Weekly Drabble #324: The Forgotten (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from Sam C with, 'did you think I forgot?', which leads into this drabble-sized drabble of a possible larger universe. Enjoy!

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The Forgotten

For as long as he could remember, Caleb had wanted to know what was beyond the Wall. He had stared up at the starless sky for hours, seeing only the moon and the thin pink-orange strip that the night in two. No matter how squinted, angled his head or tried to look at it, there was only that small strip. The Wall was much larger, of course. It encircled their entire star system, but you could only ever see it as a tiny line.

As a boy, Caleb had never understood how that worked. Even as an adult he wasn’t completely certain. Something about how the human mind couldn’t perceive something like the Wall in its full scope and as a ‘cognitive defence mechanism’, it limited the input it received to something more manageable. A line instead of the searing, all-consuming everything it was, swallowing the sky when night fell. That was why you couldn’t even see the twinkling lights of other planets; in actuality, they were lost against the Wall’s own faint glow. Only the moon and sun were bright enough not to be swallowed by it.

Caleb had asked many people many times what the Wall was. Everyone he asked had a different explanation. Father Daiki said the Wall was a gift from God to His children. Heritagists said the Ancestors made it. Radical scholars said it was made by one of the Others, a powerful race now long gone from the galaxy. Some even insisted it was a naturally occurring phenomenon that humanity just happened to benefit from. No one could really agree where it came from, but they did all agree on one thing: beyond the Wall, there was a monster.

The surviving records spoke little of what happened before the Wall rose, but they all referenced a great evil known only as the Beast. It had prowled the stars, ravenous and unceasingly hungry, devouring everything in its path. Systems and peoples feel into shadow and silence beneath it and it had nearly consumed humanity but for the Wall, and for a thousand years, they’d been safe behind it.

For a thousand years, they’d been hiding, cut off from the rest of the galaxy. Every time he looked up at the sky and saw the line that was not a line, Caleb wondered what was behind it. He’d never seen the stars.

His parents told him not to worry about it. They had pictures from books and movies with stars. He could see those any time he wanted to. He could visit any world in the system, from burning Mercury to frozen Pluto. He didn’t need the stars. Humanity didn’t need them. They were happy here, he was told. Happy, and safe from the Beast.

But still, he yearned for the stars. When he’d been very small, he’d made a promise to himself. One day he would go beyond the Wall and see what no human had for a thousand years. He would see the stars.

Though he was no longer a little boy, he wasn’t yet a man and tonight, like so many nights before, Caleb sat on his roof, looking up at a clear night sky split by an impossible line and, just as he had for all those nights as well, wondered what lay beyond it.