All Not Taken: An Apocalyptic Short Story (Nikolas Paladino)

The grass shone with dewdrops, glistening brightly as the sun shone one last time for those dying in the field. Naho was among them, quietly bleeding, but calmly waiting to perish. He recalled how many enemies he had killed that day. Eight? he thought. No, I think nine. He could feel himself slipping away; he had never struggled to remember how many died at his hands during a battle. He remembered the days when he had just enlisted, as all his brothers did before him. He remembered taking the oath before the queen, pledging his life to her and sacrificing it, if necessary. And today, it was. Naho knew he was going to die when the forest became too quiet. None in his battalion were suspicious, but Naho was too old, too experienced to shake off the eerie silence of the trees. The forest was quiet again after the opposition ambushed his team, with only Naho’s labored breathing permeating throughout the woods as the others drifted off into the afterlife. He would be the last one to die, which he took with a great sense of pride. For someone who was dying, Naho wasn’t very sad at all. He knew that he had spilt enough blood in battle to be worthy of rejoining his brothers in the afterlife. He also knew that his sweet queen would honor his soul as it left the body he gave up for her. Repeating the oath he took when he first enlisted, Naho uttered out loud, “All not taken…is wasted.” Naho breathed one last time, excited to leave his husk of a body, this husk of a world. And so, he did.

           

            A life lived in Antaxis was a life filled with hardship. The Antaxians were once a fertile people, and what began as a population boom in the midst of prosperity quickly became a legacy of despair for all those not strong enough to keep up with the increasing physical demands of living. The Antaxians were emaciated, and fights for any morsels of food were frequent, as some were willing to risk death to escape hunger. When Queen Aan seized power, she understood that there were simply too many Antaxians to feed. She instituted a strict one-child regiment, and along with it a mandate stating that all newborns must be physically capable enough to eventually serve in the Antaxian army, or else face abandonment in the wilderness. Anyone who resisted her mandate would join the children in death, and she enforced her policies throughout the seven villages with her squadron of royal officials.

            Though Queen Aan ruled with an iron fist, her mandates soon became second nature. The Antaxians soon found the idea of multiple children utterly foreign and had no issue with sacrificing sickly or weak children to the queen. In fact, it was a great honor to give the queen one’s child, and it was believed that those sacrificed would protect the queendom from the vicious Antimonians. Queen Aan has lived for what seems like centuries now, many times longer than any of her subjects. No one knew the secret to her longevity, but no one dared question it publicly either. Her age was only matched by her size—she towered over all her citizens and was double the size of some of her attendants. Her palace was an underground bunker, and only her most trusted advisors (and her selected consorts) could enter.

            Occasionally, the ground seemed to tremor from one of the Queen’s tantrums in her palace. Her hatred for Antimony, the rival kingdom of Antaxis, was always loud and violent, and no one could calm her down until she grew weary of raging. One story that made its way across the queendom was that she drank the blood of Antimonians to live as long as she did. Another was that her first lover was an Antimonian who spurned her for another, and that all her rage was a result of a broken heart. Whatever the reason, Queen Aan loved to wage war against Antimony. Her standing army was constantly replenished by strong individuals who yearned to serve their queen, for a war they never really knew why they were waging. Queen Aan was a brilliant orator, but she relied on the short-term memory of her subjects to fuel popular fury against the Antimonians. One time, according to her, they crossed the border and stole our food. The next, they murdered outpost guards in the middle of the night. The most fearsome story she told was that they stole the Antaxian babies put up for sacrifice before they perished, and that they were the favorite snacks of the Antimonians. The Queen’s tactful storytelling led smoothly into her next mandate: that every able-bodied Antaxian would serve in her army. “The age of the plowshare is over; we must now wield the sword,” she announced to her subjects one day. “We must take back what is rightfully ours! We must exterminate the Antimonians!” Everyone in Antaxia—men, women, children—felt something awaken within them. She entranced the population even more than she had before, and soon the final battle would take place. “Armageddon will not befall us! No, no, my children! We are Armageddon!”

