The Participants by Brian Blose Page A

trees. They still had weeks before they could begin their
journey. Maybe a month to cross the mountains. Then their paths
parted. They would stop whatever it was they were doing and return
to Observing.
    Trying not to think, Elza swept their stone
hearth free of snow with the branch of a nearby shrub, then set out
in search of firewood. The area around their tent was picked clean,
so she made a large circle to gather fallen branches. Their
existence in the frozen land had become routine.
    Maybe we should visit the
sea before we go our own ways. What is a few more months compared
to the hundreds of years we have lived? She shook her head. It had to end soon. Before one of them
said something to make things serious. Though their conversations
touched on every other topic under the sun, they managed to avoid
that one subject. Whatever was between them had to remain
unsaid.
    She stacked the wood in a dry spot on each
trip back to their camp. When she had enough to cook several fish,
Elza arranged the sticks and used a flint knife to create a pile of
kindling. Then she filled a wooden bowl with snow and placed it
where the heat of the fire could melt it later. There were few
edible plants available and no palatable ones, so their diet
consisted almost entirely of meat and fish. When she had tried
collecting acorns in the fall, Hess had informed her that the ones
this far north were too bitter to eat. She had quickly realized he
understated the case against their edibility.
    She sat to wait for Hess. As she did often
lately, Elza reflected on her long life. The moment creation sprang
into motion had been glorious, coming awake full of glorious
purpose. Everything had fascinated her. The false memories of the
identity provided her by the Creator were dim shadows incomparable
to the experiences she accumulated every moment.
    In the early days, nothing could perturb
her. Elza had walked through life knowing everything was a
temporary illusion, the Creator’s grand dream. People lived their
transient lives and died without ever grasping the truth of their
existence. She had felt so privileged.
    Over the years, something had stolen the joy
of her calling. Perhaps it had been enduring the constant
rejections of the creatures she was sent to observe. Perhaps it had
been the tedious monotony of centuries. Perhaps it had been the
gravitation of the world towards brutality. Or maybe all of it
together was to blame. There had been no single dramatic event to
change her, only lifetimes of hollow memories. Despite enduring
beatings and deaths over the years, it wasn’t until recently that
she had truly experienced drama.
    What if Hess hadn’t been
there to stop the men? The men would have
done what they wanted to her, of course. She could endure anything,
but not without consequences. Would that
have been the dramatic event that changed me? Like Hess had with
his sister’s death? If I live long enough, isn’t it inevitable that
something will happen that I can’t handle?
    The wind picked up and Elza moved to avoid
the snow-filled gusts, going inside the tent where their mingled
scents took her mind in a different direction. Though few enough
men showed interest in her, there had been many owing to the sheer
number of years she lived on the world. Most treated her with
apathy, happy to part ways when the time came. Several had regarded
her as property. A small few had genuinely liked her. But none of
them had looked at her the way Hess did.
    If I was just a woman and
he was just a man . . . . She didn’t
finish the thought. The wind outside howled its loneliness while
Elza waited inside the tent. Hours passed.
    Then the entire world began to thrum in an
impossibly deep pitch. With every second that passed, the sensation
grew stronger, as if existence itself were about to shred into a
million slivers. Without knowing how, Elza recognized what
happened. From the moment of Creation, she had known this world was
only the first Iteration of