Promethea

Here's an experimental short fiction story I wrote recently. (As always, no AI). CW: violence.

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The morning after the thunderstorm, a new dawn broke on the savanna. Pink and gold, like any other dawn, with wispy clouds breaking up the early morning light. A family of impala grazed in the middle distance, and the spindly form of a browsing giraffe was silhouetted against the distant treeline. No different from hundreds of other dawns she had experienced.

The ground was different, though. Wet from the night’s storm, still trickling with the remnants of that furious rain. Beads of moisture on the grass, more and bigger than the usual dew.

A family of guinea fowl were drinking from a puddle that had formed where an elephant’s foot had left a deep impression in the mud. White spots on black feathers over pale gray-pink scaled legs, quick black eyes in blue-skinned red-crested heads. Game birds, plump and prosperous, squabbling and clucking to each other. Her mouth watered at the memory of the taste of their white meat. One time when she was still a clinging child, her mother had given her a whole wing all for herself, the finest part of the guinea fowl, and screeched at the young male who had tried to take it away. It had been so good. Her mouth watered at the memory.

A serval was slinking up towards the family of guinea fowl too, hidden by the tall grass. Closer than she was. An agile little cat. Yellow fur, black spots, pricked ears, amber eyes, stealthy paws, hidden claws, cunning features. A beautiful creature, in every line of its body. A hunter born, despite its small size.

She was in the tall grass too, crouched and hidden behind a particularly tall clump. She could see the serval, and the guinea fowl, and felt for a moment that they were both prettier creatures than her. She had no such bright colors or patches on her body. Stocky torso, long fuzzy brown-black hair, nimble hands, curved fingers, small teeth, flat nose, projecting jaw, bowed legs, wide ridged brow. An upright-walker, a plains ape, one of many on this savanna. A young female, barely old enough to leave the group on her own.

She was a little bit further away than the serval, and the wind was in her favor. The guinea fowl did not know that the serval or she was there, and the serval did not know that she was there. She held her best throwing stick, the slightly curved, smoothed, and weighted acacia-wood one about the length of her forearm, and her breath stilled as she rolled it slightly in her fingers.

Not quite within the best throwing range. Just a little bit closer. Closer yet...

Another tentative step, being sure to pose her advancing foot on a patch of drier, stonier ground instead of squelching mud or rustling grass. The guinea fowl were so densely packed together, eleven of them all pushing and shoving each other to drink from the elephant’s footprint, that even from here a throw of sufficient force would be almost certain to at least break one of their twenty-two wings. She raised her arm. Focused her eyes on one of the biggest birds, near the center of the squabbling flock. Aim small, miss small. Her muscles tensed as she prepared to throw.

The serval moved first. A leap, a long pounce, pent-up energy in the cat's hindquarters propelling it for a length longer than an upright-walker body.

It missed. A young serval, inexperienced, like she herself was. The cat too had waited too long, and the guinea fowl's unending jostling for position around the elephant's footprint had moved one of them into just the right position to see the spotted head emerging from the tall grass as the leap began. A squawk of fear and outrage, a warning to the group, and they scattered, scaled feet pumping and wings whirring even in the fleeting moment while the cat was in the air. The serval landed with a splash in the abandoned elephant's footprint, hissed and spat in frustration, and whirled away, disappearing into the tall grass on the other side.

Rot! Plague! Burn! Death! She had missed her chance. The game had taken flight.

The Big Guy would beat her when she got home to the camp. It had been her turn to gather food for the clan this morning, and she had failed. Again.

Her back still ached from the bruises of his angry fists after the baby reedbuck had escaped on the group hunt yesterday. Her cheek still had scabbed-over scratches, from the sharp nails of his angry fingers when he’d bitten into one of the baobab fruits she’d brought back the day before that and it had turned out to be rotted and worm-eaten. And there were still dribbles of pus oozing from the crescent of punctures in the fleshy part of her lower leg, from where he’d bitten her last week when she’d come back with nothing for three days straight.

She’d been so sure that today would be different. She’d risen early, before even the faintest light was glimmering on the horizon. Yesterday, before the storm, she had seen where the elephants had passed, and when she woke up this morning she’d realized that there would probably be a puddle in their tracks so soon after the rain, and that some creature good to eat might be drinking there. She’d thought she was being so clever.

Rot. Plague. She slunk off, shoulders dropping and teeth grinding. She was hungry. She was too old now to be fed and cherished like a child, as her mother had a new baby this season that demanded all of her time and attention, but she was still small, and weak even for her age. Not a very good hunter or gatherer. Not very useful to the clan. Not popular. The Big Guy had bared his teeth at her when she'd tried to snatch a bite of meat from the two duikers the clan had shared yesterday, just before the storm. She hadn't eaten since. She badly wanted to bring something impressive home to the clan today. Maybe raise her status up to at least “tolerated.” But her stomach growled, her thoughts felt fuzzier, and the sharp pang of disappointment banished the last of her concentration. She wasn't ready to try and stalk new game, not yet.

