APART
Chapter XV
THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER
“The fireflies flew up into the sky, free.
I watched them until I could no longer tell them apart from the stars.”
- Paul Pen, El Brillo de las Luciérnagas (English Translation)
… All eye… All ear… All glow… twisting lumination… an incalculable spread of vermillion points in the black… a resonance in the name…Vermillion… a thought so fleeting, it cannot be caught… tunnel of darkness and mercury… no, a vastness… fractals… bending… entwining… infinite, yet contained… hue within them… for a fraction… then colorless… time consuming itself… a channel between the layers… a passage… pages… distorting in and out… rising and falling… the cosmos breathes… no, the universe… all sound… deafening… the true song of the universe… Screaming… a terrible, torturous, continuous plea… billions of years… since the Eye of Creation… yet, in the stillness, the pain lingers… never ending… the fabric pushed… expanding… outwards… into eternity… an eruption so bright… mind… thought beyond thought… imagining itself…
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First, the tissue in my face… prickles, the nerves firing… awakening. Shoulder gathers to limb, I pull my arm to my line of sight… hand… not a hand… embers… coral particles… disembodied fireflies… in an assemblage resembling a palm… phalanges… the light dimming, uniting into flesh… warmth ebbing in my chest.
Wanderer
That familiar, inhuman voice… reverberating deep within… the night… no, void… no… something else… a space, full… sensationless liquid at my feet, miles above my head, the shine of ripples… swells dancing in the great empty. Sight with no clear light-source, as though the edges of matter itself produce their own radiance. I step forward, treading upon the fluid, held aloft, strands of my hair swaying in the material that is neither air nor water. Recognition, I’ve seen this place before… the fall into Ghost River…
Line’s Flow
“Navan’yu…”
“Navan’yu?”
Silence… the tinnitus bleating in my ears…
“Where…”
“…is this?”
Yoo’O’
A chill runs through me… in the old language… it means "The Waiting Place” or “The Resting Place”… for in Aolu’yi, there is only a singular word for both…
There’s nowhere to go, but onwards…
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