It was a good day for a funeral; grey and clotted, with the clouds swirling around the sky in muddy daubs. No sun shone, no thunder cracked, even the rain restrained itself to the dampest possible spittle. All plants seemed to have been replaced with slickened moss, and all ground seemed to have been replaced with mud. The pond down the hill was as tepid as a cat’s conscience.
It was a good day for a funeral. But the man in the pit didn’t have one. He lay still and alone, rigor mortis firmly set in, neck still twisted at a curious angle, head-first in a little hollow twice the depth of his body that only so recently had been hidden by ferns.
Time passed, seasons changed. The skies cleared and the plants blossomed, the ground bloomed and the world froze. Over and over again and again over again. And as this happened, the man crept deeper and deeper into the hole as water trickled in and tunneled, bored and buried. He lay under twelve feet of soil, dirt and stone now, naked bones that were he. His teeth were the loveliest part of him, gleaming brighter now than they had when he breathed. A mole burrowed through his ribcage once and nearly blunted a claw upon his thoracic vertebrae. It never came down that tunnel again.
Time passed, years flowed – like glaciers, not water; an impossibly huge mass descending slowly but inevitably, a liquid that shammed solid. An earth tremor spilled the pond that lay to the man’s northwest, sent its beautiful translucent guts away to fade into dust and left the frogs all mourning. Half a hill fell atop the burial-place of the man, pressing with patient weight on softer soil and bone below it. Compacting it, bearing down on it, thrusting it deeper and lower, past soil and into places where light was not even an idea, leaving the song of the earthworms far above and fading out of mind.
Time passed, and the man remained dead. His bones, however, merely slept, and as they sank deeper, they began to stir in their slumber, as things formed from carbon do. From primates to protists, all things dream, even if they never wake enough to realize it. But given time, all sleep ends, and death is sleep writ large and in extremely firm print.
The bones were fitful. They had spent their youth growing, building, binding, and in time, breaking; exuberant pursuits, energetic, the best times of their lives. And fittingly, they had done so as sleepwalkers, leaving the thinking and the feeling and the experiencing to others as they just did what came naturally. To do was unnecessary, to be was enough. That had always been enough.
Now, far underneath the land they had walked, they woke to the strange sensation of mineralization – a cold, clammy tickle through the spine, an icy grip on the skull, a slow seepage into the tibia. A drowsy feeling, but not one to lull you back into torpor; rather a numbness to be shaken off. First out of surprise, second for alarm, third for a determined struggle for consciousness, or whatever semblance of it that had been washed into them. A long, hard battle towards awareness, pinned in place under a million tons of dirt and stone.
It took decades, felt like mere years, but in the end, the hard part was over. The man was gone, but his bones were awake. Immobile, but that didn’t matter. Awake and aware, open to the world beyond their borders. Dark. Silent. Heavy, so infinitely heavy.
Above was life, unreachable and a dwindling not-memory. Below was darkness, opaque and inevitably approaching. Mercifully, the bones had no time to grow fearful before the second major tremor of their existence rumbled past them in an instant, tore apart the world below them, and sent them cascading downwards in a split month, still-entombed in a solid slab of rock.
The dark was always something that they never quite got used to. No eyes to see it, but they had a mind to feel it, or at least something close enough to a mind. It was more of a pressure than a lack of light at this level, a constant sensation that vibrated through every moment.
They were never used to it, but they were able to move past it. Time still passed when years and seasons were never-memories, and with time came change. The bones began to search outside themselves, to go hunting along cracks and crannies, to dance upon pebbles and squeeze under the stubs of mountains. Sometimes they almost lost their way back to themselves, and it would take them many decades to once again work up the courage to go a-voyaging, for fear of what would happen to them if they were left alone and gone.
One day, they found a fissure grand and cavernous, a full hairs-breadth of unoccupied space that must have stretched downwards until the stones melted. They wandered far and came no closer to that endless burn, but found something far strange still: a gap in the wall that touched them with whispering echoes dredged upon from deeper layers, places where the rocks had slept like the dead for half an eon.
What was in the rocks was awake. More than awake. It was in motion.
Identity was ambiguous down there. What they found could have been millipedes, sea scorpions, fish, or amphibians. That long dead, all had been stripped away to the bedrock, and a new self had emerged from the most basic core: predator, prey; animal, vegetable, all locked away in mineral form, all emitting a part of the same breathless whisper-song that permeated the rocks of their fossilized bed. Life that had been thickened to the tiniest, most concentrated scraps possible.
That was just the surface. It was nearly comprehensible.
Far below, hidden in seams beyond knowing, there were murmurs. The old ones talked to each other, deeper down in time, using words without a language. Time passed, the world changed, but they would never raise their eyes to know, would never even realize they no longer had eyes. The stone cracked away at their touch as freely as if they walked in air; shambling, ancient bodies alien to the thoughts that moved them. Old grudges, ancient hunts relived. Bone eating bone, hidden in the dark.
