by Scott Taylor
“Yours is not a glorious mission. You will lie still, far from warmth, and might perhaps never wake. But the sky calls and I know you hear it.”
“I understand. You can’t scare me off that easily.”
“Thank you. At least know, you will not be truly alone out there.”
2097, the Kuiper Belt
Ganga held himself still before the command module window. Post-workout sweat languished on his forehead, unable to drip into his eyes without its usual accomplice—gravity. He could stare at Arrokoth all he liked.
It was still a small thing, a barely-distinguishable rusty blob in the glittering blackness of the Belt. But Ganga knew that with Arrokoth visible to the naked eye, today was finally the end of his weeks-long isolation.
He’d crawled out of the ice-box nearly a month ago, while Kirrily and Muchen got to enjoy the whole trip in frozen oblivion. Ganga was the one who had to actually put on the suit and go walking, and while vertebrate brains bounced back from cryo-stasis with reassuring alacrity, joints and fascia were less cooperative. Ganga had since lived like a muscle-beach monk, scarfing down enough protein paste to begin hallucinating its promised chicken flavor and becoming the exercise equipment’s relentless, huffing lover. By now, his shoulders almost felt like they’d never been flash-frozen.
Across the capsule, the clunky stasis equipment chirped out a little morning melody. Hot pressurized fluid snarled through the pipes behind a pair of metal coffins, into Kirrily’s and Muchen’s veins.
Ganga combed through his black hair with frantic fingers, sopped up as much sweat as he could with the collar of his jumpsuit, and flexed in the window reflection before kicking off to welcome his fellow fish-sticks back to life.
“Why do you think they built it all the way out here?” Kirrily had only taken a few hours to recover before jumping into multiple tasks at once. A hard biscuit rotated in space beside her head, her hands busy at the command module’s main terminal and her eyes busy on her crewmates. A blonde ponytail trailed all of her quick little movements.
“Maybe it was just for their rulers?” Ganga poured them all cups of hot water. He picked out a packet of dehydrated coffee for Kirrily, but couldn’t stomach the stuff anymore so stirred tea powder into the other two. “Their own Valley of the Kings.”
“Getting here from Eris is a little harder than crossing the Nile.” Kirrily gestured at the cramped capsule and the ever more Arrokoth-dominated void beyond. “I wouldn’t go to all this trouble for any king I’ve ever heard of.”
Ganga stared at Arrokoth, now close enough to make out the forms of its two lobes and the bright neck between—but not yet what they’d come all this way for. He turned to a picture that had been laser-engraved on the interior wall, the massive, angular form of an alien structure, its sealed entrance illuminated only by the internal lights of a passing probe. “I guess it’s not a very glorious monument if nobody ever gets to see it.”
Muchen, after a silent moment with his hands wrapped around a warm cup, ventured, “Exactly the point. People have always separated themselves from the dead. There’s a forbiddance to tombs, a line you’re not meant to cross.”
“Unless you’re a graverobber.” Ganga paused, realizing what he’d just said, and the three astronauts lapsed into silence while Arrokoth loomed beneath them.
Over the next few days, the crew checked all of their equipment and prepared for the mission, their ‘vigil’ as Muchen had taken to calling it. Ganga supposed it made sense for the man operating the telescope at least.
Kirrily maneuvered their ship, Ninshubur, into matching solar orbit with Arrokoth. “We’re going to stay close for Ganga’s tether.” Ninshubur hissed corrective jets at its new companion, cowing Arrokoth’s miniscule gravity.
Muchen remotely extended four telescope modules from the ship, each reaching out to the Kuiper Belt with a willowy arm of wiring and fabric. It would take days for their images to process and come in over radio, but Muchen hid his anticipation well.
Both of them saw Ganga off on his first walk, and about this none could disguise the nervous energy between them. Standing in the vacated airlock, Ganga’s whole world was sight, with sound and all other sensation locked inside his suit. He couldn’t help but flinch as Kirrily’s voice snapped through his earpiece, “Check the tether. One good jump is enough to clear you from Arrokoth’s gravity.”
“Already done.” Ganga flashed her a thumbs-up with his fat, plaster-white glove.
“Check the tether,” Muchen repeated for her.
“All alone with a bunch of busybodies.” Ganga tested every point of failure on the cable binding him to the ship. It spooled out like water, effortless, as if he were walking free. Even so, as the outer airlock doors opened before him, part of Ganga’s mind couldn’t believe that he would actually make it to the ruddy ochre form of Arrokoth below. Surely, something would stop him.
