Tag: writing

Ashland, the City: This is Who We Are Now

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
    Episode Four: This is Who We Are Now
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

THIS IS WHO WE ARE NOW
Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

My name is Ashland Mizota and five years ago, I was an orphan living in a group home and doing everything I could to not be noticed by anyone. Then one morning, I realized yesterday happened first. I thought I was going crazy, that I’d been so sad and alone for so long that I’d lost all grip on reality!

Then I started hearing voices. But it wasn’t like in movies – they weren’t evil voices telling me to hurt people. They were like stories playing in my head, radio dramas about people I’d never met. I ran away when the other kids in the house caught me trying to talk back to the voices. I lived on the streets for months, fighting whatever was in my head with every ounce of strength I had – there was no time for school or friends or a normal life. It took everything in me to keep the voices from driving me insane.

On a particularly humid summer evening, I fell to the ground behind a fried chicken restaurant next to the food scraps being eyed by the rodents in the shadows. I hadn’t eaten in days and the puddle water made me sick. I felt like I was dying. I had no more to give, no energy left to exert and I let the voices take me.

And that’s when I felt more alive than ever before.

The city spoke to me through the voices of the past, the lingering shadows of history that clung to the energy coursing through every nook and cranny of a metropolis with hundreds of years teeming with countless stories. I spent so long fighting such a beautiful feeling, a warm connection with the steel and brick and concrete and wood that held this city together as a testament to the ingenuity of mankind and the beauty of nature through science. Every crack in the sidewalk, each stain on the side of a building, and every corner of any neighborhood abandoned long ago – they all hold stories from the past, anecdotes about who and what came before. Sometimes the stories aren’t worth hearing, like how the paint dries on a wall. But often, the world has more to say than anyone cares to believe or hear.

I learned more each day. Five years I spent listening to everything I could, feeling the past flowing all around me, stepping through history as easily as I would the corner shop or high school. You’d think the center of the city would have the best tales, the epic sagas of families spanning centuries through good times and the bad. But those tragic romances quickly start sounding the same era after era, the repetitive song and dance between the aristocracy and lower castes that permeates through the entirety of human history.

The dark, forgotten corners of the city are where the richest stories live, the ones rooted in passion and flair for the lives of ordinary people. Because everyday life is a struggle constantly undermined by tragedies of horror, news of cataclysm that makes introspection more compassionate. Part of the human condition is downplaying the achievement of getting up each morning and facing life without bursting into tears over existential dread. We praise the exceptional, berate the unproductive, and forget the ordinary. I find the exceptionally ordinary stories hiding in the cracks, behind the stains, and under the ruins of what’s been forgotten.

Then one day I lost myself. My connection had never been stronger, but I felt more alone than ever before. As much as I knew about the people who once were, I barely spoke to the living, the ones walking right beside me that had turned into backdrop long ago. I realized I’d forgotten it in people – I let the memories overshadow the now and it was too late.

The pain of knowing I’d missed one of the most important aspects of humanity for a chance at everything else was too much. I couldn’t make a decision anymore because making a choice meant sacrificing all the others that might have been, letting go of every other potential thread to focus on one. I wasn’t ready to create differences. A storm brewed around me like a vortex pulling at everything else nearby.

But human thought is all about differentiation, separating ourselves from everything else at the beginning then splitting what we know even more to encompass new people, places, things, actions, behaviors, ideas, and feelings. Learning that you are insignificant on a cosmic scale makes accepting the relativity in your truth all the easier.

The storm grew worse around me and there was nothing I could do to stop it because that meant wanting something and I didn’t want to want anything ever again; stuck between wanting to be something I knew without doubt and knowing more than a single person ever could. It was crushing.

This isn’t who you are, Ashland.

Choose to be something more.

It was just an idea at first, just words in the whipping winds and dense, claustrophobic clouds swirling through my mind. Words that had no meaning, just letters strung together at random. Each time the words got closer, and each time I ignored what they were trying to say.

So I closed my eyes and stopped thinking.

I listened for the words so I could hear what they meant, the feeling behind the tone and the movement under each syllable. There was nuance between each character, symbols agreed upon and developed over time only to be perverted and mangled and twisted into something new and beautiful. The idea called to me, over and over through the maelstrom I’d made for myself in a place that shouldn’t exist, a park bench conjured from the past and future that threatened to tear apart the present. Drops of rain screaming through the sky as they barrel towards the earth, trillions of individual pieces shooting down at the ground without plan or direction as zephyrs festering into a tempest pull everything around them into a howling vortex – the rain is trapped by the confluence of weather, the elegant miasma of the maelstrom I had become.

