Beyond the limitless light, beneath a night befallen sky, groaned the idol of stone.
Once, when the ravens flew, there had been day and night, rising and falling irregularly to an indescribably skewed rhythm—a rhythm though, there had been.
The ravens had long since flown.
The walkers had come and wallowed at his feet, prodding with their noisome squeaks—silenced in concord, he would have said, if he were able to speak.
Deep within the moaning recesses of his cavernous mind he recalled rising from the dark depths to stand—no, he was unthinkably old—to sit rather, upon his throne of regret, heavy with mold.
For ages the sentinel on his throne of regret had thought—the echoes of his ideas wandering the inescapable caverns of his mind, never to emerge into the world, unevenly lit by furtive day and looming night.
Once he had towered above the barren reach on the shore of the limitless deep.
Over the ages the world encroached, the sun-obscuring and moon-hiding escarpment rising from the waste to his right, even as the depths receded, retreating before the tendrils of She Who Cares—and crept—to his left.
The ravens had not flown for eons.
It had been ages since the prodding walkers had come.
She had grown, "for" him, “Her Bean,” so her numberless leaves had whistled in the still night air.
She was the plant that thrived without the sun, whose leaves turned inward rather than reaching for the light, whose myriad opening buds gave off dew in abundant excess of any rain that, ages ago, might have fallen to nourish her roots.
She Who Cares had once attended him as consort, grown from the bean fallen from the beak of The Mourning Dove.
His rock face dripped with moisture always, but he had not felt the patter of rain or heard the roar of the surf, or even the seeping of the creeks, for so long that he wondered if he could yet hear.
His slow decay was the seat of his dismay, the green vines that had clothed him in the dry night, now strangling him—sapping his might.
He had been a god, now he was but a crumbling idol, lost deep in the mist of his own creeping decay.
He heard him there despite his leaf-choked ears. It was the Stork, the Stupid Stalker who had fed him the Questions of the Universe in ages gone by.
He had left so long ago, that the Basalt idol, groaning under the heavy burden of the crooked years, bound in the lichen embrace of She Who Cares, strained to open his eyes, to raise the heavy ominous lids that he might peer at He So Despised, the Stupid One Ever Reviled, as he returned with the fish of asking?
Yes, you there, his lonely hollows moaned across the moss-entombed stone court to die without an echo, “They yet ask? The World beyond yet seek to know?”
The ever-retreating waters, the ever more unreachable depths from which he had sprung, were now so far off that his dumb companion had stalked for ages to reach the waters and bring back a fish—but here he was, now he stood, in the dusky depths of her moist darkness—the Stork climbed, laboriously, but not as high as he once had, for the idol had shrunken, smaller now by a vast measure, beneath the all-enveloping Mother Tree.
At last the fat waddling Stork perched upon the crumbling remains of his shoulder and spat out a fish into his ear.
His expectant mind, his waiting ear, thrilled to the question to come, only to be stricken low by the rattle of fishy bones echoing down the dusty caverns of his mind, for the fish no longer swarmed, or even swam it seemed. The Stork had done its level best, stalking the shores of what had once been The Deep, only to return with the hollow echo of bones.
No! he groaned into the moistening heavens, beyond which—he now somehow knew—a sun did shine, a sun whose hope-sustaining rays had not, in ages, filtered through her loving canopies to warm his cold stones.
He shivered.
Her leaves rustled, her every bud exuding a clean earthy scent that whispered together, My Bean—love my bean!
With that expression of all-caring essence he shivered no more, for whereever her uncountable leaves reached out to the sunlit realms above and beyond, they opened, and pumped their radiant drink back along her vines, down into the valley of the decaying idol, where he rested warmly in her embrace.
From upon his shrunken and eroded shoulder sounded a belch of disapproval, followed by the sounds of a fat waddling bird pecking and plucking sweet juicy berries, gobbling them down into his gullet, and then pecking off a bit of a basalt shoulder to serve as a grindstone in it’s great gullet. These sounds, rude though they were, were soon supplanted, replaced by the sound of the sacred idol’s shoulder being stained.
So rested the much-loved idol, smothered by his Insistent Other, and shat upon by his Idiot Brother.
Blood dripped from the lonely moon hidden eons above, until the leaves parted under their own crimson-soaked weight and she peeked down from the starless cosmos to bathe his face without a hint of love.
