Phoenix
There were tremors in the west they had not been witness to before. The man, the woman, the children. In the decayed base of what was once a great tower they huddled and cooked the day's kill. The bear that would feed them, its hide fashioned into their tunics and the bones their tools. Adorning weapons of sharpened metal shafts trodding on the path with their feet. They had been moving from the eastern mountains down over a vast ocean of hillcountry. Spare and fallow in the early cold. Soot in the wind that lashed your face. A night blanket over the tall grass prairie, thunderous and entwined with lightning bolts. They watched as they walked the serpentine fingers articulate and snap down to touch the trees with smoke and fire. The breath of the gods. Judgement. Their bearing followed the hard black ground whose trail swerved about in every direction their compass rose could indicate. The prized and rare memento rusted orange and glass cracked and broken and repaired perhaps a hundred times or more before they owned it. A last gift imparted from a traveler they fell upon on the bypass of the road, prostrate and nearly taken already with consumption. Neck swollen, eyes sunken and dark. Before he inhaled one final rattle he nudged toward them his pack and nodded to silently bequeath everything that lay in it. The woman turned the faces of the children away while the man rummaged. In it the compass, some nonperishables, kindling, gauze, and a sheet of parchment in a laminate marked with circuited routes and X's. A map. It designated an itinerary to the west, to a commune nestled in the throes of those purple ranges of mountain so mammoth they could've been the finned spine of the world entire. Where he was going, where they soon would go. Sloping midair, the road beneath them stood on great cylindrical pillars erected by a people long passed. It lead to ruins of their cities that now were as mausoleums housing nothing but wanton scraps of beasts and humans that lived pretty much the same. Infestations of mice at home in some many-roomed mansion.
The tower face was perforated with sequences of openings that demarcated the floors that were inside it. Thirty, forty maybe. Too many to count and no point in doing so. They camped at the ground level in an area where the ceiling had not yet collapsed fully. A ventilated aperture in the floor above them carrying the coughing embers of their fire. The woman worked the threading through the ursine hide and cut holes in it. The finished vestment she had the son try on and it fit well enough. Loose in the arms and long, but he would grow into it. Yes, they would make sure of it. They had travailed the pastures and the hills and made it finally to the bottom of the great mountain whose rock and soil took on a curious red color. A valley had been there preceding it, as deep as the mountain was tall like they were two halves of the same scale. They went around the rim of it and took in its beauty. A land that had been claimed and reclaimed again by its first inhabitants. Roaming packs of wolves dotting the hot sands hunting after rabbits. In the fullness of the day a curse would befall upon it. A ball of infinite fire in the sky leaning closest to that desert, the red rocks and dirt sun-scorched from its eminence. Sapping all moisture, baking anything flesh from the outside in. It rained only once during their route, and they arrived dried and blistered at the gates of the compound. Immediately they surrendered their weaponry for canteens of water and they drank and drank and doused themselves. It was night before the man went out and surveyed the place. He went alone while the others slept still recuperating. The son had vomited earlier and lay now in a cool bath, the woman beside his faithful attendant. The land remained merciless. The shade of night smothered the heat but traded for it frigid gusts like scimitars that cut across the dunes. The land knew no temperance, but here where people lived and consented there could be. It was a trading post of a kind. Stands set up in the main street bartering with any and every soul that passed them. There were whole tribes and families dispersed and huddled in every unoccupied, safeguarded alcove the derelict architecture could offer. Square caves lining the causeways alight with their own little flames. A delicate armistice among them, binding and implicit.
