Looking Up
Note: Some language and themes are not suitable for younger readers.
As the lights for the press conference came up and blinded him, time stalled, and he was lost in his thoughts.
When the Council had moved his press conference to the Sacred Copularium, he’d first thought of resisting their choice. He knew the Council had made the move partly out of necessity.
After all, the crowd which had gathered this evening to see him say his peace and depart into the black sky numbered in the many thousands. The seating lining the vast arena field was the only place on the planet such a crowd could be accommodated, at least above ground.
Yet, at the same time, it was not lost on him that the last second change of venue had also been intended – very clearly intended – to stick it to him at his leaving. That is, if he was actually able to leave. It was an open question. When the moment arrived, would he actually be able to rise up from the great game-field and disappear into the realm of space beyond his planet, the space above their heads that his people scarcely even wondered about?
There were still many doubters, many who thought his wild plan would end in failure, shame, and a fiery death. Honestly, some nights he awoke in his bed as one of the doubters himself. Even in this frozen moment of thought, the hoots and criticisms of the crowd reached out from beyond the corona of the stage lights, penetrated his ears, and chilled his heart.
Nothing like this journey had ever been attempted by his people. More truthfully, nothing like this journey had ever been conceived by his people. And, in the interest of full disclosure, he himself had never imagined such a journey before the Voice grabbed him from above and set in motion the whole odd, dangerous process that had become his life’s work.
Not only had nothing like this journey been devised or pursued before, but his dreaming it, funding it, and attempting it was a harsh, bruising slap to the face of his people. He knew it; they knew it, and so they’d stuck it to him by forcing him onto the game-field of the Copularium for his press conference.
He hadn’t set foot in the sacred arena for twelve years, the time it took for the Voice to bind him to its will and to guide him in his preparations for the journey. It was a pursuit that had almost bankrupted him, even though he’d started out as a man of extreme wealth.
Before the Voice had come to him he’d been an enraptured fan present at the Copularium weekly for the games. In fact he’d been there even on days when there were no games to be seen, only preparations for the next festival’s bloodsport and the crowd that would watch it. The Copularium itself had eventually been named after him, and his wealth had funded much of its construction and regular operations.
Back in those days he’d owned a box seat of honor high up in the stands, a place that in the present moment was lost in the darkness beyond the stage lights. For years he’d occupied the center seat of his box and the High King Champion of the weekly game had been forced by tradition to look up to him as he coupled with his final female consort on the arena field. And, when their moment of climax was reached, the Champion and his consort would raise their hands to him in salute and cry out his name in obeisance.
Yet that was years ago, and now twelve years of games and death and fucking had transpired on this very arena floor without his being present to witness it. After he had withdrawn his funds and his presence, there had been convulsions and conflict within the community, but eventually things had reset themselves and gone on as before. Other investors were found. Other powerful people bought his box and made it their own.
People make happen what they desire, whether their desire is holy or hellish. This was a piece of wisdom the Voice had taught him and, after a long process of letting go and moving on, he knew it to be true from experience. He had even come to a certain peace about it.
But the road to that peace had been a hard walk on a path littered with the detritus of grief. The immediate aftermath of his withdrawal from the Copularium and from the weekly Games had led to personnel lay-offs and city-wide rage.
The rage had sparked not only angry outcries broadcast on the evening news, but also riots in the streets. One such riot had spilled through the gates of his home compound and injected chaos into the meticulous, orderly art of the red rock gardens that stood right outside his front door.
The mob’s invasion had driven him into an inner bedroom. Overwhelmed by bitter tears, he’d hidden in his bedroom and desperately sought out the Voice for wisdom about what to do next.
His son Rasoul, a virtuous man given to action and peace, had taken his father’s collapse as a chance to act.
Rasoul had gone into the gardens to speak peace to the mob. Rasoul had spoken exactly as his father knew he would if ever given the chance.
Rasoul had said, “Friends, colleagues, countrymen, my father has come to believe that how we live – how we, for instance, cheer over the death and sex and blood spread upon the Copularium field – is without rightness. Father has come to believe that it must end, or we will end.
“Do not be angry, brothers. Instead, be circumspect and prayerful. Maybe the flood of fire will not come, if we but change our path and walk into a new dawn.”
Rasoul had been killed, struck in the head by a thick, red rock from his father’s garden.
