesque for a moment, and then he sees her staring, smiles and the illusion is broken.

“I've never seen your face before,” she says.

His eyes brighten, and his mouth opens. “Where'd that come from?”

“I was just looking at your mask and realized that's all that I know of your face.”

“I've never seen your face either,” he says, “but that's oddly sentimental coming from you. Am I finally starting to rub off on you?”

She frowns and doesn't reply. That wasn't the response she wanted. But what did she expect? Essek to rip his mask off right then and there and kiss her bare-faced? He's romantic enough, but hardly that bold.

The wind picks up. It's a bit chilly now. Essek shivers. He gets up.

“It's about time to get back anyway,” she says, standing up as well.

“Can't you stay out at the ranch with me tonight?” he asks.

“What would people say?” she replies.

“A bunch of meaningless nonsense. Nonsense which they've already said before and will say again either way. That's all people ever say.”

“I can't stay,” she says. “I have to get back to the shop so this day isn't a total waste.”

“A day spent behind a counter amassing money sounds more like a total waste to me than a day spent pleasantly with someone you love,” he says.

“Yes, oh wise sage, but your bohemian lifestyle is not for everyone,” Saia replies with a roll of her eyes. “You wanna walk me back to the shop?”

He nods, bows, and offers her his hand. She takes it, and they start down the dirt path back into town.

***

Meanwhile, in a much darker place, which has nothing green and no spring, a certain being whittles away the evening in a cramped laboratory, making final adjustments to a project decades in the making. Another of her race, this one male, enters. She doesn't raise her eyes.

“You still working on that?” he asks.

“Yes,” she replies.

“I don't know why. It's completely useless.”

“Science,” she replies.

“Science is about pursuing practical knowledge. This is not practical. Your brilliance is wasted on such trivial flights of fancy.”

She looks up. “Science is about taking the world apart to learn what it's made of. If anything practical is gained, that's a happy accident—if I would even go so far as to call it happy, since it fosters attitudes like yours. Pure scientific research does nothing but coax out the universe's secrets.”

“Most secrets are not worth the effort to know.”

“That's for me to decide. Besides that... Know that I hate myself for condescending to defend my project to you, but it will poke at some practical questions. How much does one's personal nature stems from the physical, and how much from the temporal, one's experiences? If you change the physical, what, if anything, remains the same?”

He relents. “Are you at least nearly finished with it?”

“Yes, very nearly,” she says. “Tonight I will be able to perform the experiment.”

“And you're still set on the location?”

“Yes.”

“Remind me why you need to make this intrusion into my territory?”

“It's the best spot in the universe for it. The population is the right size. They have almost no connection with the outside world, no one will notice. If the results are amicable to my hypothesis, as they always are, it will not even cause much of an uproar among the townspeople themselves. I can't imagine you actually mind me tampering with the Matoran in your charge. When did you last even visit the island?”

He doesn't answer.

“That's what I thought.”

“Fine,” he says, exasperated. “I'll leave you to your work.” And he does.

***

Essek has a nightmare in which a shadowy figure stands over him while he pretends to be asleep.

He can't help stealing a glance. The figure is tall and spindly, with long legs and even longer arms. Its eyes glow a faint sickly yellow. It sways slightly as it looks him over.

It lays its hand on his chest. Its fingers are long too, and pointed. He tries his best to breathe like he's asleep, slowly, deeply, and rhythmically, but his breaths are shallow and he's almost certain the creature knows he's faking it. He hopes that it's just a phantasm, just a ghoul to be dispelled when the sun rises. But it's remarkably persistent.

As he vividly feels the heat from his chest gradually transfer to its cold fingers, he finds himself less and less able to move and strangely disassociated from the experience. Emotion is art, he reflects, and that includes horror. What an exquisite masterpiece this thing is then. So he tells himself, because he needs a reason to be calm: not because the fear is unbearable, but because it's the only explanation he wants to imagine for why his heartbeats are becoming further apart, and why his breaths are becoming slower.

