By Antoinette Van Sluytman
The primeval land of the First Women is not for this corporeal flesh of ours, and we are intruders here. This unfathomable tier they once called home is to be claimed by their red-veiled daughters alone. I know this because I have met one, and the moment I cast my soul to the black of her eyes I was damned. My mortal coil unravels still. Listen carefully.
This is the odyssey of a fool. Forever yours.
* * *
Last night I sprayed a mouthful of black water to the sky for the ancestors and prayed for their guidance. I’d never done that before.
I remember the first time I heard the story of the First Women of the Nomadic Cosmo era and their ever-changing land. The Motherland. I carelessly assume the term land, as it is not to be so arbitrarily defined by our contemporary understanding. It is much more of a cataclysmic rift that cleaves our world in half, like the negative space of what is known but cannot be defined, hyphenated between parallel realities. A paradox, perhaps. A land like an entity; if lands could breathe and whisper in one’s ear. A womb of worlds; the lantern poets call it. We must use land and lands synonymously from here on for reasons I will soon provide. I digress, my excursions into the ‘land’ of Sinnilah proved to be the very spectacle musicians indulge in their odes to the beat of goatskin drums.
Our peninsula is known as the spine. Its column of vertebrae is composed of small earthen mounds, unremarkable fields of sugarcane and cosmograms traced into hill tops that extend up to the broken waist of the land. A yawning juncture in the landmass that bridged a canopy of dragon blood trees like baring teeth in the distance. Bone white. Whispers emitted between each crevice. Unmoving against the wind. Oozing meteorite boulders like bleeding gums. The border of Sinnilah.
Listen carefully. We are intruders here.
Inside!
A minor note for the sleepless nights ahead, many voices hiss from the trees as I cross the border.
I am told they belong to the souls of those who died in Sinnilah many years ago, and have now become ensnared in its vicious cycle. More ancient souls drift like masked spirits the deeper one goes, twisted into unsightly aberrations, clueless of their past identities. Their masked faces fabricate an array of different uncanny expressions, impenetrable and seemingly carved from the celestial oak. If I die in Sinnilah today, I too could become a masked thumbprint of what was once human, roaming endlessly with a redwood grin. A grin because joy has always been lost on me, up until I braved these strange whispering ‘lands’. I enjoy irony. Perhaps I should speak less of death.
Listen!
In earnest, the maw of Sinnilah does not feel like an extension of the land beneath my feet but an egregious invader. An intrusion that claimed territory by sinking its claws deep into the soil. But that was until I came before the border myself. Then I reconsidered that assessment, and thought perhaps I was the intruder, and the border was the true caretaker of the ‘land’ (we continue to use this word judiciously).
The rest was a facade of normalcy in its wake. I could almost taste the fragrance of rotting copper permeating between the foliage. It trickles from the sores of Sinnilah’s teeth, but it comes to me sweet and yearning; never rancid. It is the smell of souls rotting in bedrock and soil, their faces soon to be carved like ceremonial masks from the dragon blood trees. Our ancestors forever walk here.
Turn back.
Trees, soil, rock. Bear in mind that these terms exist only for the moment, and in a few significant hours they will be meaningless. Discard these infinitesimal details if you so desire, as the portrait I have potentially illustrated is but a thread in an ever-changing tapestry. I do not mean to confuse you, alas this is a womb of worlds. A biome within Sinnilah exists only for a twenty-four hour pocket of time, following a vicious cycle of dying stars and their untimely collapse. Tomorrow I fear the landscape could shift into an entirely different terrain simply to contradict the last. A desert to a vast wetland. Jungle to a savannah. Trees with roots curling from a misty canopy, their heads almost grazing the ground. Rain that emerges from the earth and recedes into the sky. Lakes of boiling black water. Stones with the veins of a leaf and canyons with emerald pillars. Sinnilah is a ‘land’ of contradiction, and so in order to redeem this
passage from impending accusations of lunacy, I pledge to contradict myself for the sake of honesty. Let us proceed.
Forward!