You are not alone.

The man mourns for a past that never was, a future he cannot see, and a present he wishes he could change. The woman is missing a piece of herself, a part of her soul stripped away when she learned what she could be. Two hands, one from each, reaching out to pick me up.

Revolver and Ex Materfamilias.

The rain stopped but it didn’t stop raining – reality took pause and a deep breath in that moment as each drop of water hung in the air ever so slightly. Just one second stretched out and decompressed, kneaded out wider than it should have been, clinging like static in the sky. Each raindrop was a mirror, infinite tiny looking glasses reflecting me in each of them. They told my story, and the countless others of which I’d learned and felt over the years, the incalculable makeup of what I had come to represent.

The storm was me, and the more I kept running away from the chaos the stronger it grew. So I turned around and ran back into the abyss.

I ran for hours, days, years – an eternity with each footstep. And each of those moments was another piece of me, another story from the past seared into my memory, one more possibility for the future tucked away under other theories and extrapolations. Every part of what I was, every instance I had ever known, any feeling I’d ever shared – it was all there waiting to come back to me.

Ashland, the City…

Girl of a Million Voices

Speaker Metropolis

Herald of the Infinite Civitas.

The conglomeration of raw materials, industrial design, societal persistence, and cultural cohesion as beacons of innovation and evolution beyond nature working in tandem with people. A city is a network of ideas, an overwhelming web of overlaid wants and needs and dreams. It starts small – just a concept waiting to be more – until it grows by virtue of free will and determination, a village that becomes a town then a forest of buildings and neighborhoods, an ethos of competing goals somehow working together.

Beyond Tokyo, into the night sky amongst the clouds, I looked down upon every city in every nation across all continents on this planet, covenants traced back decades and centuries through countless souls that have come and gone over millennia. None are perfect, each with their flaws and blemishes, but there is beauty everywhere, serene brilliance flowing through every story ever told in every city there is or ever was. Each of those tales adds to the fire, another coal keeping the flames of humanity alive through generations across oceans and over mountains and rivers.

Keep going.

Then silence in the forever garden and a muted stare between three individuals who might just save the entirety of existence.

Because the whole planet is a city, a developed organization filtered through people’s affinity for one another, no matter how much they might protest their nature. The world grows smaller as cities grow larger and metaphysical portals gain more meaning on the digital frontier where viral cowboys and virtual shamans build their flocks.

I can feel it all – every last iota of every single moment.

And in the corner of my mind’s eye, the very darkest place I could have looked…

I see what is coming.

That which shouldn’t ever have been, but was always inevitable.

This is how we die.

NEXT: Empyrean, Part XIV – Revolver

Ashland, the City: Day One/Day Two

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
    Episode One: Day One
    Episode Two: Day Two
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

DAY ONE
There was no hot water that morning – the other children beat her to it, so Ashland washed her hair in a cold shower. The skies were clear, and it was quiet; a welcome change to the past week of consistent storms and rain. Ashland ran down the sidewalk then through the streets, weaving between gridlocked cars towards the subway station still ten minutes away – she would never get there in time.

Down an alley, she used as a shortcut before delivery trucks blocked it up, Ashland tripped on a pile of dirty clothes that had fallen from their lines. She picked herself up and kept going, wishing the entire time that she’d woken up when the alarm sounded. She ran into a cyclist, knocked a pile of papers from the arms of an irate attorney, and nearly caused a car accident when she ran out into a crosswalk without looking.

The streets all looked the same, each building just another version of the last, the din of chatter and machines grating on Ashland’s nerves until she opened her eyes and she was standing in front of the school with minutes to spare. It didn’t make any sense, Ashland though – she should have been at least fifteen minutes late.

A third-year girl sat crying on the bench near the entrance, staring at the ground through her swollen eyes. Just by looking at her, Ashland could feel the girl’s pain, as though her entire world had fallen apart and nothing felt the same. Ashland wondered what had happened to make the girl so sad. The morning’s blue skies were just a tease as the clouds rolled back in to drape the outside in damp familiarity.

Ashland watched Kazumi and Takeshi argue all through second period – they were never a terribly great couple to start, and the White Day situation put them even more on ice. All through third period and lunch, Kaz and Keshi bickered while people took sides. It wasn’t uncommon for students to voice their opinion on certain romantic dramas, no matter how unconnected they were to the involved parties. Everyone knew how it worked, the kids in the spotlight with grace and poise, then those on the edges left to comment and opine.