When it had been more than a week since Naho returned from his mission, Naamah knew that her husband had died. She couldn’t tell whether it was her pregnancy or her grief that had brought upon her nausea, but the end result was the same. She ran to the back of the hut that was now hers alone to vomit. Naho and Naamah were relatively old to have children, so once Naamah felt the baby inside her, they rejoiced for days. Naho couldn’t wait for his child to join him in the royal army and create the martial legacy he had always dreamed of. Naamah was just excited to have a baby; she didn’t think much of the military anymore. She had been lucky enough to be excused from the mandatory enlisting in the great war to give birth. Naamah wondered if Naho ever resented her for that. She also wondered if Naho thought of her or her baby in his last moments. She hushed her thoughts, exiting the hut and looking out from the perch to see the balcony of the royal palace. Though it was underground, a giant bronze tower emerged from its core and pierced the sky above it. There was no place in Antaxia where one could not see the royal tower. This was from where Queen Aan’s booming voice would roar across the entire land. She required no town crier, no viceroy, no messenger—her messages always came through loud and clear with her deafening voice.

Naamah saw the queen emerge from her palace and climb the steps of her tower. When she finally reached the top, she held her hands outstretched and bellowed to her army below, “All not taken!” They responded in unison, “Is wasted!” These words felt hollow to the now widowed Naamah. She remembered meeting Naho in the service, risking discipline for midnight trysts in between training days. Naho would never come to meet her, however. He lived and died by the sword; he lived and died for his queen. Naamah knew this when she married him. It was her free choice to make, but she thought that there was always something more than Antaxia and its queen. She never dared speak of her doubts of nationalism to her husband, for fear of losing the love she had worked so hard to gain. Now that he was gone, though, her mind wandered as the queen continued rallying her troops for the upcoming battle.

“Antimony must be ours! We will water our crops with Antimonian blood and feast upon the fruits of our labor!” screamed Queen Aan. The congregation roared with barbaric noises, almost animalistic in nature. Naamah looked to the army the queen was addressing. Antaxian armies were never small, but in all of Naamah’s years, she had never seen as large of a gathering of people ever before. They must have looked like tiny ants from all the way up in the queen’s tower.

            Naamah remembered her last mission to Antimony with her battalion. Her reconnaissance of the area that fateful day was her first glimpse at the place she was primed to hate. Looking through the scope of a sniper rifle, however, she didn’t quite know what to say when her team members asked for a status report. Antimony looked identical to Antaxia. From the winding roads to the marketplace to the obelisk-like royal tower that shot into the sky, if Naamah hadn’t known better, she would have mistaken it for her home. In fact, she saw the swollen belly of a soon-to-be mother walking into a tiny hut through her scope. As the reticle hovered over the pregnant woman, Naamah froze with fear and lowered her weapon. “What is wrong with you?” asked her fellow soldier next to her. It was the first and the last time she lied to her teammates: she said that guards surrounded the roads and that they had to leave as soon as possible, or else face risk of capture. No one was as skilled at reconnaissance as Naamah was, so the team took her word for it and left.

            Naamah never went a day after that incident without thinking about the mother in her sights. She often dreamed about a little Antimonian girl frolicking throughout the quiet field that separated Antaxia and Antimony. Every time she received a report of a destroyed Antimonian village, Naamah’s heart seemed to jump out of her chest. She often contemplated sneaking out of Antaxia to find out if the Antimonian village was still standing. But the gates to the outside were always shut, and only military servicepeople on sanctioned missions could exit the gates. Naamah wasn’t even listening to the queen’s screeching voice anymore, as she could only focus on the gates outside. The tethers that bound her to her country, her husband, and her queen were looser than ever, and Naamah longed for freedom from the endless rhetoric about war, Antimony, and hatred. She had never thought of defection before, but the dreams of the Antimonian girl and the solitude within her hut left Naamah’s mind aching for change. As she rushed inside and packed a tiny bag and her weapon to make her attempt to escape, she felt a hardy kick from within her womb.

            How could I have forgotten that I was pregnant? Naamah asked. She dropped her things and started to place everything that she had hastily taken out of her hut back to where she had found them. She couldn’t believe how ready she was to abandon the life that she had spent years building from nothing. She remembered when the authorities came to her parent’s hut to request Naamah’s medical records. She had always been lithe and perhaps scrawny, but she remembered the fear paralyze her entire body that night. She feared she would end up like Aybel.

