Bee And Angel

Nothing but the boxy beam of golden sunlight remained in the room apart from Bee. Of course, the sunlight coming in wasn’t actually golden, nor a boxy beam, rather the sandstone huts that made up the multi-leveled village of Colchis reflected the cold white light and bent it into the rich hue. The shape was created by the millions of dust motes dancing in the air, guiding the sunlight into a shape cast through a square mold that was the window.

The big black dog that had appeared, then disappeared into what a tired Bee could only describe as a shattered mirror had spoken of strange things. About shards, Choirs, other Bees and of some big bad thing that was encroaching, and that Bee had to prepare. Whatever that meant. Also, about two beings that were one but had to be two for some time before they could become a whole. Whatever that meant.

All of it had been very confusing to thirteen-year-old Bee, who’d just woken up from her nap, and who was still suffering from the weird sensations that the recent Mycelia symbio-implant caused. Everyone had one, and it had to be taken unless one wanted to be a Nun of the Histories and live in ass-kisses. Or was it askeesis? Aschetiks? Perhaps aesthetics? No, that was what her mother spoke of when she rearranged the potted plants and the furniture. Damn, Bee always had trouble with that word.

Bee rubbed her eyes so hard they were left bleary when she opened them again, and the strange episode seemed to disappear from her mind as though a dream. She was naked still and went to dress herself, noting the pinkish-red of her veins beneath her almost-translucent skin. It was the Mycelial network working itself through her imperfect body, and soon it would allow her to open and close herself to others who also carried the symbio-implant. She didn’t really care about mind sharing as much as her flat chest that she now regarded in the mirror, that had yet to begin producing what her friends were already enjoying. Namely, breasts.

“Mom?” she called down and listened. She heard the thunk and bunk of her mother in the kitchen, but when no answer came she cried out, this time louder: “Moo-ooom!”

“What!” a sharp answer echoed up the narrow sandstone stairs.

“Where’re my brooches?”

“In your cabinet.”

“Nu-uh.”

“Did you look?”

“I did,” she lied, still rummaging around in the little dresser by her mirror.

“Well, they’re in there.”

“They’re not! I put them on my dresser. Did Mew take them?”

“No. I moved them so she wouldn’t.”

“Mom! Don’t touch my fucking stuff!” Bee screamed, almost in tears.

There was a long period of silence, during which Bee knew, though didn’t see, that her mother was holding in tears of her own because of the outburst. She was very sensitive. The thought hurt Bee and added atop her roiling emotions, taking her to the brink of crashing out.

She took a steady breath in and out, as was taught.

Why couldn’t her mother just be like every other parent. Everyone knew that taking in the Mycelia, especially during a high hormonal state such as puberty, made for a volatile combination. Hence the need for the Nuns of Histories. Those Iron ladies knew how to keep a flock of irreverent preteens and teens in the throes of Mycelial integration under strict discipline. Though Bee hated them, as all her age did, she recognized their utility.

Before the implantation process, a child is shown the consequences of failed integration. The two specimens, male and female, locked in separate cells below the central palace of Colchis, were harrowing examples. The female was a mess; her type of failure was dubbed a Hyper-Mystic. She was unrecognizable as a human, and had become a mass of mutated growths. Her body had bloated and burst and had become mulch. Her bones had morphed and knitted into an osseous tree, and the only reminiscence of humanity lay in the root like organism, her central nervous system, terminating in a horribly mutated cortex that was slowly being suffused into the bone tree. She’d become a beacon so to speak, overtaken by the ecstasy of a free mind and union with the world. Her plastic cell isolated her from the rest of Colchis so that her thought-waves, horribly powerful, couldn’t corrupt others.

The male example was called a Hedonist. His image still made Bee tremble in horror. He was still humanoid, but long, sinewy and ape-like, with a massive member, almost a foot and a half long, in a perpetual state of erection. His eyes had been wild, completely glazed over by the pink webs of the Mycelia. The boys in the group had laughed at it at first, until they realized that they were at the risk of becoming one if they, once they advanced in years, indulged too much in intimate activities.

