Work Text:
Bathed in the digital green of a Gameboy, the Harvest stalks the corn maze, knowing from the moment of its birth that it must die.
It is not unlike other mortal things in this respect, but most things doomed to die do not know the precise moment of their demise. One month to be born, to be alive, to be dead. November bears away what October brings.
-
There are species of moth that emerge from metamorphosis without mouths; their purpose is to breed and die soon after, sustained by the food of their previous form. I imagine the Harvest like these moths. While she is capable of speech, and not capable of reproduction (to my knowledge), she must sustain herself on her old sacrifices, on what has been given to her. They are a god made up of many things; the caterpillar is hungry. They cannot create; the moth cannot eat.
-
An ivory dove flits high above the corn maze, a flash of silver-white in the artificial night. Its coo is full of sorrow, a lamentation for those things still alive.
It alights on a cornstalk near where the Harvest walks. She wants to learn as much about this strange world of hers before she must leave it again. She is full of curiosity, lethargy, hatred, and a childish adoration of dinosaurs and dragons. The ivory dove watches her, the monster at the center of the maze.
“I know what you are,” she says, her voice a digital echo without a mouth. “You’ve come here to mock my half-existence.” She’s not bitter, precisely; she’s very bitter, angry at her own rot.
The ivory dove shakes its head, a gesture too human for a silvery bird. At first the Harvest thinks its stretching out its wings to fly, but it stretches longer and longer under there is a man in a gray and white tailcoat and gray top hat. Where he should have a face is the blank sphere of a mannequin, and yet the Harvest knows he’s smiling at her.
“I am the Elegiast,” he says. “I remember the dead.”
“I’m not dead,” she says. Had she a face, it would be frowning.
“Not yet,” the Elegiast answers. She realizes that he is holding a pen and a rolled up scroll of parchment. She realizes that he has the air of someone about to sing, though he will not sing for her this night. “But you will soon be dead, and it is my role to sing remembrance of dead gods.”
“Leave me,” she says. “I don’t need yet another reminder that I will rot.”
“Ah,” he says. “You may rot, but my memory will not.” He places his hat over his chest and bows deeply. “There is a power that commemorates and grieves, from which nothing is taken. My memory does not decay. My memory is stillness. You will be remembered, as you are, in this moment, forever. You may pass, but the idea of you shall be eternal.”
“But everything dies,” the Harvest answers.
“Perhaps,” the Elegiast says. “I see only the past, not the future. With spring comes the end of ice, and what stays preserved forever must rot away. But we are gods, oh strange child, and gods have a way of outlasting even their own ends. What else did you think I was for?”
With a wave of his hand, he is a bird again, and then he is gone, leaving the Harvest once again alone in her corn maze.
“I didn’t ask to be remembered like this,” she says. “Frozen; unchanging. Not even alive.”
“You simply asked to be remembered,” a voice like permafrost replies. “The rest is details.”