acts of preservation

4/14/24 - NYC Midnight Round 2 Submission! While this piece didn’t move forward to Round 3, I learned so much from writing it. The feedback I received from the judges were night and day, from some preferring a chronological sequence of events, to one judge being so kind as to say that my writing style is “fully realized and potent.” Just goes to show that some things will work for some people and not others!! and that’s the fun! that’s the beauty!!!!

The King–so holy that He is nameless –infamously hates cured meats. 

It is said that the proximity to spoilage sickens Him. Flesh bound by salt, ripening and drying into new shriveled versions. They are pungent, greasy foodstuffs that are beneath His tongue, itself a writhing, fresh pink muscle. Chefs have had their heads roll to the rhythm of His stomach roiling.

Really, though, it isn’t the taste. It’s the stasis of it all. Transformative and artificial, but still–death. No different than embalming. Damian knows this, has underlined and scribbled and capitalized this statement in his notes hundreds of times. His workshop is full of carefully maintained piles of compost, the King’s leftovers.

Damian understands His appetite better than anyone. Marring the corner of his mouth, the crumbs from rotten meals are testimony to this fact.

The King desires the freshness found in raw vitality: crisp apples, lettuce crunching between teeth, carrots snapping cleanly. It’s why Damian focused his research proposal on the perfect gift. 

What could possibly best an eternal garden, a self-replenishing well of resources? It would change the calculus of their world. For now, the plants’ deaths are just stalled, not staunched, but he knows it’s possible. Just a few more years, and it will be perfect. Damian is ever so close to curing rot.

So why–in all godsdamned Seven Realms–is Zayden choosing that bastard, Artemis?

“You heard me correctly,” Artemis says in the silent throne room. His fingers maneuver a vile in a practiced nonchalance, contents glinting like a fisheye underwater. An effortless handsomeness bolsters the effect. “Bottled. Immortality.”

Damian scoffs. Obviously, Artemis goes for the easy answer. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said or sold in the past before–greater alchemists before them have already tried this ruse. 

He turns with a knowing smile towards the King, as if to say, Is this really it? Is this all that I’m up against–the idea of turning us into cured meats? Let’s laugh! Let’s laugh!

The King’s eyes are steady. They never leave Artemis’ hand.

They were boys, once. 

Skinny and clueless and pulled from their dirty, starving homes like potatoes, but boys nonetheless. It was hardly unusual for the King’s tithe to be young blood, be it for consumption or labor or holy ties, but that year, there was a new demand: the Royal Alchemist needed apprentices for his research. 

It’s common, unfortunate knowledge, but the end of the world is coming! The King had said so himself! Be it through fire, flood, fear–there was an impending doom so impossibly great that it became impossibly vague. Strange impurities–dustmotes and ash–float through the air towards the palace, choking crops, withering trees. But the Royal Alchemist, and by extension, the King, were the only stopgap to this problem–whatever it was. 

The territories clambered to volunteer their brilliant youths. 

Many offered warriors. (We must research military might! Study the enemy!)

Others believed in their young priestesses. (Rediscover holy scripture! The King’s legend must thrive!)

Poets and bards and artists. (Praise! Hymns! Eternity is found in stories!)

In the end, Royal Alchemist Zayden simply asks, which children can survive famine? 

In one corner of their country, a young boy had reengineered his village’s irrigation system, turning a once desolate trade post into an oasis. The soldiers find him sitting in the center of a bubbling fountain.

Another boy is found soon after. A resourceful stockpile of food marks him as the sole survivor of his village for weeks. The visual in the papers was always that of concentric rings: corpses surrounding a crop of corn surrounding dried goods surrounding a crudely drawn boy at the center. 

Neither of them screamed when they were abducted by the King’s guard. Neither of them scream until they are twenty four, the night Artemis is nominated for Royal Alchemist. 

A bloodshot eye. The shape of the orb is perfect. If it were concave or unclean, the eye would be described as gaping, or a maw, or a wound. But nestled in the dirt, the shape is wonderfully spherical. Like the white of raw egg, the sclera is wet and translucent and watery. Alive.

“Dami!” – a loud thump rattles his door – “Gods, ow, why is your door so hard?”

“Go away. I’m asleep.”

“No you’re not! Open up!”

“It’s unlocked.”

“Oh.” Slowly, the door swings open. Silence. Then, thunderous footsteps. “Dami! I solved it!” 

“Someone’s giddy today,” Damian groans. He rubs at the grit in his eyes. Sunlight streaks into his room like golden arrows. 

Arty’s laugh comes easy. It carries no malice; it carries a child’s carelessness.

“Get up! You’re so boring! Look!” He opens his cupped palms as though unfurling a flower. Damian peers into the abyss between those fingers.

Inside, there is a pulsing, red stone.

“...what am I looking at?”

“The heart of a salamander, that one from the other day.” Arty says. His eyes are open so wide that Damian finds himself staring not at the iris, but at the whites. He thinks of negative space. “I thought it was dead, but look, Dami. It’s still beating.”

Sunlight. Golden arrows. Red pulse. An orange miasma crawls towards them from the coast. 

They are sixteen, and they are forever. 

Damian storms into Artemis’ workshop in the East Wing. 

Though their spaces are mirrored across the palace, there are hardly any similarities. Where Damian’s has the clutter and ink-splotched mess of sleepless and fervent tinkering, Artemis’ workshop is pristine. It glows with a sort of precisely crafted intention: mechanisms peeping through tasteful glass structures, gears perfectly oiled.  A marble trellis serves as the backdrop for Artemis’s desk, covered with gold-foil leaves (which were all real gold and truly grown organically. One of his few projects that Damian actually respected).

