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F l u x
Roughly one hundred years ago, in the day and age when innumerable stories would unravel their infinite reels of parchment, richly encrusted with rustic heroism and diabolical tyranny, marked the fantastic end of an equally grandiose leader. The sky sought to hail glory upon his many, all-engulfing arms. The ground below beseeched his ever-seeking roots to spread out and nourish themselves in the basic supplements beneath, and feast on the ruptured nutrients of decayed ruins from millennia past. Life and lurking Death were founded as concrete laws by this great chieftain, established resolutely and made fundamental, to be obeyed by the eternal gratitude of countless vassals. Thus rendered the rumors into true gossip, for this merciful giant was indeed judicious, indeed illustrious, and indeed omnipotent. Harmonies infused so fervently into the half-crippled ligaments and tendons – which formed the mighty compilations of his limbs, used to seize hold of the world, cherish it, indulge it, and destroy it, – were of plenty.
One sunrise. . .
This sunrise was alike in every quality to those that had come and gone since the very beginning, when a burst of chemicals and mass first deformed and refigured the universe. It was softly spoken and the sun, a vast, uncorrupted essence of burning luminosity, rose to scorch the sins of night with a searing half-day glare. This one dawn rendered the secreted halo of dark smoke upon the closest horizon into nothing but an unsacred transgression. A fierce trepidation within the numerous glistening eyes that gazed upon this fiery progression began to harvest.
By the hour of midday, a poisonous fear had spread and bloomed into an icy disease, sweetly enchanting the creatures shivering in their homes until they felt sick, and then only sicker as the seconds passed precariously under quivering noses. A horrific power of unnatural proportions loomed upon them, chemically faultless in its own accurate nature as it detachedly razed the hillsides and thrashed the gullies it passed over. Greedy, this power kept only its psychotic indulgence in mind. Heat, busy dehydrating lush greenery until it surpassed time and turned the young sprouts withered gray and dead, sucked avariciously at any vaporous moisture suspended in the air. The heat lastly squelched any whimsical breezes that played among the great king’s scattered boughs and rough bark.
In a flurry of frantic wings, the king’s closest vassals flew from their nests to take to the parched heavens after a moment of frozen terror: fierce raptors, minute thrushes, song loving nightingales, proud breasted robins and swift sparrows, all fled, all forgot their ruling master. Survival was foremost in their thoughts. Slumbering ground dwellers, whose normal hour of awakening was when the red glory set, were faced by an unknown torrential death. Their large eyes opened at the last quaking second, noses quivering, before a quiet darkness overtook them and banished them to another sort of perpetual rest. A fist of chaotic and unrelenting judgment rose up to hover as a hellish destructor in the pure hazy sky, momentarily debating between ideas of life and death.
The murder soon began: prowling, flaming serpents streaked out to taste the shuddering vegetation with murmuring tongues. Caressing the ancient rows of bark in a choking embrace, they waited, focused on seducing the great majesty with a promise of ultimate and glorious death. The almighty king peered through sultry smoke, observed as his innumerable roots were defiled into crisp ashes: a splitting groan was wrenched from his very atomic structure. Such a groan! It reverberated skyward, enormous and final. Soon, the promise of ending this pitiful warfare against the hopelessly all-powerful flame was all the great, dying king could dream of.
- - - - -
Dusk found a statue of blackened bones, tips still smoldering, wisps of inner smoldering exhaled from deep crags along the tall, broad frame. The tragedy of such an influential tyrant did not go without a chorus of agonized calls: dim shadows in the blood-flag sky paused to send one last tear into the king’s charred soil. Over this dreary theatre of war, monstrous, bewildered clouds gathered to mournfully send down a mist of gentle consolation; dust from the parched ground filled far off nostrils with a scent of freshness and dirt. Harnessed energy blazed, struck, and then swift rage spread among the darkening clouds. They heaved as one, flustered with grief, and volleyed the collapsed leviathan with floods of cold, blistering rain.
As the heathen fire was doused, with even its smallest sparks deterred from further corrupting the deceased king’s worn body, there came a piercing crack. The echo jarred the storming quiet, a quiet born only after the two clashing titans eradicated each other and spewed death onto the battlefield. Loud and ghastly screams of bony timber shattered the nerves of the dark sun looming from behind his curtain of moisture. The sky lord quickly scuttled behind the horizon’s calming shield. The storm dispersed slowly, the black-cloaked and grieving witnesses to a dear friend’s burial, lifting a mountain of trauma from the glittering cosmos. A sliver of a cream-colored moon appeared: from the comprehensive goddess’s milky radiance trickled soothing shreds of ethereal rays. Softly, she touched the barren, ashen ground with pale fingertips.
Upon the full illumination of the high crag where the king was last seen standing with red tearing flesh and yellow devouring soul, there came a sudden stillness as horror settled along the veins coursing beneath the skin of land. No longer was there a silhouette of glorious leaves thrust up into the light so that young buds and blossoms might grow. No more was there a labyrinth of collective branches for wide-eyed critters to scurry among, or for feathered mammals to rest heavily upon during winter nights, or even tiny hidey-holes for defenseless insects to crawl into seeking shelter from ravenous beaks. Gone was the long worshipped God of the restless forest, set between three imperial courts of cliffs and bold stone, wearing cloaks of harsh white crystals despite the approach of summer. What remained, broken and fervently sprinkled with grayish, disemboweled gorges of decay, was nothing more than a jagged stump. In every sense, it was the scene of a king having been beheaded and the body left to rot dryly on the ground. It was the piteous, irrational end to an intellectual, almighty being, his might now vanished, his blood shed and dried to a honey-brow crust upon pallid skin.
