Sarcon’s Son
Sarconsson is imprisoned within the gaol of rock, and Lively inherits the magic mirror.
“Old-believers tell how the Primal Immortal from whom came the world is Love, and how upon this world there came Life, after which arrived Love’s necessary sibling, Death.” — Fox Wisdom
Sarconsson, bat-winged imp, steals the arrow that stabs the bare sole of Lord Jesus. It is a joke, a prank, played on the favored child of our Virgin Mother, and She does not take it well. Divine matriarchs have no use for humor. Sarconsson knows nothing else. He would die of idleness in a world without gags and pratfalls.
He has gotten his impish hands on a shaft from Love’s quiver, a broken one to be sure, but authentic. You know the bow and arrow stories, how Immortal Love ambushes perfectly reasonable people and shoots them full of mad passion so their lives become thrilling and tragic. That sort of arrow, tipped with Love’s own poison.
Sarconsson makes a quick jab to the Holy Underside of Lord Jesus’ foot and all Hell breaks loose in Heaven. Hubbub and hullabaloo. The uproar leads to Love’s abandonment of our planet. Love soars off, away, into space, to a far galaxy where They (Love encompasses multitudes) build a palace that becomes a favorite holiday destination of Immortals.
The universe teems with everlasting beings. Many of Them once lived among us. Now, like Love, They come and go. Mostly They stay gone. We mortals are left behind to populate the earth, but this is not our story.
At the time of his arrow adventure Sarconsson is shockingly ancient, an elder among imps who are not Immortals but who can live so long it may seem that way. First, backstory. Way, way, way, way back, to a sweaty swampy Pre-Jesus Era at the dawn of Life, back when the world is raw and the mechanics of reproduction are random. Life rolls Her great bulk over the globe, creeping along Her mucus trail and spawning organic matter from Her wet womb.
Sarcon is a bit of that matter. Sarcon is a sexless blob of proto-flesh drifting through shallow, salty water, occasionally rolled by tides up onto the mud flats. Lying there, splayed on the sea’s edge, Sarcon is ravished by the wild West Wind.
Wind scours Sarcon, inseminates its lumpish matter, and blows on, heedless. Sarcon gives birth to a son.
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Sarcon’s son inherits from his meaty parent a skin covering, but mostly he is made of wind shrieking inside a membrane. All that turbulent air comes from Daddy West, as does his near-immortality. Newly whelped, Sarconsson rambles the young world, rides the gusts of his uncles South and North and East. Imps like him proliferate because the Winds are a randy lot of brothers.
The Imp survival rate, however, is low. Life is an inattentive mother, lacking any self-awareness. She spews biological units at a reckless pace while close behind stalks Her constant companion, Death, trampling on whatever does not run or hide or otherwise escape through pure luck. A few make it long enough to reproduce. They too are doomed. Eventually. Sarconsson is outrageously lucky, although he’ll never know it. He will always believe skill and worthiness keep him alive.
Imps are shapeshifters. They take pleasure in contouring their skins. Inside he is a windstorm, but for the outside Sarconsson makes a face for seeing and being seen, wings for locomotion, a body for gratification. He believes himself a masterpiece of his own creation.
The world begins young and then grows less young. Millennia go by in the thousands but no one notices, no one’s counting. The contest between Life and Death is irresistible to a meddling imp, and Sarconsson delights in taking sides, now one, now the other, back and forth. Later deities will call these Ages.
For long spans he plays tricks on Death: lighted matches between the toes, hot pepper juice spilled on fingers that absently rub Death’s eyes, surprise trap doors dropping into cesspits, fire ants in underwear back from the laundry, pails of tar balanced over doorways, garden gnomes left where they are fallen over. What fun! Poor Death is distracted so Life can run wild, crowding the world with Her offspring.
Other spans he picks on Life. His favorite stunt is to salt Her, like nasty children do to garden slugs. She explodes and withers and mass extinctions fill the valleys, the ocean floor with rotted matter. Hooray! Death is supreme.
Now to begin our story. Oh, but wait. Peek into Sarconsson’s head. It’s blustery in there, screaming like a gale in a chimney. That’s all he’s known. But something new is raging in that wind. Tedium. The strangling, stifling suffocation of living forever. Or … what feels like forever.
He hasn’t made the connection, but lassitude creeps in with the changed Era, with the appearance of mortal humans. From them come language and time and then numbers for measuring time. Once time gets quantified there arrives monotony. Ennui. Made worse by his impish nature which includes a narrow mind and paltry imagination.
They say Sarconsson is impelled by the agony of these, his limitations, but who among us is not?