Aybel was one of her playmates as a child, and was a rambunctious, playful little child who broke his leg while climbing a fence. The screams of the little boy alerted the entire village to his crippling injury, which his mother reacted with a bloodcurdling scream of her own. Royal officials appeared in no time to unceremoniously scoop up the little boy in their arms as the mother and son’s screams echoed throughout the village’s silence. Naamah never saw Aybel after that day. His mother became a recluse and would only emerge every once in a while to buy food from the marketplace, never speaking a word to anyone. Ordinarily, such solitude was frowned upon in Antaxia, a place where everyone was supposed to contribute to the greater good. Yet everyone seemed to understand that Aybel’s mother was to remain a silent ghost, drifting throughout the village until the end of her days. Such was life in Antaxia. Everything was subject to royal regulation, from the children one has to the military service that is required from everyone. No one seemed particularly happy, of course, but there was no rioting or unrest anymore; Queen Aan had made sure of that.

As Naamah quelled her rebellious urges, as her military training had taught her to do, a violent wave of agony emerging from her womb emanated throughout her entire body. She was only six months pregnant, but she felt a red, sticky liquid run down her legs. As her dread started to set in, a wrenching, knelling tone rolled throughout the queendom of Antaxia. It was the war bell. Through the window of her hut, Naamah could see Queen Aan maniacally laughing as she rang the bell from atop the tower.

“Yes, my brood!” she screamed. “The time is now! The end is nigh! Now we ride for Antimony! Now shall we bring Pestilence! Now shall we bring War! Now shall we bring Famine! Now shall we bring Death!” The deafening tolling of the bell and the wrath of their terror-queen drove the army to sprint to the walls of Antimony.

Naamah’s screams of anguish went unheard because of the commotion outside. She thanked the gods for this coincidence—the royal officials would have surely seized her and her soon-to-be-premature baby had there not been such incitement outside. She could feel the stomping of the army, the ringing of the bell, and the screams of her queen as she lay on the floor in the midst of childbirth, desperately trying to make the bleeding stop. One final contraction later, Naamah felt her baby coming. She quickly grabbed a rag from the room and placed it under herself so that she could catch the child. The cacophony of the queen, the bells, and the army welcomed the baby into its first moments of birth as Naamah quickly swaddled the baby. The baby was a girl. She is so tiny, thought Naamah. She would have surely been seized by the officials. Her daughter was so fragile; she had Naho’s eyes. “I name you Pandora,” declared Naamah. Pandora cooed softly in response to her mother’s voice.

Added to the discordance of the final battle was a sudden, violent downpour that pelted the outside of the hut, rousing Pandora to let out her first wail. As Naamah regained her strength, she placed the baby in a crib that Naho had been building before his mission. She ran outside to get a glimpse of the action outside, noticing that what was coming from the sky was not so much rain but a heavenly waterfall that poured fiercely into the Antaxian army. Naamah’s eyes widened as the cascade demolished the thousands of Antaxian infantry. Queen Aan’s belligerent call to arms quickly became a cry for her help as the flood weakened the structural integrity of her tower. Her attendants were currently drowning, however, and the tower began to crumble.

“The flood will blot out every living thing that has enjoyed this world of wretchedness!” cried a voice from the village. Naamah turned around to discover that it was the ghost of the village, Aybel’s mother. “Woe to the whore who rides this Beast of a nation and its seven villages to endless war!” she screamed, pointing at Queen Aan. “See how the waters bring her down! See how the floodgates of the sky will bring forth the end of days to us all! I am coming, Aybel!” Aybel’s mother shuffled towards the battlefield and the giant waterfall, hoping to reunite with her son soon enough.

