Fallout 101

        It had been forty days since a regiment of soldiers had come through Alarastia. They were stout, and tall. But they swayed, and sang insouciantly, and their regalia mirrored the iridescence of the forest, and the plumage of kehrads and nekphias, whose long feathers caught the sunlight with striking oranges, green like shears of grass that cut the sky, or red like the lava that flowed deep in caverns beneath the mountains that surrounded Alarastia; the soldiers cloaks rippled in sheer, grand torrents, like waterfalls that shimmered with rainbows that had diffracted into their streaming, diaphanous bodies. And among them danced veiled women, laden in gold that swayed from their necks and bangles at their wrists, among hypnotically swaying, light cloth, whose maroon or violet, or indigo, was transparent in such a way that it revealed, beneath the way they fell from shoulder to shoulder and swayed as they danced, soft, but tightly fitted shirts. And when they caught the eyes of passersby, their strange visitation upon Alarastia elicited, in those who watched, mouths agape, the ferocious stillness of the center of a storm. 

        Their dark and piercing eyes seemed unsettlingly serene, as if moored upon an ocean that subsumed them in the otherworldly outpourings of forces that made their hands dance and their soft stomachs writhe passionately and intensely, in a strange bacchanalia through which some spiritual force passed through them and penetrated deep, deep into the mysteries within the hearts of those who watched them and their foreign, enchanting motions... powerful and graceful, like the gentle water creatures who could be seen making whorls and eddies beneath the surface of lakes with their slippery motions, their silver bodies glinting in the sun.

        Il’ia, like the other inhabitants of Alarastia, had been stunned at their emergence, from over the tops of the mountains to the East -- Khed, they were named. Beyond their peaks lay a land at first covered in forest; then, at the end of sight from the mountain tops, in desert.

        Most did not think anything to be beyond those arid stretches, where dunes undulated in their stoic and yet peaceful way, oceanic and yet frozen, echoing the tumultuous blue waters to the West, where it would have been even more surprising to see unexpected visitors suddenly appear. Even so, it was such a great surprise, to see them here, waving strange multicolored banners, colored perfume as thick as smoke spilling from their hands, their faces obscured in what seemed to be metal baskets they had placed on their heads, that one could scarcely trust their own senses. 

        The men were so densely clad in metal, that it left nearly everything about them to the imagination. And one had to imagine, too, why they wore such heavy vestments. 

        The Alarastians had had their problems, in the past. But none had thought to settle a dispute at the end of a sharp object. They were usually amenable to solutions that might resolve all aspects of an issue. And if the idea had occurred to one of them to end the other person in order to end the issue, they would have thought themselves mad. Their minds would have recoiled at the mental contortions required for such a profane disgracing of the very most basic tenets of sense. 

         And so, they didn’t recognize the long scabbards, nor the pikes that the footsoldiers carried, either. They did, however, recognize the drunkenness. And they were in awe of the way that strange horde seemed to walk among them as if it had no notion whatsoever of their being there, lost in a hedonistic veil of colors, music and the merrily passing faces of the morphing crowd, their features molded by the deities of surprise, delight and shock into curious and appealing masks, that were sufficient tribute to this merry band.

        The Dyed Regiment came and, without a word anyone understood, vanished. They made way for wonder, curiosity, and some concern. But mostly, fascination animated the spirits in Alarastia. And many of them had this strange suspicion that they would never be the same again.

        Il’ia, especially, felt something calling to him. It was as if they had, without drawing a blade, cut the drawstring on a purse that held his spirit together. He he had kept it shut tightly for so long he had no idea that he did so; and its jewels, gleaming with the immense riches of his sudden curiosity, came spilling out, burning his hands and eyes with an unknown desire to touch at what root gave life to such a strange fruit, in some distant land. 

