East of West #10

Ten: A Sea of Bones
written by Jonathan Hickman
art by Nick Dragotta
colors by Frank Martin

East of West would seem to be a fatalistic, even perhaps nihilistic, story.  It is a bleak portrait of institutional corruption and terrorism in the face of imminent and inescapable apocalyptic annihilation.  They are the agents of The Message, an prophetic vision of the end of the world—some pious apostles, others Machiavellian pragmatists, but each one Chosen, the apocalyptic elect.  And it is perhaps true that eventually everything will end, destruction will win out.

"Black is not a color, it is the absence of light.  All color is terminal -- spectral refugees from the ebony abyss.  Black...endures." (East of West #10: 11)

It is a statement of the ultimate and inevitable triumph of nothingness, spoken to an audience of Horsemen, and a failed answer to the given question:  "What is your favorite color?".  Though "the Beast," Death's stolen half-human son, remains an unknown variable in this epic, that there might be a real answer to the question is a powerful hope in the face of fatalism, what is sensed and felt in defiance of that triumph.

If all light is terminal, brief and always dying, falling into the enduring darkness, and if only the blind are spared vision of the world's horrific ending, why would the Oracle desire Death's eye?  She is, as much as anyone, an emblem of a fixed and predestined world, though even her glimpses seem incomplete.  And why Death's?  Her own—one of which is undoubtedly kept under the metal eye-patch of the Pathfinder, owner and barkeeper at the Atlas—have power themselves, it would seem.  What can Death's see?

"A Sea of Bones" offers two small but provocative moments of unsuspected character development and one brutal, abrupt reminder of a man I'd almost forgotten hadn't been left behind.  Groomed in a brightly lit room to see nothing but what his captors and his computer-tutor show him, another world projected in front of his eyes, Death's son is intelligent, cautious, and possesses a strangely human connection to his technological companion and co-conspirator, who speaks with "we" and "our".  Wolf is not only human, the son of Cheveyo, but the childhood friend of John Freeman, Crown Prince of New Orleans.  We knew him to have been educated in the Endless Nation, but their affection—two young boys holding hands—casts additional doubt on Freeman's conviction.  But it is the anonymous Ranger, who makes a dramatic return, a sniper who explodes Cheveyo's head, drawn with kinetic relish by Dragotta.  He's been silently looming in the dead country, his mechanical gun-dog chewing ominously on the bones there, on the cover of the previous two issues, a paradoxically prominent and stealthy foreshadowing.

"I've seen you before...  Hunting under the full moon.  All shadow and thunder in the flatlands.  Nihnootheiht."  (21)

Cheveyo steps halfway into the other world and transforms himself.  An enormous beast, a hybrid buffalo and human with an exposed skull, a shaggy red hide, and hooves at the ends of his fingertips.  And Crow knows him.  Nihnootheiht.  Like Heetse'isi'—"the Grave"—it is Arapaho.  "He (who) was abandoned."†  It's a darkly suitable choice, a lethal embodiment of Cheveyo's sense of Wolf's betrayal, his son who defied his father and his father's teachings to follow Death in a crusade against The Message.


† LINGUISTIC NOTE:  nihnootheiht = "nih-" (prefix indicating tense) + -nooth- (verbal root, "abandon") + "-eih-t" (verbal suffixes conjugating person, number and voice)  For further information, see UC Berkeley's English-Arapaho Dictionary and University of Colorado's Arapaho Project language website.

[March 2014]