The smaller lobe, spherical Weeyo, perched upon the edge of wide, flat Wenu, bound by a pale scar. Ganga could just imagine pressing the two together with his fingers.
Ganga licked the inside of his dried mouth. “Hey uh, can I get a countdown?”
“10, 9,” Kirrily’s voice was louder at first. As Muchen matched her–“8, 7, 6,”–it sounded more like an incantation to protect their moribund traveler–“5, 4,”–who floated to the edge of the airlock and gripped the sides, arms tensing. “3, 2, 1.”
No Human Being had been so far from Earth. Ganga was on the very edge of the solar system, and he’d just jumped.
Landing on Arrokoth pushed the breath from Ganga’s lungs, not for force of impact but simply his forgetting to breathe. Dust spread where his suit touched the ground of Wenu, some specks floating off with enough force that they might drift forever. Already, Arrokoth had noted his presence.
“Contact successful,” Ganga murmured, still on hands and knees for fear that rising too quickly would cast him.
Kirrily and Muchen’s cheers flushed enough warmth back into his fingers that he could maneuver a hand down to the pack on his hip. There was no ‘walking’ on a body the size of Arrokoth. Ganga produced a narrow metal pole drilled its base into the rock beside him, then threaded a slack line around the top. He reached as far as he could along the ground before drilling in another and connecting them. He would pull himself along the line, building it as he went.
Ganga lifted his head to peer across the true vista of Arrokoth. A scant 5 kilometers between him and Akasa Linea–the bridge to Weeyo–became a vast landscape. Weeyo rose in the distance, a bumpy little hill that might as well have been the greatest mountain left in all the universe.
“Thank God.” Muchen released his hunched posture before the feed from Ganga’s camera, leaning back to let the weightless air take him.
Kirrily leaned her back against the console to stay put while she swished a hand dismissively. “Come on, you really thought he’d miss it? Half the thing even looks like a target.”
Muchen couldn’t help but laugh with the softness of relief. Then, he peered down at Kirrily through weary eyes. “One must wonder if that’s why the Erisians picked it.”
Kirrily gazed out the window at one of the telescope arms stretching away. “Assuming they were picky at all.”
“Hard to imagine building more than a handful of tombs out here.” Muchen chewed on the words, knowing their taste to be off. He looked up at the image of the dark metal structure, simple but strange, breaching the orange surface of Weeyo. “Although, it would be quite a coincidence that we just happened to glimpse such a rare thing.”
“Hey—” Ganga cut into their quiet, his panicked voice bleeding sudden tension from the calm. “Did something just impact Arrokoth?”
Kirrily shoved herself to the command console. “What? No, we would have known if anything significant was coming this way. What did you see?”
“Felt! I’d call it an earthquake, but obviously… I don’t even know where to start.”
“Arrokoth shook?” Muchen couldn’t keep much of the disbelief out of his voice. He watched Ganga’s feed but saw only the placid ochre landscape and black space above.
“I don’t know what else to tell you!”
“Hold on, he’s right.” Kirrily narrowed her eyes at some readings on a console screen. “The tether’s sensor picked up one hell of a vibration. Are you sure you didn’t snag it on something?”
Ganga took a few heavy breaths to gather enough conviction. “I felt it coming up through my stakes. It was Arrokoth.”
“Seal whatever samples you have, get free of the guide line,” Kirrily ordered. “We’re pulling you back.”
Excitement gave way to lingering confusion over the next few days. Muchen fixed one of his telescopes on the edge of Arrokoth, and no more tremors had hit. Kirrily insisted it was an equipment malfunction, and Ganga wondered when she would allow him to return.
In the dead of what passed for night on a spaceship, Ganga was woken by his sleeping straps yanking into his side. He struggled to free himself while Ninshubur’s jets hissed throughout the module. After a moment, the force of acceleration eased and he managed to shove himself out of his sleeping alcove.
“Sorry,” Kirrily said without turning her attention away from the command console. “There must have been something wrong with our initial approach calculations, we were pulling towards Arrokoth.”
Ganga rubbed his eyes. “Good you caught it I guess.”
“Very. This puppy’s not made to land.”
“Maybe the big lug out there misses me.” Ganga flashed Kirrily a hopeful smile.