How does one navigate an ever-changing ‘land’? There is only one constant in Sinnilah. The behemoth statues of the first humans to inhabit our world. A tribe of women. Tall with skin the black of the cosmos that absorbs all light, and armed with seven foot long spears. Aligned with specific constellations and carved from ancient asteroids decades ago, the statues always remain the same while the landscape shifts around them. The dying light of these ancient stars now guides me. The stone science of the First Women is truly astounding, and is perhaps the only thing we truly know about them. I yearn to learn more.
Stone. The absolute. Written in stone.
The voices have grown louder, inducing several nights of sleeplessness. I understand why the ethereal dimension of Sinnilah was forbidden to all and my expeditions had to be exclusively sanctioned by my Matriarchs. After years studying the ancient lands, I was able to pace the shifting nature of the ecosystem and find ways to navigate back across the border, but I fear I leave a piece of me behind each time. This obsession of reconnecting with our incorporeal Motherland which has renounced us as her children has become like a fever. I know many will question my sanity soon enough. I question it myself. That’s not the point.
There!
The next twenty-four hour shift has come. The new terrain is composed of small mounds of white hilltops, yellow trees, and frozen rivers but such detail is lost on me.
I have come across a woman during this shift, and now everything has changed.
I suspect she is a descendant of one of the First Women. A Schaimarhad woman. Once again my words seem insufficiently callow. She appeared as a woman, but her essence was of something beyond the term. A presence that came with a strange gravity to it, an enigma one could taste, or perhaps feel. It
radiated from her skin, you see. And that scarified skin…a breathtaking black, decorated in constellation patterns I’ve never seen before. Such stars must’ve rotted eras ago.
Leave.
She crouched between the trees like the world belonged to her, adorning a magenta cloak and sash. Beneath her was my carefully selected collection of Sinnilah tomes and excavated stone from the colossal statues, scattered across the dirt like she had been reading them. I have a vivid image of her hands, those hands, spread across the leather hide of my pathetic research. Her sharp features were handsome, the length of her hair which was much too long to be untame, bespoke serene femininity. The ivory disk piercing her left earlobe was vaguely reminiscent of the traditions I was familiar with, but the way she fashioned it was so much more remarkable. She was bent to the ground and began rubbing a strange black paste against her teeth, oozing from the severed stem of a plant. When her eyes met mine across the space, time itself did not exist.
Hurry.
Do not interrupt me. Her expression was a composed masterpiece, devouring all life before her with little regard. I stood still and found myself imagining what it would be like to have my life end at the hands of such a woman. That woman. Several moments passed before she snatched up my astrolabe and research from the ground before dashing into the trees. I begrudged this small mercy, for I did not understand its meaning and began to doubt the event had actually transpired. My own disappointment baffled me. I noticed something left behind by the woman, obscured in ebony soil. The item was a broken talisman armlet made of black feathers and yordic bone. Many of the ivory beads were chipped in half and scattered in the dirt. I was perturbed at the image of a perfect being occupying such an imperfect item. An anomaly clasped around such ethereal skin. I laughed nonetheless. Perhaps she thought stealing research would discourage me from exploring further. It only motivated me, because I am a fool.
Thief!
They’re right of course. I toyed with that talisman all night as if to decipher a hidden message until I could count almost every crevice and curve. There was nothing hidden within the object, nor meteorite stone to harness the potential of dark energy. Just a simple charm any commoner could fetch from an artisan. It was such mundanity that drove me mad. Eventually I conceded to my tenacity for perfection and fixed the object.
I traced my steps to the meteorite statue from before and left the talisman in the location I found it (based on meager estimation mind you). If you recall I’d come to rely on their longevity for most of my navigation. I then turned my attention to continuing excavations of the stone, hoping to find any hint of carvings left behind by the First Women. What little I found were mostly obscured glyphs and constellation patterns I could not read, but still dedicated hours to transcribe on papyrus. The voices did not like that. The deeper I journey the louder they become. There was a vibration within the stone, like the pulse of a living entity, the sound of breathing within the statues. There is life in the stone. I hear a chant.
Return.
I must be cautious. I am an intruder here. Being caught in the middle of one of Sinnilah eco-shifts could disorient and cause one to travel the wrong direction, so I am careful not to allow myself to become distracted. The whispers are utterly useless and never respond to me. They like to echo and repeat my words back to me like mocking fools and now I have a petite lump on my head as the moment I advanced away a hard impact struck me from above.
