THE SAGE'S VIGIL — A Sycaphlegm Series Lore Fragment by Nicol S. Blue
THE SAGE'S VIGIL
A Sycaphlegm Series Lore Fragment — by Nicol S. Blue
He counted the dead first by their names, and later, when the names blurred into the general shape of loss, by their weight against the barrier.
Fifteen, now. He had felt each one arrive at the edge of the field like a hand testing a stove — a brief contact, a recoil, and then nothing. He did not think of it as killing them. The barrier did not choose. It simply read what a body carried and returned an answer. Fifteen answers, so far, had been no.
He remembers the last time the sky held a different color: an evening near the end of the Age of Masters, before Betrayal metastasized into policy, when he stood on a ridge overlooking a river delta and watched forty-four thousand people walk single-file toward a light that was not sunset. He had made that light himself, out of a discipline his teachers called Electric Magick and the colonizers, centuries later, would call impossible. He remembers a child asking him, mid-crossing, whether Earth would be there when they came back.
He told her yes. He was not lying. He simply did not yet understand what "there" would come to mean.
Heaven took them gently. The dual suns amplified what the Masters had spent a thousand years teaching the melanated body to do quietly — absorb, convert, shield — until the amplification became its own kind of transformation. He watched them adapt across two generations from a distance he chose deliberately, because the alternative was staying, and staying meant not returning, and someone had to return.
He did not expect to return alone for this long.
The Breaking did not arrive as an event so much as a silence. He felt the planetary field — the one his own people's bodies had sustained for millennia without knowing they were an instrument — go quiet the way a room goes quiet when the last person in it stops breathing. He was three days from the Stasis Site when it happened. He has never told anyone he wept on the road, mostly because there has been no one to tell, and partly because the vapor in these caves does the same work grief does: it drifts, it lingers, it says nothing, and it clears eventually.
The Melanated Robots came after — synthetic answers to a question only living tissue had ever been able to answer. He watched from a distance he no longer chose so much as inherited. He watched them get blamed for a fire their makers had guaranteed. He watched the Western New Mountains fill with the hunted, and he did not intervene, because intervention was never his mandate. Guarding the pods was his mandate. He has kept it the way water keeps a shape it did not choose — completely, without complaint, because there was nothing else on offer.
He has the Elder's Address memorized. Every syllable. Before the collapse of empire, there is debauchery. He has never recited it aloud. There has never been anyone to forward it to. He rehearses it anyway, alone, in the vapor, the way a soldier field-strips a weapon he has not fired in decades — not for use, but so the mechanism does not seize.
Lately — and "lately," for him, spans what a human would call generations — he has begun to feel something at the edge of the barrier that is not quite the fifteen. Something smaller. Something that has not yet arrived, and may not for a long while, and which he cannot name, because naming it would be a kind of hoping, and he stopped affording himself that particular indulgence around the same time he stopped counting the dead by name.
He tells himself he is only imagining it.
He starts, quietly, rehearsing the question anyway: Do you know who you are?
He has never needed the answer to matter before.
THE SAGE'S VIGIL is a world-building fragment from the Sycaphlegm Series, the ongoing afro-futurist epic by Nicol S. Blue. The first full story, PROTOTYPICAL, is available now. [PATREON_LINK]