So the tower was built. It was made of an igneous stone, jet-colored, brought from the northeastern settlements, and when it was finished Huldah called it the Black Watchtower. There, the faithful would await the True King. During the years it took to build this magnificent structure, the land continued to produce staggering harvests. The Garden existed in such indescribable beauty that men believed they must surely have at last stumbled on the path of righteousness. The tower was a fitting tribute to honor the cosmos, and Huldah herself was the bravest woman in history, as well as a Prophetess whose words were wise and benevolent.
Now, at this time Huldah’s older son, Hector, was jealous at the hand his younger brother Lee had in all their mother’s affairs. Hector complained to his mother that he was the older son and by rights her heir and right hand. But Huldah only remarked that it was Lee who had followed her into the fields, and it was Lee who had accompanied her to tell men that the Blood Rain had healed the land, and it was Lee who witnessed her visions and interpreted them with her. Hector had been occupied with his own pursuits during these times.
Hector also protested her complacency with the perpetual growing season and the unending bounty of the land. It seemed quite an odd thing, as all Kansans were familiar with the harshness of the continental winter. Kansas had not seen a winter for many years. Four, he counted. Where was the cold? Did this aberration seem truly benevolent? Huldah chided him for his ungratefulness, and he went away unsatisfied.
Hector spoke of his disbelief with Lee, and the two opposed one another greatly, in both belief and temperament, for where Lee was bright and energetic, Hector was brooding and doubtful. They argued for many hours as they walked around the tower, their voices rising as they debated the unnatural weather and their mother’s favor. At last their conflict came to blows.
Lee was the smaller of the two, but he struck Hector with a stone, his strength bolstered by his unwavering devotion. Hector limped away, bleeding and badly injured. Some time later, Hector crept into his mother’s house and there, whether driven by jealousy or humiliation or greed, he poisoned Lee’s drink with hemlock and within hours Lee had died a terrible death, paralyzed slowly until he could no longer draw air. Hector was incarcerated in the Black Watchtower for murder, and that was where he remained.
It happened that after five years of seasonless and overabundant growing, the land again became fallow. The marvelous numbers of cattle began not only to die but to change, for where they had once been lustrous and fat, they were now craggy and rageful, and they grew larger but uglier than before, and men could no longer approach them. They scraped their hides on the ground for days and weeks, until they wore away much of their skins and it hung in bloodied strips off their bodies. They teetered on skeletal legs, with eyes as dim and furious as demons. They became what we know as the Kansas Cow, that dreaded creature which still roams those dark places, whose saliva can kill a man on the spot. After several weeks of this terrible existence, they ran in wild circles before they finally, mercifully, died.
Men encountered other, even more monstrous creatures, the manticore being the most fearsome, and all these still exist, although they have been seen by very few who are still alive. For with their appearance, men too began dying in droves—of Bent Head once again. So many died that it was impossible to bury them, and even Huldah feared for her life, for she wondered if their food was poisoned again with the Disease.
And yet she did not die. It came to her in a vision that her son Hector was to blame for the reversal of their fortunes. His jealousy had undone them all. This vision was recorded by a different scribe, as her son Lee was dead of poison, but we have copies of this scripture and thus can be certain of Huldah’s intention. When she regained her senses after her vision, she understood that she must spill Hector’s blood onto the land as a sacrifice. When Hector was taken from his jail, he was glad of heart because he believed he had been proven correct in his misgivings. The land was now in turmoil and they had all been wrong to trust the Blood Rain. But then Hector heard he was to be beheaded, so his blood would soak the earth in penitence for his ungratefulness, and he cursed his mother.
He did not meet his fate willingly, but grimaced and trembled. To immortalize his indignity and to remind all others of the consequences of ingratitude, Huldah asked her magicians to prepare his severed head in such a way as to preserve it for eternity. And ever afterward, Huldah kept the Head of Hector with her at every moment, sometimes gazing upon it sadly, for he was her lost son, sometimes cursing it angrily, as he had cursed her before his death. Soon his severed head became a charm she could not do without, a bitter memorial of Lost Hope.
Hector’s blood did not stop the desolation of the land. The verdant hills regained their former character over time: dead, almost entirely poisoned and very dangerous: they became the selfsame land we know and live in fear of today. The great numbers of Kansas Cow and the other beasts died as well, since the land can support very few creatures of any kind, except those which still