A year later Rasoul’s mother left. She’d been overcome by the loss of her son and lost to anger over the changes in her once great husband.
On her way out the door, his wife said with venom in her voice that she hated this Voice. She hated this Voice she could not hear but who had so gladly taken her son’s life and her husband’s testicles. She said she yearned for the old days of games and glory and prestige.
Now at his press conference, stuck in a frozen moment of memory, blinded by the lights and surrounded by the crowd’s jeers, he imagined he could pick out his wife’s high, sing-song voice from the rest of the crowd. He imagined he could hear her spit out his name and follow it with shouts of “Bastard!”, “Failure!”, and “Fucker!”
How it had gone so wrong with his people was still a wonder to him. His absence from the games had nothing to do with him suddenly becoming more pure than the others. It had nothing to do with him being more wise than the devotees who had for so long relied upon his largess for their satisfaction.
Simply stated, something had changed inside of him because something outside of him had sought him out, assaulted him, and demanded he look up.
Odd as it may sound to people of other lands and cultures and planets, he and his people had never really looked up before. Buildings like the Copularium were the rare exceptions to the ingrained tradition and tendency of his people. His people had always burrowed down deep and wide into the rich, red clay of their world.
Culturally, they were a people trained to look down – to look down at slain enemies bleeding out on the war field, to look down at sexual partners mounted, sweated, and ravished, to look down at household slaves taught to walk with bent knees to accent their lowness.
Among his people height was a great personal attribute, one for which they were bred, like some cultures might breed for strength or intellect. You see, if you were tall you rarely needed to look up to others. To look down on others, both physically and socially, was to be great. To look up was to be humbled and weak. Such was how his people were, how he had been.
But something had come to him from above and frightened him, ripped at his sanity, and called forth both his awe and his service. So here he was in front of thousands about to speak just moments before his departure, his risky ascension into the sky demanded by the same Voice that had called him to look up.
He had been at home in the deep dark of the evening when he was forced by the Voice to look up for the first time. His house had been hushed and still until the Voice came to him from above. That was the only thing he was completely sure of. The Voice had come to him from above.
It had spoken his name, and he had performed a great dishonor for someone of his high rank – he’d looked up without even thinking. The Voice’s second call of his name had sounded higher still, and – shamefully – he began to track it upwards. In a growing franticness he started working up the floors of his towered home which spiraled 200 feet into the air and poked above all the other structures of his city.
He went up a couple of floors and then heard the voice call his name and say, “LOOK UP TO ME!”
A couple of floors higher and the voice spoke again: “RISE!”
A few more floors still higher and the invisible call was “TAKE EVERYTHING AND TAKE NOTHING!”
Yet a few more and this strange proverb descended and ripped into him: “YOUR DOUBT IN YOUR LIFE TODAY IS YOUR RIGHTEOUNESS IN ME FOR TOMORROW!”
On it went, relentless and almost cruel. Another couple of floors and he was pummeled with “WHAT HOLDS YOU DOWN WILL SEND YOU UP AND AWAY TO THE NEW HOME I AM PREPARING!”
Then, finally, he stood exposed on his roof. He stood panting and staring into the night sky. He stood twenty stories above his land with red ground and blue water extending below him in every direction. There was no one in his world as powerful as he, but still the Voice forced him to look up and said to him, “FIX YOU ELECTRONOCLE THERE AND RISE TO MEET IT!”
In a way he could not explain a part of the sky shimmered before him and a pinpoint in the night sky sitting in the center of the shimmer glowed more brightly. Slowly, with the odd pacing of a dream, he removed his electronocle from his cloak.
The electronocle was an expensive, electronically enhanced spy-glass, and obediently he fixed it on the shimmering spot in a sky. In the eyepiece he saw a small ball of white and green and blue.
Everything that had happened over the twelve years following that night, everything that had led to this press conference and to his departure, had been an unpacking of that violent, shocking, sublime night filled with an unseen Voice calling out riddles to his upturned face.
All along the way, from the Voice’s first utterance onwards, he knew he could have said “No!”, shut his ears, taken his seat in the Copularium stands, and pretended nothing was amiss.
But to do so would have taken a great movement of will. Like with the escalation of the sex act, there was a great pull for him to follow through until completion. While the sex act pulled at his loins, and the Voice pulled at his guts and mind, the force was much the same. It was a paradox: resistible and yet seemingly irresistible all at once.
