Awakening fiction in progress - unfinished
Jack struggled to remain standing; his knees were wobbling and his head rolled drunkenly from shoulder to shoulder. The meal he had eaten was having a peculiar effect on his body, much like drunkenness, but feeling the effects in the very core of his soul.
He managed to drag his eyes away from the flitting nymphs and playful satyrs (oh, how he wanted to be lost in their fun), and looked towards the horizon. There, his gaze alighted upon a mountain wreathed in light the color of the ambrosia he had eaten. It was beautiful... more beautiful than anything he had seen, even the nymph that he laid with. "That is where I must go," he declared, and with every ounce of his Will, his feet began to propel him forward, one drunken step after another. "To Mount Olympus!"
Staggering along, Jack realized he was following a path that seemed to wind up the mountain towards the shining white caps of Mount Olympus, except that, the further he staggered, the thicker the brambles got that seemed to make this path their home. Vines and outcroppings, thorned and thistled, bearing the occasional flower as red as blood. Looking behind him, he saw no trace of the festival, or the satyrs or nymphs or other beautiful creatures he had seen before. Looking up, he noticed the sky was darkening with thunderclouds, and already he could see flashes of light deep in their bellies.
He had gone from ecstatic to terrified in a matter of moments... or at least it seemed like moments. It could've been hours, or even days. It was all blurring together.
"This dream is starting to suck," Jack said to himself.
He resigned himself to moving onward, as there was no other place to go. The thunder began to roar in the heavens above, with flashes of lightning striking the ground precariously close to the winding thistle path that he was tearing himself through. His trousers were shredded, and his skin scraped with blood trickling down his calves and ankles. Frightening little gnomes lept out from behind the bushes, shouted at him in what he believed to be some manner of Greek, and produced gnome-sized buckets to catch the drops of blood he was shedding behind him on his desperate ascention.
His legs were happy to supply their sinister collection, as they had been bared to the mid-thigh, shreds of his pants no doubt left caught on the greedy thistles. The overgrowth became so thick, he could not see the path any more, yet somehow he still found the path of least resistance. All the while the gnome-things were chanting and singing something about blood shed for an Oath. What Oath? Waitaminute, I don't speak Ancient Greek!
Pythagoras. Plato. Aristotle. Postulation based on rational thought and what the gods had made evident; they made do with what the world presented to them. Men who were driven by what they understood to be true; they could hear the celestial harmonies that we have grown ignorant to simply by being born and could enunciate that brilliance to those who were learned in the natural solids. "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here," said the arch above the Academy, and so, it must be true.
Ptolemy. Apollonius. Copernicus. Brahe. Their names are all here. They were masters of their field, so very close to their Renaissance enlightenment, and yet held back by the increasing frequency of common science, facts taken for granted simply because they were discovered and published by another.
Cassini. Kepler. Sustermans. Galilei. Newton. They heralded the gradual implosion of the classical perception of the universe in favor of creating a relation between Earth and the celestial bodies that was easier for the Sleepers to perceive and accept, applying such cold and crude concepts as parallax in order to cheapen the importance of lovely Venus, wrathful Mars, kind Jupiter, ancient Saturn, and wise Ouranos so that they might be understood without wonder... acknowledged without admitting their pull on your soul.
Taking up the chisel amd hammer, Jack Beliston made his mark upon the column. But Jack Beliston he was no more: Iovis Fatalis, fated by Jupiter, Pythagorean academic, and Therugist of the Spheres.
He managed to drag his eyes away from the flitting nymphs and playful satyrs (oh, how he wanted to be lost in their fun), and looked towards the horizon. There, his gaze alighted upon a mountain wreathed in light the color of the ambrosia he had eaten. It was beautiful... more beautiful than anything he had seen, even the nymph that he laid with. "That is where I must go," he declared, and with every ounce of his Will, his feet began to propel him forward, one drunken step after another. "To Mount Olympus!"
Staggering along, Jack realized he was following a path that seemed to wind up the mountain towards the shining white caps of Mount Olympus, except that, the further he staggered, the thicker the brambles got that seemed to make this path their home. Vines and outcroppings, thorned and thistled, bearing the occasional flower as red as blood. Looking behind him, he saw no trace of the festival, or the satyrs or nymphs or other beautiful creatures he had seen before. Looking up, he noticed the sky was darkening with thunderclouds, and already he could see flashes of light deep in their bellies.
He had gone from ecstatic to terrified in a matter of moments... or at least it seemed like moments. It could've been hours, or even days. It was all blurring together.
"This dream is starting to suck," Jack said to himself.
He resigned himself to moving onward, as there was no other place to go. The thunder began to roar in the heavens above, with flashes of lightning striking the ground precariously close to the winding thistle path that he was tearing himself through. His trousers were shredded, and his skin scraped with blood trickling down his calves and ankles. Frightening little gnomes lept out from behind the bushes, shouted at him in what he believed to be some manner of Greek, and produced gnome-sized buckets to catch the drops of blood he was shedding behind him on his desperate ascention.
His legs were happy to supply their sinister collection, as they had been bared to the mid-thigh, shreds of his pants no doubt left caught on the greedy thistles. The overgrowth became so thick, he could not see the path any more, yet somehow he still found the path of least resistance. All the while the gnome-things were chanting and singing something about blood shed for an Oath. What Oath? Waitaminute, I don't speak Ancient Greek!
Pythagoras. Plato. Aristotle. Postulation based on rational thought and what the gods had made evident; they made do with what the world presented to them. Men who were driven by what they understood to be true; they could hear the celestial harmonies that we have grown ignorant to simply by being born and could enunciate that brilliance to those who were learned in the natural solids. "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here," said the arch above the Academy, and so, it must be true.
Ptolemy. Apollonius. Copernicus. Brahe. Their names are all here. They were masters of their field, so very close to their Renaissance enlightenment, and yet held back by the increasing frequency of common science, facts taken for granted simply because they were discovered and published by another.
Cassini. Kepler. Sustermans. Galilei. Newton. They heralded the gradual implosion of the classical perception of the universe in favor of creating a relation between Earth and the celestial bodies that was easier for the Sleepers to perceive and accept, applying such cold and crude concepts as parallax in order to cheapen the importance of lovely Venus, wrathful Mars, kind Jupiter, ancient Saturn, and wise Ouranos so that they might be understood without wonder... acknowledged without admitting their pull on your soul.
Taking up the chisel amd hammer, Jack Beliston made his mark upon the column. But Jack Beliston he was no more: Iovis Fatalis, fated by Jupiter, Pythagorean academic, and Therugist of the Spheres.