Do you know the story of the Beast that rises between years?
When Man’s time upon the earth grows long, he begins to find this world dull, and he casts about for new delights to entertain him.
He searches the depths beneath the vast, lifeless waters he occupies, and in that blackness he finds creatures with eyes like moons. By so finding, he destroys them; the last life below the surface of Man’s world disappears.
He searches the skies, which have been empty for eons, and finds a last, lone flying thing. He takes it to his small home. But the flying thing has hidden in storms so long that it cannot live outside them. It weakens. Man sends storm-light coursing through it, hoping to bring it back to health. His ill-considered and sloppy effort merely hastens the creature’s end. And when it is gone, nothing lives above the earth.
Still Man searches. He has looked above, he has looked below, and he is unable to bear considering what has been lost.
And so he looks ahead, and there, at the mouth of winter, sees the barest flicker of a shadow. And no sooner has he seen the shadow than he wants – nay, needs – to know how it will be cast.
Man’s mistakes have taught him, he believes, and so he does not seek the shadow. Instead he lies in wait at the cave from whence comes winter. Within the cave, Man sees a deep, impenetrable darkness. He speaks softly into the black.
I know you are there, Beast, Man whispers. His voice is gentle. So very gentle. Man smiles to himself.
But no Beast appears.
Man sits and waits as the world pirouettes, as the seasons change, nearly ‘til the year comes new–and oh! If he had waited but one moment more!–but no Beast appears.
It comes with the moon, says Man, and so he loops the moon in a string and pulls it down and down until it tickles the tops of trees.
Tides tear the world asunder, beaches become seabed here and desert there, and Man hurries back to the cave.
He waits to show Beast what he has brought, but no Beast comes, and no shadow appears.
Perhaps I missed it, says Man. Perhaps it comes for the merest blink of an eye at some special part of the day, says Man. I have heard the rising and falling of day brings change. The ancients once captured such things, flickering and ephemeral images made into motion. Perhaps it can be done once more.
And so he creates a great engine to speed the earth in its turning, gears upon gears that rise like day itself far above the earth. He cranks this machine and it roars into life. The merest vibration of its workings collapse, as one, all the empty cities of Man. Wheels turn like seasons, gathering steam. The sun blurs from horizon to horizon, burning a hot white stripe across Man’s eye before disappearing, darkness and light flashing. Things hidden within and upon the earth cry in wonder and fear. Man turns his eye to winter’s home, sure he will see the shadow and its owner.
Beast does not come.
No matter, says Man, and he cranks the handle in the other direction. Billions of gears turn his pathetic strength to the slow reversal of the machine. The sun’s strobing grows sluggish, and soon Man’s eye can resolve its orb once more. It creeps over the horizon. Man watches the sky, his hand slow and careful on the crank.
Just as the day is breaking, Man finishes his work. The edge of the sky lightens to pink, then to golden, and then, and then…
Man puts the machine’s crank into its cradle and he returns to the cave of winter. In the dim light, Man waits, never blinking, wanting to be certain to see when Beast at last arrives.
The sun slowly creeps over the horizon, and Man narrows his eyes against its light.
Beast does not come.
I must stop the sun from dawning at all, Man decides, or else I will never find the Beast.
Man, who is the cleverest of all creatures, fixes one mirror on the horizon nearest dawn, and from there finds the horizon beyond and lays a mirror upon it, and so on, until he can see the sun wherever it might shine on the earth.
He turns his crank slowly, carefully, his gazed fixed on his mirror. The sun crawls from its zenith. Man watches it appear in his mirrors, which have been so arranged as to ensure the sun appears always in one corner, moving back and forth as the planet spins, but never out of view.
Man coaxes the world to a halt with delicate turns of his machine, and the world, with a gentle bump, ceases to turn. Oceans slosh, erasing whole histories laid down by life and time. Man’s own creations fall under the tides. Even the hidden creatures feel the world stop, and they quake at its strangeness.
The tiny bump of cessation disturbs the great machine Man has built to turn the sky to his bidding, which he has cranked through days that once would have been years. Pieces fall together, hurling themselves away into the dark reaches of the universe. The machine sways and groans and falls down upon itself. It smashes a crater into the moon, severing its lasso. Gears crack to pieces, and each fragment becomes a new mountain. It destroys all that Man has ever made, all he has ever been.
And now, at last, in the newly infinite gap between years, Beast comes, and its shadow falls upon Man. And though he is in chill darkness, Man feels Beast’s hot breath upon him and begins to burn.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? it whispers, and Man’s ribs splinter beneath his fevered skin.
