Song of the Shapers

Sunlight burns through my closed eyelids as I lie back towards an inert surface. The sky above is a healthy blue, as if it was a still lake looking down at me, mocking the principles of reality and complementing the mindless voice of fantasy. I raise a smooth creamy hand up to shield myself from the glare, and orientate myself to my surroundings. Slowly, still unsure of my feet, I raise myself up first to a kneeling position, then a standing one. My vision is blurred, and my head throbs as I blink away the dizziness. I take a single, uncertain step, and my feet sink into soft, smooth sand. When my vision returns fully, I cautiously raise my head and confront the white glare of the desert. What I see before me boggles my concepts of scale. I’m staring at an endless panorama of nothing but sand and sky, and a horizon that stretches for infinity.

So this is the Road of Dust, I think, and grin.

To have come so far, only to end up here, at the end of the world, is frustrating to say the least. But questions need answering. If I am to die here, my story unfinished and incomplete, then I will do so with a sense of determination. I’m surprised at how unafraid I am; waking up in a desert of continental proportions with no sense of direction or, more importantly, no means of sustenance. But I do not think I was put on this flat, featureless landscape for nothing. Perhaps I will uncover the true story of Eden, buried in this illusory land of dreams.

***

The wind rushed at her face, crushing the air from her lungs. The sky above loomed like a leering giant, and the ground far below pulsed and swam with a nauseating texture. Mari had been propelled up and into Illusion by the guardian, so suddenly it felt as if she has been hit on the head with a hammer. She was falling now, down towards the earth like a stone, with no wings to catch the air and glide to safety. She would die here, alone, smashed by the invisible and inevitable tug of gravity.

Then the ground changed, wobbled, and disappeared altogether. The sensation of falling had stopped so abruptly the force should have broken every bone in her body. But it didn’t, and she was still completely aware. And what she saw made her gasp. It was a city hidden behind a blanket of mist, golden light glinting off metallic arches, gothic architecture towering over a massive canyon dwarfing by orders of magnitude anything seen on earth.

She looked down and found herself on a white surface, seemingly suspended on nothingness. The space between her and the sparkling city was jet black, devoid of any substance, real or imagined. She longed to cross that space and enter the golden metropolis that stood so tantalizingly close. But she could not move. It was as if the city was on the other side of an enormous impenetrable window, and to either side of her that darkness spread out into infinity.

The sky through the window went grey, and the buildings lost their glory. The great archways that stretched over the rift crumbled before her, and the walls of the mighty palaces shriveled and ebbed in the fading light. It was a dead city now, and Mari wept silently for the loss of such a prodigious civilization. Then the scene changed again, and she was looking at yet another grand city, floating on the sea by a network of giant girders sunken into the depths. Walkways snaked their way inland, enticing the land dwellers to enter and take up residence. The smell of the sea was potent, even from Mari’s vantage point. The same thing happened again. The sky went dark, the waves crept silently over the barricades that had kept the sea back for centuries, and the girders snapped like twigs. The city collapsed bit by bit into the raging waters that welcomed it with open arms, and the tears rolled down Mari’s cheeks, jewels of sorrow at such needless destruction. The same thing happened again and again, with each great city succumbing to the darkness with almost hypnotic ease. Were these visions real, of civilizations long lost? She shuddered at the thought.

Then a voice came from the darkness, speaking from everywhere at once.
“All dreams fade in time, as will yours, Mari. You must accept this.”
“No” she said quietly, forcefully, her face full of tears that stood still, suspended in quiet dignity.
“You must choose whether to stand with us, or against us. The Dream shall be reclaimed, regardless”, said the voice. Its tone was without expression, emotionless. Its multi layered accent made it difficult to deduce its gender, if it had any.
“Would my decision make a difference, in the great scheme of things?” Mari revoked. The voice answered calmly, almost pityingly.
“No. But your acquiescence will mean you may enter into Eden wholly, and live your life in rapture. We shall grant you salvation, if you support us.”
Mari began to stand, feebly at first, for all the strength had been drained out of her by the visions, then more confidently. She rose to meet the voice.
“I…cannot. I will not!” She spat the last words out in a blind fury that echoed in the nothingness. She did not know where she was, but she knew how to get out. But before she could act, the voice wavered and fractured into a mighty spectrum of sound, a laughing, echoing screech that filled the space around her, and resounded inside her head, until she yelled in pain.