“We still don’t know what caused that tremor.” Kirrily sighed. “If Arrokoth isn’t as stable as we thought, and it started to fracture…”
“I’d jump into orbit because there’s next to no gravity?” Ganga mimed being yanked by the tether. “Come on, you’d get to brag about your big catch.” He turned to Muchen for support, who was half-absorbed by a curiosity at his own station.
“He’s certainly the most impressive fish we’ll find on this pond.”
Ganga put his hands on his hips and puffed up his chest, spinning very slowly to the side. “Bet I can put up a fight too—”
“But,” Muchen continued while gesturing at his screen, “maybe not quite the most impressive catch.”
Kirrily and Ganga floated over, where Muchen’s screens printed the same code in a seemingly random sequence. “Radio signals?” Kirrily asked.
“It began half an hour ago.” Muchen tapped his fingers in thought. “I checked the ship’s transmitter, as well as Ganga’s suit, but it’s not coming from us.”
“Maybe we just picked up some Earth transmission?” Ganga proposed.
Muchen shook his head. “They’re all angled differently, but definitely the same source.”
“So, it’s close?” Kirrily kept her voice quiet, not betraying what was clearly running through her head.
Muchen nodded, and with a single soft finger pointed out the window at Arrokoth. “About five kilometers that way.”
Ganga’s excitement burst from his lips. “Where are they going?”
“It’s still calculating exact destinations, but probably a whole collection of other Kuiper Belt bodies. As for the exact source…” Muchen fixed Ganga with a look of weighty implication, then both of them turned to Kirrily.
She stared out the window before clearing her throat. “Alright, let’s get you back on the hook.”
This time, Arrokoth lay still as Ganga arrived.
“Be sure to check your stakes,” Muchen warned.
Ganga gave one a wiggle, satisfied with its stability.
“Tether’s ready to reel you back if you encounter anything unexpected.” Kirrily could barely keep her voice steady between worry and excitement. “Let us know before you set up the thermal drill.”
Ganga checked the bulky equipment case strapped to his back, which would have easily crushed him under any real gravity. Then, he grasped the stake line and kicked off from the ground at a shallow angle.
He crossed the astral desert of Wenu Lobus with a strange sort of speed, skimming across the surface for minutes until its gravity managed to pull him back. Each time, he buried another stake and kicked again.
“Good going so far,” Kirrily encouraged, unable to do anything else.
Ganga narrowed his eyes at the brightness of Akasa Linea drawing close. “Honestly, it feels easier to stay in Arrokoth’s gravity than I thought it’d be. I might even be back in time for lunch!”
“Unless the drill works,” Muchen said.
Ganga slowed his bounding as he reached the valley between Arrokoth’s two halves. He dared to stand at the bottom. Beneath him, Akasa Linea stretched as a band of glaring white, marking where the two lobes had contacted and become one. Above him, Weeyo towered.
“Ready to cross?” Kirrily asked.
“Shouldn’t I take some samples of the other parts first?”
Clearly taking a moment to restrain her enthusiasm, Kirrily returned, “Of course.”
Ganga took his time unpacking a rock scraper and a few sample containers. Akasa Linea shifted oddly beneath him, loose but crystalline like shards of ice. The frozen sand retained its luster as he scooped it into an insulated jar. Then, carefully, he walked to Weeyo and began chipping off a bit of its ochre stone. He could nearly feel the anticipation from the command module, but spoke slowly while he worked, “Do you think the Erisians cared about Arrokoth, what kind of minerals made it up?”
“Maybe, at least as far as construction was concerned.” Kirrily paused. “They probably cared about their monument more.”
“I’ve been thinking about why they chose it,” Ganga murmured. His afterthought samples safely tucked away in their pack, he turned to the horizon of Akasa Linea. “Eris’s orbit stretches well past the Kuiper Belt during aphelion. Maybe they thought there was something important about that boundary.”
Ganga could see the valley curve away, vanishing well before the limits of his eyes. Much as part of him wanted to crest the height of Weeyo and peer down at Arrokoth from on high, it was the darkness that held the true wonder.
“I wish we could figure out more of their language. What if they wrote something inside, and we end up damaging it?”
“This is almost certainly not the only tomb they built out here,” Muchen consoled him, “once our telescopes process enough images of the nearby bodies, we could have a true wealth of knowledge.”
“Ganga,” Kirrily began, reluctance making her words sticky, “do you want to hold off until tomorrow?”
He hadn’t even considered turning around. “Forget it. I’m heading there tonight.” Ganga cheered himself up a little with his own joke, and skimmed across the last few meters of sunlit ground before Arrokoth’s edge.
