The dying embers of daylight painted the virgin sky a serene orange. Here and there, a cloud or two blighted the panorama, but nothing to substantially subtract from the grandeur of the scene. The smell of early autumn clung to the freshening air. Only the calls of distant birds and the soft swoosh of ponderous traffic could be distinctly heard.
Upon this mild evening, the gently swaying form of a single flying man could be spied amongst the heavens. Beneath him now raced past the deep green swell of an expansive wood. Only moments before, his wounded flight had been soothed from below by the azure sight of still natural water. Though it was being increasingly enveloped by the relaxing bosom of nature's gifts, the mind of the man had yet to depart from the orbit of the metropolis from whence he had come.
Kal-El had been flying for more than forty minutes. His left arm stretched out alongside and in front of his head, whilst his right arm cradled and guarded his lower chest. His legs extended behind him in as proper a manner as possible. Both were slightly bent at the knee, and guilty of incorrectly aiming his desired trajectory from time to time. His altitude had been gradually descending following the burst of his initial lift-off. He had begun to paint something of a forlorn figure beneath the twilight sky, tattered and slowly sinking, wavering more and more as his voyage cut through the chilling air.
Bruising and clotted blood adorned the upper left-hand side of Kal-El's usually striking and handsome visage. He could only see out of his right eye; the bite of the flowing evening air helped to numb the agony of his many injuries. His hair was dishevelled and matted here and there with debris and the dingy residue of dried blood. The index and middle fingers of his right hand appeared swollen and misaligned. The appearance of his famous bodysuit told a tale of repeated blows, of tramplings, of concerted and unapologetic punishment.
Thankfully for his adopted home, it was Kal-El who had emerged from this latest skirmish as the victor. The other party, dogged though he may have been, and despite the cruelty of his intentions and his deeds, had eventually succumbed following a protracted battle that began within a city's centre and concluded beyond its outskirts. The local authorities, grateful though they might be for the efforts of Kal-El, would now have the unenviable task of dealing with the aftermath.
Kal-El had started to glimpse more and more in the eyes of the people he saved a look of resignation as they rushed to his side once he had quelled whatever menace had been threatening them. It wasn't that they did not appreciate his herculean efforts. It wasn't that they were ignoring his sacrifices and his honourable commitment to their protection. It was instead an overfamiliarity with the desperation of these situations, an exhaustion with the sight of wreckage, the sound of havoc and the smell of narrowly-averted annihilation.
For it was regrettably true that the incidence of the cataclysms imperilling the people Kal-El had sworn to himself to safeguard had been increasing for some time. Kal-El knew this better than most, physically, mentally and emotionally. He would often ponder to himself if it was indeed his presence that was now attracting the various sources of danger that he was confronting on a weekly basis. Deep down, he could not deny that it was most likely that he bore partial responsibility for the suffering the people who had adopted him were now withering under almost perpetually. The thought horrified him. The inescapable truth of it made him feel hollow.
Kal-El's wounded and faltering flight terminated on the lip of an unassuming hill jutting out from the verdant face of the forest. The vacant sky above was darkening now. The air was becoming more crisp, more shrouded in silence. Kal-El's landing was not at all perfect and revealed the severity of his fatigue and discomfort. The gently sloping path of his passage through the air suddenly began to plummet once his good eye spotted the bald lip of the hill he had been flying towards.
His body collided with the ground in an untidy heap, left-arm first and then all else. His slowing velocity fortunately made it such that no further acute injuries would be delivered as a result. It still hurt though. Everything did. From his ruined lower ribs to his empty muscles, all along the many deep lacerations criss-crossing his battered form, Kal-El throbbed internally with a universal ache that emphasized each area of swelling, each savage souvenir of his reward for his noble self-sacrifice this day.
This day. In a sense far removed from his injuries, Kal-El was so tired of it all. He lay there face-down in the cool and pleasingly dry earth for a period that seemed to pass in a realm altogether forgotten and untouched by time. Beyond the bedraggled crown of his head, a trail extended further up the hill and into the murk of the surrounding wood. The smell and taste of the earth passed vaguely through the tortured fabric of his consciousness. Its faint familiarity punctured the totality of his physical agony.