Bee shuddered at the idea of both. One had become a slave to an ever-roiling, ecstatic thought-scape, while the other had become bonded to his base desires.

Then those thoughts washed away as she dropped her dress over her head and let it fall to her ankles, after which she cinched a woven belt around her waist. She sighed when the fabric hung loose around her chest, and the small bones of her ribcage were visible. She pulled her long white-blonde hair from behind her ears to fall down her front to cover her shame.

“Beatrice?” Her mother called softly.

Bee snapped around and saw her mother, shapely from top to bottom, her arms crossed in front of her swollen belly where a third sibling was maturing, smiling kindly. Her hair was a mix of dark brown and white, and the patterns of veins under her skin were hypnotically geometrical. The Mycelia was said to shape itself into images that reflected the soul. Bee’s Mom’s were soft curves and knots and braids.

“Don’t call me that, Mom”

Mom smiled. “Your name is Beatrice Limwheel, and it is a beautiful name.”

“Bee is better.”

“Fine, we can settle on Beatrice ‘Bee’ Limwheel. Sound good?”

Bee thought for a moment. Then nodded imperceptibly. “Just call me Bee, please.”

“Okay, Bee,” she walked up and hugged her. Her bulbous gut forced Bee into an awkward stance as she tried to hug her mother back. “I just love you so much,” her mother whispered. And I know that this is a hard time. A very hard time. Hard time-time-love you-hard. Time-hard – oh the baby kicked, “did you feel that?”

Bee pushed away and shook her head. Her mouth worked but nothing came out. Her mother looked at her for a long time and then her face brightened. “You heard me didn’t you?”

“I… uh—”

“You did! So early! That means the Mycelia is integrating perfectly. Oh, I’m so proud of you!” she all but tackled Bee again and crushed her with a loving hug.

“Moo-om I have to go to class!”

“I know, I know but I can’t help but love you so so so much!” Mom said and kissed Bee up her face. Then she paused as if listening to something. “Oh, honey… I didn’t get mine until I was sixtee—”

“STOP IT!” Bee cried in horror, pushing her mother away as gently and firmly as she could. “Stay out of my head!” she snapped and ran down the stairs.

“Have a good day at class!” Mom yelled after her.

- - -

Bee found class interesting, as she always did. During the long lectures held by the Nuns of Histories, while others nodded off or passed on notes, Bee was alert and absorbing as much of the strange history of her world as she could.

Today’s lectures were on the first century post V.E, (Verdant End), named the Green Inferno by contemporary historians around the world. It had been a time of tribulations when  humanity, following a cataclysmic global war, had released a bio weapon that had supercharged plant-life to the extreme as an unintended consequence. Trees that took decades to mature sucked the soil dry and towered into giants in scant days. Vines rushed instead of crept over all, and fungal growth spread out like a net to encompass the world. Cities were consumed in weeks, forests and parks became unnavigable thickets, and more than one species of animal was pushed to extinction. Legends said that the green spread even to the shores of the southern ice continent the ancients had called Antarctica. It was quite believable, seeing as the once arid wasteland named the Sahara was now teeming with life.

During the century of the Green Inferno, humanity had struggled against a ravenous nature, almost falling prey to it, until Comet, a legendary figure whose existence even the Nuns of Histories debated, found the Mycelia. The Great Mother. The Bridge Between Souls. It had many names. By the closing centuries of the Inferno humanity had integrated the Mycelia and had begun to live in harmony with a planet that was not theirs anymore. They had sought out arid or sub-temperate zones at the edges of the One Wilderness to make homes for themselves. Warfare as such had sputtered out, both due to the change in human nature, but also due to the fact that there was scant weaponry and open space left to fight in.

Colchis was one of the first settlements, existing in a space between what little of the earths deserts remained and a the titanic woods that were now common around the globe, and had been for centuries. It was a township built from sandstone quarried from the sand lake nearby. Multi-layered, with cubes upon cubes of habitats built across and atop each other, with thick vines and ladders connecting the complex into a hive that reflected the mind-scape of a new humanity: connected.

