Scene of the week: The Incarnator

River of light by webtreats

 

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Bormeal hurtled through the streams of time, firmly gripping his hammer.

It was unsettling. Not the streams. They were beautiful in their own way. He felt like he were falling through thousands of horizontal rainbow waterfalls, suspended in an infinite void. No, what was unsettling was the fact that he’d lose his hammer. He loved it. It was part of him. It was huge, like Thor’s, and it could bash things really nicely. But even though he would still look the same as he did now when he landed—bulky, ferocious, hairy—and even though he would remember everything… he could not keep his hammer. Whatever god governed all this wasn’t very kind, not to Bormeal anyway.

When he looked up, things seemed to be going reeeally slow. The figures in the time-streams—so many faces and animals and births and deaths and triumphant moments—moved as though shrunk-wrapped and half-frozen. When he looked down, they all seemed to move reeeally fast. Whole lives came and went while he took a breath. On his own level (which was changing constantly as he fell) it all moved at a regular pace, like him. A man laughed with his family, another dug a hole for a plant. Crowds of people worked on huge stone buildings. They slowed down as they passed by him, as though they were falling upward.

As he neared Earth time, Bormeal began to discern the spiritual level of people on the planet. Incarnators saw the planet in different ways, but he saw this as a hazy, multi-dimensional, colorful graph. As he fell farther, he saw the structures of politics and nations. Blocky shapes bashing against each other with spasms and crashes, waddling across the world knocking each other around. By now, a second of Bormeal’s time would be around… it was hard to guess, but… an hour of time below. As he got closer still he could make out land masses, people milling around. Battles that were important only to the people in them, and some others alive on the planet at the time, if they were nearby.

Bormeal hit the earth, lost his hammer in filaments of light. He sighed, feeling alone without it. He looked around from the top of a hill in some semi-arid land. Scrubby grass and bald rocks. Cold and drizzly. A dozen goat-herders walked below, but they didn’t look up. Bormeal didn’t appear to everyone as soon as he landed. No, there was a proper sequence to things.

Generally, he first showed himself as an apparition, say, to a single crazy farmer. Then word got round. Everyone professed not to believe it, but everyone had their doubts. Then Bormeal appeared to a few folks in the saner section. Most of them wouldn’t tell anyone. Still, some would. Then he appeared to some of the leaders of whatever religion was prominent in that place. The monks and nuns wrote about him and distributed the knowledge to the faithful. That was pretty authoritative, but some people would always think them crazy—the proportion varied according to the society. Anyway, Bormeal would reveal himself, soon after that. Some would think he was a demon, others a god. He was neither, not the way they thought about such beings anyway.

Ah, one of the shepards had strayed behind the others. Bormeal manifested himself, puffing into the air with some nice effects around him, like yak-tails made of light were being whisked around behind him. He walked down, all buff and shiny looking, and approached the startled man.

This is part of the Scene-a-Week series. Each week, I’ll give you a scene from a story, maybe from the beginning and maybe from somewhere in the middle. These stories will not be fully written, just the scenes. You can vote for which ones you want to have made into a full story in the comments section.