Chapter 39: The Time of All Living Beings – To Be an Human 1

Elden expected these lives to be easier to understand.

He was human, after all.

He understood language, thought, ambition, and emotion. He knew what it meant to pursue a goal, overcome an obstacle, and desire something beyond his reach.

Surely, experiencing human lives would be easier than experiencing beings ruled by alien instincts.

He was wrong.

The first human life he remembered clearly belonged to a farmer named Tomas, who had never traveled farther than the nearest market town and considered that distance more than enough for one lifetime.

Tomas owned three acres of poor soil, a wooden house with a leaking roof, and a mule that had developed a habit of biting anyone who tried to saddle it. His wife, Mara, claimed the mule hated him because he had the same expression whenever he was hungry, but Tomas knew better. The animal had bitten the village priest once, and the priest had been fasting at the time.

It was a small life, and most of it was spent doing things that had to be done again the following day. Tomas rose before sunrise, fed the animals, checked the fence, worked the fields, and returned home with aching shoulders and dirt beneath his fingernails. When it rained, he worried about the crops. When it did not rain, he worried about them more. A broken wheel could ruin a morning, a sick mule could ruin a week, and a bad harvest could erase the work of an entire year without caring how diligently he had labored.

Yet Tomas was not unhappy.

He liked the smell of bread when Mara took it from the oven, particularly the first loaf, whose crust was always a little too dark because she refused to wait for the fire to settle. He liked sitting outside after supper, when the summer heat finally began to leave the earth, and listening to his children argue over things that would be forgotten by morning. He liked the sound of rain on the roof, provided the roof was not leaking, and he had a peculiar fondness for the tiny yellow flowers that grew between the stones beside his door. He had never planted them. He had tried to pull them out several times, but they always returned, so eventually he decided they could stay.

His youngest daughter, Elia, liked to steal the small wooden horse he carved for her brother. Every time Tomas caught her with it, she insisted that the horse belonged to her because she had found it first, even though she had not been born when he made it. Tomas pretended to take the matter seriously, holding the horse between them while the two children argued their cases. He always gave it to Elia in the end, and her brother always complained that their father was a terrible judge.

Tomas knew he was a terrible judge. He also knew that his son would forgive him before bedtime, because he always did.

These were the things that filled his days. Not grand dreams, not the pursuit of greatness, but the quiet certainty that there would be bread tomorrow, work after breakfast, and familiar voices waiting when he returned home.

Then, one winter, his eldest son fell ill.

At first, Tomas thought it was a common fever. Children caught fevers, and most recovered. He placed a damp cloth on the boy's forehead, made him drink water, and told him stories about a traveling knight whose horse was so stubborn that it once refused to cross a bridge because it disliked the sound of the river beneath it. His son laughed weakly at the story, and Tomas took the laughter as a good sign.

By the third day, the boy could no longer sit up.

The village healer came, examined him, and asked for money Tomas did not have. Tomas sold two goats. When that was not enough, he went to the market and sold the iron plowshare he had inherited from his father. The healer returned with medicine that tasted bitter and smelled of crushed leaves. For a while, the fever seemed to recede, and Tomas allowed himself to believe that the worst had passed.

Then it returned.

He spent the next night beside his son's bed, changing the cloth on his forehead and counting the spaces between each shallow breath. Mara sat on the other side, holding the boy's hand. She had stopped crying hours ago, and the absence of tears frightened Tomas more than anything else in the room.

Near dawn, his son opened his eyes.

"Father?"

Tomas leaned forward so quickly that his knees struck the bed.

"I'm here."

"Will you finish the horse?"

For a moment, Tomas did not understand. Then he remembered the wooden horse he had promised to make for the boy before the winter began. The legs were carved, but he had not yet attached the head. He had put it aside when the harvest came, intending to finish it later.

"Of course," he said. "I'll finish it today."

His son nodded, satisfied, and closed his eyes.

He did not open them again.

Tomas remained beside the bed long after Mara had taken the children away. He did not remember deciding to pick up the unfinished wooden horse, but he found it in his hands, turning it over and over while the light slowly changed behind the window. He tried to imagine what his son would have said about the head once it was attached. He tried to remember the exact sound of his laughter from the night before. The details kept slipping away from him, replaced by the image of the boy lying beneath a blanket that had suddenly become too large.

In the following weeks, Tomas worked harder than he ever had. He repaired the fence, dug the fields, and rose before sunrise even when there was nothing that urgently needed doing. Mara watched him from the doorway, but neither of them knew how to speak about the empty place at the table. Their daughter eventually stopped asking when her brother would return, and the village resumed its ordinary business, because a village could not suspend its life whenever one family lost someone.

The wooden horse remained unfinished.