Crossing here proved slow, delicate work. He dug stake after stake into the solid ground of Weeyo, slowly flipping himself over to match its curve.
Then, within the scope of seconds, he left sunlight behind.
Arrokoth’s landscape turned to a silhouette. Even Ganga’s own hands only existed as they blotted out the stars in the vast empty beyond. He reached for the light button on his suit, but hesitated. Ganga supposed it must have been some ancient prey instinct not to reveal himself in the darkness, as if something could be watching from the void.
“Ganga, are you—”
Ganga flinched at Kirrily’s voice, nearly losing hold of his stake line with enough force to send him drifting. “God, oh my God.” He regained control of himself while the pounding blood settled in his limbs.
“Report!” Kirrily demanded.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Ganga swallowed and looked back at the edge of Arrokoth. The tether wrapped around it to follow him. Not the safest option now, but a lifeline nonetheless. As soon as he could muster the will to plant another stake in the ground, he looked for his goal.
There, standing atop Weeyo’s gentle stygian rise, was a stark, artificial shape occluding the rest of the Milky Way. Ganga finally turned on his light and kicked off again.
It was slower travelling the dark side, Arrokoth only certain below him in the small crest of his light, but Ganga pushed on until the artificial shape swallowed up the whole sky. He knelt on the dust before an alien tomb. Its simple, monolithic construction spoke only to a long-waiting importance.
Ganga, turned his radio off and spoke a prayer, then lifted himself enough to finally shine his light on the door.
It did not reveal the solid slab of metal that should have stood in his way, calling for the violence of a burning drill. Instead, the light was swallowed by a deep and beckoning passageway.
While most of his mind was rendered blank, Ganga fell back on the simplest training and turned his radio back on. “Command?”
He heard the chirp of the channel opening, and a few halting breaths from the other side, but no words.
Ganga drifted forward.
Muchen could see the whites of Kirrily’s eyes from the corners of his own, as both of them hunched inches away from the little screen of Ganga’s feed. “You’re going to strain your vision,” he said.
“Uh huh.”
They both willed Ganga’s light to cast farther. Even the fidelity of the tether’s wiring couldn’t capture all that had lain in darkness for so long.
Only a pale crescent in front of Ganga had enough light to make out details, proving his descent into Weeyo Lobus. Gone was the natural ochre of Arrokoth’s stone, replaced with a soft metal that drank the light deep. Ganga had relinquished much of his equipment at the doorway, using the alien construction to carry himself along.
He drifted down a wide slope. The slanted floor, ceiling, and walls were all marked with repeating depressions. Ganga wasn’t tall enough to touch floor and ceiling at once, but could use those depressions to bounce gently between them.
Ganga paused, and his channel opened for a moment with stiff breathing, as if he’d seen something in the darkness below that his camera couldn’t capture.
“Ganga?” Kirrily asked, nearly whispering despite Ganga’s soundproof helmet.
Ganga followed suit. “It’s these depressions. The same pattern repeats the whole way, does it mean anything?” He produced a lidar reader from the side of his suit, able to transcribe the topography of minute carvings.
Kirrily turned her eyes for just an instant. “Mu?”
“Don’t bother, it’s not writing.” Muchen surprised himself, telling Ganga not to record every last scrap of data he could, but the burial chamber loomed so close in his mind. “See the overlapping plate grooves? The tubular shape? A perfect match for Erisian arms.”
Ganga was silent over the open line for nearly half a minute. “They built a ladder into a tomb?”
Behind Muchen and Kirrily, Muchen’s station chimed an alert. The telescopes’ images had processed, but they could wait, as Ganga’s feed finally changed from the monotony of its descent.
Before him was another door, much smaller. It was shut, but a bar of metal stuck out parallel, with two matching Erisian symbols to either side: three points, one symbol tapering upwards, the other down.
Ganga put his hands on the bar.
“Wait!” Muchen barked.
Kirrily seemed to come back to herself. “Ganga, we don’t know what technology we’re dealing with.”
Ganga answered simply, “The first door opened for us.”
Muchen gnawed on his lip, no longer a passive observer but the man with the key. Operating an Erisian mechanism was an utterly unknown risk. But Ganga had reached for it without hesitation, and Muchen would not hold him back. “You guessed the symbols wrong. Erisian arrows go opposite of their points. Left is down, right is up.”
