the sea god's terrible whimsy
Across the vast expanse of sea, now faded to the colour of ash and indifferent memory, I drag my weary feet aimlessly. Direction, will, and hope have failed me, bled slowly by the whipcord kelp and sodden bloated grasping milk-white hands in Ran's gloomy aquatic court...the weak sputter of flame within me snuffed by the hands of dark gods and the endless crushing oppression of the deep. The sky meets and blends with the soft edges of the horizon like the limbs of sleeping lovers, content and languid and unwilling to break free. Without sun or moon or stars to light the way there is only the constant nagging ache of muscle, the numbed pressure of the spirit. What little will I still possess is focussed solely on movement...on the blind idea of progress without direction or goal, where the will itself is burnt away and all that remains is the slow encroaching oblivion from beyond the wall of sleep. After a time, the light fading from ash to charcoal to the dull flat gloom of chimney soot, I curl myself into as tight a ball as I can manage and give myself up to a sleep so profound that even the honeyed voices of the Veelas cannot tempt me beneath the waves and back to Ran's cold arms.
Cradled by the void, held still while constellations planets stars and all the things between spin around me, I have become the sleeping axis of the universe as an infinity of matter spirals around the cold unseeing eye within me. But eventually the dreams find their way in, their tiny tentacles slithering through the cracked shell of blissful nothingness surrounding me. Empty, my consciousness floating free, my body cool and tightly wound into itself beneath my inner eye, I see and feel the universe breathing around me, breathing through me. Like the faint trace of ghostly fingers across my back it comes to me, a kind of encroaching malice, like plague rats tittering at the edge of the bed, their voices gaining strength as they begin to realize their numbers are growing. And so the feeling expands before me, fed by the world above it and the world below it until it threatens to shatter the fragile air and sweep past the horizon line, a terrible scythe reaping endlessly.
Drawn back into myself, shivering like a child left behind in the rain, I open tired eyes that do not want to grasp what lies ahead. Now sitting, pulling the lapels of my coat tighter around myself I watch wide-eyed as the wave looms before me, rising until even the black soot sky is washed away by the frothing caps of the thundering wall of water in front of me.
The base of the wave pulls inwards, clutching madly at me. Reaching inwards, I find I have no fire left, no spark to light my way...and the pull of the wave grows stronger.
Cradled by the void, held still while constellations planets stars and all the things between spin around me, I have become the sleeping axis of the universe as an infinity of matter spirals around the cold unseeing eye within me. But eventually the dreams find their way in, their tiny tentacles slithering through the cracked shell of blissful nothingness surrounding me. Empty, my consciousness floating free, my body cool and tightly wound into itself beneath my inner eye, I see and feel the universe breathing around me, breathing through me. Like the faint trace of ghostly fingers across my back it comes to me, a kind of encroaching malice, like plague rats tittering at the edge of the bed, their voices gaining strength as they begin to realize their numbers are growing. And so the feeling expands before me, fed by the world above it and the world below it until it threatens to shatter the fragile air and sweep past the horizon line, a terrible scythe reaping endlessly.
Drawn back into myself, shivering like a child left behind in the rain, I open tired eyes that do not want to grasp what lies ahead. Now sitting, pulling the lapels of my coat tighter around myself I watch wide-eyed as the wave looms before me, rising until even the black soot sky is washed away by the frothing caps of the thundering wall of water in front of me.
The base of the wave pulls inwards, clutching madly at me. Reaching inwards, I find I have no fire left, no spark to light my way...and the pull of the wave grows stronger.