How regular is this trek becoming? …How melancholy this place has become in the landscape of my mind. Kal-El was no longer a young man. The kiss of vigour, though not entirely expired, did not radiate from his presence as it once did. On the inside, a certain vitality that for so long, it seemed, had graced his life, was now more notable for the frequency of its protracted absences. His reflection, he had noticed, was more or less indistinguishable from what it had been – aside from the look in his eyes, the dimness, the grayness, the emerging coldness.
Kal-El's breathing was shallow and laboured. It had required every ounce of his remaining strength to make the flight he had just completed. It would be some time before he would be able to move again. He lay there semi-conscious in a damaged stupor, lightly comforted by surroundings and a situation that he knew so well. Too well. How long can I keep going on like this? There was a time when he would attribute such reservations to the mere influence of pain. He was no longer so foolhardy, not even inwardly.
Kal-El had no-one he could confide in, no-one with whom he could share his most intimate of reflections. He was a lonely man, and getting lonelier with each passing year. Strangely, he would sometimes find solace in the unknowing eyes of animals, at times too in that mystic whisper breathed by woods and seas and fields alike. It wasn't that the presence of nature would simply pacify his feelings of isolation. It was instead that within those wild pupils, or moving amongst the grasses and flowers or the water, he would experience communication with something unknown that acknowledged his unique burden, that appreciated the quiet tragedy of his station.
For, to those he guarded, to those he would move to rescue without a second thought, he could only ever be Superman, he would only ever be Superman. His powers, his might, his proven gallantry – it was all too much to allow room for struggle or distress to exist within him from the perspective of the external gazer. So it had proved, anyway, every time he had attempted to reach out to someone. Even worse, his keen fear now was that knowledge of his private turmoil could be used to compromise the security of the population he had spent so much of his life defending. The outer world cannot know, my duty must come before all else.
It was time to move. Kal-El couldn't stand, but he could crawl. Raising himself on his hands and knees, grimacing as fractured bones were disturbed or serious lesions were reopened, he carefully made his way up the earthen trail and into the maw of the shadowed forest. Full night had fallen at this point. An uneven wind swirled about the area, lifting grains of dirt and causing leaves to dance. Many wounds on Kal-El's torn body bled steadily as he crept from beneath the open air under the lofty pall of the solemn and stoic wood.
Not long now. A mild restoration of energies kindled within Kal-El's weary muscles as his progress continued. This old ritual, and his memories of this beloved place, more ancient in his recollection than any other, had an undeniable recuperative effect on him that was as reliable as the rising sun or the woe of rain. Deep in his heart he knew that this place was his only home, that it alone would only ever be his home, that it was the only place where he would be truly safe.
Sometimes in the sheer physical misery following a gruesome confrontation, either on the anguished flight to this particular hill or during the leaden advance along this cloaked path, Kal-El would envision dying in this area, and the reverie, morbid though it might be, would hush some of the screams of his mangled joints and shredded nerves, it would release a kind milk that would relieve his heavy heart for a while.
The years had taken their toll, in ways that even he would never understand. The endless battles, the repeated but all-so-necessary violence, the mental weight of impending doom that could only be diminished yet never fully destroyed – it was a tormented existence, his soul had become a dull lake of tears.
He loved the people he had sworn to himself to protect. He truly did. They had adopted him when he was helpless and cared for him as best they could, when all the while next to him in terms of might they were as ants before a raging volcano. But the crushing responsibility. Oh, the responsibility. There is so little joy for me anymore, so little glee, so little rest. I have become nought but my vow. I barely have the space to breathe.
Kal-El's prostrate pilgrimage culminated at the rim of an unusual crater. At its heart was housed a hollow white metallic sphere opened to the elements. The object appeared just large enough to hold a baby, but little else. In the nocturnal gloom, its contents were almost impossible to discern.