There was a thorny acacia tree she knew well, not far from here, where gum would sometimes ooze from cracks in the bark. If she was careful, and lucky enough to manage to snap off a few thorns with her fumbling fingers first to make a space for her mouth, she could eat this tasty substance. Maybe the storm had broken off a branch or two, and gum had oozed out from the wood's fresh wound. It wasn't something she could carry back to the clan, but it might give her the burst of energy she so sorely felt in need of right now.

The thorny gum tree was just on the far side of a kopje, a little hillock of standing stone in the plains. It didn't take her very long to walk there, eyes alert as always for any prowling predators, but the sun rose perceptibly in the sky nonetheless, its lidless eye peering above the horizon. Dawn was breaking. Soon the heat would come. Running out of time for a good hunt. She needed to get the gum and then go.

But when she rounded the last boulder, the tree wasn't how she remembered it. She’d been a curious and venturesome child before experience had taught her caution, and she had tried to climb this tree many times despite its thorns, sometimes winning gum and sometimes losing blood. She could paint a memory of what it looked like on the inside of her closed eyelids. It was three times as tall as a full-grown plains ape, wide, spreading, with many thick boughs like her torso extending out into branches like her arms and little twigs like her fingers.

It wasn't any of those things now. It had been torn in half by some great force, its branches scattered and blackened on the ground, its bark torn off and its insides ripped open, exposed and pale like the lungs and intestines of yesterday's baby duikers. Chips of burnt wood crunched under her calloused feet as she approached the ravaged trunk. A strange smell hung in the air, pungent as a warthog but somehow not unpleasant.

Lightning. She'd seen this before, though never on such a scale. The tree, her tree, had been killed by a bolt of power from the sky. She stepped closer, timorous but still curious, and moved her hand to touch it. The burnt bark was still warm, as warm as sun-heated rock at midday despite the cool surrounding air of the dawn after the storm. It left traces of black ash on her curved fingers.

There was a hot patch in the middle of the cracked hollow of the trunk, surrounded by blackened wood, crested and mottled with white ash, and still glowing red inside. She tentatively moved her hand closer, and it felt hotter and hotter, hotter even than the inside of a body. She extended the very tip of her index finger to touch it, curious child still, and yelped as she felt the sting of pain. She stuck her fingertip into her mouth, and moved her head a little closer, but not so close as to be stung. There were many different colors and textures in the little patch, black and red and gray and white. It was like a live thing, a lump smoldering and squirming with subtle movements, reminding her a little of a pink round baby bird in a nest. But unlike any other living creature. And still dangerous.

She plucked a strand of long grass and poked it into the glowing ember. It smoked, charred, and sent off a wisp of steam, but then went out. Rain and dew had made it wet.

She broke off a twig from one of the fallen branches, and touched it to the ember. A tiny flame, shorter and thinner than her littlest fingernail, sprang to life. She gasped and hooted in shock, dropping the twig. It bounced off the trunk, hit the wet grass, and went out.

She knelt at the base of the trunk and dug for a while, grubbing in the wet soil, caking mud under her nails until she had cleared a hollow just deep enough to find something a little drier. A half-decomposed chunk of stick, broken off from this very tree perhaps last year or the year before. Moist bark on the outside, but the inside wouldn't be very wet. She broke and scratched one end of it open, exposing the softer, whiter, older wood within. It crumbled at her touch. Punky.

Her hand trembled with both fear and anticipation as she grasped, lifted, and held the length of old, dry wood up to touch the ember in the trunk. It lit on fire right away, with a strong orange-red flame longer than her thumb whipping into the air.

The fire danced on the wood like a cloud on the wind, shifting, morphing, changing shapes. She'd never seen fire this close before. On a length of wood in her hand! Under her control…more or less. She could move it. She couldn't take her eyes off it. Bring it closer, further away. Feel its heat on her skin. Hear its crackle as it ate another fragment of the old wood. See the colors change, white wood to black char to red flame to gray ash. Ash falling like feathers as the flame moved on.

It was beautiful. And it was all hers. In her hand.

She touched more things to it, scraps and splinters of fallen, charred wood and bark and leaves. Some to the ember in the trunk, some to the new fire crackling as it ate up the edge of the old chunk of wood in her hand. Some things burned, some didn't.