“Thanks.” The word sounded strangely casual, as did the slow but smooth motion of the sealing bar. Once Ganga spun it a few times, it clicked, and the whole door slid into a recess in its frame.
Ganga hadn’t taken but a few steps beyond the threshold when darkness fled. Recessed fixtures bathed the space in soft, abyssal blue, a recollection of the ocean depths where Eris nurtured her ancient children.
Two chambers spread out before Ganga, separated only by an empty archway. This first was filled with objects and airtight containers. Muchen couldn’t name them all, but he recognized a reclining lounge shaped for Erisian forms, a few religious relics, bundles of dried flora. “Grave goods.”
“Hard to preserve something better than a place like this.” Ganga paused at the archway, arrested by what lay beyond. Symbols carved into every corner of the next chamber’s walls, a cordon around the metal sarcophagus in the center. It was a plain thing in itself, marked only by a number of rounded feet, like molding, embedded into the floor. Still, Ganga wouldn’t move.
Muchen leaned towards the microphone. “Ganga, let’s get some scans of those walls first, alright?”
“Yeah,” Ganga stammered. “Yeah that sounds good.” Even spared the sarcophagus, it took him a few more moments before he entered the final room.
Kirrily felt she was holding fire in the palms of her hands. They had a greater chance to illuminate the unknown dark than she could have hoped for, but so too had that dark proven deeper. The tomb had been sealed since time immemorial. Why had it opened itself now?
She was almost grateful when her station alerted her to the ship needing to stabilize itself again. It gave her enough excuse to tear her attention away from the Ganga’s crawling task scanning all those symbols.
“Did they even test this software?” She muttered. The updated positional calculations could only make sense if Arrokoth’s gravity had grown since they arrived. She made sure to watch the corrective jets’ logs carefully as each scrolled across her screen. It all looked right.
No matter where Kirrily’s mind settled, there was no rest to be found. She caught Muchen’s attention. “Scanning’s going to take Ganga a while. Let’s see what your telescopes found.”
Muchen was reluctant to pull himself away. He moved with sluggish, distracted motions at his station, until he suddenly stiffened.
“What?” Kirrily launched herself over.
“The signal calculations finished too.” Muchen flicked through solar coordinates on one screen, while images of Kuiper Belt bodies appeared on the other.
Kirrily’s breath caught. The bodies themselves were just about right, imperfect forms of stone and ice, but nearly half of them had a single, monolithic structure standing on their most prominent point. Kirrily found herself asking, “Where are the signals being sent?” Although she knew the answer before she finished the question.
Muchen followed her gaze to the continuing slideshow of alien tombs, and merely nodded.
“Mu?” Ganga began, “Something’s up with the next row here.”
“What would the dead have to say to each other?” Kirrily mumbled, not yet listening to anything but her own confusion.
Muchen drifted back to the observation station. “Ganga?”
“Take a look. The symbols aren’t the same as they are on the top layer. Different dialects?”
“No,” Muchen said. “Those are entirely different scripts. Scan the next row down… those too. And the next row. There have to be dozens of Erisian languages here.”
“Think they’re all saying the same thing?”
“We know of a few matching symbols by now, give me a minute.” Muchen struck his keyboard with a clacking so fervent it pulled Kirrily from her contemplation. By the time she was beside Muchen, he’d started scribbling myriad Erisian symbols in his notebook and comparing translations for the few he knew. “Warning… the sky… noise, or voice, we don’t know that one for sure… sun… down, or deep, or far… warning… animal…” He tapped his pen on the edge of the notebook. “The spacing isn’t identical, given differences in grammar and symbol kerning, but it has to be the same message.”
Ganga had insisted on scanning all the symbols anyway, in the hope that there would be some other mystery to solve before his true task. That done, he had nothing left but to face the sarcophagus.
He fumbled in a side bag for the biopsy tool, a crude thing made with consideration for the starkness of space rather than the depth of its trespass. A part of him hoped that he would simply fail to open the box, while another knew the crushing weight of disappointment from such a failure. So, he was content to let the work of the Erisians decide.
“I’m going to see what sort of lid we’re dealing with.”
The script on the walls reminded Ganga of grave spells, meant to guard the body and spirit, and in this he supposed he was their enemy. He put a gloved hand on the sarcophagus.
The alert that chirped through his helmet was a small and frail noise, but its meaning struck his chest like stone. His communication had been cut off. Ganga tugged at the tether stuck to his back, and found the dark cord drifting towards him, slack. After a few meters of length, it was gone, severed clean. His eyes rose to find the tomb’s inner door shut, all without a sound.
