Asylonia

8. The Birth of Asylonia

VIII.

Grains of dirt trickled into the shallow grave. A shovel scraped against the damp ground and caught the crumbling earth in its mouth. David Attreus flung the shovel over his shoulder, splashing more dirt onto the growing mountain behind him.

The rain had eased off. Only a freezing wind kept him company, skipping and twirling about as he worked wearily at the grave, and pulling the rich, smoky smell of a recently subdued fire through the sleeping marshes. Daylight was not far from the horizon. The suns of United Earth swarmed around a sky bleeding with watery reds and shallow puddles of indigo. Passing by on either side of the moon, they dusted the tips of broad green hills and forests with a soft, golden hue. Clouds rose and arranged themselves to mimic dragons. The dragons chased angels, swallowed them, turned into huge, prehistoric birds, and floated away from fresh dragons, dragons who swept up specks of dust and dirt in their whistling wind and scattered them about. Some of the dust settled between the strands of David's hair, some fell about his shoulders and slid down his back. The grass was springy and wet underfoot. David had a horrible vision of it giving way beneath him, a black void opening up and dragging him down, through the centre of the Earth, to something that almost looked like Hell Itself, where dragons were no longer light, benign clouds, but flesh-eating, fire-breathing monsters. In his vision, he saw the monster-dragons flapping their tremendous, blue and green scaled wings over large, luminous pyres, all crepitating wickedly among banks of decomposing skulls with impossible grins. Perhaps his mother would be there. Perhaps falling through the Earth would not be such a bad thing if it led him to her, if he could save her from Hell's embrace.

David wiped his brow with his sleeve and exhaled through pursed lips as if blowing the troubled scene from his mind. He was tired, that was all. A man leaves himself vulnerable to all sorts of weirdness if he doesn't get enough sleep, he thought. The bitter chill froze his sweat, and his plump cheeks glowed with the deep red of exhaustion. A fine, artificial light broke through the basement window, spraying two defeated UEF ships with sat in the yard.

David had discarded the body of the Temüjin in his basement, laying its sinewy limbs, head and torso on a wide, plywood table like loose pieces of a 3D jigsaw. He would deal with that later. First, he had more pressing matters to attend to, like building a grave for Patrol Sergeant Hogan Ferris.

More than once, David had stopped and second-guessed himself. Of course, preserving the Lieutenant's body and arranging for the Home Guard to collect it would be the best course of action in most circumstances, but not this one. By handing the body over to the UEF, Hogan could be sent to the heavens in a manner more befitting one who had given his life for the planet they called home. He could be buried before his family and loved ones in a resplendent coffin, adorned in the colours of his motherland, and of the United Earth Force. There would be a grand procession through streets aligned with solemn, proud faces. This would culminate in a ten-gun salute and the announcement that posthumous honours would be lavished on the fallen war hero.

Instead, Hogan's final journey saw him bungled into a dirty hole in the ground by an out-of-shape UEF engineer. As David took up his shovel and began the tiring slog of burying the man, he once more rationalised with himself that he was doing the right thing. Calling the Home Guard would mean preserving the body until they were able to collect it, yet the mangled remains of the Patrol Sergeant were in such a deformed state, that preserving them would mean folding the Sergeant's body over itself, like a duvet being put into storage for the spring, and shoving the whole thing into the chest freezer in the basement. David decided against this. The inert heart inside the body had once beaten proudly to the drum of the United Earth. The arms and legs and eyes and ears had once been used to protect the planet, to fight for The Greater Good. Those who served deserved better than to be stuffed into domestic freezers like slabs of meat. A burial, no matter how basic, felt far more appropriate.