It wasn’t terribly original Ashland thought as she fiddled with the pile of rice on her tray that looked about as appetizing as the pile of rice from the day before and the pile before that. There was no good reason to indulge the melodrama, nothing to gain from subtly encouraging conflict between two people who would do good to simply end what they have and go their separate ways – but that’s part of the act, Ashland had come to believe, that the narrative mattered just as much as the emotion to a box full of hormonal teenagers trying their hardest to focus on anything other than their education.

The final bell rang, and the wave of students pouring from the front doors made Ashland anxious – she stayed back and wandered through the empty halls for a few minutes as the immediate chaos cleared out. The snack vendor was already gone and the crossing guard had stowed his road cones away for the night. Subtle serenity pops up between school’s end and rush hour; just a few minutes of peace after the children reach their homes and parents leave from work. The constant chatter and rumble of everlasting traffic died down, and Ashland let herself content.

Down she turned onto one of the oldest streets in Tokyo, a simple paved road hiding bricks underneath and dirt even further down still, each level bulging with history and the memories of yesterday. History interested Ashland – knowing what came before made sense when no one knew what the future held, and fragments of the past became clearer the longer she looked. Knowing what made her home what it was gave Ashland confidence, savvy on the subject her peers cared about least because what sort of income would an education in history bring?

She liked to notice what others took for granted. Like the fox that appeared before Ashland, the neighborhood’s familiar strayed too far from the woods looking for a way home. Or the group of barely-teenagers playing at street gangs, shoving and insulting one another because they saw it on TV and it looked cool. Perhaps the struggling game developer who finally hits a milestone. Maybe the old woman keeping the noodle shop died the week before, and her son still couldn’t get the process right.

Silence persisted; Ashland walked alone up and down and through the seven neighborhoods between school and her bedroom, seven distinct segments of Tokyo she’d come to know intimately. Then, in the park across the street from the orphanage, Ashland watched love die under pale moonlight just beginning to overtake the twilight’s lasting gleam. This woman’s heart was broken, fractured, and dying inside – she gave everything to this man, and he threw it all away. This man’s guilt consumed him every minute of every day – he betrayed this woman and she lost all faith in him.

Ashland laid down to sleep that night wondering what would come of the man and the woman, if the developer could sell his game, what the fox saw in Ashland’s soul, and why the son couldn’t get his mother’s noddle recipe right. Then, before she drifted off, Ashland realized there was no noodle shop.

 

DAY TWO
Ashland took a long shower before even the sun woke up, when the other kids waited for their alarms and she could move freely without worrying about personal space. The rain poured through the night and Ashland knew a bright morning was too much to ask, that she would have to try for the early bus if she had any hope of staying dry. As she got dressed, Ashland thought about noodle shop that didn’t exist and why she had such vivid memories of something that wasn’t there.

The bus was ahead of schedule for the first time ever, and Ashland found herself in the rain, sloshing through giant puddles growing from the edges of the sidewalk. She turned down the same alley as yesterday. A cat jumped out, and startled Ashland slipped on the wet concrete; she reached out for anything and grabbed a laundry line tied to building. Clothes fell from the sky into a pile at Ashland’s feet, the same pile of clothes she tripped over the day before. She didn’t know what it meant, such a physical coincidence, only that it made her uneasy.

There was no hustle or bustle yet in the halls, just a few eager students who showed up early every day including the third-year girl Ashland saw crying the previous morning. She was on her phone, panicked and distressed as she argued with her father about the laundry that somehow never made it onto the line even though she absolutely hung it up. The look of terror that washed over the girl’s face gave Ashland chills, and she walked into the school wondering what was going on as panic started to build.

Ashland hid away in a dark corner of the library, a spot she often found herself when the anxiety got too difficult to handle or she felt like life was bigger than she imagined. The library was always quiet; students either avoided the book stacks like the plague or adhered to the rules and kept their mouths shut. Because of this, Kazumi and Takeshi’s sudden outburst was all the more obvious and obtuse.

She demanded to know why he was sitting with another girl, why he would spend his time with someone else. He reiterated a point he must have made earlier, told her that he explained she was his sister’s friend and why he was sitting with her before school started. She asked what he said to make her cry – had he admitted that he was seeing someone else and was he getting ready to do it again? She started to sob through her words, only the worst possible outcomes swirling through her head – Ashland felt what Kazumi felt but didn’t understand how or why. Takeshi cut through the bullshit and Ashland felt a deeper cut; it was the girl outside crying.