Now on a night twelve years later it was time for the press conference to begin.
Without fanfare, he simply began to speak. At his first syllable, the harsh barkings of the crowd ceased completely. It was as if a lead door had been slammed shut on a raucous party in full swing. His lips moved, but his brain did not move them. It felt like his words roamed unbridled and bareback across the arena.
“Fellow countrymen of the Red Land, I built this arena. I have sat in the box of honor. Like you, I have roared my cheers when the 15 champions were released onto the stadium floor, one for each tribe of our people. Like you, I have sat in those seats and gauged the relative speed of our sons as they scrambled to the center of the Copularium field to claim the weapons stashed there.
“Like you, I betted and cheered as our 15 sons sliced, speared, and crushed one another until only one stood breathing and bleeding, but alive. Like you, I prayed with fervency for his health as medics rushed to him and used their tonics and elixirs to revive our High King Champion.
“And, like you I celebrated what I long believed was a great affirmation of life. I celebrated when our Champion, now revived and erect, was overwhelmed in an avalanche of flesh and orgasm. I cheered with you as the six consorts set upon him – each of them drugged and oiled, naked and primed to the point of ecstasy. Like you, I have put my electronocle to my eye and focused in on the swollen labias of the prized consorts.
“And, like you, sometimes I purchased a commemorative shirt from a game that had moved me profoundly.
“But now it is different. I am different. I have been told by a Voice from above, (yes, friends, from above) that the little doubt I held within myself about the rightness of our lives could be fanned into the flame of a new and better life. Perhaps it could have been the same for you, but you did not listen to the flickering doubt within you. So you and I have parted ways. We did so long before this night. But tonight that parting will be clear and final.”
A few minutes later, with the crowd still silent, he was within his craft strapped into a seat and counting down to liftoff. When the engines were engaged, very little fire flowed from the tubes beneath his craft. He needed little thrust to break the bonds of his red sphere. His ship had been designed to reverse the pull of his planet’s gravity and turn it into a mighty force of propulsion.
Eight years ago he’d realized that this was the solution to the Voice’s riddle: “WHAT HOLDS YOU DOWN WILL SEND YOU UP TO THE NEW HOME I AM PREPARING!” And he had spent untold amounts of money so that the best minds could make it so.
Strapped into his safety seat and sensing his home shrink below him, he looked around at the four walls surrounding him and saw the fruit of another hard-won solution to a different riddle: “TAKE EVERYTHING AND TAKE NOTHING!”
One wall was labeled “Upon the Land”, another “Within the Sea”, still another “Among the Air”, and, finally, the fourth wall bore the title “Under the Dirt”.
Each wall was lined from floor to ceiling with row after row of small vials encased and protected in cushioned pockets. Each vial held the primal notes, the life code, of each creature he and his closest advisors could think of. He trusted with a fervency that frightened him, that when he set foot upon the green fields of his new land, the Voice would show him how to grow everything from its invisible seeds.
Despite his confidence, he felt sad and crushed. How could he not? He cheered himself by touching his chest and fingering the two vials within his breast pocket. The vials were identical in shape and form to the thousands that lined the walls of his spacecraft. But what lay within those two vials demanded they rest near his heart.
Within one vial were Rasoul’s primal notes stolen from a hairbrush after the unthinkable loss had become undeniable reality. Within the other rested the code for his wife. He’d captured it from the spit she’d left on his face the last time they’d talked face-to-face as husband and wife.
The Voice hadn't said anything to him about these two vials, their contents, or the despair and insane hope that had propelled him to fill them. But, deep within, he sensed this was not what the Voice had demanded or anticipated.
That was all right. At some point his relationship with the Voice would have to shift from dictation to dialogue. He’d lost so much that he could – he would – demand at least this from the Voice that had demanded so much from him. He touched his chest pocket again, this time with a long and loving stroke.
As the small fire of his craft disappeared into the night sky above his former home, he wondered if his people, gathered as one body in the Copularium, had actually looked up and watched him depart. If they hadn’t, it was ultimately of no consequence. They soon would look up whether they wished to or not.
For as his fire shrank and disappeared, a much greater fire enshrouding a massive ball of rock and ice was expanding in the sky. And, in a moment not long from now, it would descend upon them and all would go black and the games would end no matter who was funding them.
He sighed. He wept. He raged and cursed his people and himself and the Voice. Then he checked his speed and calculated his arrival. He did the math. At his current speed it would be a short journey, all things considered. Just forty days.
