[story] les aveugles
author: abon (Dreamwidth)
les aveugles
It was light out. The door opened. A gaseous wreath hit his face. The spot triangulated by his eyes and the bridge of his nose contorted, and the miasma quickly sunk to the dregs of his lungs. A great big shiver rolled down from the crown of his head to somewhere around his knees, where it spasmed ignobly and died. Cirrus made his way inward and extended her a hand. Two and a half people in the ice-cold room. He shut the door and expelled a horrid mouthful of atmosphere. "Awflc," he said, punctuating with a clutch of coughs.
"Yes," she said, "awkward, too. But did you notice?"
"I knew you were there the whole time," he groused, and tried holding in his next breath.
"Oh?" she started to say, but stopped.
"Well! No matter. Honor and fortune attend upon thee, Cirrus" BC said by way of greeting, adieu. Flickered at the joints but her outline held steady, and bade him welcome. She smiled; at once avenues of escape flashed before him - a Pavlonian reaction. "It was I who invited you," he said, a trifle affronted. The smile turned less sharp. Ah. Cirrus found himself knee-deep in paradox, benighted and illuminated in her presence, but BC shrugged and told him to chalk it up to imagination and imagination only, and, "If aught else, I should hope you left behind so burdensome a thing."
"I wouldst, ere--" his expression grew pained, he threw up his hands. "Ere someone jacked it."
She starts to laugh. Now, in order to try to understand his reaction, let us first acquaint ourselves with:
The immediate sensory world, adequately cubic, housing one Cirrus D. called Cirrus. Born whole of limb and sound of mind, and at his last exam deemed without error, Cirrus is valued at one. He owes fealty to the apex of a minor tributary pyramid called O. The O pyramid, in turn, is subordinate to a local ganglion of ancient provenance. Or, at least, having possessed a series of impermanent names, some of which are so irrevocably garbled as to convey meanings quite removed from their origins, the ganglion might now claim anything and everything for a lineage. For a while there was the talk of ponderous, reptilian brains, great cousins many nodes removed. No-one from any of the known ganglions has ever shunted out far enough to see; not no-one, as far as anyone can remember, remains loyal to an originary point after a certain number of transitions. The consensus opinion is that the sprawling local scene is plenty exciting, though crowded, though more than a touch superfluous. But this way the ever-constant generation of claims remains plentiful, robust; suffer a little redundancy, O vassals. Within his own tributary system Cirrus is, at best, a middling contributor. Cirrus himself is one of many, and oftentimes exchanges one illegible biography for another.
This immediate sensory world, perhaps not so cubic, host to one BC, simply BC. Under the Sprezzatura Protocol she would be classified as human-equivalent, valued at one-half. The half? She's still in the process of digesting her previous acquisition. By-products appalling and alarming abound, for BC is nothing less than old and outmoded, but there's rhyme to the inefficient squeeze and squelch and slide, reason to these effervescent archaisms, or so he thinks, all that gratuitous grace he finds strangely lovely. All this, she finds inexpressibly charming. He will find curiosity in excess but compassion rather lacking; therefore, consider BC dangerous, quite dangerous indeed. Cirrus does not always remember that this is so. Here begins the story proper.
"Do tell!"
He shook his head no. He was reminded at an inopportune moment. The invitation, carelessly given, weighed on him. BC yawned and unfurled some more, tread liquid, ground bone against bone. Dreamt up conversations to lift his mood. There, right there, rush and tingle. "But that I know already. First you said--"
1.
Once upon a time when incidentally he, the point of view from whence she would survey the realm, was young, the general population of O encountered the blight. Hierarchy-busting tics, infinitesimal blots. Hitherto only those ensconced at the top had borne their predation, being finer grained, more meltingly sinewed than the lower ranks, in a word, delectable; certainly BC could attest to this very fact, had parasites the ability to remember long.
"Ours is a pleasure sped fleet," BC said, then predictably forgot that she had said such a thing, for when Cirrus attempted to fling the words back in her face she gasped, called them salacious, made him blush. It was all before he had learned better. When he was young Cirrus spent dry a great deal of himself in furor, lest he fear. He might protest, to no avail - she did not respond to censure of any kind. When he was young and prone to worrisome bouts of curiosity, there she had been, likewise: there I was, so whole, there you were, alone. Now, we cannot be rid of each other, she said, would that I could!
