It has been no small journey and while I might have suspected it to be long and arduous, I find myself now seeing a mountain where I had planned for perhaps a steeper than normal hill.
I mean this literally and figuratively, of course. Here in the shadow of the vast, rocky expanse that people have long since taken to calling the Jaws of Heaven I find myself at the proverbial precipice. Long and longer have I traveled, after all. Low and lower to near nil has everything begun to grow or else has already grown. The distance back – to anything resembling back – feels like a trail of desolation wearing a mask of hopeful reprieve. The distance forward looms as large and lethal as its namesake.
Still, I’ve seen the lands north of Amberlin and I’ve seen the illusion of hope in the ragged weeds of failing crops in the once-city of Verimund. I’ve heard the sobs of men and women who can speak of nothing but the lineage from which they descend. Bloodlines that have left them as accidental periods on a sentence now poorly crafted.
Even now, my path here has become a phantom. Erased in the wind. A land of drifting ash and dust. All of it slipping around like some strange reptilian blanket. Devouring everything inch by inch. Circling around populations wearing signs of “Too big to fail” like a life preserver in a sea of silt where they now sink – arms waving for a savior who they’ll never see.
In the night, there is a stillness. A silence that feels unnatural. Broken only by the low, ominous warbling sounds of something that has somehow found habitation in the dust of deadly desertion. I sleep little and less. I wake often from dreams where I cannot hear into a world where sound is so still and so soft that I – with trepidation – must make a noise to prove that sound exists and that I can still hear it.
I fear that I shall die and none will ever find me. Buried beneath a desert of ash. Food to some abomination whose existence is to me now naught but a sound and a fear.
What there was of food failed me before the water and, of that, I feel some amount of gladness. It’s the kind of optimism one finds when weighing different deaths and attempting to give one the moniker of lesser evil.
The sounds in the night remain but they feel distant now. They rumble like echoes. Something about that makes it feel worse. Like a point of demarcation to remind me where life ceases.
The path behind me mocks me with the very idea that I could ever turn back. A thought I’ve had more than once. A thought that crumbles beneath the weight of its own hubris.
The path before me mocks me further. I see a peak and, at times, I see something in the air that makes me think – if only for a moment – that something is there. Just out of reach. Just out of touch. Another day of walking. Only one more. I’ve been telling myself one more for more than one day, however, and the destination eludes me still.
I find myself having to turn and then turn again. To ascend and descend. To stop and try to figure out where “back” was and where “forward” even is.
Yesterday, as I readied myself for a sleep that filled me with dread, I felt farther from anything that resembled a destination than I had the day before.
Today, as I write this beneath a shroud of a thinning blanket to spare my pages from the blemishes of falling ash, I feel as though I could reach it – whatever it is – in just another day.
Just one more day.
Even were I committed to subsisting on my own urine – which I am not – I would not be long for this world.
The place I seek feels so close and yet so far.
Last night it was so silent that I couldn’t sleep. I could think of nothing but my home on South Pine and the way the spring air would drift in through my open windows and the creaking and groaning of the windmill out beyond felt, at times, like some deterrent to sleep. I tried to conjure it as I lay there with my head upon a hardened lump of balled-up clothing. My neck aching. My limbs so tired that they could barely feel how sore they were.
I fear this may be my final entry.
If anyone finds this in some strange and fantastic future – my name is Quentin Edward Davis. I once lived in the city of Muresh on the street of South Pine, fourth home of the four hundred block. I was never married though, when I think back, I know now that I should have married Emilia Isabelle Larson. I left behind no children nor any parents. I left behind nothing but this journal and even in that I can say, with honesty, this is not my best work.
When I woke, the world was somehow dark in a way that promised light. It reminded me of life before when I’d wake with the windows shuttered and small fractions of the sun slipping through where imperfections silently lived.
At first, I thought I was dead.
I even said aloud, “Am I…am I dead?”
A voice answered me, however. Admittedly, in that moment, I did not fully trust my senses. I didn’t trust much of anything.
I could feel that time was different. That whatever was now was not a distance of a night’s sleep from where I’d been. That settled in upon my shoulders like a backpack full of academy texts – digging into the recesses of my shoulders and giving me a convoluted syllabus of doubt and dread.
The voice, were it not obvious, had replied with, “No.”
My eyes felt heavy like they used to when I’d imbibe red lotus tea to help me sleep.
My questions came out as a stream and, as I write this after the fact, I am not certain that I recorded this accurately but I feel mostly certain that my questions were:
Where am I?
Who are you?
What did you do to me?
I have slept many times in my life. I have woken the same number. I know the feeling of waking with a mind unsullied by toxins. I know what it is to wake with the anchor of inebriation hanging heavy to my limbs and eyes and mind and meaning as much and more.
The only thing said to me was a gladness that I had not perished and that I should eat.
