From ‘The Churned Earth’: The Ceremony
Eleanor HancoxA Ceremony could only take place in the event of a blistering eclipse.
Above the alabaster sands, the sky fell like a pall, like a black cap placed over a lit candlestick. In the darkness the white plains appeared hazy grey, shifting in the slightest wind like smoke lurching and curling after a flame has gone out. The chant began with a crackle of static, as it always did, before a dozen other voices joined, thrumming through their metal chests:
“Churned from the earth,
Their death gave us birth.”
The stranger beside Roe turned his head to face her and became a pair of flaming eyes. The whites flickered, sparking with reflections, and the two pupils were streaked at times with light like the smouldering charcoal left crumbling into the pit, like the film of glass fired and then fractured by the eclipse. Before, he had been a grey silhouette. Shadows cradled his bright eyes; they danced upon his ashen cheeks as his lips moved, another black shadow like the soot smudge from a thumb’s touch in his cupid’s bow and below his bottom lip.
The stranger became a low voice where before he had been a silent silhouette as he said, flicker in his eyes, “What does that mean?”
If Roe had not known to listen with care when he turned to her, she would have lost his words among the sounds of the Ceremony. The stranger glanced up at her, brow creasing into his hairline, but he seemed to address the sands at his feet. His words were a murmur. Roe remembered her own first time hearing the History performed. She remembered the quiver of taut awe through her wires and the moss of her spores as Mother Ship projected her rasping voice through each of the speakers mounted around her exterior, remembered the reverential silence that fell among them all even as white light screamed through the lens and the metal in the Ceremony pit groaned, gargled, spat as it slouched down into liquid. Now this stranger must feel much the same amazement. It gleamed in his eyes and trembled a little in his lips.
Lowering her head towards him, Roe kept her voice soft in response. The gentle vibrations from her speaker rumbled through her throat to her chin and up through the plates of her face. She said, “We chant this at every Ceremony to pay our respects to those who died before we could come to these lives. Long ago, we were all dormant spores lying scattered in the sands, too deep beneath the surface for even the strongest winds in the wildest storms to turn us up, even as they blew some dunes flat and drew others up from the flat landscape.”