The Eternal Sleep: A Collection of Short Stories

Greed and Glory

Throughout the course of history, the sky has always been alight, burning with the fire of our ancestors. In your modern world, you call them stars. On that night, millennia ago, we were their sworn protectors.

"Arm yourselves!" The stifled cry drifted through the open air, lost to the ears of our opposition by the same heavy fog that concealed all but the flicker of our torches and the beating of our collective hearts - our presence, widely known to our enemies.

Nearly two thousand swordsmen and women silently and immediately answered the call. Weapons of varying ranks were plucked and carefully brandished by those of equivalent value. Although, tonight, as the fires in the sky foretold, all of us were more than our weapon.

Throughout the remainder of history, philosophers would dispute the glory in bloodshed. Although I was only curious of this philosophy at the time, if I were to revisit the battlegrounds on the same night with what I knew of history now, I believe I would have an unconditional conviction that the blood that would spill tonight would be and was glorious.

It would be thousands of years before anyone discovered what exactly had transpired on this battleground in the lands that would become known as Tollense, and it remains to be seen even by myself whether mankind will ever understand the magnitude of the greatest battle of the Bronze Age, but recalling the night by that river, it is clear that this small fact matters not.

We did not fight for mankind. We fought for the fire in the sky, knowing well that we might be the only humans who ever met and protected the gods.

A bone-chilling plate of bronze was shoved into my trembling hands. My father's eyes swam in the light of the fires around. Nearby, the council barked orders to the warriors rushing past us.

"They're laying planks across the river as we speak!"

"Horsemen are attempting to cross the bridge! Be prepared to flank them with spears!"

"You have the most honourable task of all," my father promised me. The tin rings that adorned his fingers should have been proof of the credibility in his words, but after all my training, I could only wonder how I had been so willing to be the only one who lived to see the sunrise.

"You know I would rather die by your side," I said. "True glory does not involve running away." I had spat the words from my tongue like they were a cousin of the smoke and mist in the concealing air.

"True glory," my father told me, "is not self sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of everything but oneself to cultivate a world in which death is a gift you will not accept."

He kissed the top of my head. "We will see each other again one day."

I never saw him again.

With the bronze disk in my hand, I turned to the noble warriors who charged the enemy that outmatched us only in numbers and skill.

My feet began to move, all my life's training amounting to this night. I moved through the mist, ducking between makeshift bedrolls, leaping over trenches. Until recently, I never comprehended the way I moved that night, but now, with my present knowledge, I understand it to be like slow motion.

Perhaps it was a result of my pounding heart, pumping heat and nausea into my head, widening my eyes, providing me with that extra bit of control over my legs. Perhaps it was the bronze disk clutched firmly in my hand, the last relic belonging to your stars, our fire in the sky.

The Sky Disk was mankind's final connection to the deities of our world, our sky. Furrowed into the bronze was the blue-green patina base, and chiseled into the top were the symbols of a crescent moon, a sun, the stars, and slivers of gold that indicated the cycle of life and time - the sunrise and set.

The warriors who died gloriously as I ran had assembled themselves upon two fronts - one that sought to protect the Sky Disk, and one who wanted to use it for themselves. Such is the repeated circumstance of mankind: greed. Greed and glory.

It was only when an arrowhead pierced my thigh, and half a dozen enemy warriors fell upon me did I plead with that disk in hand for it to use its strength, and from it, the light of a billion stars blasted my pursuers, blinding them, allowing me to escape.

But it came with a cost.

From that night on I became eternally bound to the disk, my soul tethered to its very structure. I formed a new symbol on the patina: the sunboat, the manifestation of greed and glory immortalized on a heavenly bronze object - mankind's imprint on the gods.

My death came not before I had spread the word of the gods who lived above us in the form of the sky's fire, later known to be your stars and planets. My stories then traveled across what was to be known as Europe, carried by gypsies, birthing beliefs of astrology.

One day, thousands of years later, an eyeblink in time for me, my disk was uncovered under the earth, and a metal spade broke the sunrise, rendering any further power of the plate useless.

Appropriately then, I believe as my soul stares forever out from the undiluted bronze, greed caused the Sky Disk to become only a relic of the past, but, and this I know now, the glory seen during the battle of Tollense will forever be immortalized, for the enemies looted my father's body along with the rest and threw them into the river, where history awaited to preserve its greatest and most glorious battle, a battle for the gods.