The Cold Light of Fate: the first chapter

Some believed she was born of the earth’s core. 


A burning ball of maternal fire pressed into liquid and streamed through cracks and fissures the way magma flows uphill. So intent was her energy to reach the surface of the Earth that when she met with its tectonic plates, her ferocity slammed into them and shook the ground in every direction. 


The day the thing that would become Dayana broke through the rocky crust was the day Pangea cracked into pieces. She entered the living world with a crashing bang and a gasp, desperate for her first breath as if emerging from deep ocean waters. 


Exposed, she crawled across the desert, a semisolid creature in search of a riverbed in which to cool. She came to recline in a stream of roiling rapids and spread herself upon the silt. Like an old woman pulling up the covers of her bed, she settled, buried in clay and mud. 


Years passed. The yellow light of the sun filtered through the canopy of branches above. Instinctively, the flora (and later the fauna too) sensed Dayana’s simmering presence, the life that pervaded the river in which she slept. The long-leaved trees flourished beside her roiling stream. It was there, under the alluvium that she came upon the elements necessary to mold her human body—first her head, heart, and womb, and then all the rest.


Fully formed, Dayana walked out of that river and onto the land, where she greeted her beloved mosses, ferns, and flowers. Trees of all sizes and shapes. Fungi, vines, clover, dandelions. She wandered for years, following the curve of the stream up hills and through forests, across valleys and into the jungle. Finally she reached the cloud forests of Peru and settled there in a stone house with a thatched roof—among the people who lived there—for many hundreds of years. 


They called her Pachamama, a mysterious woman who kept to herself, came and went like the wind, and was very much like everyone else, and not at all like everyone else. She never grew old—or died. 


Millennia passed before Edmund met Dayana in Machu Picchu. He introduced her to Starbright International, and she agreed to make it her home. There she slept under a warm blanket of lime-green moss in a plot of soil padding a corner of the greenhouse. Few in the building had spoken to Dayana or so much as saw her face. None had ever witnessed her arrival or departure, because she was always there, slumbering in her peat, stirring with dust particles in the light, or flowing with the oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the fountain’s water. 


Dayana tended the greenhouse. As Evander once said, she was charged with “ministering to all things ‘kingdom plantae.’” Her presence inspired seeds to shuck their shells and hoist their stalks, to blossom in the morning light and shower in evening dew. She kept watch over the precious, vulnerable seedlings that thrived in her home and across this bright blue planet. 


That morning, roused by the gentle fingers of the sun, she rose from her bed of soil. She wore a handwoven shift dress the shade of wheat decorated with beads of turquoise fastened with threads of gold at its hem. The glass walls that rose high above her dark-brown hair invited the sun’s warmth, and the damp of birth and death and nourishing ground pervaded the air. As Dayana made her way through plants and potting beds and gurgling fountains, she lent her gentle touch and whispered encouragement to the many juveniles there. “Yes, yes, very good,” she said and, “Oh, how lovely you are,” bending to touch their maturing bark or to gaze into the spiral of their seed cones. 


When she reached the center of the room, she sensed a charge in the air: something cold and promising. She paused before instinct drew her to a small grove of Jack pines. Passing underneath their long-needled branches, she entered a space lively with the babble of water and ice. Ancient aquatic specimens from the Jupiter System clustered within a narrow pool. The Cryophylla glaciata, a species found in the oceans of Europa, fed upon saltwater, some of them rising six-feet tall with many arching, sea-weedy arms. Dayana approached them and came upon a much smaller specimen wedged in between the Cryophylla trunks. It was a mostly formless lump in a clay pot set in the middle of the bigger trees like a little penguin chick at the base of the parental specimens that surrounded it. 


“Oh, no, no, no, little babe, you don’t belong over there,” she whispered as she eyed a potting table it should have occupied across the way. Carefully, she pulled the little lump and its pot from the trees that surrounded it. Near-freezing water gurgled over its sides and wet her palms, then streamed down her arms and spilled upon the earthen floor below.


The babe trembled like an amorphous infant struggling to raise its heavy, bowed head. Dayana leaned in close and smiled at the sound of breath in and out, in and out. 


“You are waking up,” she whispered with delight. The babe opened its tiny knot of a mouth, then two blinking gray wrinkles for eyes, gurgling as if it were greeting its mother for the first time. 


“You know what that means, don’t you?” Dayana gazed upward, beyond the glass rooftop above, into the place where the atmosphere meets the exosphere and merges with the beyond. 
“She must be on her way.”

The Cold Light of Fate is the fifth and final book in the Jovian Universe pentalogy.