“What?” Artemis crosses his arms. “Upset that I have a product, and you only have a proposal?”

“You’re spineless.”

“I’m resourceful.”

“Stop acting like you’re Zayden,” Damian spits out. “You didn’t even know what that word meant until I taught you.”

“Ah, and you have my eternal thanks for that. But oh! Wait!” Artemis brushes his fingers against the broach on his chest. “Aren’t I basically Zee’s replacement now anyway?”

“I thought we agreed that we can’t let that lunatic live forever.”

“Careful. It almost sounds like you aren’t capitalizing Lunatic.”

Damian idly picks up one of Artemis’s notebooks. It, like everything else, is pristine. Untouched. He hurls it at the other man. The book slams against the wall.

“You betrayed me!”

“Stop being so dramatic!” Artemis says, bending down to pick up the notebook. “Weren’t you the one who said it wasn’t personal? That your research was just so much better than mine?”

“Because it is.”

“You can’t handle the fact that I’ve made something that He actually wants. Who cares about eternal gardens when you’re not eternal yourself?”

“It’s about sustaining a future. Are you hearing yourself? Don’t you know He’s the reason we’re in this predicament in the first place?”

“...you left me behind first.”

“Because my research matters. It changes everything.”

Artemis scoffs. “Don’t pretend you’re noble, Damian. I know you.” He leans in, spitting. Damian can smell the aftermath of his dinner, all salt and grease. “You like being right. This wasn’t about saving the world or the future–it was about you winning.”

“Because your research isn’t anything new!” Damian roars, kicking at one of the mechanisms. It topples into a heap of metal; every precariously manicured gear spins out into the corners of the room. “Empty beasts and promises. Whatever He asks for, even if it destroys the rest of us.”

“Say what you will. Your desperation is a fucking stench.” Artemis shrugs, turning his back on Damian. “I know what the King wants. You miscalculated.”

“Immortality means nothing if we cannot survive the world ending. You know this. We can’t afford to chase after preservation when we can’t save anything else.”

Artemis laughs. Damian wants to uproot that cursed, careless, childish sound. He envisions it: hand reaching down the other man’s throat, squeezing the laughter between his fingers, yanking it from the lungs the way a tooth pulls from its socket.

A silver chain glistens at Artemis’s collarbone, slipping beneath his shirt. A soft red glow emanates from under the fabric, barely noticeable.  

Artemis says, “You’re just His lapdog.”

Fisheye through water. Pulse-pulse-pulse.

I hate you, Damian thinks.

IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhate–

He lunges.

It’s fascinating, seeing the resemblances, the echoes. A waxy, green leaf curls perfectly on its stem, dipping briefly from a raindrop before springing back up. Like a tongue’s movement. Down and up, down and up. Like saliva.

“Do you think we’ll ever leave?”

They are twelve. It’s their first night in the palace. The guards had tried dragging the two boys towards opposite sides of the palace on Zayden’s instruction (East and West, the Dawn and Dusk corridors, a sun chasing itself into oblivion). One, a village’s sole survivor. The other, a savior. Neither scream, but neither lets the other go.

Now, in the twilight, both boys lie nose-to-nose on the floor, foregoing the room’s luxurious four poster bed. Moonlight slants in from the window, limning their skin with silver.

“No.”

Silence. Eyebrows furrow before one boy turns their back on the other. This close, the action makes a nose brush against the nape of a neck. 

The Palace is an empty beast, looming with opulence, with no other inhabitants to feed it. Here, they are just two boys in its underbelly.

A whisper: “If you leave, will you promise to take me with you?”

Beyond the walls, rolling past the seashore, the rim of the horizon is a thick, cataclysmic orange.

“It’s a shame,” Damian tells the King. He’s kneeling. His eyes are trained on the red carpet beneath him, imagining the fabric going pulse-pulse-pulse. “Arty never seemed like the type of person who would run.”

“...”

“I found it odd too. You know the two of us were closer than anything else.” Drops of water tumble from his eye, darkening the red carpet in uneven splotches. “You know, he-he promised that he would take me with him if he were to leave. This was years ago, though.”

“...”

“I miss him. I’m sorry, but I don't know where your Royal Alchemist has gone. I’m so, so sorry.”

Slowly, something creaks. Fabric rustles. An uneven, hobbling gait down the stairs. Labored wheezing. The King’s mottled and wrinkled hands tremble as they come into view under Damian’s face. Clumsily, they try to latch onto his chin, cold thumbs catching at his flesh.

The smell of decay is not a strike on the senses, but a slow crawl. It is a dull miasma. Damian raises his eyes.

Sunken sockets, where two bulbous eyes roll, unable to focus. Where there was once a nose, is now barely a membrane, gathering its mucosal remnants. The King gasps, trying to speak, and his teeth rattle from the effort. It is the sound of knees knocking together, of two boys rolling dice against tile. His entire body trembles from the exertion of moving from his throne.

It was almost laughable. Last time Damian had seen The King, he was perhaps middle aged, but far from decrepit. At that point, they had already run out of earth to drain, but Zayden–that cunning bastard–had begun to pull from the villagers. Then, the guards. Finally, himself. The King has run out of life to sap.

Life begets life, and a sun eats itself into obliteration. Artemis and the heart of a salamander and laughter that was always a child’s and the question–who did he test immortality on? 

There is a perfect eye in the dirt. Stripped flesh fortifying the soil. A heart’s pulse-pulse-pulse into oblivion. 

“My King,” Daminan says, softly. “I have a garden to show you. It will never rot.”

Somewhere, in his new eternity, Artemis must be laughing.