GREEN [complete]

CHAPTER 35: Sekam

Sekam dreamed of the end of the world.

Thunder bellowed over her head and white-hot lightning split the sky, but there was no storm. The thunder didn't cease. It grew louder, and louder, and louder. The lightning didn't fade. It broke the sky like a stone broke fresh ice in the early winter, and on the other side, there was nothing but the blinding white abyss.

Sekam watched the cracks spread, tilting her head back to watch the destruction. Her neck stretched and the world flipped upside down until she was looking behind her, where the mountains met the night. The cracks shocked from one end of the sky to the other and the sound of thunder was deafening. Pieces of the sky fell away—clouds and stars and chunks of the moon.

No one was afraid. No one was left to be afraid. Everyone and everything had died.

And Sekam knew why. She'd always known. All the mountains but one blurred away, and that one began to grow. It's summit pressed up into the broken sky. A carcass rested atop the mountain, so large it might have been a part of the mountain itself.

Sekam turned to face her fate, her head returning to its place above her shoulders and her neck returning to its original length.

The carcass's belly was slit open and its guts spilled down into the valley. Blood. Rivers of it, flooding from the carcass of the bear god. Neon green blood, glowing hot against the earth. Thanuk, the first god, had been killed and the world would die with him. She should have known that everything would end. She should have been able to see it.

But she had been stupid. She had been blinded by her fondness of humankind.

"Extinction," Thanuk had said, "is sometimes the only way." She could hear his voice in her ears, in her bones, in the crumbling world around her. "They will die, and we will make this world a better place with better beasts."

"But I don't want a better world," Sekam said again. Cried. Burning tears ran freely from her eyes. Thanuk's blood rushed towards her, painting the land so bright and so green she could almost believe that everything hadn't died; that there were still plants. But there weren't, and there never would be again. "I want this one."

"It is too late, my child."

"I won't let you kill them." Her lips moved in time with the words as they crashed through the sky, but she felt none of the conviction. She had let him kill them, hadn't she? She'd let him kill them and everything else too. Sekam's knees buckled and she hit the ground. Dead grass turned to dust under her touch.

Thanuk spoke no more. The world was drowned in green and the last pieces of the sky fell away. The world Sekam had fought so hard to save was left with nothing but neon green and bright, bright white.