When the Council had moved his press conference to the Sacred Copularium, he’d first thought of resisting their choice. He knew the Council had made the move partly out of necessity.
After all, the crowd which had gathered this evening to see him say his peace and depart into the black sky numbered in the many thousands. The seating lining the vast arena field was the only place on the planet such a crowd could be accommodated, at least above ground.
Yet, at the same time, it was not lost on him that the last second change of venue had also been intended – very clearly intended – to stick it to him at his leaving. That is, if he was actually able to leave. It was an open question. When the moment arrived, would he actually be able to rise up from the great game-field and disappear into the realm of space beyond his planet, the space above their heads that his people scarcely even wondered about?
There were still many doubters, many who thought his wild plan would end in failure, shame, and a fiery death. Honestly, some nights he awoke in his bed as one of the doubters himself. Even in this frozen moment of thought, the hoots and criticisms of the crowd reached out from beyond the corona of the stage lights, penetrated his ears, and chilled his heart.
Nothing like this journey had ever been attempted by his people. More truthfully, nothing like this journey had ever been conceived by his people. And, in the interest of full disclosure, he himself had never imagined such a journey before the Voice grabbed him from above and set in motion the whole odd, dangerous process that had become his life’s work.
Not only had nothing like this journey been devised or pursued before, but his dreaming it, funding it, and attempting it was a harsh, bruising slap to the face of his people. He knew it; they knew it, and so they’d stuck it to him by forcing him onto the game-field of the Copularium for his press conference.
He hadn’t set foot in the sacred arena for twelve years, the time it took for the Voice to bind him to its will and to guide him in his preparations for the journey. It was a pursuit that had almost bankrupted him, even though he’d started out as a man of extreme wealth.
Before the Voice had come to him he’d been an enraptured fan present at the Copularium weekly for the games. In fact he’d been there even on days when there were no games to be seen, only preparations for the next festival’s bloodsport and the crowd that would watch it. The Copularium itself had eventually been named after him, and his wealth had funded much of its construction and regular operations.
Back in those days he’d owned a box seat of honor high up in the stands, a place that in the present moment was lost in the darkness beyond the stage lights. For years he’d occupied the center seat of his box and the High King Champion of the weekly game had been forced by tradition to look up to him as he coupled with his final female consort on the arena field. And, when their moment of climax was reached, the Champion and his consort would raise their hands to him in salute and cry out his name in obeisance.
Yet that was years ago, and now twelve years of games and death and fucking had transpired on this very arena floor without his being present to witness it. After he had withdrawn his funds and his presence, there had been convulsions and conflict within the community, but eventually things had reset themselves and gone on as before. Other investors were found. Other powerful people bought his box and made it their own.
People make happen what they desire, whether their desire is holy or hellish. This was a piece of wisdom the Voice had taught him and, after a long process of letting go and moving on, he knew it to be true from experience. He had even come to a certain peace about it.
But the road to that peace had been a hard walk on a path littered with the detritus of grief. The immediate aftermath of his withdrawal from the Copularium and from the weekly Games had led to personnel lay-offs and city-wide rage.
The rage had sparked not only angry outcries broadcast on the evening news, but also riots in the streets. One such riot had spilled through the gates of his home compound and injected chaos into the meticulous, orderly art of the red rock gardens that stood right outside his front door.
The mob’s invasion had driven him into an inner bedroom. Overwhelmed by bitter tears, he’d hidden in his bedroom and desperately sought out the Voice for wisdom about what to do next.
His son Rasoul, a virtuous man given to action and peace, had taken his father’s collapse as a chance to act.
Rasoul had gone into the gardens to speak peace to the mob. Rasoul had spoken exactly as his father knew he would if ever given the chance.
Rasoul had said, “Friends, colleagues, countrymen, my father has come to believe that how we live – how we, for instance, cheer over the death and sex and blood spread upon the Copularium field – is without rightness. Father has come to believe that it must end, or we will end.
“Do not be angry, brothers. Instead, be circumspect and prayerful. Maybe the flood of fire will not come, if we but change our path and walk into a new dawn.”
Rasoul had been killed, struck in the head by a thick, red rock from his father’s garden.
A year later Rasoul’s mother left. She’d been overcome by the loss of her son and lost to anger over the changes in her once great husband.
