Cirque stole the elephant’s bridle from its gilded chest. In the lee where midnight loitered on the toes of dawn, Cirque pocketed all they could and fled the Stage for the last time.
Weighed down by harlequin rockets, Soleil met them at the riverbank. She carried cherry bombs and nuclear fizzlers that glowed radium green in Harvast’s imperfect dark. Already, burns colored Soleil’s arms. She didn’t expect to live long enough to see the sickness through. Anyway, she’d faced worse in the Show.
Alien stars struggled to shine above the place where Cirque and Soleil enacted their doom. Between then, the Show’s orbiting ship gleamed silver. Soleil couldn’t shake the ingrained sense that her every motion was being watched.
They didn’t speak. Cirque’s tongue was gone, removed by lasers before their first act, seven years back. Soleil spoke a language confined only to herself. The Show arrived eight months ago in the sky of her home world. A day was all it took to wipe a culture away. Soleil was all that remained, a collected curiosity pressed onstage.
Only she recalled the true name of a planet that no longer lived. She spoke it to no one. Not even herself. Nostalgia was a poison she couldn’t stomach.
Cirque unfolded the elephant bridle on the scrubby bank. Already, night was limping toward day. A heavy mist crept across the horizon from the east as Cirque put their right leg through one strap. Soleil slid her left into the other. Locking arms, they leapt into the atmosphere of a planet neither could call home.
The Show settled over Harvast no more than a week ago. Rolling fields of grain, Soleil couldn’t identify, tickled her scabbed feet as they gained altitude. Harvast unspooled below, hills gradually giving way to valleys, valleys crumbling at last into a scarlet sea. It was a beautiful place. It was a lie invented by the Show.
Before the Stage rose on the surface of a new conquest, the Showrunners turned the terrain inside out. They poured strata of imported soil over ruined cities and pumped vapors across continents to create their preferred air. They extinguished all but one of every being, ensuring an exotic and exclusive cast of performers wherever the Show went.
Locked in the orbiting ship until Harvast’s transformation was complete, Soleil couldn’t imagine what this world looked like before. Perhaps like hers. Perhaps not.
Waves sparkled beneath them, glitter-flecked foam pluming upwards in sprays of corrosive salt. Under this manufactured ocean rested all that had been Harvast before the Show. Its people—those unable to perform alongside Cirque and Soleil—rested with their remnants beneath eternal chewing waves.
Soleil’s world had been buried in sand, abrasive granules shaped like jagged stars. She still recalled the feel of them latching onto skin and hair. She’d learned to swim, keeping her head above the grit. She’d learned to perform. She’d learned to survive.
Cirque steered them towards a lightening horizon. Soon, the Show would awaken. The holographic Stage would heave to life. The Showrunners would don their plate-glass armor and rouse the performers en masse. They’d notice then the absent bridle, the pilfered bombs. Soleil held tight to her straps. She and Cirque had precious little time to fulfill their escape.
They flew through morning light. It felt not so different from a performance. Except the crowd was absent, pixelated faces piped in from planets as distant as Soleil’s home. Silence was a mercy she’d forgotten.
Between churning blood-red currents, an arching shadow revealed itself before them. Marooned in Harvast’s unnatural sea crouched a stone no acid could dissolve. It rose only a few meters from the waves, pitted and ancient and alone.
Cirque pressed a button on the bridle’s strap. For seven long years, they’d coaxed and coerced the elephants in the Show. Their bones had broken and knit. Their skin had blistered and bled. They, like Soleil, learned to perform. And in their performing, they plotted a way out.
Under Cirque’s guidance, the bridle hissed. They descended to the surface of the island that had once been a mountain.
Soleil’s sore feet found stone. It was no true rock, she knew. Along the craggy face, growths like petrified burls marred its silicon skin. She walked between them, touching with the six fingers that remained to her. Callous to rock, she felt for the deepest divots in which to nestle her charges.
She had heard the legend from a performer. A waiflike girl with no arms and scars latticing her face. She came from Harvast, the newest addition to their act. She sang like the dead.
In whispers, the girl told Soleil about the arrival of the Show. She recounted how the ship entered orbit and filled the sky with subduing gases. How the diggers unrooted her homeland and molded magma over playgrounds and schools. Yet she said that it was not the end. For Harvast bore a secret.
“The Eucatast,” she breathed in Soleil’s ear two nights ago. In halting, haunted tones, she told the legend of Harvast’s rebirth.
It awakens at the end
When fields burn
When waves rise
And people drown—
The Eucatast will rouse
And turn the end back
To begin anew.
