Sarcon’s Son
“Old-believers tell how the primal Immortal from whom came the world is Love, and how upon this world there came Life, after which arrived Love’s necessary sibling, Death.” — Fox Wisdom
Sarconsson, bat-winged imp, wields the arrow that stabs the bare sole of Lord Jesus. It is a joke, a prank, on the favored child of our Virgin Mother, and She does not take it well. Divine matriarchs have no use for humor. Sarconsson knows nothing else. He would die of idleness without jests and pratfalls.
He has gotten his impish hands on a shaft from Love’s quiver, a broken one to be sure, but authentic. A quick jab to the Holy Underside of Lord Jesus’ foot and all Hell breaks loose in Heaven. The furor will lead to Love’s abandonment of our planet. Love soars off, away, back into space, to a far galaxy where They (Love encompasses multitudes) build a palace that becomes a favorite destination of Immortals. The universe by then teems with everlasting beings. We mortals are left behind to populate the earth, but this is not our story.
At the time of his arrow adventure Sarconsson is shockingly ancient, an elder among imps who are not Immortals but who live so long it may seem that way. First, backstory. Remember how he is born at the dawn of Life, born from a blob of proto-flesh in an Era when Life is experimental, when the mechanics of reproduction are random. See how Sarcon, his sexless parent, drifts in shallow, salty water, occasionally rolled by tides up onto the mud flats. Lying there, splayed on the sea’s verge, Sarcon knows and is known by the wild West Wind.
Wind scours Sarcon, inseminates its lumpish matter, and blows on, heedless. Sarcon gives birth to a son.
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Sarcon’s son inherits a fleshly form, but mostly he is made of wind shrieking inside a membrane. All that turbulent air comes from Daddy West, as does the near-immortality. Newly whelped, Sarconsson rambles the young world, rides the gusts of his uncles South and North and East. Life evolves and imps like him proliferate because the Winds are a randy lot of brothers.
The world begins young and then grows less young. Millennia go by in the thousands but no one notices, no one’s counting. Life rolls her great bulk over the globe, creeping along her mucus trail and spawning organic matter from her wet womb. It’s a contest between her and Death who stalks behind stomping on what They can. Imps delight in meddling. For one Age they play tricks to distract Death so Life is free to crowd the world with her offspring. For another Age they salt Life, like nasty children do to garden slugs, and mass extinctions fill the valleys, the ocean floor with rotting cellular stuff.
Imps take pleasure in contouring their skins. Inside he is a windstorm, but for the outside Sarconsson makes a face for seeing and being seen, wings for locomotion, a body for gratification. He believes himself a masterpiece of his own creation.
Now return to our story. Oh, but wait. Peek into Sarconsson’s head. It’s blustery in there, screaming like a gale in a chimney. That’s all he’s known. But something new rages in that wind: the suffocating tedium of living forever! Or what feels like forever. He hasn’t made the connection, but after people appear there comes language and time and then numbers for measuring time and once time gets quantified there arrives monotony. Ennui. Made worse by his impish nature which includes a narrow mind and paltry imagination. They say Sarconsson is impelled by the agony of these, his limitations, but who among us is not?