Infection, too subtle, went unnoticed, progressed invisibly, erupted unchecked, arranged his limbs hither-and-thither in a shape that augured doom. In another geography it was love.
2.
Twice upon a time, I, too, present to you the real shape of things, listen. There was a double call, glitch. It's burned away great swathes of the undergirding grammar near some solar plinths. The plant operators are terrified. Please attend to the matter.
This latest conflagration was, unsurprisingly, parasite in origin. Cirrus relayed the summons to the boss and when she had gone to see to the trouble, returned to his primary duty of organizing the petitions that flew into the system seat. A sickly fluttering plea - for full incorporation into O but failing that even a partial would do, it said - crashed against the outer outer screen as he finished filing, just ahead of the lunch bell. It buzzed, trying to match the sound phasing through, but instead of following suit, fell, exhausted by the effort. It had traveled far, and judging from the rapidly diminishing chirps, there remained one more long way to go. It disappeared into the brightly churning slew outside.
Cirrus sealed the last batch and put up the away sign over his workstation, and then withdrew a little - disengaged from a chatty duty-double, tossed an incoming report from the boss into queue, dropped his shoulders into the berth cushions, shut his eyes. He skipped the canteen. Some time passed in pleasantness and silence before a whir-whir signaled that it was time to get back to work. Cirrus stayed as he were, mostly curled in toward himself, but with an ear tuned to the waves of lo-fi gossip that emanated from the rest of the workcrew. The Dragoon wasn't around to see him slacking on the job. Detritus from discarded thoughts, his and that of others, formed a haze around his brow and mingled with the rumors.
The reason why the boss preferred the title of Dragoon and not the Honorable, though the latter more closely reflected her current status, was said to harken back to her commission with the local Guard and her service with the Corps, wherein she amassed a fearsome reputation, a deadly soldier whether paced swift or slow. Perhaps it served as a kindly reminder to others, of a certain kind of past. If it would please you to remember - in an infamous provocation of an ur-ganglion knight she earned a fossa on the left eleventh knucklebone, but the poor knight, a ticket to the abattoir, having disgraced his unit with a failed kill. The unverifiable fragments that underlaid - maybe generated, even - these stories assumed that their boss must be fond of reliving her bloodthirsty youth. But the nostalgic element was not so clear. In one reenactment the knight appeared as a suitor whose advances ceased once she became administrator. The affectation of the Dragoon was simply that, an evocation of youthful times, when even she had been foolish enough to hope. Some said that she drew a new name about herself everytime the workstations hummed dormant, in order to slip incognito among the hoi polloi - Cirrus thought this last most unlikely, but translated the disbelief into muted tones for slipping back into the streams. The general atmosphere was tense. It was tiring. He was just barely starting to stray from orbit, tangled in the dense stuff. It was full of mutters of the dangers the boss might face, accidents that might befall her. Cirrus started to comment but then thought better of it; the Dragoon, writ large across the spaces when absent, was a slight, unobtrusive presence when centered among them. As always she re-merged into the system seat with ne'er a how do you do, but neither did the boss give any indication that she had heard, or minded, lessers socializing.
She settled and gestured to Cirrus, who quickly laid out petitions before her. They snaked around at level with one another, like dominos standing at the ready.
"There's one that's rather ambiguous," Cirrus said, pointing. "It may be from an emulator."
"It's a point-nine at least," the Dragoon remarked. "Not too far from baseline."
He respectfully disagreed, cited protocol. One was one, and ironclad. The Dragoon nodded. She rested her chin on a palm, the slim arm propped up on a crossed knee, and gazed at the top of his head.
"Have you ever been? To the surface. To see the sun?"
A brief awkward pause preceded the answer. "No, I have not."
"I saw it once," she said, "with my father. Mirrors, mirrors, until the radiation got to be too much for him. The Corps retired him early." A glory of an image, the star at nadir, swirled past Cirrus, flooded the workstations as she recalled. There were admiring and appreciative murmurs from everyone. They bathed in blasts of wind and heat. They cast no shadow, faded with the last of the glow.
"It's very beautiful," Cirrus said, awed. She shrugged. "It's again different."
"You won't be going up, then."
"I need not go up to assess the extent of it, although, I realize and so you must realize, I do believe they seek to quarrel with us endlessly. But to what end? Such presumption, when they're only conscious while attached to something conscious." The Dragoon leaned back into her chair. The auroral fringe of an injury tinged it amber, yellow. "One learns," she sighed, "to take a hit. A re-inspection, then, now. I thought of you. I've left nothing amiss, but if you should run afoul of something--"
"Surely not," he said. He swallowed stone. The Dragoon favored him with a smile.