He tried to turn on the radio connection, only static answered him buried so deep in walls of metal.
His training had left him as surely as Kirrily and Muchen’s voices, and Ganga couldn’t process enough thoughts to even conceive of what to do. Then, to this small and frightened animal, came sound. Air hissed past his helmet. The boots of his suit fell with muffled thuds on the floor, steps suddenly heavy enough to hold him down. If not for his weeks of exercise, he would have collapsed on the spot.
Below him—below the sarcophagus—a hot fluid pumped up through its metal feet.
Ganga stumbled backwards against the wall, grateful that the gravity was still just a mere fraction of Earth’s. His fingers, even through cloth and airtight lining, felt out the symbols. What warning had been so important to hand to the dead?
Minutes passed in the groaning of this ancient, waking structure, and Ganga couldn’t bring himself to move. Nor could he turn away when the sarcophagus’s lid slid open. His mind conjured all sorts of horrors, but nothing that matched the true presence of five dark eyes staring back at him.
He’d seen the images the Erisians made of themselves, so he at least did not have to process the form of the creature that dragged its uncooperative body from the box. It rested on the overlapping plates of one wide tail, while two tentacle arms explored the pale light of Ganga’s suit. It moved almost like a seal, aquatic form frustrated but persistent on ground. Even so, it towered over Ganga, and should not have been alive.
Ganga resisted the instinct to run, then that to fight, even to freeze, as the Erisian reached towards his sides. He let it pry the biopsy tool from his fingers, and as it pressed his fingers against the wall, it called so deep that Ganga only knew its voice by the trembling of his skull, which began to consume his very thoughts.
“I don’t know if we’ll even hold together!” Kirrily clutched her terminal as if that could make Ninshubur bear them away from this impossible gravity any more safely. She bristled beneath Arrokoth as it continued to encroach on the scant remaining space between them.
“Just get us stable!” Muchen pleaded, “Ganga’s not on his tether, if we leave—”
“If we don’t, and Arrokoth’s gravity changes again…” Kirrily’s palms burned where she held them. “Just… just get him back on the radio, somehow!”
Muchen couldn’t even claim he’d tried, because there was nothing to do. If Ganga couldn’t transmit, then no receiver in the universe would hear a call from Arrokoth.
In the silence of their shared desperation, Muchen and Kirrily heard the little chirp from Muchen’s station. It wasn’t Ganga, but another of the unknown signals sent out from whatever Erisian machine could still speak after such a long sleep. This one pointed to a very particular object of the Kuiper Belt—the Ninshubur.
Muchen hesitated to turn their operation radio off of Ganga’s channel, but its dreadful static was scraping his ears bloody. He tuned their receiver to the Erisian frequency and babbled what few words of theirs he knew, even though his human voice could not make the low sounds in which their languages lay, nor could his human ears have perceived their answer.
Yet, he did hear a voice. It was not Ganga’s cadence, nor his trepidation, not even his own words, but it was the timber of his chest, humming as if shaken by some hadal vibration.
“Our gift is not glorious, it is a warning. We thought ourselves a knowledgeable and powerful people, nursed beneath the ice of Eris. We too heard the call of the sky even as we were blind to its stars. But we breached the frozen surface and, in Eris’s eclectic flight, we beheld what lay beyond this belt you have named Kuiper, beyond the warmth of the sun. We have seen a great cold thing in sepulcher, and it has seen us.
“We retreat back to the depths, let Eris’s ice swallow what we have built upon her, and we bury the bravest of us among this last threshold, that you will pause to trespass upon them.
“Have your own eyes strayed beyond the light of our sun? Have you, too, been seen in the dark?”
“Heed this warning, as you heeded the promise of another animal’s bones.”
Scott Taylor is a short story and novel writer most interested in speculative and surreal fiction. He works as a fiction editor and lives in Bellingham, Washington with his family and a decisive black cat. With a fascination in the hidden wonders and terrors of the world, he explores multiple media of art, from prose to playwriting to music, finding that each medium feeds into the others.
Scott’s short stories have been featured in four previous HamLit issues: “Real Live Dinosaur” in Monsoon Season: Flood Memory, “It Came from the Ocean, and It Was” in Special Issue ’24: After Dark, “Laws of Attraction” in Autumnal Equinox: Hearth Songs, and “The Stoneshaper” in Summer Solstice: Life Expectancy.