Years passed. Tomas grew older, his remaining children left home, and Mara's hair turned white. He still woke before sunrise. He still complained about the mule, though the animal had long since died and been replaced by another equally unpleasant creature. The flowers beside the door returned every spring. He never planted them, and he never pulled them out.

When Mara died, Tomas found himself speaking to her while he worked, telling her that the roof needed repairs or that their daughter had written from the city. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of a sentence, waiting for a reply that did not come, then return to his work without acknowledging the silence.

His own death arrived quietly, in the middle of a summer night. He had gone to bed feeling tired, as he had done thousands of times before, and did not wake when the sun rose.

His last clear memory was not of the grave that would soon be dug for him, nor of the fields he would never see again. It was of Mara complaining about the burnt bread while Elia laughed with her mouth full, and his son demanding that he settle the argument over the wooden horse.

For a moment, Elden could almost smell the bread.

Then the house, the fields, the old man, and the memory vanished.

He expected to feel relief at the end of the life. Instead, he carried away the peculiar ache of having lost something that had never belonged to him , and that no matter how powerful he became, he would never be able to bring it back.

The next life began with a different name.

The man was called Silas, and he made locks.

He worked in a narrow shop on a crowded street, where the air smelled of coal smoke, wet wool, and the fried onions sold by a woman at the corner. His hands were strong and precise, his eyesight excellent, and his patience considerable. He could spend an entire afternoon shaping a tiny brass component until it fitted perfectly into a mechanism, and he disliked customers who watched him work over his shoulder.

He also disliked people who whistled indoors.

His mother had been a cheerful woman who whistled while cooking, and the habit had followed him into adulthood as a memory he could not bear to hear. He never explained this to anyone. When a customer began whistling, Silas would simply stop working until the man grew uncomfortable enough to leave.

He had an ordinary life, by most measures. He paid his rent on time, kept his tools clean, and visited his sister every Sunday. She had a little boy who adored him, mostly because Silas could make small mechanical toys from scraps of metal. The boy called him Uncle Sly, a name Silas pretended to dislike. He always brought the child a sweet, and he always claimed that he had bought it by accident.

His sister's husband considered him a strange but dependable man. His neighbors thought him quiet. The local baker knew him as a regular customer who complained whenever the loaves were too soft. Nobody found him frightening, and there was nothing in his appearance that suggested he might one day become a murderer.

Silas himself would have agreed with them.

His first killing happened because of a mistake.

A customer came to the shop late one evening, angry about a lock that had jammed. The man accused Silas of cheating him, shouted insults, and struck a display case hard enough to scatter brass fittings across the floor. Silas asked him to leave. The man seized him by the collar and shoved him against the workbench.

Silas reached for the nearest tool.

He remembered the weight of the iron hammer, the sharp crack when it struck bone, and the sudden silence that followed. The man fell beside the bench, one hand still gripping Silas's apron. His eyes remained open, fixed on something above the ceiling.

For several seconds, Silas could not move.

Then he heard footsteps in the street.

He looked at the door, at the body, and at the hammer in his hand. His thoughts came in practical fragments. Someone would hear. Someone would come inside. His sister would learn what he had done. The boy would look at him differently. He would lose his shop, perhaps his freedom, and certainly the quiet life he had built.

He wrapped the body in canvas.

He spent the rest of the night cleaning the floor.

For days afterward, Silas slept badly. Every knock at the door made him tense, and whenever someone mentioned the dead customer, he found an excuse to change the subject. He expected guilt to become unbearable, but it did not arrive in the form he had imagined. What troubled him most was the possibility of discovery. When he finally returned to work, he found that his hands had become steady again.

The shop was still there. The locks still needed repairing. His sister still expected him on Sunday.

The world had not changed as much as he thought it should have.

Several months later, he killed again.

This time, the victim was a stranger who had followed him into an alley after a drunken argument. The man was larger than Silas and seemed to enjoy the sight of him backing away. Silas tried to leave, but the stranger blocked his path, laughing at the way he kept glancing toward the street.

Something in Silas settled.

He could have called for help. He could have run. Instead, he watched the man's face as the laughter faded and the first hint of uncertainty entered his eyes. Silas had spent his life studying mechanisms, learning how small movements produced larger effects. A lock yielded when the right pressure was applied in the right place. A spring resisted until it did not. People, he discovered, were not so different.

The stranger's confidence disappeared by degrees. His threats became questions, then pleas. Silas watched each change with a concentration he had never given to anything outside his work.

Afterward, he stood in the alley for a long time.

His heart was beating rapidly, and his hands trembled. Yet beneath the fear was something else, something that made him feel strangely alert. The street seemed sharper than before. He noticed the rainwater dripping from a broken gutter, the faint music coming from a tavern, the smell of bread from the bakery two streets away. He could hear his own breathing.

