Days of the Vipers

A thread of old memory rose up inside him. A boy’s bare feet padding along the rough stone floors of the Temple of Oralius, decades before it had been torn down and ground to rubble. His new master’s hand on his shoulder, guiding him away from a mother whose trade for his life now meant she could afford to feed his brothers and sisters. Young Hadlo, at first not understanding, coming to face the priestess with the mask of the Fate upon her. The sudden knowledge that he was in the presence of something greater than himself. The need to subsume himself within it.

He felt a stab of panic. The Cardassian was not sure what he had expected to see, but it had not been anything like this. Some sculpture, perhaps, or the mummified bones of an old dead saint. He held up his hands and watched the waves of light cross over his skin. His flesh tingled and the image wavered; for a moment he saw not the gray quality of his own species but the pale tones of a Bajoran.

Hadlo blinked and the illusion vanished. The box compelled him toward it, and he found his fingers moving across the wood. It was pleasant to the touch, as if it had been warmed by the glow of a summer sun. Seams parted and the ark opened to him, almost of its own accord; a helix of glittering, shifting intricacy lay there, casting its light over his face. And inside it…

Inside Hadlo saw—

Whiteness hazed his sight, burning the stone reality of the shrine away from him, casting the Cardassian into a footless void of numbing darkness.

I am falling and falling and falling—

There were voices speaking in tongues, chattering in Old Hebitian, crying out his name in Lakarian dialects, laughing and hooting. Hadlo looked down and saw pale flesh upon his hands. He raised them to his face and there were no ridges upon his neck and about his eyes, only a raised serration across the bridge of his nose. A heavy weight of metal links dragged upon his ear.

No, this is not who I am—

He felt rough caresses over his legs and bare feet, a touch like old dry parchment. Hadlo’s gaze dropped to see serpents crowding around him, rising up like a tide. Gray vipers moving about his body as if he were not there, more and more of them now, burying him under their obdurate mass.

He cried out and threw them off, stumbling away. His feet plunged ankle-deep into drifts of ash, and the cleric turned, his robes catching in a tormented wind, tearing his pastel hood from his head. Hadlo glanced up and saw the vestiges of an obliterated city ranged around him, beneath angry clouds that spat flames and lightning.

He heard the distant screech of disruptor fire, the crack-and-thump of chemical explosives. The ash was everywhere, thick in layers that coated the stone ruins, turning and wheeling in motes that clogged the air in his lungs. He made out toppled towers and shattered statues robbed of their majesty, cracked domes and piles of dead bricks. Hadlo struggled to make some sense of the murdered vista, searching to find some commonality, some indicator.

Is this Cardassia? Or Bajor? Which is it? Which one? Answer me!

From the wall of howling, windblown ashes came shapes that formed into figures of hooded men and women, the masks of Oralius tarnished and broken over their faces. Hadlo lurched forward and grasped the closest one, snatching the façade away. It disintegrated into powder in his fingers and beneath there was nothing but a bare skull, the gri