        The melody of their voices still reverberated in his mind. They had been so enchanting, and mysteriously satisfied in their lilting, gentle and yet joyous tones; so close to the earth, and so distant as to seem a mere phantasm. But, their feet had pounded in the dirt, and left unmistakable evidence of their passage in trails that would have seemed as mysterious as the strange lights to which the endless darkness was host at night. 

        As well, the cloaks and flowers and jewels they had given so freely to the ones who came to see them through the town center were like living memories that had flaked off in photonic bursts from the event horizon of that strange, otherworldly event, streaming in silk and shining bangles and necklaces between the high, arched buildings with their white peaks and and stone columns, laden with wood filigrees. 

         But for all the romance of the idea of their largesse, like a sun that gave so easily it hardly knew it did so… They had an air of possession. As if the sprit realm had intoxicated them with its richness, and its sacredness had perverted their materiality with the promise of insights into things that made gold as empty as air, and made fine things, at most, a single filament of the tapestry of the divine.

        And so, forgetting they would return to the world, and would curse the vile fortune that accompanied the sojurn of the spirit; they would curse the way it wandered in ethereal realms, and handed itself over to bliss in such a way that hands on earth, wandering thoughtlessly the way the sprit did, spilled treasures as a stream spilled water.

        Perhaps, though, these things were not lost. Because they were found by those who gazed upon them, and saw pieces of their own souls they could not have seen otherwise, and were elated. And so, in the way that a gift is not lost when it passes from the possession of one to another... The regiments' willingness would have been in the joy of those who received what they left behind. How could they have refused it?

        About all these things, Il’ia thought. But other fantasies accompanied them, too. The fantasy of his modest home, built of interlocking slats of wood that had been decorated by his flights of fancy as he sat and carved beneath the sky whose openness inspired the way he dug in spirals and waves into the wood; the fantasy of his stores, where he kept grain and fruits. The fantasy of his bed, warm with the soft, downy feathers that had fallen, and that he had gathered where forest fowl congregated and shed their winter layers. 

        But of course, even the smallest things began to seem like a dream, when here he was, in that way he had only been once before, in the same place he was in now, as a child… Lost. In the woods. In the cold. Two ways called to him with siren song: one, towards the familiar hearth of his life until then. The other called in veils, and in mystery. Toward the mountains. And into the desert... and beyond it where, in his imaginings, the world clothed itself in Autumn, in the cloak of unknown worlds stitched out of the falling leaves, carried through the dark lands by specters that laughed behind hollow masks they wore, made of the vestiges of what he could imagine; and reborn in trees that were gilded and fiery, like oak and maple as he had encountered them, once, in a dream, where strange orbs called lamps wended their way along cobblestone pathways between them, spilling light even in the darkness, so that it glinted and shimmered, in amber among the cool night that seemed, when he awoke, as if he had not witnessed it in another world, but had remembered it. 

         He thought for a moment. Should he try and go back? Perhaps that would be the same as going forward. If he didn’t know East from West, North from South, any way would take him where it pleased. He had relinquished his domain over the cardinal, and it now held him within its blind whim. He knew himself as the wind knew itself... a thing called to and fro; by chance, it might mingle with the leaves and have the chance to lay its enchantment upon them, so that they rippled and were resplendent in their play.

        But he hadn't learned to let go, and be carried, and carry the way the wind did. He was more solid than the wind and craved warmth. And his flesh turned cold. Colder the more he was lost, since a degree of lostness was determined by proximity to warmth, or, at the other end of the spectrum, death. He wondered if — in spite of the density of his flesh, and the way it jailed him more progressively in that alien sensation of iciness and numbness — he was like the wind in that way. Here, lost, he was coming to know the world more and more deeply. He was coming to know it in its knots of roots that, once but life giving tendrils that gave rise to shading giants and their beneficent leaves and fruits, were now coils that wound through the dirt, and clasped at his feet so that he stumbled and fell beneath the milky white of the stars that were obscured by leaves who surrounded his vision, so that he was subject to the blindness of the rocks and the streams... as if the world asked him to be as natural, and as accepting, and as free as these things which simply were. And he tried, but the world took the rocks and it ground them up into sand; it buried the streams in its earth to give rise to behemoths that towered for centuries, small shrubs, and bushes where fruits sat ripe and full of juice in the summer. Everything would be ground up. 

