This story contains mature themes. Click here for a list of content warnings.
The sun was sinking low in the western skies by the time Varo and I made it to The Watchtower. In fear of being seen and stopped, we had waited until nightfall before we approached the giant stone formation. It loomed over us, threatening and immovable.
Beside me, Varo stopped walking. He paused and gazed up at the monolith. In the dull light of dusk, I couldn’t make out much more than his silhouette, but I knew he was scared. I would be.
“The entrance is just over there, behind that rock face,” I explained.
I didn’t want to think about my last time here. I didn’t want to think about the sharp rocks that cut into the bottoms of my feet as I walked into the cave.
Varo nodded and began walking again.
I watched as he approached the monolith, ready to learn its knowledge in hopes of saving his sister. I wondered absently if anyone had been willing to do that for me? Or any of the other women who had been used for their wombs.
As Varo approached the entrance in the wall, I felt something inside me stir. This was all wrong. This was not how it was supposed to happen.
Without a second thought, I took off after Varo. I caught up to him just before he entered the cave, grabbing his arm to slow him down.
“Wait,” I said. “I…”
Before I could finish my sentence, darkness overtook me. A memory grabbed hold of my brain, more real than anything around me.
I was swallowed into the oblivion of my past.
I was twelve years old, and I was terrified.
The only light inside The Watchtower came from the opening in the stone behind me. I knew Leon and the other Watchmen stood guard, so I couldn’t leave. But I wanted to. I wanted my mother and the comfort of her home. I didn’t want to be here, where the other girls had gone.
My legs felt like lead as I forced myself further into the cave.
The cave tunneled deeper and deeper, further and further away from the light. I wondered if this was what hell was. My neighbor, Henry, used to talk about god and the devil. He talked about heaven and hell–this place felt like hell. Despite that, everyone had always told me that the Primores were good; they were gods sent to save us.
I didn’t feel like I was walking towards any kind of god. I felt like I was walking to my death.
After some time, the tunnel widened. It opened into a large cavern that was lit by a single beam of sunlight. I gazed up, realizing that the sunlight was coming from a small hole at the very top of The Watchtower. The hole felt miles away, but somehow, I felt better seeing the blue skies.
Around me, the cave was still mostly dark. It was a circular space with smooth walls and damp floors. It was hard to tell if the inside walls were as white as the outside walls, but from what I could see, I assumed they were.
At the center of the room, where the light pooled in, was a hole in the ground. I approached it with hesitation, feeling the heartbeat of The Watchtower beneath my bare feet. It felt stronger than ever, and I wished it would stop.
As I made it to the edge of the hole, my stomach churned. There was only darkness below, but the heartbeat was clearer than it had ever been.
This was its heart.
I didn’t have time to understand what that meant. Behind me, I heard what sounded like wind. I turned quickly, but nothing was there. The sound of the wind came again, echoing through the caves. This time, it was followed by the strange sound of clicking.
The clicking was rhythmic and patterned as if it were a code or a language. Tears were already staining my cheeks as I looked around frantically for the source of the noise. My heart pounded in my chest, faster than the heartbeat beneath my feet.
“Please,” I tried to plead with the Primores. “Please don’t hurt me.”
The clicking continued, and the wind was howling through the cave, tugging at my hair and my long white skirts. I backed up until my back was against the wall and sobbed.
“Please,” I said over and over until the word lost all its meaning.
The clicking paused suddenly, and I smelt a strange combination of sulfur and burning foliage. Beneath my feet, water began to pool around me. I sobbed louder, knowing the Primores were close, but it was too dark to see.
Suddenly, I felt something wrap itself around my ankle.
“Stop,” I sobbed.
The sound of the wind shifted and combined with the clicking noise to create something new. It reminded me of how two instruments could come together to make a song. The noise slowly began to form words I could understand.
“It is not us,” the voice said. It sounded like the hiss of sizzling oil.
“What?”
I could hardly breathe. I could hardly think.
“We are not the monster you fear.”
“No,” I sobbed. “I know what happens to girls who come here.”
“Yes, girls are hurt,” the voice said. “But we do not hurt the girls.”
I couldn’t stop the tears. Fear still coursed through my veins. “Who hurts us?”
“The men.”
I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to understand. Before I had time to ask anything more. I heard another voice. This time, it sounded human. Relief washed over me when I saw the outline of Leon and two of his men emerge from the cave. Leon held a flashlight. Whatever had been holding my leg was gone.
“Can I leave?” I looked at Leon, hoping he had changed his mind. He had come back for me after all.
“You’re not done here, Ophelia.”
I was pulled out of my body at that moment. I felt like I was one of the enigmatic Primores, floating just out of sight, watching as Leon and his men did things to me that even the monsters in the caves didn’t do.
I was no longer twelve and terrified. I was thirty-one and sick with anger, trapped in a place between waking and sleep.
I stood in the moonlight. Around me was nothing but sand and sky. There were no plants, no mountains, and no Watchtower. The stars were brilliant, twinkling in the inky black skies above me.
“Hello?” I called out into the empty desert. “Varo?”
There was no response, but I had expected as much. Wherever I was was not a place many people ventured. It felt like a hallowed space, like an empty church or a cemetery after a funeral. I wasn’t supposed to be there.
I should have been panicking, but all I felt was a strange sense of calm.
I found myself gazing up at the stars. They were beautiful in a way I had never noticed before. I wondered absently when the last time I went stargazing was.
Suddenly, the sky broke into two, and something large fell from the sparkling heavens. It landed in the desert with a thud and a cloud of dust. I watched as the dust settled and the sky stitched itself back together. Sitting in front of me was The Watchtower.