Panic slowly crept through Ashland’s veins as she saw what was happening – a chain of events with results of which she experienced prior to inadvertently orchestrating them. It was half past tomorrow, ten ‘til yesterday, the day time stepped back to move forward. Ashland didn’t know what to do, how to comprehend that she lived tomorrow yesterday already.

Ashland kept her head down for the rest of the day; a flimsy bandage on a gaping wound in Ashland’s psyche. Her walk home is rife with paranoia as she looks over her shoulder every five seconds wondering how she changed the course of history in a single day, her every step another chance to fuck everything up more than she already had. She remembered when she saw the fox and turned her head. Then a new though arose, a new notion Ashland hadn’t considered as she walked through the park and seven strangers watched her from the shadows:

Maybe it’s the same day.

Through the fear and guilt Ashland wondered; if she had the ability to make things worse, why couldn’t she make them better, too? Seven strangers wreathed in light and chained by tradition stay themselves just a little longer. An orphan girl with no place in the world, lover of that which no longer exists, and seeker of stories – Ashland asked herself what was stopping her from at least trying to make it all better.

She passed by the kids bullying a smaller classmate and stepped in. She threatened to call their parents and report them to their homeroom teachers. Ashland made a difference, if only for a few minutes; she felt good about what she’d done, like she could truly start to affect change even with the weight of this time nonsense.

The silence persisted again as Ashland walked alone through the park toward the orphanage – she remembered the couple who couldn’t find the good in each other, the lovers destined to kill love just a little more under a pale starlight and washed out fluorescents. Ashland felt the woman’s heart like she had yester-morrow, the inconsolable panic, shame, and sadness from learning what the man had done and why. He had an affair, a gentleman’s intermission because the woman’s daughter was too much to handle, a third-year student unable to even keep the laundry hung let alone do anything to make their lives easier.

Ashland felt the woman’s pain, the utter loss of confidence in herself as a person and a mother. The man betrayed her trust and her value, kicked her soul to the curb instead of owning up to his insecurities and misgivings. Instead of communicating, he fucked around and broke this woman’s heart. Ashland recognized that there were some things she could never fix.

Seven shadows become seven figures with seven faces and seven voices calling out for Ashland in the twilight settling into dusk.

The city fell silent as Ashland walked up the steps to the front door of the orphanage and it broke apart, the front façade split at the windows and melted into the ground. Shifting back and forth, the Victorian aesthetic inverted within itself and reconstituting as something new. The massive entrance swelled and shrank like the house was breathing, as if it knew something had changed. Ashland nearly fell in; just one slip away from losing herself. Seven hands reached out and pulled her back from the abyss, saved her from everlasting chaos and confusion.

She hung in the air, unaware of what was happening as Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” played on repeat; until she realized it was absolutely everything.

NEXT: Ashland, the City – Episodes 3 & 4

Service

*Original Draft: October 28, 2012

This constructed reality,
Or that one…
Does it really matter?

Of course it does.

This fabricated reality,
Structured by belief
Not actuality.

Desperate times.

Truth is relative
Until it isn’t.
It’s an excuse
That fragments
Everything,

Splinters morality and
Bargains idealism
For comfort and
Superiority.

 

Divisionaries

*Original Draft: October 28, 2012…for real.

It’s a death in the nation
Of ideas and competency.
Where did the vision go?
How did we forget ourselves?

Uninfluenced, unfettered in
Stalwart belief – no room for
Change. Disturbing.

Society will fall because
We were too proud
To let those we don’t
Understand still be.

Remember these days when
People still respected truth;
They are fleeting, and
Tomorrow will be staged
In warehouses and in our minds
Because we don’t
Care enough to ask why.

It’s a death in the nation
Whose reason isn’t real.
Forgotten in the trunk
After she became too
Annoying on Facebook.

Found lying on the side of the
Road, decaying in vain.

This Story (Now Told)

*Original Draft: December 24, 2014

I.
Day three.
Eighteen never felt more real.
The air was wet, and
We met.

Handshakes and hugs,
Expected but not reciprocated.
Drugs, alcohol, everything else.
Those nights I don’t remember.
We grew up.

I watched you discover,
From afar, the things
You’d always hold dear.
That life couldn’t last.
We grew apart.

II.
Together again,
Not unlike the first time.
Everyone knows everything.
Parties bigger than your head,
People bigger than people,
Life larger than average.
We bonded.

There’s more here than it seems.
Expression from restriction,
Beneath a house of sin.
We were confused.

Without much light,
An idea crawled forth,
Entering our vernacular.
I left.
You accepted it.

In a car, hand on the wheel;
I never forgot.
Words more satisfying than
One hundred Christmases.
Stage two – I thought (would be) the last.
We kissed.