The daughter dabbed a washcloth in the blood from the kill and with the extinguished coal from the fire outlined on the wall a tracing of the figure she saw as they walked in. It was a monument embellished and preserved, hanging from the overpass entrance as a welcome for the sojourner. A welcome, or a warning. His overcoat was boxy, broad, lined with ivory buttons. He sat on a throne where behind a pane of golden luminescence shone through his combed grey strands and christened his ascension. In his hand was a talisman of the ancient magic, small tablets with which his people spoke language to the gods. It's been said by some that they had the ability to capture a person's soul, to take their essence and store it such that they could be summoned at will, but no shaman was ever able to call out their power. They had once come across one in the wastelands, its little rectangular body entombed in a metal box in the dirt. The son found it, dug it up, opened it like a treasure chest without fear. It was light, yet a surprising heaviness could be felt holding it as though it was bigger on the inside. It had a panel of glass on its surface and a spot fit for the tip of a finger to press in. Its face had flashed white but one instance then went black, lifeless forever. It was carried by them while they traipsed down the eastern coastline until they were accosted by dangerous men and in exchange for their lives it was stolen. It and it alone.
He remembered a time when he was young, the man. He'd been in a place like this where there had been clustered so many others it seemed every last soul that remained on the earth was congregated there. Pushing through them in the streets like trying to stave off a great river current. The dissemination of all their voices into one inarticulate roar. He thought he'd never be somewhere like that again, thought they didn't exist anymore. It was left behind him while he was still a child for reasons that appeared now hazy and nebulous, yet inevitable. And she was there; they found each other within a crowded exodus and knew even then their spirits were aligned, matched, fitted. Their hands held in a gray silhouette against the calamities befalling their posthumous community. And they would not leave one another again, and together they would endure many such calamities that adjudicated over the hours of the day and of the night especially on their twice-bolstered shoulder. One single entity spread over dueling bodies, they were. Symbiotes so contrarian they wrapped back around to homogeneity. To be alone was to die, this truth had been revealed. The man that is not alone does not die even in his death; he lives on beyond himself, codified in the hearts and minds of those who accompanied him. Miseries that stem from union are shared, but the woes of the isolated belong only to them and they curdle inside them and turn their lifeblood sick. In a world of orphans, strangers, forsaken the frustrations of the betrothed are blessings, their quarrels privileged. A populace as a bulwark against the black savagery out in the night. He returned to them glad, grateful. Tonight was a night of fortune, of peace and full stomachs. Yes, the gods were pleased, so far as their countenance could be ascertained or relied upon. Capricious they were, and inscrutable, and whatever tenet was conjured up did not explain them. All chronicling of the old world was compromised or lost altogether in the dark centuries since it lived. But tonight there was calm in the wind and the sky and when they passed their rations about them they did so in thanksgiving.
The tremolo was faint at first and there were none among them that bleated alarm until it rose and seemed to jostle the very foundations that they laid upon. The woman awoke first and shook the man and the children. She followed the crowd to the outskirts of the ruin and saw sitting on the far away horizon a sun hurdling up from the western wastelands into the ebony sky. A canopy of mushrooming smoke and white fire like the spit of Hades erupted from a desert pit where, unbeknownst to them, a dispatch of feigned archaeologists dug too deep, too curious, and exhumed an antique shame better left dormant. The body of it like a shorn cedar, the point an arrowhead on a giant's projectile. What the old gods would've used, their weapon. It was corroded and sweaty and warm to the touch and they went at it with their tools, their recklessness. Its apotheosis took with it what little life there was in that desert, and its caustic afterbirth would seed the clouds and sweep more death across a longitude that had once been called the Westward Expansion, in a language that now was dust. Captured in their pupils, the shock shadowing through them. Some warm counterfeit dawn she knew instinctively was darker, somehow familiar in its malevolence like a spasm of muscle memory. She backed away from the gawking, rapt crowd. Confusion and awe everywhere. She met the man at the edge of the crowd and the haste and disquiet in her eyes told him. The people's confusion would soon curdle into fear. The gravity of its omen becoming clear to them, and quickly the yearn for a purpose entered them. Why would the gods scourge them with such a great and overwhelming evil? There must have been some odious wrong committed to incur such a wrath. Shouting began to proliferate. It was soon discovered that a man among them had stolen another's supplies and was bartering them for more. They outed him, set him apart.