Following the Histories lectures Bee took on extra work, helping the botanists in the hanging gardens, the archaeologists to catalog their knickknacks, the nursemaids in the breeding chambers, and of course cleaning up all the rubbish in the hallways.

She was on the fourth story third arm second cluster of the academy structure, a work of art in its own right, when she realized that the sun was setting and soon her mother would be expecting her home, if not already in the early stages of hysterics.

Bee sighed. If this morning was anything to go by, soon her lovely solitude would need more guarding than ever before. Soon she’d have to build layers in her psyche that would be difficult for people to pierce. Having read the ancients, that would be hard work indeed. Soon, instead of the silence of quiet halls and amphitheaters in the hours of twilight and dusk, she’d be hearing the mumbling of other minds.

She sighed again when she was at the window, ready to depart, as she looked upon sleeping Colchis from atop the academy structure, which was taller even than the palace far off, having been built atop and around a husk of a colossus tree. Hallways carved from from massive limbs, study halls and libraries made from sandstone and clay. The outside was boxy with parapets and support pillars, all dyed a deep blue with gilded lattice edges. Like the Colchis below, the academy wasn’t one large building, but a collection of many, though it gave the entire complex the shape of a massive cone pointing toward heaven.

The palace followed a more classical style of construction, being a large domed thing with tall minarets spaced equally around it. It looked strange in the cubic sprawl of the city whose center it was.

Then there was the stone grove at the outskirts of the city, which hadn’t been built by the people, but rather had been discovered as the sands of the great desert once named the Sahara had been pushed aside or turned into life-giving earth. What an odd thing it was with its ten titanic pillars equally spaced apart around the ovoid flat surface, with that strange, very strange, carving in the center.

Few people went there, for it gave off a strange vibration that excited the Mycelia. The Mycelia that Bee now had within her body…

A smile stretched across her face. Mom could wait a little longer.

She hopped out the window and gracefully lowered herself down ropes and vines until she was atop the highest levels of many-layered Colchis. Then she ran toward those Cyclopean monuments.

It didn’t take long until she’d rooftop-run across Colchis to that massive edifice to something. Her bare feet touched cold stone and the silence was overwhelming. The scale of the structure was breathtaking, and she felt insignificant under the shadows of those giants. Star and moonlight cast the field of stone silver, and bathed the titans in black shadows.

She stood there for a long time, enjoying that feeling of being small, swimming in the thoughts and speculations that the unknown brought out it every human being, until she heard a pitter-patter of paws.

She turned and saw a dog. It was a stout and stocky thing with a flat face and perked ears, but tall enough to reach Bee’s waist.

It looked at her, then, quite without fear, came closer. Bee put out a hand and called softly and reassuringly, but the dog didn’t seem to care. Instead it came right up to her and sat down.

This close, Bee could see it had deep green eyes, and something was strange about its mouth. Otherwise it looked like quite the normal canine. Its fur was a slate gray close to its skin, leaving every muscle visible, and its tail had been snubbed, leaving a tiny stub where once a tail had been.

Feeling a little silly, bee lowered her hand, and then, not really knowing why, asked the dog: “Are you the dog from this morning?”

The dog cocked its head.

“I guess not. It was black, and I’m not too sure if it was a dream. Everything’s a little hazy.”

The dog kept staring at her.

“Are you lost?”

“Not really,” said the dog.

Bee yelped. The dog started and got back up to its feet.

“You can talk?”

“I can,” the dog said. Its voice was clearly female. And now Bee could see why the mouth was so strange. Instead of the pointy teeth of a predator, this dog had human teeth, and a human tongue.

 “I… um… my name is Bee,” she said, not really knowing what else to say.

“Mine is Hildi,” the dog said.

“Do you, um… need something?”

“The dog from the morning. Was it big and black?”

“It was. Did you see it too?”