III.
Everything is everything.
Lives intersect.
Emotions never go away,
Happiness springs from
Beyond a ring.
We were happy.

Ten thousand oceans
Couldn’t break us.
Aliens on a redirected course,
Finding our center in
Each other.
Surreal and hardened
At the same time.
We explored.

In settling,
The structure flipped.
It grew stronger, resolved in it’s
Efficiency and fortitude.
Promises were made.
The years began to show.
Once brilliant, the
Pieces simply smiled in the mirror,
Hoping to be convincing.
We struggled.

Streets not so easily navigated,
Talks of indecision.
Confidence is a hell of a drug.
The screw was stripped, and
I didn’t have the answers.
We worked.

Familiarity concedes to difference.
Symbiotic becomes parasitic.
They were watching different movies.
Expectations change because
We changed.

IV.
Frustration;
Lines on a face from too much
Anger and sadness.
This suture is ripping;
I keep wondering why.
We fought.

Lies are told,
Trust is destroyed.
A common denominator is
Harder to find.
Both feel betrayed,
We talked.

If only the heavens could be
Moved, you would be seen in a
Good light.
All my rage is nothing.
Bitter endings after a
Gold star tenure.
We tried.

New avenues where there were
Once roadblocks.
She saw them ages ago.
There’s nothing left;
The legacy will remain intact,
The truth is much harder to swallow.
We walked away.

Omicron (Sepulcrum)

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part IX½: Omicron (Sepulcrum)
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

It sneaks up quiet and unassuming through blank nothingness bleeding out the edges of the cosmos, a silence so deep one wonders if sound ever existed in the first place. It does not know what it seeks through the infinite storm, only that it persists and survives to reach some unknown destination even if it takes until time’s last gasp.

Averbole was high as a fucking kite, brimming with gravitational anomalies and bursting with solar flares, he was exhausted and surging with energy at the same time, a cosmic traveler with limitless potential and even more limitless divinity. He departed his home happier and more alive than he’d ever felt, then became terribly alone because he left it all behind and didn’t look back. When the majesty you expect crumbles and the rose-tinted glasses are wiped clean the wine from last night, what’s left are consequences that offers no divergence from the set path, no leaving the party early for a warm bed because it isn’t there anymore. Those conceits are long gone, idealized relics of the past put to rest and buried. Averbole only had his mistakes left to keep him company.

It takes the plunge, deep down through the sewers of a binary existence into the lowest levels of rotting micro-verses clinging to reality by threads of unraveling fate so very close to snapping and erasing the fragile remnants of trillions of stars and planets and lives. As dark as it is, it shines a light in this most bleak un-place, spinning with purposeful meticulousness so it doesn’t get swallowed into the void.

In the most outer of spaces, Averbole came to know his cosmic theater. He witnessed miracles and travesties, fought the vile armies of entropy as it looked to conquer all it saw and birth kingdoms of decay. He watched empires of infinite lines subjugated to pointillist governances with their objective paradigms pushed down and crumpled up inside a box. He dueled with the living concepts of existence, the behemoths which kept the universe safe through rashes of pure paradox. He saved galaxies from premature death when the notes from a butterfly’s song turns into wind that becomes energy and thunder and wind then gravity and eventually a force so powerful it rips planets from their orbit and sends them hurtling into their suns. Averbole rose high in his journeys, found a new definition for himself far beyond the veil of our mind’s eye. He commanded millions with mere gestures, unquestioned faith in a god of a man who left his home to become something even greater than he imagined.

But he felt nothing.

So, he tried harder.

It fumes with anger and grinds against the dominant ebb and flow, goes against whatever is good – it goes up when there is only down, and when there is red it vomits green. It doesn’t know where to go so it just keeps going, ripping apart atoms in its wake in attempt to feel something again. Ever it creeps closers, sliding between quasars and supernovas and black holes and nebulae, subtly sparking and exploding outside any perception but its own. This moment; it stalks Averbole and watches him from afar wrestling with isolation after separating from collective nirvana, the death throes of a god unbecoming of his title.

Averbole weaved oceans from symphonic contentment past the shining remnants of archangels decimated by a war fought when life and death and love and hate were still real, physical entities, when the sharpest blades were the cutting words that pushed evolution forth or extinguished life at the root. This ancient war of relativity against singularity, between the right now and the infinite forever – which side stood victorious in the end?

No answers.

No solace.

No relent.