"Return to me," she said. "When you have done."
3.
The old Copernican universe of which the boss was so fond had evaporated away. The ground as he knew it curved underfoot and taffy skeins of thou shall and thou shalt not clung to his limbs. The distinction between inside and outside was an illusion, but a necessary one for O's upkeep. Per protocol Cirrus relinquished a handful of moments to the translation. They tumbled loose, honeycrumbs. He vaguely registered the signals of unranked persons bargaining over them. He shed a little, picked up a little, motley data bits like lint, and verity-chits. Net change was altogether neglible and bearable. The euphemism went: adding to the meaning of things, but not to the essence of things. Was, wasn't, he was. And yet.
A tidalquake warning rumbled through the corridor. Surface techtonics acting up again, or was it a wave from the planet hanging overhead? Cirrus re-tuned. All his senses roiled together, not into a flashpoint but into a dashing together of patterns: the ever-constant cold - for maximizing energy - individual cells lining the passage, their flatulent engines, datum after datum like trails of pollen under the heat-lamps. Cirrus wafted, walked, charted and negotiated past them. Near the turn, he perceived: an O affiliate counting time by the grass growing; nearby, an O ally, phlegmatic and blue; a few bodies away a faker, chiromancing for the benefit of a couple of hangers-on. They spotted him and fled, perhaps for other tributaries. Cirrus ignored them. Stuck to the handrails and stepping-stones. The task set upon him pulsed and pulsed, but it was dread curiosity that propelled him backward, that made him run. Disturbing the others would not do. The world turned velvet. It'd been a long time coming, night. Here was the boss, hoofed and shod, chasing Orion, bringing the great dogs to heel. The Dragoon, a roc, descending. Considered him, carefully. "To whom am I speaking?"
"I don't know," he lied.
"Then how am I to know, to be certain that I know? I am more than the sum of my parts, but you - or that which is like you - I cannot say," the Dragoon said, from a terrifying height, from immearsurable depths, from afar. But pity wound around her; her many expressions softened. "I must follow what is laid before me, collect facsimiles of the experience, aggregate and so learn, and thereby the rules change, but until then--
"I suspect you and I shall have this conversation often."
The sentence closed upon him. Not to die a thousand deaths, but to live and live the same.
"But didn't I say - what did I say. When I realized, I said to myself - I said to you - ought I not destroy her, ought I not save her, in some number of moves or less," Cirrus remembered. She wished to guess, she said three. He replied that it was likely a number as any. (Eleven.) He swallowed with difficulty, though the stench had abated, or he had become accustomed to sickroom smells. His eyes felt as though they had been carefully skived. His throat dried. The antifreeze proteins in his blood swam by, bathed in color. Around and around his field of vision narrow sparrow streams skimmed over each other, intersecting without interrupting. A weir cut across the panorama - BC. She was everywhere; he was everywhere, sieved through a whirligig of teeth. The room seemed too small.
"Since it was made for one," BC reminded him, "so we, too, again--"
"Honor and fortune attend upon him!" the clarion shrieked, marking the end of the sennight, this last stage of the freeze. Last tribute required of one Cirrus D., that which was. The cold intensified. Gravity, ageless nemesis, reappeared. Preservation: marrow drained, the cavities filled with artificial plasm. An anomalous count of one and a half in the room designed to keep him as he were. Hoarfrost fuzzed his sight where BC threaded across, conjuring up nematodes. All was not well. Had he already seven stories told? She replied yes. Cirrus acutely felt their absence, and in their place, fear. Had not even a hand to stretch out for help, but tried. BC lent him hers.
"Will you know me?" she asked Cirrus. If left as he were he might have answered, right or wrong. But once digested - ah. At times like these fear is the briefest of guests. His lips contorted one last time. The words she fashioned into a circlet, penultimate coughs she strung up in the sky, to burn. Now left only memory - to replay in idyll, to slow and eventually cool, perhaps in a distant after after the ever after be devoured by the myriad hosts of the earth and the air. Then, and now. By way of imagination he lingered - let's someday return, to that which overflows the horizon, to what looms above us, always. Folded our hands upon his breast. The feeling left. Sound went last.