Naamah knew that Antaxia would be no more. She sprinted back into the hut, grabbed Pandora, her gun, and her tiny bag that she had already packed. The waters were already rising, and they didn’t have much time left. As Naamah ran with Pandora in her arms to the gate, she noticed that the outposts had no guards left. Queen Aan must have reassigned them to infantry, thought Naamah. As she climbed the walls of her village, she took one final glimpse at the queendom she would never see again. Queen Aan’s tower had fallen, and she was nowhere to be seen. The dissonance of noise was replaced with an eerie silence, with only the sound of rushing water filling the soundscape of a now deserted Antaxia. Naamah wasted no time in leaving her home forever, running to the Fields of Beyond, where no one, civilian or military, was permitted to enter.

Naamah sprinted through the Fields of Beyond as fast as she could with Pandora, leaving behind the drowned remnants of Antaxia. As she finally stopped to catch her breath, she noticed the sky darkening again. Oh no, she thought, not another flood. She looked up to see a giant, indescribably large and looking down upon her and her child. Paralyzed with fear, Naamah closed her eyes, waiting for the end of the world to come for her and her child as it did for all the other Antaxians.

The giant approached the ground with its hand and placed a large morsel of bread next to Naamah and Pandora. It then swiftly disappeared from view as it sprinted away from the fields. Naamah thanked the gods, the giant, the universe—anything and anyone she could thank—for the blessing she had just received.

“All not taken,” said Naamah to Pandora, “is given.”

“Christopher!” yelled the schoolteacher. Christopher looked at her curiously with his empty water bottle in hand. He could see hundreds of ants floating in the deluge, away from the giant anthill and into the river just inches away. “What are you doing, Christopher? Don’t waste your water like that, you’ll get parched!” scolded the schoolteacher.

As she walked back into the schoolhouse, Christopher, a little boy of seven years old, looked at the anthills he had flooded. One had a tall column of dirt sticking right from the center of it, where a large ant had been perched atop it. Christopher imagined that the big ant was telling all the littler ants below what to do. When he dropped his water bottle, all the little ants floated away helplessly, and the big ant was buried underneath its giant tower. Christopher felt so sad—he didn’t mean to ruin the ants’ home, of course. As recess ended, he took one final look at the submerged anthills. He noticed a smaller ant that had managed to run away from the flood in the neighboring grass, with a tiny larva placed gently in its jaws.

Christopher looked down on the ant and its young, happy that his mistake hadn’t washed these two away. “Maybe one of you two will be the next big ant,” quipped Christopher. He took out a tiny crumb from his sandwich, placed it next to the ant and its larva, and returned to the schoolhouse.

Author Commentary

“All Not Taken” is a short story that is heavily based on biblical accounts of the apocalypse from the Books of Genesis and Revelation, drawing upon the destructive and transformative themes found in the Great Flood and Armageddon. Queen Aan and Antaxia as a whole are allegorically linked to the Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist, respectively, while Naamah is connected to the figure of Noah and Aybel’s mother draws from the characters of Methuselah (more from the film Noah than the actual biblical figure) and the author of Revelation, John. I was also particularly inspired by David Alfaro Siqueiros’s painting, El Fin del Mundo, especially with the singular miniscule figure remaining in the midst of the destruction of such grand structures surrounding the figure. The “revelation” at the end of the story, in which Naamah, Pandora, Queen Aan, and all the inhabitants of Antaxia and Antimony are actually ants, reflects the concept of apocalyptic relativity discussed in N.K. Jemisin’s interview, specifically when she states, “An apocalypse is a relative thing […] The end of the world is happening even as we speak. The question becomes whether it’s the kind of world that needs to go.” I wanted to contrast the destructive deluge at the end of the story with the revelation that these people are all just ants, even though they face the same struggle that Noah did when the Great Flood occurred in Genesis.

One motif that I decided to leave out of the final assignment was that of transformation. Although Naamah goes through some internal transformations throughout the story, as she becomes a widow and a mother quite quickly, I wanted to leave the rebirth and transformation of the ant cities unstated, hinting at Naamah or Pandora’s future leadership with Christopher’s final words at the end of the story. This unspoken ending also appears in the short film Pumzi, in which the main character, Asha, plants a tree outside the underground compound to re-terraform the Earth, but the aftermath of her actions is left unsettled. Just so, I wanted “All Not Taken” to be an apocalyptic tale full of possibility and transition, as well as one with a dramatic shift in the perspective from which we view our end of the world relative to that of other beings.