They departed the commune safely under the cover of night and the crowd's frenzy. They'd recovered their provisions, gear, weapons. Swift work in the abandoned hovel. Confusion in the children abated by the man's reassurance, the woman's urgency. The son was exhausted and nauseous, but there was no time to afford. It was too late already, too late for the people to even realize it. They remembered as they passed through growing furor, their little tribe of four. Holding hands nearly tight enough to break. An entire world between them that would have to remain theirs alone. No one else to rely upon, none but themselves. What last they saw before they crossed the overpass threshold back under the road was one lone figure isolated in the middle of the crowd, the body prone and red and severed. They looked back, stared. A dread sat within them that there was something that had awakened in those people from which a precedence would be set. Some familiar liturgy that felt at once new and ancient, a shade that had already been in them waiting for the chance to return. It had happened before, perhaps a thousand times, and had been at the root of the world's devastation, the seed that had sprouted even a thing as great and unknowable as that plumage of flame that still was rising. A beginning, and an end. They turned back east on the trail, away from the emblazoned roar and the destruction it had brought.
The tower face was perforated with sequences of openings that demarcated the floors that were inside it. Thirty, forty maybe. Too many to count and no point in doing so. They camped at the ground level in an area where the ceiling had not yet collapsed fully. A ventilated aperture in the floor above them carrying the coughing embers of their fire. The woman worked the threading through the ursine hide and cut holes in it. The finished vestment she had the son try on and it fit well enough. Loose in the arms and long, but he would grow into it. Yes, they would make sure of it. They had travailed the pastures and the hills and made it finally to the bottom of the great mountain whose rock and soil took on a curious red color. A valley had been there preceding it, as deep as the mountain was tall like they were two halves of the same scale. They went around the rim of it and took in its beauty. A land that had been claimed and reclaimed again by its first inhabitants. Roaming packs of wolves dotting the hot sands hunting after rabbits. In the fullness of the day a curse would befall upon it. A ball of infinite fire in the sky leaning closest to that desert, the red rocks and dirt sun-scorched from its eminence. Sapping all moisture, baking anything flesh from the outside in. It rained only once during their route, and they arrived dried and blistered at the gates of the compound. Immediately they surrendered their weaponry for canteens of water and they drank and drank and doused themselves. It was night before the man went out and surveyed the place. He went alone while the others slept still recuperating. The son had vomited earlier and lay now in a cool bath, the woman beside his faithful attendant. The land remained merciless. The shade of night smothered the heat but traded for it frigid gusts like scimitars that cut across the dunes. The land knew no temperance, but here where people lived and consented there could be. It was a trading post of a kind. Stands set up in the main street bartering with any and every soul that passed them. There were whole tribes and families dispersed and huddled in every unoccupied, safeguarded alcove the derelict architecture could offer. Square caves lining the causeways alight with their own little flames. A delicate armistice among them, binding and implicit.
The daughter dabbed a washcloth in the blood from the kill and with the extinguished coal from the fire outlined on the wall a tracing of the figure she saw as they walked in. It was a monument embellished and preserved, hanging from the overpass entrance as a welcome for the sojourner. A welcome, or a warning. His overcoat was boxy, broad, lined with ivory buttons. He sat on a throne where behind a pane of golden luminescence shone through his combed grey strands and christened his ascension. In his hand was a talisman of the ancient magic, small tablets with which his people spoke language to the gods. It's been said by some that they had the ability to capture a person's soul, to take their essence and store it such that they could be summoned at will, but no shaman was ever able to call out their power. They had once come across one in the wastelands, its little rectangular body entombed in a metal box in the dirt. The son found it, dug it up, opened it like a treasure chest without fear. It was light, yet a surprising heaviness could be felt holding it as though it was bigger on the inside. It had a panel of glass on its surface and a spot fit for the tip of a finger to press in. Its face had flashed white but one instance then went black, lifeless forever. It was carried by them while they traipsed down the eastern coastline until they were accosted by dangerous men and in exchange for their lives it was stolen. It and it alone.