Far above, the moon and stars were visible through a crack cut into the dense canopy of the forest. Some of the leaves and branches of the tall trees on opposing sides of the rift reached across it to touch one another. Fragile misshapen shadows spiralled downward in the darkness, dwindling before they could reach the centre of the artificial cavity.
Kal-El took a moment at the lip of the crater to survey the surrounding spectacle. A handful of tiny shafts of moonlight illuminating the great green dome of the wood, a formless troupe of shifting shades frolicking everywhere the eye could rest, hinting here and there at the silhouettes of boughs and trunks and foliage, and amongst all this like a distended albino watermelon was the pale sphere he knew so well gleaming dimly in the bowels of the pit it had burrowed all those years ago – there was indeed much to espy and admire, but a moment was all his enervation would afford his one working eye to savour.
Kal-El crested the earthen edge of the hollow and clambered downwards toward the silver orb. Contact with mud and rock and vegetation had further besmirched his famed cape and signature attire. Now reduced to a tapestry of ribbons and bloodstained rags, Kal-El's garb seemed to simultaneously manifest and sympathize with the condition of his mental state. Across his battered chest, his iconic insignia remained recognizable, retained a defined dignity, prevailed unbowed and distinctly undefiled.
Kal-El ceased his motion at the foot of the opening of the curious white hollow ball. There were tears in his eyes, some flowing freely down the contours of his rugged and comely face, as he ran his hands over the smooth pale surface, his thoughts aflood with affection and a strength of meaning.
For this humble silver globe was the vessel which had ferried him to the world he now protected when he was nothing but a suckling babe. This benign machine, so long ago deceased in terms of electricity, had held him during that fateful voyage in long, metallic, mechanical arms. It had nursed him and reassured him as it delivered him from some terrible unknown to the sanctuary of the very wood where it now slept.
Kal-El was now many times larger than the round electronic spaceship which had nurtured him like a devoted mother when he was a defenceless infant. It always thrilled and comforted him in equal measure to look inside the synthetic womb he owed so much, to marvel at the circuitry and sterile equipment that had kept him alive when he was at his weakest.
Kal-El loved this cold pale orb. Even now, whilst in the throes of sharp bodily agony compounded by long-standing and deep-rooted mental and emotional woe, to touch his artificial mother, to be within the tomb of her secret slumber was as a spiritual elixir for Kal-El. It poured honeyed consolation into the fathoms of his heart. It caused the cream of cheer and warm repose to circulate about his tired and noble form.
Curled around his beloved silver sphere, Kal-El lay down his weary head on a patch of clay. The desire for rest was overwhelming him – at long last, he had reached the singular, hallowed ground where he could truly relax. I no longer have any doubt: this is indeed the place where I want to die. Nowhere else in the world could ever mean as much to him. At his darkest moments, and in the face of the gravest peril, his soul would yearn for nothing other than the blissful company of his static, automatic mother.
Thus, this anguished day in Kal-El's life concluded as he finally drifted off to sleep. Above him, the many towering and august trees watched on as sober guardians. Around him, the slender flowers and huddled shrubs quivered and exhaled with a fleeting tenderness. And, from within the hollow white ball came a whirring murmur as a single long metallic arm extended out of the opening.
Crooked and aged and moving more spasmodically than intended, the arm stretched until its robotic fingers hovered above Kal-El's dreaming head. In practiced motions repeated every time Superman had slept inside this special crater, the mechanical digits caressed his cheek with their cool knuckles, softly held his shoulder as his doze continued unabated. They would remain in loving contact with the man whose life they were devoted to until what little energy lingered in their wiring insisted that they withdraw again from the world back into half-existence, back into the realm of ghosts.
The air, the forest, the night itself swathed Kal-El's dormant form. Far away, a cracked gray face observed impassively and chose to stay its fearsome hand for the interim. Kal-El would not live forever, nor would his custodianship of this world last in perpetuity. For now, however, the bosom of creation pulsed with gratitude for his existence. The resolution of his dire dilemmas would be forestalled, at least, for a little while.
For a little while, a little while. Three metallic fingers lightly squeezed a shoulder of the Man of Steel as the moon and stars shone on above a peaceful night and a protected world.