He went home and washed his hands.

The following morning, he repaired a customer's lock, visited his sister, and gave his nephew a small brass bird whose wings moved when its tail was pulled. The boy laughed when the bird flapped, and Silas found himself smiling with him.

He did not think of the alley again until he was alone.

Then he remembered the moment when the stranger had realized that he could not control what was happening to him.

Silas sat at his workbench and turned a brass gear between his fingers. He had always enjoyed the instant when a difficult mechanism finally yielded to his hands, when resistance became movement and a thing that had seemed impossible became inevitable. The memory in the alley carried a similar satisfaction, though he knew there was no reasonable comparison between repairing a lock and taking a life.

He put the gear down.

That evening, he stayed late at the shop, working on a complicated lock until the streets emptied. When he finally closed the door, he walked home by a longer route, through streets where he did not know anyone and nobody knew him.

He told himself he was merely taking a walk.

After that, the killings became less frequent than the rumors would later suggest, but more deliberate than Silas ever admitted to himself. He did not kill every person who annoyed him. Most annoyances were too trivial to be worth the risk, and he had no desire to destroy his life for the sake of a stranger's insult. He remained careful, patient, and selective. He continued to pay his rent, repair locks, and bring sweets to his nephew.

He also learned to recognize the people who were unlikely to be missed quickly.

Sometimes, he went weeks without thinking about killing. During those weeks, he could almost convince himself that the previous act had been an aberration, something separate from the man who ate breakfast at the same table every morning and complained about the weather. He could enjoy a good meal, laugh at a joke, and feel genuine affection for his sister. When his nephew scraped his knee, Silas knelt to clean the wound with the same careful attention he gave a delicate mechanism.

He was not pretending to care about the boy.

That was what made the rest of his life so difficult to understand.

He could love someone, worry about them, and remember their favorite sweets without feeling that these things placed any particular obligation on him toward the rest of the world. Other people possessed lives that extended beyond Silas's view, but those lives had never seemed especially real to him until he found himself standing close enough to end one.

Then, for a little while, they became intensely real.

It was not hatred that drew him back. Hatred was exhausting, and he disliked allowing other people to occupy his thoughts for too long. Nor did he imagine himself an avenger, a judge, or a man correcting some injustice. He had no grand explanation for what he did. He simply found that, when a person stood before him and began to understand that their life was no longer entirely their own, Silas felt an anticipation he could not reproduce elsewhere.

He tried to replace it with other things.

He bought better tools. He began taking long walks. He visited his sister more often and spent whole afternoons helping his nephew build wooden ships. For a while, the work and the boy's company were enough. Then the familiar restlessness returned, and Silas found himself paying attention to strangers in the street, not because they interested him, but because he had begun to imagine how they might react if their ordinary lives suddenly ceased to belong to them.

He hated himself for the thought, briefly.

Then he went back to work.

Years passed before his sister discovered the truth. By then, her son was old enough to understand what the accusations meant, and the little brass bird had long since lost one of its wings. Silas had repaired it twice, but the third time his nephew brought it to him, the boy left it on the table without asking whether it could be fixed.

Silas stared at the toy after the boy had gone.

He could have explained himself. He could have told his sister that he had loved her, that he had never wished harm upon her child, that the years they had spent together were real. Every word would have been true, and none would have answered the question in her face.

When the authorities came for him, he did not resist. He had imagined his arrest many times and had expected terror, anger, perhaps even a final surge of defiance. Instead, he felt a dull irritation at the noise in the street and a strange concern that someone might mishandle his tools.

His sister did not visit him.

He died in prison, years later, after an illness that left him too weak to stand. The cell was cold, and the blanket smelled of damp stone. He thought of his shop, of the brass bird, and of the lock he had been repairing on the day of his first killing. He remembered how the small components had fitted together, each one performing its task without hesitation.

He tried to remember the face of the first man he had killed.

It came to him only vaguely.

His nephew's face, however, remained clear.

Silas died wondering whether the boy still remembered the sound the little brass bird had made when its wings moved.

Elden emerged from the life with the unpleasant sensation of having looked through a window into a room that had no door. He had experienced the man's affection, his daily routines, his fear of discovery, and the quiet pleasure that had drawn him toward murder. None of those things had erased the others. Silas had not been secretly miserable every day of his life, waiting for violence to give him meaning. He had enjoyed ordinary happiness. He had loved people. He had also killed because the act itself offered him something he wanted.

The two truths had occupied the same man without ever resolving into a contradiction he felt compelled to solve.

Elden had once assumed that understanding a creature meant finding the instinct that governed it.

Humans seemed determined to make that task impossible.

Before he could pull himself together, his consciousness drifted forward, and the world around him faded away once more. Another life took hold of his consciousness.