Averbole screamed and cried and flailed in his little void of nothingness, for he was lost beyond all hope and even the simplest queries seemed overtly impossible. He was stuck in himself, psychologically unable to break free from his own desperate anger and uncontrollable frustration. The curious little god lingered longer, loitering in the festering cesspool of degenerating existentialism His consciousness caramelized and melted away through the souls of forgotten empires and dirty streets alike. He consumed it all, absorbed meandering fractures and cancer-ridden fears that permeated indefinitely through the underside of the multiverse. He ate everything to learn all that he could never understand.

It is destiny. It is fate.

Averbole the Lackluster Lord looked out into the abyss and cried. The stars were blinding even though he could barely see them through the oily, murky void – infernal cosmic torches like desktop icons for the chaos of everlasting psychosis compressed into something beautiful. There was no truth in those stars, no reference point or base line amongst billions of haphazardly placed heavenly bodies, nary a delusion of order within all that had come to pass, and it angered Averbole. There was a scorched fury buried deep within his soul, an inconceivable pain through a torturous blaze that burned away the tapestry of his former salvation. Fire destroyed him from within and made a hole of nervous destabilization, a paradox of rebirth.

Those discarded feelings of pain and misery and fear and anger rejected and expelled so long ago never died. The darkness from inside those wannabe gods wished away and forgotten survived and persisted through ages, screaming through the endless night as the pieces fused and compressed and hardened into a Massive of darkness denser than ten thousand diamonds. The unbreakable absence of good tore through reality, stripping molecules of meaning and knocking billions of alternate timelines aside. Then, it felt something familiar, an old memory almost lost.

All it took was a single second of absolute doubt, one moment of weakness to expose Averbole, alone in the cold. Just a deity in by name alone who lost his way to never find it back. In that empty moment, the terrified god felt a blade sink into his heart, the Massive above him come to carve away everything Averbole had learned and become and taken for granted. One moment became a leviathan of maddening pain and suffering borne of immature divinity extrapolated through interstellar chaos and darkness. At the center of a smaller black hole within another, Averbole was bled away by the Massive in the night.

Become something else; survival of the fittest.

Averbole unhinged, digitized into cubic microcosms of perpetually pending potential that will never find direction. Everything was within his grasp and the truth he sought was there behind so much that rang false, but he couldn’t see through blackened eyes and thick clouds of moldy doubt. There was no light for Averbole, only a never-ending ocean of platitudes meant to deconstruct everything he ever loved.

Then the moment passed, and Averbole was no more.

Each part of the young godhead was scrubbed from existence, every fragment picked apart into smaller shards of what were once building blocks for physical objects. Cancerous notions unloaded pain and hurt and misery into fair Averbole the host, the hollow figure home to the irreversible rage we so ignorantly believed we could erase like a sentence in a story. All that remained of a fledgling god that left home was a crumbled shell with the same face. Behind his million teeth a tempest was born of a new truth this monster would represent:

They will fall. All of it will die.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part X: Infinity Dies

From Stellaris: Binary

 

I didn’t know what hate was until I was thirteen. It’s one of the only saving graces of living down here – kids get to be kids without the weight of knowing who they really are. But did I appreciate being kept in the dark? – of course not. I hated my parents for lying to me and pretending they were happy, for letting me believe I had a chance in hell of ever getting out when the truth is none of us do, because there’s no one who remembers when we could. All that’s left are just stories now, memories of a time when things were good. The truth could never set me free, so I decided to do it myself.

Under smoke-filled skies, walking down dirty streets littered with last week’s trash and stinking of piss and sweat as twin suns set behind too many factories, I realized none of it was normal because we’d grown up believing this was the way of things without asking why, and that when we learned the truth, we simply resigned ourselves to a life un-lived. The only hope we still had was in each other, and even that was starting to fade.

It made me angry. I walked for hours, out to the middle of the barren desert that was left behind when all the mineral deposits went dry and where nothing would ever grow again because the land was poisoned and wouldn’t heal. I screamed at the other, binary moon hanging in the sky as loud as I could until I lost my voice and nothing came out when I tried to curse them up above just one more time. Because this is just how it is. We are inferior, menial, less than – and it is wrong. They bend towards the sun the same as us, know the same gods, and bleed just like we do. We are their dirty secret, their unending sin kept hidden from the rest of the universe so they can keep living in bliss as we suffer in the shadows where we just exist. We cannot wait for another inversion that may never come, and I wouldn’t let the cosmos decide my fate, anyway.

It starts slow; just a feeling, at first. But the feeling grows into acceptance, and then into anger and rage when you realize acceptance means giving up on everything else just to hold onto something familiar – what you know isn’t worth anything without understanding what you don’t know, and understanding sacrifice is easier said than done. We gave up on wanting to more, and generations paid the price through subjugation, oppression, and hate. No one is going to help us; we must deliver ourselves from this life.