It was my research books of course. She had chucked them at me. By ‘she’ I mean the woman, that woman, from before. Tucked amongst the swaying crystal trees, her piercing gaze pinned on me from above. On her right arm, a black feathered talisman gleamed proudly. It seemed she had reclaimed the lost object I left for her and decided to throw my things at me to express her gratitude. Gratitude that came with a warning. I recall she then scowled vehemently at me and disappeared amid the foliage once again.
I wasn’t sure what drew me to open the book at that moment. I felt some incredulous absurdity that an ethereal being had touched my belongings, and it was almost like they weren’t mine to claim anymore. Inside astounded me further. My carefully detailed pathetic research, transcriptions, and notes were obscured by a tantrum of crude scribbles, etches, shredding, and a few obscene notes that read
—Flawed research. Unfounded speculation. Was your teacher a pebble? Biased theories. Lies. Dead art.
I was being educated. Or perhaps, the woman had never existed and I had scribbled the notes in a fit of insanity, as these things usually go. Out of all the notes, the one thing that drove me the most mad was that the page depicting the First Women remained untouched. The only page without a disturbance. It was because of that single detail that I no longer had an interest in any of the other notes she had scribbled. Perhaps the worst thing to happen to a scholar is the loss of interest in a world of contradiction.
And there was one last note I almost missed, a single sentence carved into the back of the book when I turned it over.
Stop looking.
I cared little for this note as well. None could compare to the endless rehashed thoughts burdening my mind as I attempted to understand her choice to leave me alive. Why is this? Well, certainly because I am a fool. And so, I traveled further, knowing that she monitored me like prey the whole time as I was eager to claim her as my predator. I could almost feel her eyes with every step, and occasionally heard the sounds of parting branches above me. This time the eco-shift left behind a landscape of interconnected islands in a terrain of volcanic red water, which made it terribly difficult to reach the statues and retrace my steps. The insomnia of the many nights before have kept me in a trance of ill-fated fatigue. This miserable lack of sleep is not caused by the whispering souls but the mere memory of that woman wearing the talisman. How that image burns into the grey matter of my unspooling mind.
Foolish.
Ruin me. I wanted to beg her. These pervading thoughts, which I often confused with that of the voices following me, continue to linger as time passes without seeing her again. I did not desire to be stalked prey anymore, no—I wanted to be entirely consumed by her. The anticipation of her pounce no longer thrilled my imagination, for I wanted to feel her heel on my throat—crushing my windpipe. That bit of agonizing satisfaction might at least relieve me up until I utter my last breath. The voices laugh and taunt me. They know I crave the self-destruction she alone can grant me. I feared my end would come at the hands of Sinnilah’s paradox, but instead it would be at the whim of one of its daughters, my yearning soul caught between the crevice of her inky black teeth. Those teeth. I must find her again. The Schaimarhad woman.
Closer.
I fell asleep in a bed of grass and woke up on a stone plateau. The chanting is so loud now. That’s not the point. There was one once. What was it that I came here to find? The First Women were said to be great philosophers who mastered the art of life and death, born from the egg of black matter as all living things were. They passed down such knowledge to their many daughters. Schaimarhads. I have met one, and the moment our eyes met I knew I was damned. I haven’t a clue how many shifts have passed since. My research is untouched. I cannot find the statues anymore because I no longer seek them. Safety does not interest me. I do not care to know where I was. There was something alluring about losing control in the eye of a thousand worlds. It’s not that my mind is deteriorating in the mire of celestialism, it’s simply that I have found something more valuable than scholarly composure.
I have come across a woman, and everything has changed.
At some point I encountered a dancing spirit. Dead palm leaves decorated its waist like a skirt, dancing in a silent breeze. Its indigo black body was terribly thin, as if compressed by gravity, and it had a grimacing wooden face—a mask with sharp vertical eyes, wide lips, and hollow cheekbones. A necklace of okra decorated a long twisted neck. I’m uncertain how, but this spirit knew what I wanted. When I emerged from the mist it stopped dancing and turned to observe me (as much as one assumes a mask can ‘observe’). It lifted an arm and pointed west.
