Something pulls itself from the dust of this place.
No. Not something.
It tries to speak. Ten tones, climbing over one another. Tangling together; choking their fellows into silence while growing hoarse under the weight of their own words. But in truth, all ten bloomed into just one resonant voice; pulling from the same strata. The same voice that’s been speaking, from the very beginning.
My voice. My skin. My flesh. My bone. My heart. My blood. All carved under a single, steady hand.
Slowly but surely, I push myself upright. Wearing a Face of my own. A long, beaked skull sprouting vines from its peak. In dark chasms, three eyes burn: one ebony; one ruby; one another shade entirely. All are mine.
I clench my hands into fists, feeling my ivory nails bite into the wood plating my dark flesh.
Truthfully, I don’t know if this is right. If this is how things should go, or whether I’m a god of memory, something else entirely, or nothing at all. For gods could never be captured with just one word. I don’t know if I’m anything more than a child groping in the darkness. I can’t know. Uncertainty is my inheritance; the one all those that walk this earth share.
But I do know that there is no heaven or hell beyond the bounds of our skulls. Salvation or damnation courses through our veins with every beat of our hearts. All that means is that paradise must be wrought with our own hands.
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That’s a problem for later.
My eyes sift through the darkness of that place. Searching for an answer that I already feel, through the vast, empty space that formed my body, still connected to by the vines through my feet. I can sense it: in the air; in the earth; in the wrenching deep in my chest.
They’re gone.
Leaving behind the midnight blade thrust into the ivory. I wrap my fingers around its hilt and pull it out. By rights, the weight of it should tear my arm off. But it’s easy.
My hands hold it horizontally. Where I can see, in its exquisite filagree, a ringing bell. A broken wing. A mended scar. A waiting seed. A scrawled slate. A pock-marked laugh. A smiling giant.
Then I press the chill flat of its scabbard to my forehead.
“I miss you,” comes the shuddering confession. My many tones chorus harmoniously, but for a moment I wish they didn’t. “And I’ll keep trying.
“I know I can’t change my nature,” I tell the ghosts around me. “But I can interpret it.”
Just like that, the blood – hanging unreachably high above – begins to thaw. At first, only one drop falls. Then, like a heavy cloud hanging over the land finally yielding, the downpour begins soaking every piece of this place. Rivers of divinity run across the walls and the ground and the many twists and turns of this labyrinth; onyx and crimson rushing into the sculptures and buildings and places and many moments, like words washing from pages. Carried into me.
I feel those dry veins be revived, one at a time, and the gentle patter of rain upon my being. Sensing the blood finally flow, as it was always meant to. Rushing between my own two hands.
And I’m crying, I realise; huge, ugly sobs rippling from somewhere deep within this place. Within my soul.
Where I write and am written, in ink of black and red.