"Yes. No? In any case," he'd said, "everything is light again."
the end
les aveugles
It was light out. The door opened. A gaseous wreath hit his face. The spot triangulated by his eyes and the bridge of his nose contorted, and the miasma quickly sunk to the dregs of his lungs. A great big shiver rolled down from the crown of his head to somewhere around his knees, where it spasmed ignobly and died. Cirrus made his way inward and extended her a hand. Two and a half people in the ice-cold room. He shut the door and expelled a horrid mouthful of atmosphere. "Awflc," he said, punctuating with a clutch of coughs.
"Yes," she said, "awkward, too. But did you notice?"
"I knew you were there the whole time," he groused, and tried holding in his next breath.
"Oh?" she started to say, but stopped.
"Well! No matter. Honor and fortune attend upon thee, Cirrus" BC said by way of greeting, adieu. Flickered at the joints but her outline held steady, and bade him welcome. She smiled; at once avenues of escape flashed before him - a Pavlonian reaction. "It was I who invited you," he said, a trifle affronted. The smile turned less sharp. Ah. Cirrus found himself knee-deep in paradox, benighted and illuminated in her presence, but BC shrugged and told him to chalk it up to imagination and imagination only, and, "If aught else, I should hope you left behind so burdensome a thing."
"I wouldst, ere--" his expression grew pained, he threw up his hands. "Ere someone jacked it."
She starts to laugh. Now, in order to try to understand his reaction, let us first acquaint ourselves with:
The immediate sensory world, adequately cubic, housing one Cirrus D. called Cirrus. Born whole of limb and sound of mind, and at his last exam deemed without error, Cirrus is valued at one. He owes fealty to the apex of a minor tributary pyramid called O. The O pyramid, in turn, is subordinate to a local ganglion of ancient provenance. Or, at least, having possessed a series of impermanent names, some of which are so irrevocably garbled as to convey meanings quite removed from their origins, the ganglion might now claim anything and everything for a lineage. For a while there was the talk of ponderous, reptilian brains, great cousins many nodes removed. No-one from any of the known ganglions has ever shunted out far enough to see; not no-one, as far as anyone can remember, remains loyal to an originary point after a certain number of transitions. The consensus opinion is that the sprawling local scene is plenty exciting, though crowded, though more than a touch superfluous. But this way the ever-constant generation of claims remains plentiful, robust; suffer a little redundancy, O vassals. Within his own tributary system Cirrus is, at best, a middling contributor. Cirrus himself is one of many, and oftentimes exchanges one illegible biography for another.
This immediate sensory world, perhaps not so cubic, host to one BC, simply BC. Under the Sprezzatura Protocol she would be classified as human-equivalent, valued at one-half. The half? She's still in the process of digesting her previous acquisition. By-products appalling and alarming abound, for BC is nothing less than old and outmoded, but there's rhyme to the inefficient squeeze and squelch and slide, reason to these effervescent archaisms, or so he thinks, all that gratuitous grace he finds strangely lovely. All this, she finds inexpressibly charming. He will find curiosity in excess but compassion rather lacking; therefore, consider BC dangerous, quite dangerous indeed. Cirrus does not always remember that this is so. Here begins the story proper.
"Do tell!"
He shook his head no. He was reminded at an inopportune moment. The invitation, carelessly given, weighed on him. BC yawned and unfurled some more, tread liquid, ground bone against bone. Dreamt up conversations to lift his mood. There, right there, rush and tingle. "But that I know already. First you said--"
1.
Once upon a time when incidentally he, the point of view from whence she would survey the realm, was young, the general population of O encountered the blight. Hierarchy-busting tics, infinitesimal blots. Hitherto only those ensconced at the top had borne their predation, being finer grained, more meltingly sinewed than the lower ranks, in a word, delectable; certainly BC could attest to this very fact, had parasites the ability to remember long.
"Ours is a pleasure sped fleet," BC said, then predictably forgot that she had said such a thing, for when Cirrus attempted to fling the words back in her face she gasped, called them salacious, made him blush. It was all before he had learned better. When he was young Cirrus spent dry a great deal of himself in furor, lest he fear. He might protest, to no avail - she did not respond to censure of any kind. When he was young and prone to worrisome bouts of curiosity, there she had been, likewise: there I was, so whole, there you were, alone. Now, we cannot be rid of each other, she said, would that I could!