Lost!
How could one be lost if they did not care to return? Perhaps this was why the spirits became what they were. I had pitied them, not considering there might be some bliss in losing oneself in the Motherlands, and in the abysmal gap between an ancient woman’s eyes. Perhaps this spirit recognized it, there, in my lifeless gaze. The unsightly yearning of a fool seeking to be reclaimed. You might come to pity me as well. Alas, I turned west, and found her there. Crouched at the shore and gutting a crab with a blade between her feet. The Schaimarhad woman didn’t appear at all interested in concealing herself for once. She had nothing to fear of course. I should’ve been dead many shifts ago.
She brought the flesh of the crustacean to her mouth, taking in a mouthful of white meat. My journals slipped from my hand as I advanced forward. I had many questions to ask her but did not care for any but one.
“Why did you leave this page blank?” I held the depiction of the First Women in front of her.
She barely acknowledged my presence, head still turned toward the view of the red waves caressing the sand. She lifted a hand and wiped the meat from her chin.
“Do you want to die?”
Yes. No. For a threat, it resonated with a calm genuinity that caught me off guard. “Perhaps I’ll answer yours if you consider mine.”
There was a pause before she turned her head and settled her eyes on the image. The sight of her face exposed made me suddenly painfully aware that I was standing above her. A rash decision in his haste. If she found this display of irreverence disrespectful, she did not show it.
“That’s a depiction of the Ancient One’s, isn’t it?” “It is.”
“Then it would be sacrilegious to desecrate such an image in any way would it not?” she had said.
My hand slightly lowered, jaw twinging. Of course. Such an obvious fact anyone would be able to distinguish. How utterly remiss of me. How completely unremarkable. I detected a note of contempt when she recognized the disapproval in my expression. When I threw back my head and laughed she recoiled away. The laugh was pitiful and raucous and when I brought my head down her eyes were dark enough to bludgeon straight through my chest. Every second threatened to unravel me further. I am at peace.
“If it’s alright with you, I’d like to lay down…just for a little while.” I nodded. “You may kill me later if you like. It doesn’t matter to me…”
She watched without a word as I layed down on the ground beside her, my face exposed to the sky. Only the sky was gone and what revealed before me was a reflection, as if I was gazing into a mirrored image from the surface of water. It pulsated and ebbed back and forth like a tide. Like we were in the sky, lounging above a crown of water. There was more absurdity to distinguish but I was tired. So very tired. Forgive me.
“The sky is gone…” I muttered.
“It’ll be back tomorrow.” Her lips peeled back, and black teeth gleamed at me.
I smiled at the sight, then finally found the strength to close my eyes. The chants faded. For the first time since entering Sinnilah the voices were silent, and I slept there at her side, in the womb of worlds, cradled in soil like a child. I recall I came here for some dignified purpose, but it is now lost to the dreamless lament of a fool trapped in a cycle forever on the brink of creation and destruction. Now there is nothing but her eyes and a reflection in the sky. And so shall be my undoing, as I so devotedly submit to her tender call with the ire of a lover. For now I must sleep. Maybe one day another will come and find me drifting here—masked with a redwood grin, dancing in the mist, and discover that they too would not wish to be saved.
One of us.
We are intruders here.
I no longer desire to be careful.
* * *
Antoinette Van Sluytman is an afrolatina scholar, fantasy writer, UCLA Extension instructor, film & media coordinator, martial artist, mangaka, and award winning illustrator based in California. Her illustrations have been showcased in many exhibitions and received awards from esteemed organizations such as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and Scholastic Art & Writing Alliance. Her afrocosmic short fiction is featured in Hexagon SF Magazine, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Amorphaville, and Inner Worlds Magazine. Her debut one shot is forthcoming from VIZ Media.
Antoinette’s work honors the legacy of pre-colonial spirituality and matriarchal antiquity that is bridged across all of her stories and illustrations. Her stories exist in the liminal space between sci-fi and fantasy as a reimagination of ‘advanced’ societies without artificial intelligence. She lectures on the literary circuit about decolonizing fiction and is the co-founder of the upcoming multimedia studio, Broken Chalice Studios.
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