My husband left me when I told him I wanted to go. Through tears in both our eyes and those nights knowing what was coming on the dawn of the final day, I tried to hold onto what we had and not what we had become; divided and distressed because neither of us realized the home we had made was emptier than we thought. He saw hope between the cracks of this dingy moon, happiness in what was there instead of working for something better, and he saw a life growing old in this place I cannot be anymore. I think I loved him, and I like to believe he loved me, too; but I won’t ever really know, and that’s okay because this was never enough for me and it’s all he will ever want. When a good man and a good woman can’t find the good in each other, love dies; the others stole our potential and robbed us of our pride, and then I stood alone when they took my husband, too.

I have nothing to lose, and it is good. I hold onto the pain and sadness and frustration because it’s what gets me through each day and helps me remember that everything I left behind will still be there even though I won’t. The trek across the desert is cruel, and few are ready to make the journey, but those who join me see this place for the prison it truly is, and they will no longer be defined by being born on the wrong moon. I let them say their last goodbyes to families begging them to stay and reconsider such a fool’s errand. I don’t know how their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters cannot see the desperation in their eyes, that staying means dying without living — because it’s all I can see. At the edge of everything we’ve ever known, twelve set off with me across the barren wasteland towards the promise of anything else.

Ours was a baptism of fire, a crucible we brought upon ourselves that stripped us of pretense and forced us to survive with faith as our only guiding light. Through storms of thick dust and sharp sleet, days of unending heat that claimed one of us and drove another insane, nights so cold I often wondered if I would even wake up the next morning – through it all, we marched. Weeks felt like months in the summer expanse as the days stretched out and beasts hunted us in the pitch-black darkness of even longer nights. Comfort became little more than a memory, just a fading idea we used to know but could no longer recognize. I questioned myself more times than I can count, wondering if I what I was doing was right, or if I was leading us all to our deaths on the other side of the world where no one would hear us scream. But I would rather die knowing I tried than live wondering what could have happened.

After what felt like a lifetime, we reached the top of the ten-thousandth mountain and I saw the Moment; a small quantum singularity locking two moons together yet separating us so much more, the unstable point in space and time that I could see with my own eyes yet isn’t supposed to be real. But we stood on the summit of the mountain and looked upon the moment we’d been taught was a fairy tale for children too old to deny the lies but too young to accept the truth – it was magnificent. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen or would see again in our lifetimes; the nebulous, vague something pulsating with energy that crackled and spit and flared out from the center and across the crater’s face that meant freedom.

When the Moment first came into view, it felt like there couldn’t be anything else like it across all of Stellaris, that it was wholly unique in its lucid, breathtaking beauty. I wanted that moment to go on forever; just let me sit there and imagine what’s on the other side until I grow old and die with a smile on my face. But I stopped myself; that temptation wasn’t enough to keep me from moving forward. Two more stayed behind who were happy to watch the universe invert within itself in a shard of existentiality, content enough to accept they would die out there while the rest of us kept going.

It was the end of the world and the beginning of everything else, the only chance we had to get out, and every step was another towards deliverance. It felt right, struggling down the cliff face into the valley below where the Moment’s sheer force pushed a hole into the ground like a goblet spilling over with potential. I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked in the field of glowing flowers and vibrating trees warped by the Moment, so astonishing and extraordinary and uncanny and new. I couldn’t stop laughing the closer we got, like none of what I was seeing could possibly make sense yet it was there, and I could nearly touch it.

Reality swung like a boxer in a title fight when it’s fist connected with my mind as bullets from nowhere barely miss me. On the far side of the valley, they sent warning shots and moved to intercept. When they cut us off from the Moment, I panicked; sheer terror of never experiencing what laid within it’s shimmering perfection gripped me by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. I ran faster than I’ve ever run before, as one by one the others fell behind me. I did hear them follow me when I took off, but I couldn’t look away from the Moment, and the closer I got the more I knew I made the right decision. Nothing I did on this world could make a difference, so my last hope was wanting to survive more than their guns could hurt me.

I jumped into the moment with a smile on my face when three of their shots found their mark and blood started streaming down my back. I cried with joy in the moment before I landed on the other side surrounded by strangers who nearly let me die on a busy intersection in a golden city. Before I lost consciousness, an old woman took my hand and told me everything was going to be alright. Somehow, I knew she wasn’t lying – I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I woke up two days later in a hospital, scared and confused; I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I threw up over the side of my bed and a kind nurse came in to clean it up. I asked her where I was, and she told me I would know in due time. Even though I wanted to scream, my body wouldn’t let me and I fell asleep again.