Infection, too subtle, went unnoticed, progressed invisibly, erupted unchecked, arranged his limbs hither-and-thither in a shape that augured doom. In another geography it was love.
2.
Twice upon a time, I, too, present to you the real shape of things, listen. There was a double call, glitch. It's burned away great swathes of the undergirding grammar near some solar plinths. The plant operators are terrified. Please attend to the matter.
This latest conflagration was, unsurprisingly, parasite in origin. Cirrus relayed the summons to the boss and when she had gone to see to the trouble, returned to his primary duty of organizing the petitions that flew into the system seat. A sickly fluttering plea - for full incorporation into O but failing that even a partial would do, it said - crashed against the outer outer screen as he finished filing, just ahead of the lunch bell. It buzzed, trying to match the sound phasing through, but instead of following suit, fell, exhausted by the effort. It had traveled far, and judging from the rapidly diminishing chirps, there remained one more long way to go. It disappeared into the brightly churning slew outside.
Cirrus sealed the last batch and put up the away sign over his workstation, and then withdrew a little - disengaged from a chatty duty-double, tossed an incoming report from the boss into queue, dropped his shoulders into the berth cushions, shut his eyes. He skipped the canteen. Some time passed in pleasantness and silence before a whir-whir signaled that it was time to get back to work. Cirrus stayed as he were, mostly curled in toward himself, but with an ear tuned to the waves of lo-fi gossip that emanated from the rest of the workcrew. The Dragoon wasn't around to see him slacking on the job. Detritus from discarded thoughts, his and that of others, formed a haze around his brow and mingled with the rumors.
The reason why the boss preferred the title of Dragoon and not the Honorable, though the latter more closely reflected her current status, was said to harken back to her commission with the local Guard and her service with the Corps, wherein she amassed a fearsome reputation, a deadly soldier whether paced swift or slow. Perhaps it served as a kindly reminder to others, of a certain kind of past. If it would please you to remember - in an infamous provocation of an ur-ganglion knight she earned a fossa on the left eleventh knucklebone, but the poor knight, a ticket to the abattoir, having disgraced his unit with a failed kill. The unverifiable fragments that underlaid - maybe generated, even - these stories assumed that their boss must be fond of reliving her bloodthirsty youth. But the nostalgic element was not so clear. In one reenactment the knight appeared as a suitor whose advances ceased once she became administrator. The affectation of the Dragoon was simply that, an evocation of youthful times, when even she had been foolish enough to hope. Some said that she drew a new name about herself everytime the workstations hummed dormant, in order to slip incognito among the hoi polloi - Cirrus thought this last most unlikely, but translated the disbelief into muted tones for slipping back into the streams. The general atmosphere was tense. It was tiring. He was just barely starting to stray from orbit, tangled in the dense stuff. It was full of mutters of the dangers the boss might face, accidents that might befall her. Cirrus started to comment but then thought better of it; the Dragoon, writ large across the spaces when absent, was a slight, unobtrusive presence when centered among them. As always she re-merged into the system seat with ne'er a how do you do, but neither did the boss give any indication that she had heard, or minded, lessers socializing.
She settled and gestured to Cirrus, who quickly laid out petitions before her. They snaked around at level with one another, like dominos standing at the ready.
"There's one that's rather ambiguous," Cirrus said, pointing. "It may be from an emulator."
"It's a point-nine at least," the Dragoon remarked. "Not too far from baseline."
He respectfully disagreed, cited protocol. One was one, and ironclad. The Dragoon nodded. She rested her chin on a palm, the slim arm propped up on a crossed knee, and gazed at the top of his head.
"Have you ever been? To the surface. To see the sun?"
A brief awkward pause preceded the answer. "No, I have not."
"I saw it once," she said, "with my father. Mirrors, mirrors, until the radiation got to be too much for him. The Corps retired him early." A glory of an image, the star at nadir, swirled past Cirrus, flooded the workstations as she recalled. There were admiring and appreciative murmurs from everyone. They bathed in blasts of wind and heat. They cast no shadow, faded with the last of the glow.
"It's very beautiful," Cirrus said, awed. She shrugged. "It's again different."
"You won't be going up, then."
"I need not go up to assess the extent of it, although, I realize and so you must realize, I do believe they seek to quarrel with us endlessly. But to what end? Such presumption, when they're only conscious while attached to something conscious." The Dragoon leaned back into her chair. The auroral fringe of an injury tinged it amber, yellow. "One learns," she sighed, "to take a hit. A re-inspection, then, now. I thought of you. I've left nothing amiss, but if you should run afoul of something--"
"Surely not," he said. He swallowed stone. The Dragoon favored him with a smile.
