The Year One,
Two brothers awoke standing over the river. Ignoring the strange light that stirred them, they began fighting as soon as they could see, their fingers locked in a groping tug-o-war for a trinket which they slowly came to realize was no longer there. Something was amiss. Stupefied, they checked the water below and the wasteland all around, but the object of their quarrel was nowhere to be seen. The brothers sat down, each on his own side of the river.
They looked around, puzzled. The trinket was not the only thing missing. Where were the red sands? More importantly, where were their piles of gold? The whole world was wrong. The brothers looked at one another and snarled, but as dense as they were, they knew neither was to blame for the other’s missing treasure—they were both afraid of the water and would never try to cross the river.
They gazed at the sea. Had the waves washed everything away? Surely no ordinary rainfall could have wiped clean so boundless a desert. Whatever the cause, all that remained of the desert they once called home were endless tails of gray shale littered with large, broken bones petrified to stone.
The brothers gaped at the sky, noticing now that the air was cast in an uncanny light, as if it was both day and night at once. They stared in awe—there was a black hole in the sun. Only a rim of fire remained burning in flickering tongues around the dark disc. This is what had woken them, they knew—the sun, which they had never seen before; with its center blacked out, the brothers finally saw their world in the light of day.
To the far west, over the sea, the sky morphed red in a single heartbeat, alight from horizon to horizon.
The brothers turned from the coast and began marching to the mountains, each on his own side of the river. It began to rain. They quickened their step. In the mountains there were good places to hide. The rain did not bother them, nor the livid sky, but if the black hole left the sun, the brothers knew they could not be there to bear witness and yet survive.
They waited in dark caves for over a year. When they emerged the world was renewed, as if they had been sleeping all along. They shuffled along the riverside to the edge of the sea. Vast crimson dunes covered the wasteland, just as they remembered. They sat in the dark of night and waited.
When they were hungry they caught fish.
When a ship passed along they demanded a hefty toll and hid the gold below the dunes, amassing new hoards of treasure to replace what had been lost.
When the sun rose they burrowed into the sand and waited for dusk to fall again.
They waited by the sea night after night, dreaming of a trinket they had seen long ago which might one day drift within reach again. They waited, and a century slipped by like a river in the dark.