And then her own world came into focus, with each major city standing like stubborn children in the face of the strange deity that destroyed such beautiful worlds. Each yielded in turn, and she dropped to her knees in anguish. This was real, for she realised, with despair, she was in Eden. She did not know how, but she was here, and she was terrified. Her dreams had seen her mind cast over Noah and her imposter, but she had never actually been here. With a start, she clapped her hands together in quick succession, mouthed a phrase that spun the world out of context for a brief time, before reshaping itself around her in a different place. A safer place. She took a deep breath, and looked up. An ominous light seeped into the blue sky, a cancer breaking free of its womb and spreading into the ignorant affairs of men.

The residue of time maps a path in the Guild. The bloodline must be preserved…

***

My wings faded on the first day. Nothing remains, not even stumps. I only feel the itch of their presence, forever burned into my mind. I feel no loss. Not anymore. I let my musings run free.

What is it like to not exist, to be nothing more than a memory of what you where; an impressionistic portrait ingrained upon the memories of the living? Have you ever tried to grasp the concept of simply not being, watch it bloom inside your head in a wave of perceptive delusion, before feeling it slip out of the bounds of your comprehension? I have had plenty of time to ponder these exotic concepts, or perhaps no time at all, I don’t know. My mind is not my own anymore, and the sand burns black against my skin.

What does it really mean to be alive? Is it the subconscious mechanisms of your brain controlling the monotonous functions of your body? The inward and outward actions of breathing, or the steady rhythm of your heartbeat? Or does the answer reside in the metaphysical world; the steady thrum of a dying universe as it bleeds away its life in infinity, giving birth to bastard offspring like humanity to corrupt itself and spread more poison into the cosmos. What am I saying?

My prison is alive, I have come to see. A cocoon of an ancient intelligence.

I slept at the end of the first day, or how I judged it anyhow. My limbs were pained from the endless walking, and my eyes burned an oily purple in the back of my eyelids. But my mind was alive, it seemed, more frantic than at anytime in my monotonous existence up until I discovered Eden. I lay down in the warm sand, and spread my arms and legs wide, staring up into the fading light. My mind was pondering exotic concepts and principals at a frenzied rate, equations that would take humanity twenty thousand years to discover. It was as I was studying such theories, turning them on their head and coming at them from different angles, that something happened.

My milieu shifted.

The sand became a vast sparkling ocean, flat and featureless as far as the eye could see. I looked down in sudden panic, expecting to fall in. But I stayed stationary. Balls of light suddenly materialized silently in the empty space; millions, perhaps billions of them. And around me, in a full circle, was a ring of skyscrapers reaching up and grasping at the sky, breaking free of their dreamlike bonds. Beyond that was a reddish glow, as one would see at dusk. It was beautiful and terrifying. I pushed my hand out to touch one of the light globes, but it moved away quickly, wary. It looked so delicate and strange, that I wanted to tell it that I didn’t mean it any harm. But my language was too simplistic to convey such meanings. I would not realise until much, much later, that these peculiar spheres of pure white light were actually worlds, or rather blueprints of worlds. Designs for life in the form of information stored and connected by invisible cords of a material I could not even hazard a guess at, even with my heightened perception.

This was what I would discover later. For now, I let the mystery of night upon my Road of Dust linger in the back of my mind, like an itch that could not be satiated. It kept me going, at least.

Water did not turn out to be a problem. The first week was the worst, and I thought I was actually going to die from thirst my mouth was so parched. But as I lay choking on the ground, I stayed awake, looking at the deep blue sky of the world and wondering when the darkness would come. It never did. I concentrated hard on the feeling of quenching my thirst, and immediately I felt ok again. Reality here was an empty house in need of redecorating.

I realised I could control anything in this world; make things happen with my mind. It was alarmingly similar to Illusion. But of course, as I would eventually figure out, Illusion did not exist in this place of gods and demons, of the Guild and its Dreamers…

And then they came to me; faceless gods cloaked in black light and shimmering in the dying sun of this ancient place…