The fire could make babies even faster than termites did. If you touched it to something else good and dry, fit for the flame to eat, one flame could become two flames as quick as a blink. If she made too many flames, she could drop them in a particularly wet patch of grass, or on wet dirt. Or even blow them out, as she discovered when one too-close intake of breath put out a twig.

She didn't recall just how long she stayed there. She tried a lot of combinations, finding out what burned fast and crisped up right away, what burned slow or dwindled until it out, what held steady with small but consistent flames. She'd never felt like this before. Mesmerized. This fire was the most fascinating thing in the entire world. The most amazing thing she had found in her life. And it was all hers.

The reverie was broken by a shifting cloud, exposing her bent neck to a new heat.

The sun had risen. Dawn was gone. All the small animals were finding their resting and hiding places. Her best chance to hunt for the clan, after days and days of failure, had evaporated like the dew.

The Big Guy would beat her again.

The Big Guy didn't have fire in his hand.

She glanced down again. A new stick, the wide end of one of the fallen branches, was burning steadily now in her left hand. It was a big stick, almost too wide for her hand to grasp, and perhaps two-thirds as tall as she was. It would last for a while. Quite some time. The clan's camp was not far away, near a pool just a short walk from here.

She hardly dared to hold her mind still for a moment to more closely examine the thoughts now racing around it.

---

She walked back to the camp. The clan was still waking up. One of the other young females in the clan, who was bigger but sometimes had shared food with her, slept on the outskirts, in a paltry nest almost as wet and exposed as her own. The other female scooted away as she walked up, her eyes rolling in disquiet. The movement caught the eye of one of the young males, then an older female, and they started pant-hooting. Curiosity, with undertones of fear. Almost but not quite an alarm call.

Now every eye was on her. The clan had seen. Too late to back out.

The Big Guy came out from his nest, swaggering as usual. Everything he saw was his, that was the way it had always been, and anything new and interesting one of the clan brought back to the camp was especially definitely his. She saw her mother cringe away in submission as he walked by.

When he saw her, with the small flame at the high end of the stick she held in her hand, his eyes widened. He hooted loudly at her, staring hard, and begun to drum with his hands on the packed soil of the camp. A dominance display. With each smack, she remembered what it felt like for those hands to strike her skin.

The Big Guy drummed steadily, stomping a foot every so often and hooting every few seconds. She cowered, reflexively, and turned down her head, not daring to meet his eyes. It was what you did. Yield to strength. What she'd always been told, what all the plains ape females learned sooner or later.

Submit. Obey. Live another day.

The Big Guy stopped drumming, and stood up. Taller than her, much taller. Broader shoulders. Bigger muscles, much bigger. He reached out towards the burning brand she held. Clearly a demand. He wanted it. This new thing, holding fire, would be his. Like the best of the food, and the driest place to sleep, and the submission of the clan. All his, every day.

She almost let him have it. He was the Big Guy. The strongest of the clan. He took what he wanted. Always had. That was the way of things. Her hand trembled, and she began to slowly hold out the stick.

The motion drove a little breeze to lick the smoldering tip of the blackened stave. A renewed flame rose, an orange curlicue twisting in the air like a serval’s hissing tongue. The Big Guy saw it, and flinched, drawing back his body. Away from her.

He was afraid!

The Big Guy, who could beat anyone he wanted in the clan, and feared no other plains-walker alive but only the great predators, he was afraid. Of her, holding fire in her hand. Of the strength of this new thing.

For this moment, for the first time in her life, she was the strongest. She had been the weakest one, the little one, the one any adult in the clan could cuff or bite at will. Now the Big Guy flinched, from her. It was almost too big of a thought to hold in her head.

Almost. The Big Guy overcame his fear within a few moments, she could see it in his eyes. The wind whipped up the little flame to a big flame, but he did not flinch again. He was angry now. Angry at her, for bringing this new and strange power into the camp and not giving it to him immediately, and angry at himself, for showing fear before the clan he ruled. He screeched with rage, bared his teeth, clenched his fists, and swung at her face.

She ducked, and thrust out her arm, a single swift movement touching the flame at the tip of the burning brand to the knots of fur on the Big Guy’s hairy chest.

It wouldn’t have worked on anyone else in the clan. It had rained hard the previous night, and they were all still damp after fitful, soaked sleep. Or nearly all. The Big Guy got whatever he wanted. He had had the best nest, with the leafiest branches and the thickest padding of grass, built and rebuilt for him by the females as soon as the sky grew overcast. He had slept in that nest all night, warmed by the craft, labor, and body heat of his subjects.

The Big Guy’s long, thick fur was now dry. Bone dry.

