Countless pallid blossoms waved in the sanguinely scented night, waved upon their flush stalks, not in concord with some vagrant breeze, but of their own fragrant accord.
The dance of the night flowers was solemnly unaccompanied by the whistle of wind, the rustle of leaves, or the tune of whatever alien instrument might have inspired this soundless cacophony of motion. Surely an intelligence lay behind this unseen dance, for the lids of the idol that they danced before like some troupe of temptresses before an ancient king strained under the weight of ages unknown and sorrows unnamed.
The vast forest of tree and vine played host to a multitude of soaring night flowers upon stalks of twenty cubits and more. This solemn rite occurred under the light of a wan moon, as if the nightmare garden of ghostly petals gave audience to that heavenly body. The triple canopy of tangled jungle growth that soared far above the grumbling head of the yet massive idol, seemed to have parted of its own accord, forming of itself a leafy cleft, into which the light of the dying moon crept hesitantly, like the fingers of a midwife of light probing a goddess’s womb, questioningly, wondering blindly if it had become a god’s tomb.
A tear of congealed, mold-flecked dew rolled slow and sap-like down the age-pitted cheek of the basalt idol.
One great, flinty lid creaked slightly, in a feeble attempt to witness the silent night song.
The lid covering the other great eye, which had once gleamed like a dark twin jewel upon a gathering world, was weighted shut by the detritus of the ages, layer upon moldy layer of sodden petals having fossilized into a stony tumor.
The cracked basalt of the idol’s face, from which a mighty beak of a nose had once thrust out in domineering contempt of the infantile world, now gave way to a pitted lump, more nostril than nose.
Below the ruin of his aquiline nose, the idol’s lips of onyx had chipped and cracked until his ivory teeth—once gleaming and iridescent with wonder under heaven—now peeked out upon the overgrown world in time-stained indifference.
There was a seed there, wedged between two massive teeth, that beckoned a friendly intrusion. A great, fat, waddling, stork, perched upon the crumbling chest of the idol, pecking with its lichen-crusted and berry-stained beak at a seed, making of itself a greedy centerpiece for the languid dance of the night flowers.
The peck of the stork echoed for the first time since the dance began beneath the foliated cleft, which had invited the seeking light of a lonely moon with an exuding spray of flowery musk, which, in its heavy way, had wafted up through the heavens like a moan become a groan, a weeping, pleading admission that some wounded creature was fatally alone.
The night flowers recoiled in a pained, rippling way, as did every pale leaf and stillborn bud of the vast living thing that was the tomb of the idol.
The night flowers then returned to their soundless dance, waving like kelp at the bottom of an airy sea, farther from the moon’s faint rays than any kelp had ever been from the light of the searing sun.
“Peck”—and the night flowers rippled as if in pain, recoiling from the wounded body of their stony king, miasmic lord of their lonely domain.
The night flowers returned again to their soundlessly swaying song.
The stork drew back its mottled and featherless head, bulging with blue veins, prepared to deliver the peck that would free this tasty morsel once and for all from the grip of those unsavoring teeth, which had not chewed, gnashed, or ground since the world was young.
The night flowers, had, by this time, come to anticipate the racket, and prepared themselves expectantly for its dull echoing sound, adapting the rude creature’s pecking to their rite. Bulbous, elongated, mottled and featherless vein-bulging head and pallid deathless petals alike swayed back on their sickly necks.
Then came the first sound that had entered the valley of the idol—once a plain, and now a tomb—for ages, a faint metallic whine, an altogether alien sound, more lonely than the dying moon, more avaricious than the pecking stork, and more relentless than the Mother of They Who Danced Before the Crying Idol.
An entire world, a world older than that which its inhabitants could conceive, stopped, looked heavenward, and listened.
And it came, the very bumble bee of heaven, hanging like a spider from its floating silk sack, the only wayfarer of a wingless sky, lighting its own way like a tiny yellow-eyed star falling at the speed of leaf.