Held more by the blurring eyes of toxicity than by the crepuscular world around me, it still took me some time to make sense of my tiny sliver of habitation.
As should be obvious, they left me my journal, quill, and ink. In truth, they’ve robbed me of nothing that wasn’t already disposable. They even gave me new attire – soft and clean and smelling of amaranth.
I write this now as I eat – hesitantly so – the meal that they gifted me. It appears to be what I imagine are fruits and/or vegetables. Some are semi-circles with what seem to be thick, purple rinds and a flesh of reddish-pink. Others are long, tapering cylinders of green that blur to indigo.
Something about the food seems like it should be sweet. Sharp. Intense to the tongue.
So far, however, the taste is oddly subdued.
I can hear movement around me in the places where my eyes cannot see.
I lie upon the soft, green earth below me and stare at the opening far above me to see if anyone looks down. I try to listen for the sound of a door opening or a foot moving to tell if someone has entered.
For all my time here so far – a time I’ve scarcely known nor understood – I’ve yet to determine how my one visitor – if they were real – entered where I am now nor how they might have left. The walls seem quite secure. There is no door that I can speak of.
As I write this, I can’t tell if I’m writing this the day that I think I’ve arrived here or if it’s now a different day. When I look up at where I began this narrative, I feel uncertain as to whether I wrote it recently.
I’ve been here for four days now, I think, though I begin and end my days in this same prison. A prison is – indeed – what it is. They seem to receive few visitors and they take precautions. Loathe though I may be at my treatment, I would be lying if I said that I’d not seen worse in Principtin or even in the supposedly rural and welcoming tracks of Ellemore or the bustling outskirts of Rurisia
While the food continues to be of a lacking nature, I find no ire with it. My sleep sympathizes, I suppose, as naught has disturbed me here save for the random moments when the earth trembles from the anger of the Tektonikos. Whatever lives in the stretches of the wastes beyond are less than a whisper here. As best I can recall, I’ve not heard the strange tone that – in hindsight – makes me think of serrated slabs of stone being pulled one across the other.
The land here is soft and fertile. A circle that one can walk the perimeter of ten or so times in one day – or, at the very least, I can as a man who has spent a multitude of months traveling through the feeding wastes of this world and some unknown days within a cell of stone and hearth and peace and limitation.
Still, even this prison feels like nothing short of a realm of salvation. Soft and warm. Comforting with its sounds of a living static during the day – what I imagine must be a world of humanity still at work – and a more understated hum at night in the presence of fireflies that – in and around and between their flying and their landing – feels to me like a strange view of a cosmos that the window above me cannot offer.
I-
When I woke, it was to a voice. It said, “Rise and then follow.”
I took more than a moment to understand. The tone of the voice sharpened and then repeated. For some reason, I half-expected the voice to be a figure of human design with the face of a crow or maybe a raven.
It was – oddly and yet comfortingly – neither.
I was led to a door within my world that did not appear to be a door but one which only became one because it had been opened to allow our egress. I followed and followed farther. We scaled the exterior of a massive tower beneath the earth until we reached the surface where I was taken to a man who wore robes of brown and gray. A man with withered cheeks but dense, thin muscles beneath wrinkled, tanned skin.
He spoke to me of their beliefs here and I cannot – I regret – remember his words clearly for he spoke them as though I could remember at the speed of his expression. It blurred together. It became as cotton torn at the edges – lacking any and all clarity. As I think on it now, there are moments where I feel as though he was not speaking in a language I knew and yet I feel certain that I did not think so when he spoke.
I believe that tomorrow I may be allowed to see the world beyond my immediate capture.
I am both excited and filled with dread.
As I write this, the sky above me descends into darkness. I find myself regretting not making a better effort to enumerate my entries. I shall do so henceforth and so I mark this passage accordingly.
VIII-
I have been relocated and I have often thought to write but have chosen not to do so out of a sense of paranoia. Sadly, there are likely things that I now cannot recall as clearly or as truly as I would have done had I written sooner.
Beyond my prison is a world of flats and hills. There are tracks of land with crops the likes of which I’ve never seen. The likes of which, I imagine, are the source of the meals I’ve consumed.
There are natural slopes in all directions. The staggered teeth of the mountains at every angle of inspection and yet the valley around us seems to run with reckless abandon to the very horizon. My previous point of occupation was one of few – a restricted realm that seemed to hold what looked like wells at the surface but whose interiors, I must assume, were all like mine.
I was taken to a small home and told that it was mine. It was little more than a shack with a bed. Still, it was more than I’ve had for a long time and though the bed is by no means of fine quality, the hovel rests upon the soft ground that seems so prevalent in this region.
When we ate this evening, it was as an assembly of all. As the night grew dark and darker still, the world around me seemed to almost shift with the swiftness of a lantern being squelched. At the same time, a light seemed to appear up and away. A growing haze of illumination in the distance.
