The death of their world, Rialto thought, deep in his historical reverie.

  WHUMP

  WHUMP

  WHUMP

  Rialto was jolted back to reality by disorienting pulses that he could feel in his chest. They were so, so loud. He tried to figure out where they were coming from, but he was too shaken to think.

  A sudden silence was followed by the arrival of a massive shadow, circling the Ark as it spiraled ever upwards. Rialto realized that it was one of those terrible birds of prey venerated by the faith. Simurghs, his people called them. The simurgh's eyes were blazing medallions of red, its body so black that it was almost invisible in the dark. The creature rose up above the Ark, fanned out its wings, and then dive-bombed back down below the sphere.

  Rialto braced himself for the next set of deafening wingbeats as the simurgh passed beneath the aperture of the Ark. WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. He wondered how much sound was enough to kill a person. Now that he thought about it, he had no idea which factors were predictive of one's resistance to sound. Body mass seemed critical for surviving most physical dangers, but he couldn't see how body mass would protect your eardrums. He mused that if anyone was born with superhuman resistance to deadly sound— perhaps due to strange bone resonance, or an unusual chest cavity— they would likely never find out. For some reason, that struck him as a shame.

  WHUMP

  WHUMP

  WHUMP

  The simurgh's wingbeats faded as it disappeared into the distance. Rialto breathed a sigh of relief. Simurghs were divisive among the faithful. Some said they were benevolent messengers of God; others thought they were omens to be feared. Rialto fell into the second camp. God created intuitions for a reason, and it was especially wise to trust one's intuitions about the natural world. If he saw something that chilled him to the bone with fear, then as far as he was concerned, that was God speaking through his eyes.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  His mother, a painter, fell into the other camp. She was fascinated by the simurghs, one of her favorite visual subjects. She even painted one on the ceiling of Rialto's nursery, intending for it to be a sort of divine protector. Rialto shivered as he remembered that piercing avian gaze staring down from above. His mother had intended it to be reassuring, but it had instead put him in a constant sense of unease.

  In general, he regretted that his mother's disposition towards art was not closer to his own. Her works were undoubtedly beautiful from a technical perspective, perhaps even divinely inspired. But they venerated sublimity, beauty, drama in a way that aroused his suspicion. In his mind, art was meant to be austere, elegant, moral; not ostentatious, indulgent, gauche. Still, he had to admit that they inspired people. Some people had come to the faith through the power of his mother's images alone. That was more than he could say for himself.

  And there was one painting by his mother that he did admire. It was a mural interpreting her own experience of the Ascension, in which she stood in dark robes staring up at an endless expanse of sky. She was tiny in comparison to the ashen planes above, but the mural was so large that the lines on her face were clearly visible. Her dominant feeling was hard to read: hope, peace, solemnity, and others danced across her face in equal measure. It reminded him so much of the layered expressions she wore every other day of her life.

  Countless artists had depicted the Ascension, but so many focused on the violence, the spectacle, the gory details. To him, this missed the point; the Ascension was not some entertainment to be consumed for mere pleasure. But in this work, his mother bravely captured something more transcendent: the stillness after, and the reverence the faith owed to those who had already passed beyond. It was possible to honor the divine transformation of the Ascension while still honoring the sacred mortal lives had passed from this world. He still thought it was a bit idolatrous for her to put herself in such an image, but he considered it forgivable in the context of great art.

  Perhaps his mother saw simurghs as a similar reminder of death: something she had long been at peace with, to her credit. Despite his best efforts, Rialto could never reach his mother's level of equanimity with the concept. He had never focused on it during his religious practice, his instinctual feelings towards death being so keenly felt. Surely if God had aroused such feelings in him, then they were there for a reason. Still, he felt that his mother had had access to some religious truth that he did not. He should have asked about it, before...

  Death.

  Death.

  Death.

  In order to stave off the incoming flood of images, Rialto began to relive his own vision of the Ascension from so many years ago...