And slower still...

Essek wakes up without realizing he had fallen asleep, and the entire world is a way it's never been before. It's brighter, and warmer, in a bad way. Light shines through the window and it's utterly repellant. He is saddled with an urge he's never known before: to be away from windows, or better, underground, surrounded by earth or stone on all sides with only enough light to see.

And then he catches sight of his armor. Jet black.

Essek is a Su-Matoran, and his armor has been white his entire life.

He puts his hands to his mask to find that it is an entirely different one. Its smooth surface has been replaced with awkward ridges, and its shape is more triangular than the diamond it had been before. He dares not take it off to look at it.

It takes him several minutes to make the connection between this change and the dream-like events of the previous night. He can't imagine what exactly the creature was, why or how it transformed him, but nevertheless, it must have been responsible.

Of all things to be transformed into, an Onu-Matoran has to be the worst, Essek thinks: turn me into a Skakdi, a stone rat, a boulder, anything but an Onu-Matoran. He doesn't feel it yet, but it occurs to him that he will: the complete inability to enjoy the beauty of the way light filters through leaves and the smell of fresh spring air. The great loss strikes him as tragic, and then as beautiful, and then an inner voice he's never heard before tells him that's a stupid thing to find beautiful, and he sort of agrees.

Essek gets out of bed. The sky is cloudy today but the world is still too bright. He shields his eyes as he walks out to his garden. The garden has absolutely nothing of any practical purpose in it: just flowers and bushes and miniature trees and sweet-smelling herbs. This all seems terribly worthless to him now. Why has he gone so many years without ever cultivating something edible? What a waste of soil!

He resolves to head into town and buy some seeds for edible plants. It's high time for him to start supporting himself rather than mooching off of Saia as he has been for so long. And thinking of Saia, how can he ever show his face in front of her again? He has been such a fool towards her, so ungrateful. That is the one good thing about this metamorphosis so far: she won't recognize him.

He goes to Saia's shop, a dim and dusty little place with a wooden floor that creaks when you walk on it. All the inventory is in a storage room in the back. There are a few chairs in the corner and no other furnishings beside the counter behind which a Ba-Matoran stands. Essek always hated coming here, to such a bland and utilitarian place, but now he finds it strangely comfortable.

Strange that Saia isn't here, though. She had mentioned hiring an employee to man the shop when she was away, but where would she be away to besides Essek's ranch? Just as well, anyway.

“What kind of seeds do you have?” he asks the clerk. “I'd like to start a garden.”

“Hyacinths, lilies, carnations—”

“I mean fruits and vegetables.”

“Oh,” says the Ba-Matoran. His posture tightens awkwardly. “Tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers...”

“Some of those.”

“Cucumbers?”

“Some of everything you just listed.”

The Ba-Matoran turns to go back into the storage room, then turns back. “Would you like fertilizer as well?”

Essek pauses before answering. It occurs to him only now that he doesn't know the first thing about growing vegetables. Honestly, even the flowers and bushes were mostly Saia's doing. He planned the layout of the garden but Saia walked him through the process of planting and tending to everything.

“Do I need fertilizer?” he asks.

The Ba-Matoran's lips wrinkle as he tries to stifle a smile. “Yes. I'd say you do.”

“Okay. Some fertilizer too.”

“What type?” he asks.

“Um...”

The Ba-Matoran puts his hand over his mouth and snickers. “Sir, can I make a recommendation?”

Essek frowns. Saia wouldn't have laughed at him. Well, she would have. But in a beautiful way that exuded joie de vivre. He always thought that that made her invincible. No matter what happened to her, no matter how many long and dreadful hours she spent standing behind that counter, she would always be happy and because of that she was eternal.

“Go ahead,” he says after some time.

“Why don't you start with some tomatoes? They're easy to grow, and it's the right time of year for them. I can set you up with everything you need and give you a rundown of everything you need to know from planting to harvest.”