On her way out the door, his wife said with venom in her voice that she hated this Voice. She hated this Voice she could not hear but who had so gladly taken her son’s life and her husband’s testicles. She said she yearned for the old days of games and glory and prestige.
Now at his press conference, stuck in a frozen moment of memory, blinded by the lights and surrounded by the crowd’s jeers, he imagined he could pick out his wife’s high, sing-song voice from the rest of the crowd. He imagined he could hear her spit out his name and follow it with shouts of “Bastard!”, “Failure!”, and “Fucker!”
How it had gone so wrong with his people was still a wonder to him. His absence from the games had nothing to do with him suddenly becoming more pure than the others. It had nothing to do with him being more wise than the devotees who had for so long relied upon his largess for their satisfaction.
Simply stated, something had changed inside of him because something outside of him had sought him out, assaulted him, and demanded he look up.
Odd as it may sound to people of other lands and cultures and planets, he and his people had never really looked up before. Buildings like the Copularium were the rare exceptions to the ingrained tradition and tendency of his people. His people had always burrowed down deep and wide into the rich, red clay of their world.
Culturally, they were a people trained to look down – to look down at slain enemies bleeding out on the war field, to look down at sexual partners mounted, sweated, and ravished, to look down at household slaves taught to walk with bent knees to accent their lowness.
Among his people height was a great personal attribute, one for which they were bred, like some cultures might breed for strength or intellect. You see, if you were tall you rarely needed to look up to others. To look down on others, both physically and socially, was to be great. To look up was to be humbled and weak. Such was how his people were, how he had been.
But something had come to him from above and frightened him, ripped at his sanity, and called forth both his awe and his service. So here he was in front of thousands about to speak just moments before his departure, his risky ascension into the sky demanded by the same Voice that had called him to look up.
He had been at home in the deep dark of the evening when he was forced by the Voice to look up for the first time. His house had been hushed and still until the Voice came to him from above. That was the only thing he was completely sure of. The Voice had come to him from above.
It had spoken his name, and he had performed a great dishonor for someone of his high rank – he’d looked up without even thinking. The Voice’s second call of his name had sounded higher still, and – shamefully – he began to track it upwards. In a growing franticness he started working up the floors of his towered home which spiraled 200 feet into the air and poked above all the other structures of his city.
He went up a couple of floors and then heard the voice call his name and say, “LOOK UP TO ME!”
A couple of floors higher and the voice spoke again: “RISE!”
A few more floors still higher and the invisible call was “TAKE EVERYTHING AND TAKE NOTHING!”
Yet a few more and this strange proverb descended and ripped into him: “YOUR DOUBT IN YOUR LIFE TODAY IS YOUR RIGHTEOUNESS IN ME FOR TOMORROW!”
On it went, relentless and almost cruel. Another couple of floors and he was pummeled with “WHAT HOLDS YOU DOWN WILL SEND YOU UP AND AWAY TO THE NEW HOME I AM PREPARING!”
Then, finally, he stood exposed on his roof. He stood panting and staring into the night sky. He stood twenty stories above his land with red ground and blue water extending below him in every direction. There was no one in his world as powerful as he, but still the Voice forced him to look up and said to him, “FIX YOU ELECTRONOCLE THERE AND RISE TO MEET IT!”
In a way he could not explain a part of the sky shimmered before him and a pinpoint in the night sky sitting in the center of the shimmer glowed more brightly. Slowly, with the odd pacing of a dream, he removed his electronocle from his cloak.
The electronocle was an expensive, electronically enhanced spy-glass, and obediently he fixed it on the shimmering spot in a sky. In the eyepiece he saw a small ball of white and green and blue.
Everything that had happened over the twelve years following that night, everything that had led to this press conference and to his departure, had been an unpacking of that violent, shocking, sublime night filled with an unseen Voice calling out riddles to his upturned face.
All along the way, from the Voice’s first utterance onwards, he knew he could have said “No!”, shut his ears, taken his seat in the Copularium stands, and pretended nothing was amiss.
But to do so would have taken a great movement of will. Like with the escalation of the sex act, there was a great pull for him to follow through until completion. While the sex act pulled at his loins, and the Voice pulled at his guts and mind, the force was much the same. It was a paradox: resistible and yet seemingly irresistible all at once.
Now on a night twelve years later it was time for the press conference to begin.