Her flame caught immediately, fire spreading through the black hair of his chest. Crackling hair, peeling skin, sizzling flesh. A moment of shock before reacted, then a howl of rage and pain, thrashing arms trying to beat it out and only fanning it higher. Flames spreading faster than she could see, from chest up to shoulders and down to crotch. The heat scorched the bare skin of her face. She backed away hurriedly, a maneuver she was well practiced in, but this time she kept her head raised and her eyes level.

The Big Guy’s screams were terrible, a sound worse than anything she had ever heard. His burning body kept flailing desperately for relief, eventually falling on the ground as the burning legs refused to take his weight. The flames kept eating the dry male plains ape, snuffed as soon as they tried to spread to the damp earth and grass. She looked on, saw the stinking hair become ash and the skin, already splitting from the flesh, soon after. Around her, some of the clan wailed and hooted in shock and horror, while others were too shocked to make a sound. A smell of warm meat began to fill the air, like the hot heart's-blood of a just-caught antelope, making her mouth water despite herself.

She couldn't quite remember, later, just how long she watched. The sun kept rising towards midday heat, she could feel it on her back, and the brand in her hand kept eating its fuel bit by bit. Still so small compared to the great killing fire that it had unleashed, that was its child. The clan's wails of shock turned to quietly terrified gibbers and the occasional moan. No one dared to come close to her.

Eventually, the screaming stopped. The body crackled on, burn-black and blood-red with sprinkles of ash-grey.

He might be dead already, or he might die soon. There could be no recovery from this.

She had done this thing. She and the fire, the fire that she had picked up like no one else ever had, and then fed and carried like a baby.

She picked up another stick from the ground with her off hand, still holding the torch. It had been under a bush, so not so wet as all the others, She braced it against the ground and stepped on its middle, breaking it in two, then peeled off the bark on one of the halves with her teeth until the white inner wood.

Her brand was half gone, now, since she had left the tree. Just a little time ago, a short walk. A lifetime.

She touched the broken splintery end of the newly bark-stripped stick fragment to the flame still burning at the end of her blackened torch. She held it there for a long time. The eyes of the clan, of everyone she knew, fixed on her hands in fascinated horror.

After some time, the flame caught, and began to slowly burn the second stick. There was a soft moan from somewhere off to her left, and a muted pant-hoot from her mother.

She kept standing there, a torch now in each hand, the Big Guy's body burning on the ground in front of her. The clan lowered their eyes before her, and crouched down in fearful submission. Even her mother. Even the young males twice her size, who might have become the next Big Guy someday.

Nothing like this had ever happened before, she thought. The order of things, turned upside down. A new power in the world. Strength not of the muscles, but of the mind. Agility not of swift limbs, but swift thoughts. What could not be done with this? Fire fed, fire carried, fire that could be coaxed to birth new fire. Fire on command! A tool, like a hunting stick or a termite-dowsing twig or a bone-smashing rock or a water-carrying leaf. And what a tool! Warmth on cold nights. Light in the dark. Soft wood, blackened and hardened. A barrier of safety, a weapon of such a strength that even leopards or lions would fear. Her discovery could change everything for the clan. They couldn't make it themselves, but now they knew what to look for and what to do when you find it, and there was lightning often enough.

She inhaled through her nostrils, tasting again the rich meaty odor of the burning corpse, and wondered for a moment what would happen if she touched fire to the meat of a duiker or guinea fowl. She would try, the next time the clan hunted. Perhaps they would bring one to her, now.

She turned her head and held out one of the torches towards her mother, who had edged her way closer than any of the others, and crooked one of the fingers holding the main stem of the stick. A gesture to invite others to share food. Her mother looked up with disbelieving eyes, new baby clutched to her chest. She brandished the burning stick, wobbling it in the air a little and causing the flame to dance. An invitation. This power could be shared.

Her mother shied away, crouching and turning her eyes down towards the soil.

Was she the only plains ape ready to hold the fire? No one but her had ever done this before. Perhaps no one but her would ever do it again. It was strange, perhaps too strange. Not even her mother would join her in this. All her dreams of power, of a new way of life, a tool with a thousand uses, would remain the twisted fantasies of a one-of-a-kind maniac. She was no longer weak, a servant or a target, but perhaps she would become a freak, an outcast, a monster. Reviled by all other plains apes, more feared even than the leopards. Alone.

She turned her head back to the burning corpse. Even then, it would be worth it.

Then she froze, and whipped her head back around. She felt another hand grasp the stick she still held out. Her mother had reached out, and put her hand on the torch. They made eye contact, and she saw her mother had adopted a new posture. No longer crouching, submissive. Head held higher than she had ever seen before.

She let go, and her mother became the second plains ape ever to hold fire in her hand.