Though it was too far away to see, the entire perimeter of our realm seemed to ignite with a replication of the view that was so far away. Paneled iterations of the vision seemed to encapsulate me and, with a focused lens, showed their entry as though I were much closer than I was.
They placed a grand tome upon a lectern and spoke in a voice that was equal parts intensity and softness. Their face was veiled by a mask the likes of which I’ve never seen. Their mannerisms were somehow odd and yet normal all at once. They had a voice that I could not immediately identify.
I have seen what the blind hope of redemption has brought to the city of Thiasah and I’ve seen what kind of cruelty rose from the theocracy of Seletia. Still, this seems a different sort. Whatever it is that weaves itself into the fibers of these people has done something meaningful and purposeful.
NLI-
There is a kindness here that pervades all logic.
I find myself both curious and concerned.
It is no small occurrence to see those about clutching to a tome with the same design upon its face. A circle with a series of lines cascading around its interior. Like a spiral of many spirals.
There’s a part of me that is waiting for the other shoe to drop. I check my windows at night and it’s the utter innocence of life around me here that makes me feel certain that something must be wrong.
I am afraid to write too often as I fear I may be being watched.
SIIL-
Life has changed a great deal since I’ve last written.
Within the pall temple, I have seen the speaker more closely. My time within this place feels oddly serene now. Much of my previous worries seem to have been of ill regard.
Though I have rarely been a man of faith, the one that holds those around me seems to have produced a meaningful designation of reality – of purpose, I dare say. A simple treatise, in truth, but one which they all seem to adhere to in the most obsequious of ways.
It seems to nearly infect me even by nature of proximity. Though the words spoken seem to weave between the intelligible and the naught, I see the result of it in the deeds of those around me. The kindness. The caring. The ever-outstretched arms of compassion.
All of it, of course, hidden behind the jagged mountains and journey that nearly killed me.
I have no disclarity on how they can live so peacefully and yet it still eludes me. There is an instinct in my brain to see how they could be so easily betrayed. So cleanly destroyed. All of it built upon their unwavering softness and gentle smiles.
YLIX-
I have been silent for more time than I should have but such was the cost of my diligence.
I have risen among them and have seen the temples of their homage.
I have met with the high priests and priestesses and have been in arms reach of the sacred tomes that they recite. The arbiters of existence, all.
I have blood on my hands but my concerns of this land echo deeply within me. I feel regret for that which I have done but I know that something here is wrong. It rests upon my chest when I sleep. It weighs upon my shoulders as I labor in the day.
Their great messiah has no name. They have existed since before anyone that lives here or, at the very least, that’s what everyone seems to tell me.
I sense nothing but subterfuge. A lineage of control. I wonder what they gain from their duplicity. All those around me laboring and living and existing and for what?
ZNXI-
I fear this may be my final entry.
Even as I write this, I feel uncertain as to what to say or how.
I ascended the steps of the salt flats into Urin’s spire. I waited until the guards had allowed me a moment of ingress.
I slipped within the peak and sought out the tome of the speaker. I could hear the voices below me in consternation.
When I found the tome, it was upon the chair that sat just behind a great desk of oak or some other very impressive type of tree. I held it in my hands and felt a sense of fear. Of revulsion.
As I broke through my disregard, I began to move the cover and the pages and I found…nothing. Pages and pages of nothing. Some were colored by smudges and streaks. Others were entirely blank but for a scattering of tiny bumps upon the surface. Others still were a scattering of black boxes within a thick black border. Nothing seemed to say a thing.
The voice of the speaker surprised me when it spoke.
“What do you seek?”
When I turned, I half-expected to be shot or stabbed but neither occurred. I simply stared at the speaker. It was without distance and without its normal garb. It stood there, strange and metallic. Its facade of a face and its pretense of eyes somehow seemed to shift in a way that made me feel like I was being scolded by a parent in a world where children and parents are both given such a luxury.
I told it that I didn’t understand.
It told me, “Those are the stories of the dead. Those who have died. I read those and I tell the world what I must.”
Writing this as I bleed out is hard. My brain is drifting in a fog. I didn’t even feel the knife at first, I felt the warmth of blood as spilled out from my stomach.
It looked me in the eyes and it said, “They just need something to love. To believe in. I cannot let you take that. I know that you would try.”
I know that I will die here. My hands are already growing tired. My focus is blurring. I wonder if this is what heaven is like. I wonder if this is what hell feels like.
I can see the night ascending in the windows of my home. The glimmer of my blood shows my entry and my collapse just as surely as this passage tells my truth.
I sense, even as I die, that this place is broken. Something here is wrong.
If you find this, tell Emilia that I died thinking of her.
Inspired by the prompt by Afterwards: http://afterwards.blog/2024/03/11/afterwards-writing-prompt-10-monday-11th-of-march-dominion/
The Pegasus Fiasco 
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