by Alex Hammer
Humanity served the dark for eight thousand years.It was no figure of speech. Through the long ages before the light was lit, the dark had weight, and will, and eyes. They lay in the deeps of every star-domain, soundless, and they did one thing only: they watched. Watched mankind into life, and watched mankind into the grave. Those who came after gave that ancient, ceaseless watching a name. They called it the Gazers.Two thousand years ago, beneath that gaze, humanity tore a hole in the dark by main force—a wound that let the light through.That year, the histories name Year One of the Illumination. On the ruins of Gaia, the mother world, the first Consul bent and set his name to it; he pressed his thumbprint down, and the alloy plate dented half a millimeter—and so humanity entered into covenant with the flame it had kindled by its own hand. One article only, but graven into every husk of flesh that came after: *whosoever bears the light shall make of his flesh a vessel for it.*And so came the Iron Guard of the Illumination, a craft for forging the bones of children into blades. And so came the Crimson Pastoral, the legion of singers within the Iron Guard, whose song was no requiem but a munition: at its furthest pitch, the soundwave could burst a heretic's chest from the inside. This was the refashioning the Illumination allowed, the sanctified kind—flesh that took in the light, was shaped by the light, and at the last was rendered back to the light, entire.But the light was grace, and grace breeds thieves.Beyond the frontier walls of the Republic were others who had likewise set the knife to their own flesh. The light-bearers must, in the end, give their flesh back to the light; these would not. What they wanted was exactly that—the deathless life that is never given back. The light named this refashioning Desecration; those who flew that banner named themselves the Danut.The Gazers of eight thousand years watched on from below; the desecrators of two thousand years bored their tunnels within the walls; and that flame, no more than two thousand years old, caught in the vice between them, had never truly gone out, and had never truly won.For two thousand years the Iron Guard marched into one dark star-domain after another, and when they marched out, that domain bore their name carved into it. Any darkness a man could walk into had, in their presence, only two acts remaining to it: to kneel, or to be unmade.And the Gazers in the abyss—what of them? Did they kneel, or were they unmade?The universe never tastes. It only chews.What follows is the story of one body of flesh that, after the chewing, still heard a voice.