Death laughed once in spite, gleefully reminiscing on how easy this victory had been. How proud that bark covered vessel of glory and law and life had been! How little resistance to the end! Such perfect cruelty! Such terrific blight! Such, such. . .
Death moaned, felt a pitiless grip upon its own bleak heart, and, with one abrupt squeeze, Death fell away, returning dispassionately from whence it came. In its place was a singular physique, one of a muscle hewn male, garbed simply in dull leather hide, enriched slightly in appearance with dyed porcupine quills in an ornate fashion along the legs and chest. A sheet of glossy raven hair rested along the nape of his unadorned neck and collarbone, caught up in a leather cord. He hunched among the scattered remains, both soggy and crunchy beneath his bare feet. Wide hands – strong in grip and deeply tanned by the days under the relentless sun – became gentle as his long digits stirred among the soil. A low grunt escaped from his lips, perched upon a scowling, striking face. It was a sound of sheer disapproval touched with a slight pitch of culpability.
'Quev... Your son has been struck down. Hunite's seek to feast upon the Naturli’s, the Animili’s and the Eclipssic’s; jealousy thick, numbers vast, minds focused to carnage: We are falling, Quev.’
A low moan rumbled from the depths of rock that vaulted vertically upwards and struck the sky in molten rage millennia ago. The night rippled and the unheard velocity called up a returning whisper: star songs tried to soothe the uneasy rock faces and wholeheartedly embraced the fear embedded into the immortal crevices nestled upon the planet’s brow.
‘Do you refuse me, Lord Quev? In this calling hour do thine people find themselves forgotten? What will be the next step in this delirious notion of battle, this lustful beast that prowls, ever lurking, in the vengeful duty of greed?’
His voice rose upwards to passionately inquire the lurid cosmos. Quietly, his question reached out beyond mortal conquest to discover a purpose and, in finding a purpose, discovering an ultimate reason. Shine-less ebony orbs, made blank genetically despite the male’s immense sentimental reach, sought out and captured a faint glimmering hope exposed between layers of fine pale ash and burnt wood shavings. Fingers, creased and calloused, brushed tender tips on the topside of yellow sails, just in the beginnings of unfurling, so that the yellow might change to green, and then the green to growth. Below curved a lovely flute neck, burying a web of sustenance hunting tangles well on the way to establishing a firm grip in the soil below.
‘Infant, grow strong. On your young limbs rest a reason; in this reason a fate, and a fate that shall either salvage or squander through the powerful influence of your future branches. May this year of turmoil remain but a faded memory, thus liberating thee of any tempting bitterness or any such fellowships of ill meaning...?’
His words, whispered with the sugary urgency of dire pleading, left ardent lips to brand each awakening molecule of shape and function the tiny seedling consisted of. As if to reassure this bereaving creature, there was a minuscule straightening of spine, a slight quiver of damp leaves and then an earthly roar as the seedling dreamed of coming light. A prayer of ancient rhyme was entrusted to the soil. Words hopefully cherished, the male lifted his lean, soot-soiled body to stare momentarily upon the bloodless universe, a ruthless expression carved onto his otherwise solemn visage.
‘May truths be learned thoroughly, Lord Quev, else focus your fury in full to vanquish those that impose upon this newborn’s predestined and unparalleled revenge. Fire finds Shadows, Shadows find Light and then Fate can rest easier... Life, Life, may all ears open to hear the coming cries...’
Darkness lifted up to divulge a tainted embrace upon the tall male shadow, near indistinguishable among other black regions, misting grays and sultry blues. In seconds, or perhaps – in the entire mystery of the universe – this anonymous spectrum had never really stood upon the rocky hillside, the ominously-spoken man faded from sight.
Above, high, high and even higher than the scantily cloud-clad sky, straight upwards into the sheer enormity of vacuum unrealities and tormented universe, reverberated a sound. Where no echoes or waves could usually exist, fumbled one lone, pious note; tossed sideways off crackling ice hell-storms and jilted and swatted harmlessly aside by irrepressible metal mountains tearing through weightless environments. Calling, calling, an ethereal, perpetual tune, a heroically stolid scream that sought to pierce and could only stumble when it found nothing, nothing at all, to touch. Forever. Coming closer, ever shifting, changing, rolling inwards and clawing outwards, melodious and marvelous in a phoenix veracity and chimerical-like substance. Softly, softly, darkly, darkly, on and on...
Quote: Flux, as I've named this piece, is abound with literary devices and isn't exactly a simple read (I have had to edit it several times to make it easier to comprehend): I hope that those that read it will enjoy it and give some thought to the writing style I attempted to use.
I realized later that Flux reflects the philosophies of the Greek hermit Heraclitus:
"Heraclitus held that fire is the primordial element out of which everything else arises. Fire is the origin of all matter; through it things come into being and pass away. Fire itself is the symbol of perpetual change because it transforms a substance into another substance without being a substance itself: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be eternal fire." and: "Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water. Measures of it kindling and measures of it going out."
"Heraclitus sees a cosmic balance in the struggle of the elements, water, air, fire, earth. Due to the eternal transmutation of forms, which are made of the elements, no single element ever gains predominance. This implies that Heraclitus thinks of fire as a non-destructive; but merely transforming power. The process of transformation does not happen by chance, but is the product of God's reason, which is identical to the cosmic principles."
 b o n n a b y · Wed May 13, 2009 @ 06:45am · 0 Comments |