“I'll take what you were going to get me, but I don't need the tutorial. I know how to grow tomatoes.” He doesn't, but this guy doesn't need to know that.

“Whatever you say, sir,” says the Ba-Matoran with a smile, and he turns and goes to the storage room in the back.

***

Saia bids the customer goodbye and he leaves with a bag of fertilizer, a bag of tomato seeds, and no idea how to use either of them.

It's been a strange day. She woke up and found herself changed: her white armor black, her blue armor purple, her Kanohi replaced, and her voice an octave lower. The whole world feels lighter now, but dead, void of all the electrical energy she's always been acutely aware of. The air used to tingle and crackle, silently, sensed through secret channels only open to her. But now those channels are closed to her too.

She still reels now at what this all means for her future. No one will ever realize that she is a woman. And could she really explain it? She turned around in front of a mirror again and again this morning and tried to convince herself that she still looked feminine enough. But she hadn't turned any heads today. Every single person she talked to, she silently begged them to say, “I didn't know there were female Ba-Matoran,” but why would they? Her voice is masculine now and her colors are unambiguously Ba-Matoran.

She has not seen a single familiar face today. Which is just as well. She doesn't want to be seen. The horror of being changed, her whole identity ripped away and replaced with another one she has never known, is almost too much to bear. Almost. Saia will bear it, and in time she will forget the life she has lived up until now. This she resolves.

Another customer comes in acting strangely, this one a Ta-Matoran. He looks quite uneasy. He strokes his mask repeatedly and looks down at his body as if he's never seen it before. For a moment, Saia fancies that perhaps everyone in the town has been subject to the same change as her, and this poor fellow is like her: actually a poor girl, frantic about having gone from blue armor to crimson, from having her elemental affiliation with lightning or water or psionics warped into one with fire overnight. But she figures she is probably just projecting. Even if she is right, she is too afraid to ask.

Wouldn't it be funny, she thinks, if the entire town was changed and all of them were too horrified to say anything about it, too hopeful that they could blend into the background and not have to deal with the public ramifications of the metamorphosis?

It would be beautiful, a voice tells her. She is not usually one to think about beauty. That's something she always left for Essek to do for her. But she is now firmly convinced that the whole situation, her transformation and everyone else's, even if only hers actually happened, is the most beautiful thing to have ever happened, and she silently thanks whoever is responsible.

She gets the Ta-Matoran the spade she asked for, takes her money, and sends her on her way. It's two hours to closing, but Saia wants to see the world now, before it gets dark. She would like to go see Essek, but to go to his ranch, to see him unchanged, would spoil the magic for her. She can never see him again. And besides, how could he still love her with this mask and these colors, and this voice? Whatever they had yesterday evaporated last night.

Essek will live without her, anyway. She has always thought that Essek's best quality is his remarkable obstinance. You could blind him, deafen him, take away his ability to detect beauty in any form, and the man would adapt and keep on going just because resigning to despair would betray his pride. Essek would only ever die if someone told him he couldn't. In that way he is eternal.

She closes the shop, probably for good, and feels the gentle sun warm her newly black armor. A butterfly blows by on a perfumed breeze. There is not a cloud in the sky.

Characters

 * Essek, a Su-Matoran and later Onu-Matoran
 * Saia, a Vo-Matoran and later Ba-Matoran
 * Two unnamed Makuta, one female and one male

Trivia

 * The story is deliberately ambiguous and left open to interpretation: was the whole town subject to the metamorphosis that Essek and Saia were? Are Essek and Saia each right that the other is "eternal?" Is, as the female Makuta wondered, there really anything of a person's nature that doesn't arise from their biology, or is there something eternal and unchangeable in each of us? The author presents the story and these questions for each reader to consider and draw conclusions as he or she will.
 * The story's prosaic style and thematic content are inspired to some extent by The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
 * The author originally conceived of this short story as a non-BIONICLE piece, but adapted it to BIONICLE characters and settings for the Spring Writing Contest.