        The body would never be a rock, or a tree, or a stream; not until it freed itself from the torment of a mind -- that spirit that constantly reminded it of the vulgarity and the density and the humiliation of the flesh which could be thwarted in its very simple desires to perpetuate its own comfort and its own life. Whether to be still and warm and filled with food, or to be --

        Il’ia fell. And with him, stones fell, and twigs snapped. And dirt spiraled up in clouds he couldn’t see. The moment punctuated his thought, and a fleeting impression mocked him with the perfection of its timing. The world ended the sentence he'd begun, with an example that gave crude reality to the thought that was, until then, but fancy.

        And, unsure of what other choices he had, ensconced in consuming darkness, he wrapped his cloak around himself, and curled up like one of those great boulders that were hidden in the woods. And he realized that what he had thought to be the snapping of a twig was, in fact, his finger. His hand shaking, he arched his body protectively around it, and closed his eyes, steadying his breathing, and thinking, in a way that he had never thought before, that he was somehow traveling toward a place where he had always been; and that although he walked in the world, his motion was but an illusion to the stars. He was, by the nature of his soul, but one of those jewels burning on night’s diadem. 

        And the further his body grew from him, frozen into the cold, the closer he came to waking up as a light upon that tapestry that surrounded his world, just one of an infinity that bled into itself in the bodies of all these lights that seemed the same from where he was... each one, by itself, nothing great to marvel at, unless you sat on a planet where it gave rise to all the life you could see; but all of which, together, set in the void, were as magnificent as anything to be imagined. And there was nothing to fear in returning to that landscape; and there was no shame in dying here.

        So why did his eyes pool? Why did he taste the saltiness of tears on his lips? It felt so unlike him.

Truly, he realized, it felt unlike him.

        In the delirium of his slowing heart rate, and numbing limbs, he felt as if someone else opened its eyes through him, and saw through both the star through which his mind shone, projecting itself down to this world where he believed himself to be the product of physical processes, and the material thoughts that occupied his worldly senses.

        And it was those eyes through which the tears passed. He knew the name of this being, and he didn’t know why. But all he could think was that death came like the falling leaves. Its inevitability had never even occurred to him to be thought of as a form of cruelty; it would have been as if to think of a passageway between rooms to be cruel. 

         And yet, the one behind his eyes saw him, turning cold, as if across the empty and the infinite, as if his body was becoming but a pebble upon the shore of a small island before the vast ocean of the endless, about to swallow it up. And although she too loved death in the way the woods loved the seasons, she wouldn’t have loved to be holding the bounties of the spring, and find autumn’s cloak vanishing before the barren, frozen grasp of winter. And as she saw him, sitting there, on the threshold of all her mysteries and beneficences… Death seemed to be falling over him first, before she could reach him. And so she cried. 

         And, in a state of disbelief, he said her name: “Eristhia.” 

         Time. 

         Time, he suddenly knew -- either through the potency of his dissociation, or from an insight whose origin beyond his conception -- had gathered, across the fields and valleys of her heart, flowers… endless flowers. She had waited an eternity to spill them over him, and watch the way their petals took desultory paths to meet him in torrents of her love. Instead, her tears poured over him. At once from his own eyes, and yet they were hers. He had to call his spirit back, he knew. It was trying to wander away from him, and in doing so, remove him from the throne of his heart and body, and set peace in the place where he had sat... peace in emptiness.

But he would not become the emptiness. Nor would it overcome him, and bury his spirit in its domain.

He was a jewel that the infinite was trying to return to its crown. 

And time pleaded with him not to let it. Not yet, she said. Please, not yet.