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 gets 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 will become 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 but mostly stay gone. We mortals are left behind, unattended, to populate the earth. 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 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 Life is new and naive, experimental, the mechanics of reproduction still random. Sarcon is a sexless blob of proto-flesh who drifts through shallow, salty water, occasionally rolled by tides up onto the mud flats. Lying there, splayed on the sea’s edge, Sarcon knows and is known 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 world begins young and then grows less young. Millennia go by in the thousands but no one notices, no one’s counting. Life rolls her great bulk over the globe, creeping along her mucus trail and spawning organic matter from her wet womb. It’s a contest between her and Death who stalks behind stomping on what They can. Imps delight in meddling. For one long Age Sarconsson plays tricks to distract Death so Life is free to crowd the world with her offspring. For another Age the imp salts Life, like a nasty child does to garden slugs, and mass extinctions fill the valleys, the ocean floor with rotting stuff.
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.
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 his boredom arrives with the new Age when mortal humans appear. 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?