The Show razed Harvast’s cliffs and drained the sea. It flooded the gorges and fractured the clouds. When all who resisted it were overcome, it harnessed the sun, channeling fiery power to the Stage to better light the performers and their acts.
Why had the Eucatast not risen then? Soleil didn’t know. She feared—even as she planted missiles in the middle of the toxic sea—that the girl’s myth was a story and no more. But Soleil and Cirque could not turn, for their absence was surely known by now. Here on a lone rock lay their last chance: they must manufacture the final catastrophe. They must waken the Eucatast, or succumb in the attempt.
She passed half her sparklers to Cirque. Together, they crisscrossed the living island, planting explosives like prayers. Soleil imagined it breathed beneath them. She fancied it listened. She hoped it knew that she and Cirque meant no harm—no more than had already befell this wretched world.
When all was ready, she joined Cirque in the bridle. She kept a single radon rocket at her side. With a flick of Cirque’s fingers, they flew once more.
Seventy ells above the island’s surface, Soleil uncapped her rocket. She broke the seal and murmured a prayer in her native tongue, to gods who were long dead. She dropped the charge into the center of the island.
Stars ignited. Powder burst. The surface throbbed, and waves caught flame. Cirque sent them higher as sparks dazzled the air. Soleil clutched their arm. It was hard to breathe and harder to see.
Had the girl believed the story she told? Did the Eucatast exist? Did it slumber here?
Wrapped in the bridle and Cirque, Soleil shivered with doubt. By now, the Show would have noticed their lack. Showrunners surely heard the crackling and saw them hanging helplessly above the corrosive bay.
Seventy ells below, the island rocked. A great groan like a glacier in steady motion shook the sky. Chemicals sizzled. Smoke churned. The Eucatast woke from sleep.
Harvast heaved. The ocean boiled. As Soleil stared down in magnificent horror, a bouldered shoulder shrugged free of surf, and rose.
Cirque screamed.
Some legends—borrowed and bought with blood—live.
The Eucatast emerged from the ocean that shouldn’t be. It was not armed. It had no legs Soleil could see. It was large, though—so large. Larger than the many-bladed ships that now converged on them in the light of dawn.
Cirque steered the bridle away from the Showrunners and their grasping hooks. Surrounded, the only way to go was down, towards the Eucatast and the thrashing sea. They shied from shimmering propellers and swooped low. Soleil held her breath as they plummeted.
When she could hold it no longer, she found herself face to face with the Eucatast.
Its visage bore no resemblance to Soleil’s, or anything from her vanished world. Its broad face, riddled with reflections that could just as easily have been crystals as eyes, looked nothing like any beast or myth she recalled. Yet when Cirque guided them down, down, around its great body shedding fizzling droplets and noxious mist, when it smashed the Showrunners’ ships and swallowed the scarlet sea, Soleil was struck by a deep sense of rightness. Of nature in its more sublime, vengeful form.
The Eucatast thrashed. It gulped. It raised itself from Harvast’s ruptured heart and clambered onto the fields over which Cirque and Soleil soared. The stolen bridle kept pace with it, Cirque chasing and Soleil holding on with all her fractured might.
When Harvast broke, we were there.
Plants wavered. Under the many elephantine appendages of the Eucatast, they multiplied. Invasives cultivated by the Show withered, strangled by climbing vines and creeping mosses conjured from dormant seeds. Pollen colored morning air golden.
The Eucatast dragged itself over the hills and down to the valley where the Show reigned, glittering steel tents reflecting the captive sun. The Stage folded like paper. Elephants fled Cirque’s pens, freed at last. Performers took refuge in rapidly growing forests. The Showrunners gasped as the earth cracked beneath them and the air changed shape.
We followed the Eucatast, replanting dales and tangling trapeze wires at dawn.
Performers seized weapons where they found them. Screens warped and electrics fused. Wheels and drums sank into the marsh that the Show had tried to drain. The bridle holding Cirque and Soleil broke.
Soleil screamed this time. Cirque grabbed her as they fell, the Show’s tricks utterly undone. Flightless, they tumbled past the Eucatast’s gleaming eyes and trunklike core. They were still falling when the sky split and the sun shook off its chains.
We were still falling when the mountains grew back, and the seas relented.
We were still falling when the Eucatast batted the Show from orbit and ripped its ship to shreds.
We were still falling when the earth reformed.
Harvast trembled like a beast unleashed. Halfway down a crevasse curling from the planet’s heart, they landed in a hollow soft as spun sugar from Cirque’s home world, long gone. Soleil held their hand.
We were there that day. Together, we watched the fantastic conclusion of the Show.