It didn’t look like how it looked in my memories. There were no cracks in the stone or weather-worn surfaces. Instead, it was solid and perfect–a polished statue pointing up.
I stared in awe as The Watchtower glistened in the moonlight. I was utterly entranced. I felt like a moth seeing its first flame.
Slowly, the image in front of me shifted, as if it were merely a reflection on the water. Before I could make sense of what was happening, three strange figures stood in front of the white monolith.
They were tall and thin, made out of dark wisps of smoke. Instead of arms or legs, they had long tendrils that drifted downwards like the legs of a spider, barely touching the ground. Their forms were translucent, like black smoke, and moved in strange fluid movements. Each had three eyes as bright as stars, twinkling as they took me in.
“You…you’re the Primores,” I could hardly speak. “I…I thought…I thought you were the ones hurting all the girls, but…you’re not, are you?”
The memory of Leon holding my body to the ground was burned into my brain. The Primores were not the monsters.
“We made a deal,” said one of them. Its voice was a hiss, like wind through the trees.
“With who?” I asked. “Leon? The Watchmen?”
“Yes.”
“What was the deal?”
“They feared death, so we took it away from them. In return, they promised us water; Earth’s most abundant resource.”
“Water?” I was trying to understand, but my mind felt listless.
“But no water came, and we grew weak.”
I tried to process this. Water wasn’t their weakness; it was what they needed.
“Then why don’t you take away what you gave The Watchmen? Take away their youth.” I asked.
“When a gift is given, it cannot be taken back. We do not have the strength we had years ago. So, we must wait for water to come.”
“Why would you take away their thirst if you needed water?”
“Greed,” there was almost a sorrowful tone in its voice. “If they no longer thirsted, we would have more. They couldn’t hoard it for themselves.”
“Why…are you telling me this? What am I supposed to do?” The realization that I was talking to a strange, ethereal creature still hadn’t caught up with me.
“Save us and destroy Judgment.” The words echoed around the empty desert I stood in.
“No, I need to save my friend first. I need to make sure what happened to me never happens again.”
“It can’t happen if they are dead,” the Primores countered.
I contemplated this for a moment. “But how do I get water to you?”
Before it could answer, the skies turned into swirling patterns of color. The desert faded away until it was nothing but a collection of dancing colors.
I returned to my body, somewhere near the entrance to The Watchtower. I was sitting on the ground. It was dark, but I could hear Varo beside me.
“You fell down, are you-”
“It’s not the Primores,” I said, feeling tears pour down my cheeks at the memory of it all.
Leon and his crimes filled my head. The thought of myself and other girls being led into the caves only to be raped by cruel men. Then they lied. They covered it up with the grand nature of the Primores and The Watchtower. But they were hurting the Primores as well, keeping them from the very thing that gave them power.
“Harper,” Varo’s voice was soft as he sat beside me. Slowly, he reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder.
Suddenly, I couldn’t hold it together anymore. I realized just how deeply evil Leon’s plans had been. I realized what he had done to me.
I was a child.
And so were the other girls.
I began to sob.
“They aren’t the ones who’ve hurt people. It’s Leon and his Watchmen. They…” I couldn’t bring myself to say everything that happened to me–that would be happening to Lu if we didn’t stop it.
I’m not sure how long I sat there, sobbing. At some point, Varo attempted to comfort me by putting his arms around me and pulling me against his chest. I was too tired and confused to be embarrassed. There was so much for me to process–too much.
Time felt irrelevant. It could have been minutes or an hour that I sat there on the desert ground with Varo. The only thing that ended my tears was Lu. I didn’t have much time until she would be sent into The Watchtower.
Slowly, I pulled myself out of Varo’s embrace and wiped the last of my tears away. He was watching me carefully. I could tell he wanted to ask me a million questions, but he restrained himself.
“It’s not the Primores,” I said as last.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not the Primores who impregnate the girls here,” I clarified. “It’s Leon and his Watchmen.”
Slowly, rage colored his features. “Are you sure?”
I nodded.
“But what does The Watchtower have to do with this?”
I explained what the Primores had explained to me. Varo listened, looking paler with everything I told him. When I finally explained our need for water, he simply nodded.
“Are you alright?” He finally asked after I ended my long rambling about what I had experienced.
It wasn’t the question I had been expecting to answer. I hesitated before saying, “When Leon and The Watchmen are dead, I will be.”
“After talking to Coyote the other night, I couldn’t stop thinking about water,” Varo admitted. “There’s no well, there’s rarely any more than a drizzle of rain.”
“From what I can tell, the Primores need a lot of water to…recover,” I said.
“I know Coyote said there’s no water, and that’s true, but…do you remember when we first met? Not in Phoenix, here.”
I gave a slow nod. “Yeah, I caught a lizard, and you told me you were hiding four in your closet.”
His grave expression lightened slightly, and he smiled. “Yeah, well, do you remember where we’d always find those lizards?”
“The old river bed. It was…” I trailed off, realizing what I had said. “The river bed.”
“So, I was looking at some maps of the area,” he pulled out his phone. He had no service, but the maps still worked on his phone. “There’s the river bed.” He pointed to a change in texture on the topography.
“It’s not too far,” I replied.
“Everyone in town said that it dried up a long time ago, but look at this,” he zoomed into something several miles from us. A white wall was constructed beside a river. The longer I looked, the more clearly I understood.
“It didn’t dry up,” he said. “They diverted it.”
“And if we took out that dam, where would the water go?”
“Through town.”
I smiled.
This is going well. I hope you have something else lined up.
Thank you.