Beast rages, tearing into the landscape. Man huddles, terrified, in the dark, rotting remnant of his hut while outside this gargantuan, this fundament, this god makes the ground glow.
But when Beast has vented its fury, it raises its head, and Man feels it turn to him with some new thought.
Man recognizes the shift, for he has changed with each new idea, each invention, each modicum of knowledge dug out of the darkness. The comfort of a like companion, which he has sought for so long, washes over him like the warm water of a soothing bath.
MAN, Beast shouts–and Man’s tired skeleton shatters, and his head falls backwards, eyeless, earless, and still his bones carry Beast’s voice to him as if it were his own–RUN WITH ME.
Man hears Beast. Oh, he hears its voice, though he slithers underground and behind walls and beyond doors. For its voice shakes the world. Its voice, so much like Man’s own, sets him to weeping with self-pity and relief.
MAN, says Beast, quieting. COME, RUN WITH ME.
The request is so strange, so mildly put, that Man’s spirit rises toward it. He rolls and surges and slides, gasping and sweating as the dust of his bones grinds within the sack of his flesh, until he emerges into the darkness he has created.
Beast looms above him. Its legs are hidden far away in either direction, its body curving over the horizons. Breath washes like flame over the land, and Man draws its warmth into himself.
In the dull glow thrown up by the earth around him, Man spies the glinting belly of Beast. Its bulk blots out the great expanse of stars for which Man long ago devised names. Man considers its breadth, and his own smallness. The Earth chills as it spills its heat into the black and eternal night.
This night is his fault, for the Earth would yet turn its face once more to its star had he not valued his own pleasure above all else.
As he faces the blackness, a dying remnant of weather arrives, a soft, cool breeze born beyond the boundary between night and day, beyond even the realms over which Beast towers. He turns his face to let the last breeze blow his hair behind him and steal the sweat from his brow, and he knows, at last, that he must undo all that he has done if he is to last in this world.
He pulses and contorts, and though agony is a wide dark oblivion he must cross to do it, he stands. Beast regards him serenely, never hurrying him, though the stars burn dimmer when he is done.
RUN WITH ME, Beast exhorts.
Man runs. No salmon ever felt more keenly the desire to fight against a current. His feet flop and slap at first, but soon they hurl dust skyward as he drives himself forward, over valley and hill, pushing always in one direction. Air rushes hard against him, tearing away his thin white hair, pulling the loose skin of his arms into long flaps behind him.
Beast, seeing Man in motion, thrusts its powerful legs backwards. It tears trenches like small seas into the earth. It, too pushes through the air, its massive body sending storms and tsunamis spiraling through atmosphere and ocean. It traverses the scorched earth with all its forgotten nations and no man’s lands and places between where life, diminished though it may be, still cowers.
As they run, the laws of Man and of Beast and of Earth make themselves felt. They run together, toes and claws, impelling Earth in one direction even as Earth pushes them in the other, until at last the darkness begins to lighten, and the sun creeps past the horizon.
Man slows, his small steps robbing the great orb of an infinitesimal part of a day.
But Beast, you see: Beast endures.
Faster and faster it runs, until the surface blurs beneath it. As it runs it passes through a broken world, a world of fallen trees and ruined cities, shattered mountains, spilled oceans, past all the world beyond its cave, all defiled and destroyed, with nothing that might have brought Beast from its cave at the next calling of winter.
To these ruined things it whispers words of comfort, asking Time itself to undo this undoing. And Time grants this boon, but it asks a price.
And so when Beast sees Earth spinning as it did before Man’s folly, when black eternity shrinks to mere night, when darkness can no longer pin all living things together at the mouth of winter and the day creeps once more over the world, then Beast calls a sorrowful goodbye to all of creation, and it grabs the moon between its claws and leaps away with it into the darkness, and Man cries out, for he is again alone.
When the moon is a mere thumbprint, Beast gathers itself against that small, dumb rock and leaps again, sailing away into the darkness, its star-silhouette growing ever smaller.
Before it disappears in the dark between stars, Beast waves farewell to Man, and it makes a sign, and Man looks around him at a world already healing, and his eyes grow wide.
Man turns before Beast disappears, and he waves, and he shouts into the void.
He thanks Beast for the comfort of its companionship. He shouts that he has learned his lesson at last, and he promises to remember and honor Beast and all that it has wrought.
He swears to keep the space between years for Beast, in case it should one day find its way home.
And for all we know, he will do just that.