It took hours, but someone finally arrived in my room to give me the talk, the same talk every one of us who’s ever made it through gets when they wake up and don’t know where they are or what to think. That was his job; to tell us the truth without a hint of despair, to admit he and his kind oppressed people like me, to explain how I lived a lie for twenty-nine years based on an arbitrary cosmic design. I never imagined the truth would set me free, and here it was to prove freedom was never really an option to begin with. I was born on the wrong moon, and nothing could change that. No matter how much I wanted to forget them both and just leave, all my hopes and dreams disappeared as quickly as the Moment. That feeling of pure ecstasy I felt jumping in was inverted completely, and the dread pushed me over the edge.

Because everyone knows – the whole universe, all of it. They all know what’s was happening, and they don’t care because they don’t want to lose what our suffering produces. They’re more worried about the refined minerals we thought only those above us used in their vain glory, but instead sell for next-to-nothing for political favors and financial clout while the rest of the galaxy lets them keep us like animals. We are not a dirty secret or a shameful sin – we are the result of their necessary evil, the means to justify their ends, the terrible truth they don’t deny because everyone’s hands are dirty. The man went on about refugee rights while I tuned him out completely because I realized they were going to send me back. Everything I went through, all the heartache and disappointment and fear, the pain and sacrifice and broken promises – none of it meant anything because the only possible outcome was always going to be regret.

Of course, I would be the exception, the one who made headlines when my case defied all precedent and I was allowed to stay as a citizen of their glorious and shining city that stretched across the entire moon even though I couldn’t bear the sight without thinking of everything I once loved and gave up to live amongst those who treat us worse than the dirt they’ve never even seen. I thought it would be amazing to be someone else, to find my way to a new life and a new me in a new home because that’s all I’ve wanted since I was thirteen years old. But the air here stings, and what smells beautiful to them reeks like death to me.

I am a pariah, a child of neither world because mine is a trap and theirs will never truly accept me. There are those sympathetic to us lowly drifters – more often in some perverse obsession with our dirty world – and others like me, but when we see one another in the streets, guilt stops us from ever speaking – guilt from leaving behind those we claimed to love, guilt for surviving when others fell, and guilt for wanting to not feel guilty anymore. Mostly, they hate me and anyone like me. They hate me because seeing me is a reminder of the dirt they can’t wash away, the bloodstains that won’t come out, the tears seared into their minds every time they degrade and insult me because they don’t want to be reminded that I’m just like them.

My husband and I used to sing songs about dreams, melodies our parents taught us that helped make life a little easier when it felt like nothing would ever be okay. Those funny little songs got me through the first weeks on the higher moon; I would sing under my breath when they passed by, staring at me, the blight on their perfect little world, without thinking about how their sneers and upturned chins made me feel…like they would care even if they knew. I often thought about my husband back home, wondering if he still thought about me or if he found a nice girl to settle down with and have the children I never gave him. I asked myself every day if it wouldn’t be better to just pretend like none of this ever happened and jump off tallest building I could find. I wanted to do it so many times, and each time I didn’t, I cried myself to sleep knowing I was just that much more of a failure.

But I’m also a coward, and even though I dread waking up each morning, I still get out of bed and go to work at the printing press where they keep me in a windowless room processing paperwork from the moment I arrive until I leave at the end of each day. They don’t care that my home is never clean of hateful slurs and broken glass, or that each moment I endure their hate, I hate myself even more. This is a dark place full of shadows masquerading as light, just a shiny veneer hiding such a terrible truth that no one dares challenge it, lest they upset the profit margins and miss quotas.

On my deathbed, as cancer ravaged my body, I watched the inversion through my window, the anomaly I never thought would come in my lifetime; the world I once called home rose up from below, out from under the horrible, shadowy nightmare it had known for three-hundred years and bathed in the golden glow of a radiant and welcome sun — and it was good.

I knew we would soon descend back into the darkness I fought so hard to escape, that this golden world would soon fall like mine did centuries before, but I was finally happy. Because as the acidic, putrid smoke I recognized from my youth filled the air outside the hospital, it felt right – karma is a bitch, and this ‘higher’ moon would finally know what it’s like to be down below. Part of me wished I could have been there with my family and friends, but I gave up that right a long time ago. And so, I took comfort in knowing the ones I loved the most were finally in the light, and went to sleep accepting that I would never wake up.