Without fanfare, he simply began to speak. At his first syllable, the harsh barkings of the crowd ceased completely. It was as if a lead door had been slammed shut on a raucous party in full swing. His lips moved, but his brain did not move them. It felt like his words roamed unbridled and bareback across the arena.
“Fellow countrymen of the Red Land, I built this arena. I have sat in the box of honor. Like you, I have roared my cheers when the 15 champions were released onto the stadium floor, one for each tribe of our people. Like you, I have sat in those seats and gauged the relative speed of our sons as they scrambled to the center of the Copularium field to claim the weapons stashed there.
“Like you, I betted and cheered as our 15 sons sliced, speared, and crushed one another until only one stood breathing and bleeding, but alive. Like you, I prayed with fervency for his health as medics rushed to him and used their tonics and elixirs to revive our High King Champion.
“And, like you I celebrated what I long believed was a great affirmation of life. I celebrated when our Champion, now revived and erect, was overwhelmed in an avalanche of flesh and orgasm. I cheered with you as the six consorts set upon him – each of them drugged and oiled, naked and primed to the point of ecstasy. Like you, I have put my electronocle to my eye and focused in on the swollen labias of the prized consorts.
“And, like you, sometimes I purchased a commemorative shirt from a game that had moved me profoundly.
“But now it is different. I am different. I have been told by a Voice from above, (yes, friends, from above) that the little doubt I held within myself about the rightness of our lives could be fanned into the flame of a new and better life. Perhaps it could have been the same for you, but you did not listen to the flickering doubt within you. So you and I have parted ways. We did so long before this night. But tonight that parting will be clear and final.”
A few minutes later, with the crowd still silent, he was within his craft strapped into a seat and counting down to liftoff. When the engines were engaged, very little fire flowed from the tubes beneath his craft. He needed little thrust to break the bonds of his red sphere. His ship had been designed to reverse the pull of his planet’s gravity and turn it into a mighty force of propulsion.
Eight years ago he’d realized that this was the solution to the Voice’s riddle: “WHAT HOLDS YOU DOWN WILL SEND YOU UP TO THE NEW HOME I AM PREPARING!” And he had spent untold amounts of money so that the best minds could make it so.
Strapped into his safety seat and sensing his home shrink below him, he looked around at the four walls surrounding him and saw the fruit of another hard-won solution to a different riddle: “TAKE EVERYTHING AND TAKE NOTHING!”
One wall was labeled “Upon the Land”, another “Within the Sea”, still another “Among the Air”, and, finally, the fourth wall bore the title “Under the Dirt”.
Each wall was lined from floor to ceiling with row after row of small vials encased and protected in cushioned pockets. Each vial held the primal notes, the life code, of each creature he and his closest advisors could think of. He trusted with a fervency that frightened him, that when he set foot upon the green fields of his new land, the Voice would show him how to grow everything from its invisible seeds.
Despite his confidence, he felt sad and crushed. How could he not? He cheered himself by touching his chest and fingering the two vials within his breast pocket. The vials were identical in shape and form to the thousands that lined the walls of his spacecraft. But what lay within those two vials demanded they rest near his heart.
Within one vial were Rasoul’s primal notes stolen from a hairbrush after the unthinkable loss had become undeniable reality. Within the other rested the code for his wife. He’d captured it from the spit she’d left on his face the last time they’d talked face-to-face as husband and wife.
The Voice hadn't said anything to him about these two vials, their contents, or the despair and insane hope that had propelled him to fill them. But, deep within, he sensed this was not what the Voice had demanded or anticipated.
That was all right. At some point his relationship with the Voice would have to shift from dictation to dialogue. He’d lost so much that he could – he would – demand at least this from the Voice that had demanded so much from him. He touched his chest pocket again, this time with a long and loving stroke.
As the small fire of his craft disappeared into the night sky above his former home, he wondered if his people, gathered as one body in the Copularium, had actually looked up and watched him depart. If they hadn’t, it was ultimately of no consequence. They soon would look up whether they wished to or not.
For as his fire shrank and disappeared, a much greater fire enshrouding a massive ball of rock and ice was expanding in the sky. And, in a moment not long from now, it would descend upon them and all would go black and the games would end no matter who was funding them.
He sighed. He wept. He raged and cursed his people and himself and the Voice. Then he checked his speed and calculated his arrival. He did the math. At his current speed it would be a short journey, all things considered. Just forty days.