They did not linger there. Instead they retreated, and only now did doubt arise in them, in their trust in themselves. They had plunged too low too quickly, had been pulled far down below their rightful depth. The dark was familiar, maybe, but it was not home – not yet, and maybe now it never would be. The bones now knew what lay beneath them, and they didn’t want it. To be pressed down to nothing but ancient instinct might be appealing by the time the process was nearly through, but to see it from afar, a long time before… that was less appealing. And that was supposing that they did not fall victim to their fellows before they were boiled down to their essences; they were only safe thus far because they were insignificant. As they grew more concentrated in their presence, they would be prey, and easy prey.
And so it was that the bones had their first goal ever conceived, though they did not know it then: to escape.
The idea was simple, the concept less so. There were limits to their grasp, limits that the surface lay well in excess of. Their grasp on the stone was weak and hesitant, their substance still soft-formed, near-bone. Cracks were their avenues rather than the result of their passage, and strain as they might they could not free themselves from their matrix, stuck fast where they lay.
Time passed, and now too quickly. They heaved and hauled and sank nearly as quickly as their reach expanded, murmurs from below growing closer every day – and now day existed again, an infinitesimal change in the moisture and temperature of the dirt that once more arose at the very verge of their expanse.
Once days existed, time seemed to move faster still. Tense, sunrise, untense, sunset. Reach, sunrise, relax, sunset. Over and over and over and farther down they sank, the world pressing them towards the rumbling elders down below.
And one day, as they scraped away at the soil above, something strange and hauntingly unfamiliar stirred at the very tip of their awareness. A strange…emptiness.
Air.
Stale air, in a soft-earth pit half a dozen feet below the surface. So very close to far away, but so far. And in the pit, something sleeping, a distant cousin, a far-away relative of themselves. But softer, and so much younger. They had forgotten that anything could be so young. It smelt faint, but vibrant and strange, unmistakable.
Sleeping. Still asleep. There was still matter heaped atop those bones, still decaying. It would be gone soon.
Exploration, tentatively conducted, at the very edges of their strength, showed dozens more, all either new bone or not yet unfleshed.
The plan was intuited immediately. The justification took but a significant moment longer. They were young and asleep, not really awake. This was a necessary act of survival. They would eventually fall victim to the same descent into the not-there if they remained. Why should they care anyways, it was irrelevant.
None of it was successful, but it didn’t need to be.
They reached up,
up,
up,
up,
UP
and raked at the sides of the corpses above them with desperate strength, the dangerous sort. They were no great ancient walkers of stone, but their lives depended on it, and that gave them the power they needed to flay the diffuse, weak, but somehow intoxicating shreds of fresh life from the hides of the graveyard’s crop of bodies and send them hurtling down, down, down. All the way down below they flung them, stretching them to their limit, an ethereal rope of that which separated bone from rock – faint, so faint, so diffuse in its presence in the newly-dead, but unmistakably alluring in the novelty of its freshness. They carried it through cracks microscopic, they carried it through the grand fissure, they carried it to the gap in the fissure’s wall and they flung it into that strange and remote deep where the murmurs leaked through from far down below.
Time passed, and at first nothing changed. Then the whispers stopped.
Time passed, and the world stood still and the darkness deepened. They moved not at all, as paralyzed as if they were true stone themselves.
Time passed… and the rocks fell away.
After a life lived in years and decades, it was a shock extreme to see such change in mere months. First there was silence, and then a roar; stillness, then turmoil. The bones bobbed in their rocky bed as corks in a stream, and watched as life’s grandfathers tore their way free of the roots of the continents to seek the trail of their children’s children’s children ad infinitum.
The bones found that their confining matrix was gone and that they were falling, half-fossil, half-there, still unnoticed. Not safe, though – the migration of the ancients was indifferent as to what it crushed. The brute strata vanished under their limbs as if nothing, the passage of their bodies ruptured geological formations massing a million mountains, and they did not notice, did not care. All of history had passed them by, and they passed it by in turn on that hellish climb, one claw, one heave, one limb after another, chasing that long thread that had been drawn down to them until the first of them broke through and felt sunlight for the first time in half a billion years.
Some days later, the bones emerged from the yawning pit that had been the graveyard. Movement was almost unimaginably swift now, but they had decided to play it cautious.
They looked down into the pit behind them – ten miles across and more, though they could not measure it with eyes – and for a moment they wondered if what they had done was worth it.
They decided it was irrelevant.
Time passed, things changed. Time was passing, always passing. It was never too late to see what you could do as it did.
They stepped out under the bright blue sky.