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Serenity dreamed of fire and water. Things had been bad for close to a century now. A world that slowly cooked itself, a frog planet reaching boiling point under the impermeable insulation of greenhouse gases, clutching the sun's heat to itself like a masochistic miser. The air churned with convection energy, sending great skyfulls of water to dissolve parts of the surface, yet inhaling the moisture away from other parts, leaving them soured, desiccated, vulnerable to the slightest spark that would turn whole continents of dust into conflagrations. Ice sheets melted like butter in a timelapse, permafrost bubbling away into fumes that choked the atmosphere further. Fire and water rose together, and met in a hiss of blistering steam.
There wasn’t enough room on the ships that were leaving to find new planets in the firmament beyond the miasma. Serenity was fifteen when she’d acknowledged to herself that there was no realistic way for her to escape her dying home. This hurt - she was a lonely child, part of a meager final generation born to the last brave few willing to bring offspring into such a life. There was little to fill her time but the idea of the stars that twinkled out past the smoke.
Then one day, there was a climactic crescendo of global panic, and it was all over. Serenity saw the midday sun splutter and go out, bringing a frozen darkness lit only by the glow of terror from ten billion computer screens. She never saw reignition, because the shockwave from the thanergetically reborn star moved at the speed of light, and irradiated the tiny blue planet faster than the electric impulse of any neuron.
Serenity woke up swimming in filth. A vast flotsam tide of bodies, mostly moving in frantic jerks, people pulling themselves past one another in a liquid stampede. Humans trying to move like a shoal of fish, minus any shred of grace or common purpose, minds driven to vacant madness composed of fear and need. The water was wretched and greasy, a dim yellow-red cesspool of viscera and tattered corpses. Serenity found that none of this bothered her.
She was very hungry.
She felt there was something she needed to find, or get back to. Something vital, foundational, right at the grim edge of memory. But only a fragment of her mind was able to dwell on this need; the rest was drowned in the much simpler compulsion to feed. She must have meat, lots of it, and there was none at all to be found in this merciless current.
It could have been seconds or it could have been myriads before her cravings were interrupted by a voice. She had long lost any ability to comprehend human communication, but nevertheless, at its sound she stood. Her feet touched the bottom, and she saw that she was in the shallows. Her face surfaced with a surprised gasp, and, with everyone else beside her, she walked up a gradient and onto the shore. It smelled like lemon.
Serenity dreamed of a man with oil for eyes, saying, “Welcome back, everyone. I’m terribly sorry for all of that. Hopefully things will be better now.”
Later, they said it was time to sleep again. Some had to be kept for safekeeping. Her time would come.
She didn’t know what they meant by “sleep”. She couldn’t remember ever having done something like that.
Serenity woke to ten thousand years of memories. The images shuffled through her mind’s eye in inexplicable loops and combinations. At first she could remember nothing but the filth and the human shoal, but gradually other pictures returned. The old world that drowned and burned. Stars glimpsed through smoke. Sadness and desperation on social media—and gallows humor. Her parents attempting to cheer her with old shows, old games. Other children she had known, talking of other worlds.
There was one memory of a room where others stared at her, laughing, pointing. She thought she was supposed to say something to appease them, but she was interrupted by a bell. The shrill alarm slowed in both speed and pitch, starting to echo, deepen, resound as if heard in a cavernous space. The terrible tolling grew louder and deeper still, a great reverberation of black-cast iron that spake to her soul of dark omens, chill whispers, an everlasting tomb—and spake to her ears of BLA-BLANG... BLA-BLANG... BLA-BLANG...
Serenity dreamed that she sat up, shaky and benumbed, in a dark chamber set with bones. Before her came a face like a glacier with an agenda. A ghastly face, at once bloated and skeletal, decrepit, one-eyed, grim as a graveyard in the new moon. Serenity felt cold.
“Welcome,” said the apparition, and his voice cracked like arthritis beneath the continued peeling of the unseen bell, calling her to judgement. “I am the marshall of Drearburh, and this is the House of the Ninth. The Kindly Prince of Death has appointed you to our ranks, in his holy wisdom. With us, you will execute that most sacred and eternal office of guardianship, that the Tomb will remain forever locked.”
Serenity felt faint.
“Is my mom and dad here?” she said. “Can I see them?”
The creature’s face made a nauseous contortion. Serenity’s eyes were adjusting to the crepuscular murk of the room, and she could see dim figures, hooded all in black, standing behind the marshall. Strings of bone dangled from their abyssal sleeves. She thought she heard chanting, but it was hard to tell; still the great bell tolled in the distance.
“That is unlikely. You are a child of the Tomb now. You must forget all you once knew. Rejoice, for you will give the Emperor his greatest service, for the ecstasy of the closed eye and the stilled brain. These are glad tidings. You are the ninth revived from the five hundred of our restored House, a most propitious number, and therefore I name you Anastas Nonaventus, blessed daughter of the Ninth. Rise, child, and we shall see if you are master of bone or steel.”
A hand was offered that looked as if it consisted of about thirty knuckles. Serenity looked at it. The assembled penitents and tomb keepers looked at her. The First Bell blanged morosely. All at once, she began to sob.
All she wanted was to wake up.