02.14.07
The Twilight of the Gods
Darkness swallows the East Hills almost utterly, even today, on the edge of the great agri-industrial complex of the Great Valley. The startling exception to the darkness and silence is that interstate artery called “5″ that seems, to a bystander or a pedestrian, to be a channel of rockets, roaring and flashing in two opposing streams, utterly enclosed in the black silence of space. Sometimes the streams will vanish. The thunderous pulses echo between ones ears, while the void closes in. And just as the echoes are almost swept from the mind, the lights appear, and close behind, the nerve-shattering thunder.
One rocket pilot floated through the darkness, bathing in the green glow of the control panel. He reached down to his right and lifted a stainless steel thermos, and watched lights approach along the opposite stream. He reached again to the right, pressed a button, and suddenly a chattering of voices filled the chamber. Coast to Coast. Art Bell. Unidentified flying objects. Alien abductions. White light beamed into the chamber from the left, and a roar from the outside overcame the chatter, as the thunder and light rushed past. The red glow of tail lights flooded the cab, as the chatter resumed its dominance of the chamber.
He turned toward the east, and noticed the sky had changed from black to midnight blue, just enough to silhouette the mountains. Igneous Range, he half-mumbled and half-thought. He remembered the story the old cowboy had related on that charmed evening by the campfire.
“Watch your fires up here. Up here, this is what they called the Igneous Range. This place will catch on fire in a hurry if you let it.”
“Who—who called it the Igneous Range?”, he had asked the cowboy.
“It was the gods themselves.”
The word gods echoed through the teenager’s head.
The cowboy chuckled. “That’s quite alright, son. You go right on.”
“Why’d they call it that?”
“‘Cause that is what it is.”
The cowboy picked up a large stick and turned a log. “Right near here is where the Creator himself came to fetch fire. He came from across the sea on a whale, and he walked right up this canyon …”
The pilot glanced again to the east, and noticed the glow was not so dim as it was.
“Excuse me, sir, but why would the Creator need to come all the way to California to get some fire? Couldn’t he just create some?”
“Well, that’s simple my friend. I’m talking about our creator, not the creator. He isn’t almighty.”
“Right,” the boy lied.
“Yes, I know. You’re atheist schools would have you believe the gods are only tales of the ancients.”
“Atheists?”
“What else would you call somebody that can only worship a nameless, disembodied, almighty abstraction?” That, my friend, might be a philosophy, but it’s not religion. Folks used to call that blasphemy.
The pilot drove on, as the dialog in his memory was drowned out by a vision. He had played out the cowboy’s story so many times since that night in his youth, it was as though he’d been there himself. Daydreams, one sown into the soil of his thought, and tended to throughout the seasons, had matured into real memories.
Under the light of the stars, he had stealthily walked with only his walking stick, up the Grand Canal, a linear, u-shaped glacial canyon that slices through the mountains as though a great, dull axe had hewn the range from North to South. This was before forests had moved down the cliffs and into the canyon bottom. It all remained naked as the god that ambled up along the glacial torrent that crashed down toward the sink west of the range. His lips moved occasionally, but whether he was speaking even he could not know, for nothing could be heard but the thunderous roar of the stream.
When he reached the junction at the head of the canyon, he turned east up a ridge between two tributaries, and ascended the bald slopes to the barren, boreal plateaus. The icy flank of the Great Divide towered above him, and blocked out his view of the eastern heavens. When he at last saw the sleeping hump of the granite fire tower, he straightaway turned east again and began his ascent, watching the heavens to gauge the passing of time.
His exhalations steamed out into the frozen air and crystallized. He felt the continuing sting of the alpine cold. Thin laces of ice highlighted his eyebrows and locks in the starlight, but the warm, immortal blood of the Titan admitted no frostbite. His breathing grew more and more labored as he ascended the back of Damavand. Though he could not see eastward, he could sense the daybreak, so he pressed onward and upward.
Once he mounted the tower, he lifted his walking stick and stumbled hurriedly across the stony platform, racing against the oncoming sunrise. Suddenly he felt a rush of warm air, and found himself perched over the East, just as Phoebus with Helios broke the horizon. The hot light of the sun cast a wave of steam across the plateau as it melted the nocturnal icing. The Titan held up his walking stick to Helios, as he and the stick began to warm. He turned his gaze back to the west, and saw the clouds of Zeus boiling up and approaching from the Great Western Divide. He looked up at the oiled stick, now hot with sunlight. In an instant the staff was ablaze, and thunder pounded down upon the granite from heaven. The Titan, turning to see Zeus over his shoulder heaved the staff into the abyss. Zeus, outraged, hurled bolts down upon the mountain, throwing the Titan into a frenzied, writhing dance of electrocution, utterly without self-control or even will, until he fell lifeless onto the stone.
The immortal awoke prostrate, far beneath Helios, and enclosed by mountain daemons binding each of his wrists to a chain. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the great vulture soaring and circling, and at that he passed into sleep. But he awoke just as suddenly to a stabbing pain in his torso. He looked down to see the raptor’s bald head buried in his abdomen. It raised its head, oblivious to the Titan’s startled gaze, and tossed a piece of liver down into its gullet.
Prometheus lunged up, and swung his thigh at the immortal beast. The raptor flapped its broad wings, and hovered up above the Titan, who desperately rolled in an attempt to flee the raptor. On his second turn, he felt the ground give out from under him, as he slipped into a free fall down the face of the mountain, and just as instantly, he felt the ropes jolt against his limbs as he stopped suspended between two towers of the eastern face of the mountain. Overcome by the trauma, he lost consciousness once more, only to awake to that same cutting tugging sensation in his gut. He opened his eyes heavenward, but did not venture to face the raptor at its grizzly task. He winced, and tried not to blink. At last, he would fall asleep again. His immortal liver would then regenerate while he slept. It would seem like an instant to him until the return of the eagle would jolt him back into consciousness.
Far below him, smoke rose from a distant patch of nascent woodland, where the burning staff had at last found rest. Shouts of primitive men echoed against the mountain, as they circled around the wood in wonderment and excitement. The fire made its way from village to village and from nation to nation over the millennia, while their loyal Creator hung in unremitting agony betwixt two spires of the mountain that came to bear the name of fire, and on Olympus, the name of the Titan who released its fire to his mortal children.
Every so often, the tortured Creator might smell the smoke and hear the shouts of a ceremony far below. Perhaps a dance or a sacrifice intended to summon another bolt of fire from heaven. They would search the mountains, and on rare occasions they would find a fire burning, ignited by an ember from that first fire. On occasion, a stray bolt from Zeus himself might even provide the gift of fire, but there was to be no mercy for the rebellious Titan, and no immortal would dare attempt to free him for fear of the wrath of the Almighty. Only a mortal, it would at last be shown, would have the courage necessary to face the wrath of the Almighty.
