Prologue: The Horus
And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire engulfing itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of its midst as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Ezekiel 1:4
A rumble like a distant and perpetual thunderclap heralded Karla’s exit from the Liminality and transition to the Deeps. She twisted through the null space that joined all existences, emerging in a deep and cold patch of pinkish dust as fine as talcum.
In a blink, she shed all her physical pain. Worm-like Fellstraw had tunneled into her spine and sent every branch of her nervous system jangling. But the agony they had inflicted was gone.
She lay on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, basking in the luxury of numbness. Not only did she feel no pain, she felt no discomfort, no pleasure, nothing—a complete absence of sensation.
If only her emotional distress could have attained such a state of ease. She overflowed with anxieties. How would her little sister Isobel survive without her? How could she cope in such a brutal world alone?
And James! Her last glimpse of his face lingered. His panic, pity and despair. She should have felt bad for making him feel so bad. But he was no stranger to tragedy. He would get over her. Her heart summoned tears, but she had lost the ability to shed them.
The distant rumbling grew to a din like a hundred oncoming subway trains. Lifting her head, she spied its source—a massive haboob—looming over the near horizon like a rolling mountain, a tsunami of dust.
She watched it come until the wall of thick, brown dust plowed over her, obscuring everything, while the droning engine of its animation remained unseen behind this heavy veil. This was no mere dust cloud. It bore the varied texture and the intricate activity of a living thing. Puffy billows tumbled and boiled in strands and sheets and layers; vertical, horizontal, slanting; parting and clashing; merging, disengaging this way and that, like muscles and sinew and hide.
Dust coated the insides of Karla’s nostrils and caked her eyes. Bitter, biting cold pervaded all. It had already sunk deep into her flesh, seizing her bones, penetrating their cores. She felt no urge to shiver, even though the frigidity went far beyond what a living human could survive.
If she wasn’t already dead, the cold alone would have killed her.
She realized she hadn’t been breathing and gasped for air, but found it wasn’t needed. Good thing, because there wasn’t much to be had. The atmosphere carried too little oxygen to sustain life. She commenced to breathe more out of habit than necessity, the rhythmic action a vestigial reflex, leftover from life.
Her body had changed. She had become less a biological entity, more a sham collection of dormant organs and empty veins. Her heart no longer beat. Her muscles functioned without fuel, her blood carrying no oxygen, no nutrient, no waste. This new flesh was a functionless, human-shaped receptacle for her soul, its former parts only approximated.
She lifted her newly dead flesh off the ground and took her first steps, striding blindly through the miasma of dust over dunes that rose and fell like ocean swells. She walked aimlessly, stumbling across the undulating plain, ankle deep through the frigid sand. The wind carried voices—organized chants, solo cries, even some singing.
She nearly tripped over another naked form, a woman with skin as gray as the slab of bedrock on which she reclined. She might as well have been carved from stone. Karla looked at her own hand and saw that she was the same. She was a Duster now, or whatever souls called themselves down here in the Deeps.
A roar like a thousand Niagaras thundered close, the precise location of the engine of its animation obscured by blowing dust. Curiosity made her stick around, even as her instincts told her to run.
She veered towards a brighter area, a thinning in the dust that enveloped her. She stumbled onto a crowd of people milling about aimlessly in the haze. Some knelt facing the source of the rumble, foreheads pressed against the soil. Some chanted and sang what sounded like prayers.
And then, as abruptly as someone flipping on klieg lights, the wall of dust peeled away and the world became completely and starkly transparent, the air so clear and sharp it could have been a vacuum. Rolling dunes and hills, devoid of vegetation, surrounded her, rising in all directions as if they were in the bottom a basin. The horizon looked blurry, the sky the same shade as the landscape. This was no basin, it was a bubble. That was land up there, not sky.
Directly overhead hovered a small and dim orb with an orange-brown cast—what passed for a sun in this place. And there, barely a mile off but moving away fast went a gnarled and twisted shaft of dust and wind, a gargantuan tornado beneath a flat-topped mushroom cloud. It dragged a ragged shroud, a skirt dark with dust around its point of contact with the land. It looked and sounded like a bomb exploding infinitely.
“Rats! Missed us again,” said a man whose skin hung from his arms in shreds.
“It just wasn’t our time … yet,” said a woman who looked youngish by virtue of her lack of weathering.
“It never is,” said another man, wearing scraps of what I hoped was leather covering his loins. “Never will be.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s always teasing us. Testing our will,” said the shredded man.
“Shut up, all of you,” said a woman with eyes lodged far too deep in her sockets. “Everyone, get down and pray. Maybe it will come back.”
“Pray? To that thing?” said Karla. “But it’s just a storm. A dust storm.”
“Not just any storm, you foolish thing,” said yet another man, kneeling, who had thus far remained silent. “It’s the Horus.”
“The what?”
“The Horus. Our last hope or final doom,” said the shredded man.
“Blasphemy!” said a woman with eyes too deep in their sockets. “I know the Horus to be bliss. Pure bliss.”
“Heaven’s gate,” said the un-weathered girl.
“We hope,” said the shredded man.
