[ IP ] Heart of Eden

*Between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, a very long time ago. * 
 
 The door opened abruptly, revealing a tall figure in the gray robes of the tyro. Her face was the perfect vision of worry, as her eyes adjusted to the bright light of the room and fixed upon a purple-robed man hunched before a giant mechanical sphere. 
 
 “ Everyone has evacuated the city. The walls are fallen and the ships have withdrawn! ” 
 
 “ And yet the heart remains, ” the man turned around, his wrinkled face twitching into half a grin. 
 
 Standing half again the height of the tyro, the sphere was a buzzing, whirring machine encased in large, bronze plates that reflected the light of the evening sun onto the smooth, marble floors of the hall it stood in. The sound was not so loud as to deafen, but seemed still to carry itself to every corner, filling the air with its urgent presence. 
 
 The tyro was unmoved from her own urgency. “ Honorable master, ” ( for she did not know his name ), “ we must leave at once. Heart of the city this once was, but we have no use for it now. We have urgent use.., ” she stopped, embarrassed for a moment, and rephrased, “... urgent need of you. ” 
 
 As she spoke, she cast around the room to try to find some motive for his dangerous delay. The furniture and other trappings had long since been removed, but now in their place were strewn dozens, if not hundreds, of wooden crates filled with all manner of orchid, and daisy, and fern, and shrub. By the look of it, the master had moved all of the garden into the hall. Beneath the sphere itself a small pyramid of baked clay bricks took the place of the golden pedestal that had been its former seat. And finally she saw scattered around the purple-robe all of the screws that had held the bronze plates in place. Even as she finished speaking, he began to gently lift the first plate off of the machine to reveal the dark iron tubes and caps and canisters within. 
 
 “ It is an ugly thing to look at naked, is it not? ” The man said. “ No wonder we hide it behind the bronze-workers' artifices. But we have need of its nakedness now. Come, you will help me, tyro. ” 
 
 The woman turned and shut and bolted the door behind her, then darted over to the master to assist him. 
 
 Duty urged her to continue to plea for haste, but curiosity dared her to ask what all of this was for. 
 
 “ I believe, ” the man explained, “ that the council has made certain errors with their present contingency plans. Catastrophic errors. ” The man's expression darkened slightly. “ But, ” he added, smiling once more, “ I shall soon set it all to rights, as they have always trusted me to do. ” 
 
 Another pair of plates clattered on the ground, and the buzzing of the machine grew louder as its prison was dismantled. 
 
 “ We must tell the council at once, surely. ” 
 
 “ They will not listen. ” 
 
 “ They will listen to you. ” 
 
 Another clattering. But from far off the woman thought that she heard something else as well. She tried to push it from her mind. 
 
 “ The council will not feel that it has time to listen. In that, if nothing else, they are right. Can they come down and effect some small change? ” 
 
 The tyro frowned in confusion. “ They can, ” ( and she began to quote ), “'... with thunderous roar and mighty calamity..', ” the master cut her off. 
 
 “ Big things! Sweeping gestures or grand endeavors. But what is needed now is the tossing of the smallest of pebbles into a lake, or planting a seed into rocky ground. ” 
 
 Clank, clank, and the sphere stood nearly bare. As the echoes faded away, the faint sound from before came again, but much louder. They were on their way. 
 
 The woman stepped back. “ We have no time; I must bring you back! We must get you back alive... ” 
 
 “ Many years ago, when I was garbed in the humble gray, as you are now, I was given a task. ” The man continued patiently to strip the machine. “ It was impressed upon me the importance of my task, even hinted that failure should bring me infamy and exile. As with your task, mine too was to convince a stubborn old man from his designs. And as with yours, it was a task that proved impossible. ” 
 
 The tyro's heart sank with the man's last words. They were uttered with firm finality. In that moment she imagined her light gray robes turning into the black robes that corpses wore. But a blood-red anger stirred in her stomach as well. 
 
 “ You condemn me with your words. Our stories do not run in parallel up to the end; you were clearly forgiven your mistake; I shall not be forgiven mine! If I can not return with you, I can not return. ” 
 
 “ I made no mistake, ” the master snapped back. He cast the last bronze plate off with a fury and it rung out louder than the rest. “ And neither have you, ” he continued, more gently. “ Except in supposing that the council are gods, whose commandments carry the weight of prophecy and whose condemnations are no different than death. You are right that your story will end differently than mine. Times now are dire, and empathy will be in short supply. In their heart of hearts, the council will know that I stayed for reasons of my own from which no neophyte would be able to move me. But such sense will not reach their heads. You can not return to them. ” 
 
 A loud booming noise could be heard now at the door the woman had entered from. Her head filled with images of scales and tails and her nose imagined the foul scents of slime and dirt. She steadied herself and breathed deeply. 
 
 “ Than I shall stand with you... and fall with you. ” 
 
 “ A harder fate awaits you, I fear, ” the master replied. “ You will leave this place, and carry upon your shoulders the burden of a failing that was not yours. When we are shortly parted, flee the dying sun: head East. ” 
 
 The man unslung a large, obsidian staff and tapped it lightly on the ground. The tile of marble the woman was standing on suddenly rose up beneath her, even reaching past the height of the walls until she was surrounded on all sides by open sky. 
 
 Looking down, the spacious hall appeared but a small room. All around it lay the sprawling metropolis she'd once called home. Hundreds and thousands of homes stretching to the very walls and towers. All now were burning. And as she adjusted her eyes once again to the darkness, she could see, or perhaps just sense, the teeming masses moving within and without. 
 
 The sphere glowed as a small circle, and illuminated a tiny speck next to it. As she watched, more specks approached, slowly surrounding the man below. There was a stillness to the scene, and she could feel the beating of her heart in her chest. She counted one, two, three, four, before the selfsame stillness was broken by a blinding flash of light coming from the sphere, following almost immediately by a crack as loud as thunder. The flash stretched out in bolts in all directions from the sphere, reaching every side of the room. 
 
 When it subsided she looked desperately for some sign of life, but the brightness of the flash still affected her and the sphere was glowing no more. A silence took hold as well as she realized that the faint buzzing of the sphere had stopped. 
 
 It was soon replaced by a deep rumbling, coming not from the sphere, but from the whole room. The pillar she was kneeling on itself began to shake, and after a few moments she could see the walls begin to tremble. With the same suddenness with which she'd risen, the entirety of the hall beneath her, that makeshift garden with the strange sphere, sank into the earth. A ripple of destructive force flowed out in an oval around it, and as the pillar beneath her fell she could see the rest of the city collapse into ruin, swept away by the movement of the earth. 
 
 When her steed of marble approached the level of the ground around her, its descent slowed and finally stopped. Dirt and sand and wood and brick and other things best not to think about had flowed into the hole the hall had left and so she stood now only perhaps forty feet above the crater that was left. Grooves in the pillar let her climb down slowly to the bottom, and then she scrambled quickly up the side and out into ruins. Looking back once to the sun, Eve set off.