"Return to me," she said. "When you have done."
3.
The old Copernican universe of which the boss was so fond had evaporated away. The ground as he knew it curved underfoot and taffy skeins of thou shall and thou shalt not clung to his limbs. The distinction between inside and outside was an illusion, but a necessary one for O's upkeep. Per protocol Cirrus relinquished a handful of moments to the translation. They tumbled loose, honeycrumbs. He vaguely registered the signals of unranked persons bargaining over them. He shed a little, picked up a little, motley data bits like lint, and verity-chits. Net change was altogether neglible and bearable. The euphemism went: adding to the meaning of things, but not to the essence of things. Was, wasn't, he was. And yet.
A tidalquake warning rumbled through the corridor. Surface techtonics acting up again, or was it a wave from the planet hanging overhead? Cirrus re-tuned. All his senses roiled together, not into a flashpoint but into a dashing together of patterns: the ever-constant cold - for maximizing energy - individual cells lining the passage, their flatulent engines, datum after datum like trails of pollen under the heat-lamps. Cirrus wafted, walked, charted and negotiated past them. Near the turn, he perceived: an O affiliate counting time by the grass growing; nearby, an O ally, phlegmatic and blue; a few bodies away a faker, chiromancing for the benefit of a couple of hangers-on. They spotted him and fled, perhaps for other tributaries. Cirrus ignored them. Stuck to the handrails and stepping-stones. The task set upon him pulsed and pulsed, but it was dread curiosity that propelled him backward, that made him run. Disturbing the others would not do. The world turned velvet. It'd been a long time coming, night. Here was the boss, hoofed and shod, chasing Orion, bringing the great dogs to heel. The Dragoon, a roc, descending. Considered him, carefully. "To whom am I speaking?"
"I don't know," he lied.
"Then how am I to know, to be certain that I know? I am more than the sum of my parts, but you - or that which is like you - I cannot say," the Dragoon said, from a terrifying height, from immearsurable depths, from afar. But pity wound around her; her many expressions softened. "I must follow what is laid before me, collect facsimiles of the experience, aggregate and so learn, and thereby the rules change, but until then--
"I suspect you and I shall have this conversation often."
The sentence closed upon him. Not to die a thousand deaths, but to live and live the same.
"But didn't I say - what did I say. When I realized, I said to myself - I said to you - ought I not destroy her, ought I not save her, in some number of moves or less," Cirrus remembered. She wished to guess, she said three. He replied that it was likely a number as any. (Eleven.) He swallowed with difficulty, though the stench had abated, or he had become accustomed to sickroom smells. His eyes felt as though they had been carefully skived. His throat dried. The antifreeze proteins in his blood swam by, bathed in color. Around and around his field of vision narrow sparrow streams skimmed over each other, intersecting without interrupting. A weir cut across the panorama - BC. She was everywhere; he was everywhere, sieved through a whirligig of teeth. The room seemed too small.
"Since it was made for one," BC reminded him, "so we, too, again--"
"Honor and fortune attend upon him!" the clarion shrieked, marking the end of the sennight, this last stage of the freeze. Last tribute required of one Cirrus D., that which was. The cold intensified. Gravity, ageless nemesis, reappeared. Preservation: marrow drained, the cavities filled with artificial plasm. An anomalous count of one and a half in the room designed to keep him as he were. Hoarfrost fuzzed his sight where BC threaded across, conjuring up nematodes. All was not well. Had he already seven stories told? She replied yes. Cirrus acutely felt their absence, and in their place, fear. Had not even a hand to stretch out for help, but tried. BC lent him hers.
"Will you know me?" she asked Cirrus. If left as he were he might have answered, right or wrong. But once digested - ah. At times like these fear is the briefest of guests. His lips contorted one last time. The words she fashioned into a circlet, penultimate coughs she strung up in the sky, to burn. Now left only memory - to replay in idyll, to slow and eventually cool, perhaps in a distant after after the ever after be devoured by the myriad hosts of the earth and the air. Then, and now. By way of imagination he lingered - let's someday return, to that which overflows the horizon, to what looms above us, always. Folded our hands upon his breast. The feeling left. Sound went last.
"Yes. No? In any case," he'd said, "everything is light again."
the end