“I did. But it seems I’ve forgotten what it told me. It seems you have as well. Still… we both came here. Perhaps that’s what it wanted.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Before the dog, Hildi, could respond, a strange crack resonated across the stone grove. As though someone had broken a piece of glass and ground the shards together.

Both dog and girl turned toward the sound, and there, in the air directly center of the ten pillars, a crack was forming, growing wider and wider. Light oozed from between the scintillating shards, and the sound became so loud that no doubt Colchis was now wide awake.

Then the cracks burst, tearing a shard of light into where mere seconds ago there had been only air, and out came something.

It was a blob of limbs and wings, incandescent, pearlescent, luminous and titanic, and with a massive exhale it unfurled itself. It had no center, rather its innumerable arms and seven wings seemed to grow from each other and into one another. On all of them were slits that slowly opened to reveal rainbow colored eyes. Between the topmost wings, pointed up towards the night sky, a massive face, (and that was the only descriptive Bee could attribute to the countenance, for it looked like the skin of someones face had peeled off and taken on a life of its own), floated below a large ring of light.

“BE NOT AFRAID!” the entity spoke in a voice like a mountain moving, but with the melody and softness of a songbird singing.

Bee screamed. Hildi the dog trembled and both wet themselves.

“PLEASE, DON’T BE FRIGHTENED,” it said, this time a little softer. “I JUST CAME TO SEE THAT YOU TWO MET. WE REALLY NEED EVERY SHARD TO HARMONIZE IF THIS IS GOING TO WORK. MY NAME IS ___”

Bee slapped her palms to her ears and screamed louder. The name the being had given itself was impossible, just like its likeness. The name was voiced light, and just hearing it made every particle Bee’s her body vibrate and itch. Hildi too had fallen flat on her side and was whimpering as she pawed her ears.

“OH, OF COURSE. APOLOGIES. HARK, I CANNOT STAY LONG. JUST LISTEN. THIS SHARD IS GOING TO BE ERASED PRETTY SOON AND WE NEED THE EVACUATE THE TWO OF YOU BEFORE THAT HAPPENS.”

Bee was crying hysterically and Hildi was vomiting.

“I KNOW THIS IS HARD TO PROCESS PRESENTLY, SO I’M IMPRINTING THIS MEETING INTO YOUR SOULS SO YOU WONT FORGET. WE SCOUTED OUT ONE OF THE LARGEST SHARDS AND YOU’LL BE GOING THERE. THAT MYCELIA BOTH OF YOU HAVE WILL DO WONDERS FOR YOU, DON’T YOU WORRY, IT’S FAVORITE NOURISHMENT IS RADIATION AFTER ALL.”

The being looked upon the two cringing mortals and its countless arms moved, some reached out tentatively to try to comfort while others touched its own face in motions of worry. “OH, PLEASE STOP SCREAMING. I KNOW THIS IS DIFFICULT BUT, OH, IF ONLY I WAS HERE TO HELP ME, HE ALWAYS KNOWS WHAT TO SAY. WHY WAS I THE ONE WHO HAD TO COME.”

Bee’s eyes were bleeding and so too were Hildi’s and upon seeing this the cosmic entity pulled back. “I HAVE OVERSTAYED NOW, HAVEN’T I. I DO APOLOGIZE. I TRULY AM A BUMBLER AT TIMES. WELL. I’M SORRY FOR THIS TOO, BUT IT HAS TO BE DONE.”

It reached out and grabbed Bee and Hildi with its glowing golden fingers and raised them from the stone. It turned to the shrinking reality-fissure and whispered. “I WON’T LIE: THIS WILL HURT A LOT BUT YOU ONLY NEED TO DO IT ONCE IF ALL GOES WELL. I’M SORRY, BUT YOU WONT BE SEEING THIS HOME AGAIN.”

And with that it disappeared back into the shard of light, and the night was once again still. The citizens of Colchis slept soundly, never once disturbed by what had happened. Soon they wouldn’t even exist, and the only memory of them would be the two that had been whisked away by an Angel.

 

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