World of Orrison

The day the spire breaks, you fish. For the quiet peace and the soft life you have made yourself in the ruins of Immitheus, you take from none but the Blue Lord’s domain, and pay your respects with every waking breath. Here, where the tides dictate the whims of the city, you have come home. Whatever shaky creature lived in your heart, trembling and wailing for the sea, quiets and vanishes.

First comes the earthquakes, slow rumbling and uneven rolling shaking the ground beneath you. Second, the waves react, thrown into choppy frenzy. Third, your feet, ever steadfast, cannot contest the churning violence. And your board capsizes, plunging you into inky waters. The turbulence beneath the surface whips you to and fro, and by no will of yours-

you sleep.

You dream you are twenty-nine nineteen nine clutching the hand of an immanu with no face. The immanu, your mother your bastion your saving grace, leads you through the weaving tunnel and across the ankle-tides in the dark cavern. You ask if this dream will be kind. If this time of all times you’ve fallen into slumber, will it be kind? Aria answers in taking up your child-face into warm hands, large and loving, and pulls forth the old memory of your small form being held in the night. You think your tears drip down your face and Aria’s hands feel velvetine.

When has a century come to pass

A house burns in front of you with sunlight radiance reflected in your brother’s eyes. Clinging to each other as the ribbon-wire net that holds afloat in the riptide. And you are nine nineteen twenty-nine with defiance in your bones and Sanga’s steadfast support. The you whose child-fat still clings to your stumbling gait turns and totters away, down the low-tide beach. Your arms, ever reaching after a brother who promises he will never leave your side.

Since my eyes lain on you last -

A breeze wraps around you with the wind’s song as you gnaw on dried meat. Thousands of glimmering stars and warm lamps dot your vision above and below. You are twenty-nine nineteen nine, kicking your feet against dock crates as a leyr performs a street urchin’s epic. The you who chose belief in these makeshift fairytales drums your hands for the performance’s rising tone. In this dream, someone hands you a slice of melon, syrup rolling down your palms.

Meeting beneath this sky asunder

An ocean calls you. Its waves reach with gentle hands for your face and its children place you on the altar and hark your coming. The waters, thick with the blood of a god, wash your heart to sea. The you who is and isn’t and who once was and will never be calls in siren-song. This, your grave, made immortal. This, your legacy, come undone. This, all of you, reborn as something hailed divine. And love crests every current, mourning your name.

Where great Fys rises from slumber.

Where Aria takes you, down below a weeping ocean to a cavern vast and dark, the statue of your dead god with a thousand chromatic eyes breathes. It breathes as a whalefall as a beached oarfish as a hooked squid. Then it becomes tenfold thousandfold its size and you hold fast to your mother’s hand as Fys chokes.

And when Aria opens her mouth, she borrows the distant memories of the voice of someone you once loved, and she says she speaks she weeps with the words of myths your heart knows-

For this dream I dearly apologize
As my voice no longer sings lullabies
Becoming now a lonesome guide
And hear now what I have decried.

You Child of Fys, gentle reed-grass
This waking must not come to pass.

And the you who is real wakes up coughing all the ocean’s tears from your lungs.