Emran watched the shadow of the great Blackfish crawl over the parched earth towards him.
“Finally. This is it…” Emran muttered, shifting from one foot to the other in unbearable anticipation.
The watching crowd behind him echoed his agitation, and as the vast beast drew near, a deafening hush fell over them.
As always, the five months prior to its arrival had dragged by in a gloomy haze; the old sun was only barely visible as a pale greyish circle in the vast fog of suspended ash and dust above them, and its ancient light and heat were unknown even amongst the eldest of their colony. They had only known the spotlight beam from Blackfish’s all-seeing eye as it swam in the murk above their heads.
Its bright searching beam lit the earth at the feet of the watching crowd as it drew near, and they turned their faces up to drink its warmth as it passed. After a few seconds, a shadow fell as the beast’s head passed them, and the rains finally began to fall from its broad outstretched fins. A cheer erupted from the crowd, and they raised their arms in jubilant salutations amid the watery hail.
Emran breathed a half-sigh of relief. Their crops would grow and the colony would survive for another season. His two young daughters had scooped up handfuls of the moist earth and were squealing with delight as they painted grey-brown patterns over their faces. Emran reached out a hand to draw them near. Now was the hard part. The watching crowd grew silent again, and Blackfish’s low sonorous call drifted through the damp air.
“Please not my girls…” Emran whispered fiercely into his daughters’ mud-caked hair as he held them tightly.
Almost as if the plea had drawn its cruel attention, the great beaming eye of Blackfish paused before pulling back to drown Emran and his youngest daughter in its bright spotlight. Emran’s breath burst from him in a sob of anguish.
“Etra! Etra!” Emran called to his daughter, even as her pale grey eyes slid out of focus.
“It calls, Father,” Etra said blankly; the chilling reply of all who were called to Blackfish’s aerial reef.
The bright eye of Blackfish roved away towards the darkened edges of the colony, and Emran felt Etra straining after it. He cast around desperately as his neighbours and friends drifted away, giving Emran space to say farewell to his daughter, and already thinking of chores ahead of the new planting season.
Staring at Etra’s pale face, still streaked with the jubilant smears of wet earth, he was struck by a sudden reckless thought. Without a glance at the dissipating colony, Emran dragged his daughters back to their shelter. Collecting a woven rope from his shed, he lashed his squirming daughter to a sturdy support beam inside the sparse living space.
“Father, you cannot! Etra must go!” Rema cried, pulling on Emran’s arm and appealing with shining tear-filled eyes.
“Rema. From now on, you must care for Etra. Do not untie her until she has quieted. And do not tell the colony,” Emran said.
He stood up with his lips set in a thin resolute grimace.
“I will go,” he said.
Deaf to his oldest daughter’s cries, Emran crept from the house. He moved quietly in the semi-gloom, stumbling along the path that countless children had worn through the gravel hillocks. Blackfish itself swam overhead, throwing vast undulating shadows around Emran as he climbed. Ahead, the bright beaming eye danced over the wastes, lighting the way towards its great grey sky reef home.
After some four hours of breathless climbing, Emran reached the final hillock. He cast a final glance back through the murk at his former home, then, thinking of Etra, Emran breached the hilltop and gazed down at the land in mute awe. Fine yellow-white pebbled sands lay at his feet, and stretched out in a wide flat plain towards the void. No rock clusters broke its clean topography, though the spotlight eye of Blackfish painted illuminated scripts over the sands as it swam overhead. Emran stumbled forward and fell to his knees, overwhelmed at the nothingness. He grasped at the pebbled sands to stop his reeling head, and found them soft and brittle under his fingers. Pausing to examine the muted yellow minerals littering his palm, he realised with a nauseous lurch that these were, of course, bone shards.
Back in the colony, Rema heard a gentle tap at the front door.
“It is Elder Taban,” a thin voice croaked through the door, “we have come to pay respects.”
Rema hesitated; her father had said not to alert the colony, and behind her, Etra had begun a wordless keening wail as she writhed against her bonds. Rema had reached up to bolt the door, when the elder abruptly pulled it open and strode into the dim room. Immediately, his eyes cast upon Etra, and the reverent greetings fell dead on his lips.
“Why is the child here?” Elder Taban gasped as the two other elders filed into the dim space.
Rema gazed up in terror at the elder’s ashen face, watching it crease into an expression matching her own.
“Emran has gone?!” he cried.
“What of the sacrifice?” the second elder cried. “Blackfish feeds on Time. Only the remaining time in a child’s life is enough. What—”
Elder Taban threw out an arm to steady his hysteric comrade, the watching child, and his own racing heart.
“It is done,” he said finally with a heavy sigh, “Blackfish has received its tribute.”
The elder moved toward the western window overlooking the great reef. Emran had lived 27 crop seasons; he was only a few years from a natural aged death, so Blackfish could not eat. What would happen? As Elder Taban watched, the dancing beam of Blackfish’s eye briefly brightened in the ash grey reef, before a veil of utter darkness suddenly draped over the colony and the bright eye flickered out.
Jennifer Newell is a student of English literature and natural science, and her science-fiction writing combines these two passions.
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