He remembered a time when he was young, the man. He'd been in a place like this where there had been clustered so many others it seemed every last soul that remained on the earth was congregated there. Pushing through them in the streets like trying to stave off a great river current. The dissemination of all their voices into one inarticulate roar. He thought he'd never be somewhere like that again, thought they didn't exist anymore. It was left behind him while he was still a child for reasons that appeared now hazy and nebulous, yet inevitable. And she was there; they found each other within a crowded exodus and knew even then their spirits were aligned, matched, fitted. Their hands held in a gray silhouette against the calamities befalling their posthumous community. And they would not leave one another again, and together they would endure many such calamities that adjudicated over the hours of the day and of the night especially on their twice-bolstered shoulder. One single entity spread over dueling bodies, they were. Symbiotes so contrarian they wrapped back around to homogeneity. To be alone was to die, this truth had been revealed. The man that is not alone does not die even in his death; he lives on beyond himself, codified in the hearts and minds of those who accompanied him. Miseries that stem from union are shared, but the woes of the isolated belong only to them and they curdle inside them and turn their lifeblood sick. In a world of orphans, strangers, forsaken the frustrations of the betrothed are blessings, their quarrels privileged. A populace as a bulwark against the black savagery out in the night. He returned to them glad, grateful. Tonight was a night of fortune, of peace and full stomachs. Yes, the gods were pleased, so far as their countenance could be ascertained or relied upon. Capricious they were, and inscrutable, and whatever tenet was conjured up did not explain them. All chronicling of the old world was compromised or lost altogether in the dark centuries since it lived. But tonight there was calm in the wind and the sky and when they passed their rations about them they did so in thanksgiving.
The tremolo was faint at first and there were none among them that bleated alarm until it rose and seemed to jostle the very foundations that they laid upon. The woman awoke first and shook the man and the children. She followed the crowd to the outskirts of the ruin and saw sitting on the far away horizon a sun hurdling up from the western wastelands into the ebony sky. A canopy of mushrooming smoke and white fire like the spit of Hades erupted from a desert pit where, unbeknownst to them, a dispatch of feigned archaeologists dug too deep, too curious, and exhumed an antique shame better left dormant. The body of it like a shorn cedar, the point an arrowhead on a giant's projectile. What the old gods would've used, their weapon. It was corroded and sweaty and warm to the touch and they went at it with their tools, their recklessness. Its apotheosis took with it what little life there was in that desert, and its caustic afterbirth would seed the clouds and sweep more death across a longitude that had once been called the Westward Expansion, in a language that now was dust. Captured in their pupils, the shock shadowing through them. Some warm counterfeit dawn she knew instinctively was darker, somehow familiar in its malevolence like a spasm of muscle memory. She backed away from the gawking, rapt crowd. Confusion and awe everywhere. She met the man at the edge of the crowd and the haste and disquiet in her eyes told him. The people's confusion would soon curdle into fear. The gravity of its omen becoming clear to them, and quickly the yearn for a purpose entered them. Why would the gods scourge them with such a great and overwhelming evil? There must have been some odious wrong committed to incur such a wrath. Shouting began to proliferate. It was soon discovered that a man among them had stolen another's supplies and was bartering them for more. They outed him, set him apart.
They departed the commune safely under the cover of night and the crowd's frenzy. They'd recovered their provisions, gear, weapons. Swift work in the abandoned hovel. Confusion in the children abated by the man's reassurance, the woman's urgency. The son was exhausted and nauseous, but there was no time to afford. It was too late already, too late for the people to even realize it. They remembered as they passed through growing furor, their little tribe of four. Holding hands nearly tight enough to break. An entire world between them that would have to remain theirs alone. No one else to rely upon, none but themselves. What last they saw before they crossed the overpass threshold back under the road was one lone figure isolated in the middle of the crowd, the body prone and red and severed. They looked back, stared. A dread sat within them that there was something that had awakened in those people from which a precedence would be set. Some familiar liturgy that felt at once new and ancient, a shade that had already been in them waiting for the chance to return. It had happened before, perhaps a thousand times, and had been at the root of the world's devastation, the seed that had sprouted even a thing as great and unknowable as that plumage of flame that still was rising. A beginning, and an end. They turned back east on the trail, away from the emblazoned roar and the destruction it had brought.
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