The Word

KIERAN KNOX

The air is warm. It borders on hot. Your breath does not fog, rather, it pushes the air. Fat, corpulent, droplets seem to visibly move before sluggishly sliding into a thick plane before you. Your steed’s flanks glisten, wet-heat as it heaves. It carried you from across the horizon.

This place is not what you expected. Empty grassland. Flat, pressed down by other’s steeds as they trample across this world. Flat is a paltry descriptor. It is not flat in the same way a plate, a book, a screen is flat. Those are flat by design. Flat by choice. Their shape did not scream out as it was pressed, subjected to pressures titanic or cruel. These grasslands echo with the memory of resistance. A spirit of rebellion which did not succeed.

There. A fire flickers in the distance. Vague smudges cluster about it, obscuring the fire’s edge. The flames leap into the sky, and are lost. The clouds, they are gone. In their place, a single pillar of smoke rolls. To your eyes, it looks like the underside of a woollen blanket. You cannot smell it, so tightly have you placed your helm upon your head. Second-mouths breathe the air in, choking so you may breathe freely. Still, it is stifling.

Your eyes, though, are unobstructed. The smoke is red and orange, yellow and black. It does not look like a wood fire, a forest fire, a jungle fire. It resembles burnt skin, stretching, tearing, cooling to burnt black.

You walk. A plodding step, after a plodding step. The ground below your boots is wet, somehow. The surface crackles, ice upon a lake breaking beneath a rock, paper curled into a ball, drought wrought lips opening to taste a drop of water. Below the crackle, your step sinks. Rancid milk, heavy with clumps surrounding your feet. Decaying meat, a refuge for roaches and maggots. Every heavy step precedes a lingering lift, as the ground refuses to let you go. A mouth stuck to a teat, fighting to return. Churned mud, aching to remember, to keep, a footprint. Still, you have time. In the distance, the fire grows.

It resolves, a simple campfire. Figures crouch around it. They bear its wrath. As you crouch beside them, as they shuffle minutely to let you in, you sweat. The fire is insatiable. They throw dry sticks into its waiting mouth. The wood barely lasts a minute, releasing a sigh as it dissolves into nothing. They are also heavily cloaked. Helms, masks, hoods fashioned tightly around features. Their secondmouths noisily churn through the acrid air. Their bodies are bulky, hiding equipment to survive this dying place. They are hot. You feel it. Everyone here is melting, sweat sticking to the back of necks, clogging points where fabric bends around skin. It’s in everyone’s eyes, pouring down to tickle the tips of noses. It bathes your chests, your backs, it collects in the recesses of your groins and thighs. No one moves, though. Comfort is not the goal here.

A man crouches at the head of the fire. There is no head technically, but everyone who has gathered here keeps their distance from him. He has no helm, and his bald pate is wet, his ears a bright red as his body struggles to throw away this warmth. A scarf covers his mouth, and nose. At its edges, faint gold and black lines can be seen. They seem to wave slightly, trying, in vain, to reach his eyes. Those are blue. They are the only cold thing this world has to offer.

Some others have left their steeds closer than you. They noisily cool themselves, silversweat collecting on their hooves, their wings, their hands. They only add to the claustrophobia, here, a sensation brought about by temperature rather than architecture.

The man grunts. He will start speaking. He pulls his scarf down, revealing a thing. He has no jaw nor throat; it was ripped away. The sides of the wound still glistened wetly. They are ragged and loose. The wound reminds you of paint, congealing into long and bumpy strips. Beneath his remaining upper teeth, nestling in the hollow of his oesophagus, the thing sits. It is Golden City in origin. It is a wet, organic-like vocal box of gold chased through by lines of black marble. It is a golden slug, vines growing off from it to wind their way across the man. It is a parasite, suckling at the man’s blood. It is a sign of God, a creature of His which roams the Golden City. It is alien technology, hidden beyond a trans-dimensional gate which we should never have broken. It is a demon, and it feasts on sin.

“I went to the Golden City,” the man says. His voice is perfect, beautiful even. Deep as ancient trees, clear as spring-water. You detest it. Every word he says causes the thing to quiver. You cannot tell if it is in ecstasy, pain, disgust, or arousal. Yet you are fascinated, as it translates this dead man’s gurgles to speech.

“I saw the towers, the laneways, the homes, the palaces,” he continued, turning to look at you all, the thing swaying fatly with his head. “I walked into the Worship, saw the corpse of Gabriel atop His throne. It was empty.”

Everyone nods, you as well. All who gather here have seen the Golden City, walked its pristine halls, traced the contours of its architecture. Everyone here has seen the corpse of Gabriel, last of the Seraphim, atop the empty throne of God. Empty. Abandoned. Derelict.

“Like you, I asked a single question.” The man breathes in deeply. That awful remnant of divinity sinks into his wound, before ballooning out like a frog’s sac. “Why?”

You nod. Why indeed. It is now the most dangerous word in existence. Who would want to know why God left, abdicated His throne? The answer could never satisfy the pain. Beside you, one of the others shudders. It takes you a moment, but you recognize the rise and fall of their shoulders as sobbing.

“Why?” he repeats. “Beneath Gabriel, we found a shape.” Now there is hunger. You hear faint clicks, whirring, the movement of gears and steel. Some of the others are recording this, penning it within the void of their helmets or masks. You listen, an ancient method with no record but memory.

“Even now, I struggle to remember or describe it.” The man lifts his head to the sky, and you can see him, imagine him. He struggles beneath the weight of a great wing attached to a lidless eye of burning light. He pushes pinions, and feathers from his path to look upon the throne of a departed father. It is perfect in its construction, except for a single blemish too small to have been meant for the Servants. It was meant for you.

“I will tell you what it looked like,” he says, returning to stare at the people who had travelled so far to this burning world. He speaks and you listen.

It was a glass perched on a branch a length of glue spread between two fingers Dust fallen from hair a chair bent backwards in pain the throat, gulping, drowning, in thirst it was curved at its beginnings, like serpents aching to meet straight in its middle, a spear at its ends, it bled, ink fallen upon thick paper machines, pumping endlessly A word “It was a word,” he says reverently. You nod, you understand. “I will speak it now, and you will carry it with you, wherever you wish.” He spoke. Lightning ate Thunder swallowed by a sea the roar of a wave the pop of eardrums a child cries out rattling of cans bristles on a brush skins rubbing skin buzz of faulty wiring holes in a dress

The man lies on the hot ground. His mouth is a blackened mess, the parasite, the thing reduced to charcoal. His remaining teeth are ash, his lip is seared.

“Jesus. He looks like he ate a grenade.” You do not look at who spoke. No one does.

You leave. The others do as well. You climb atop your steed, watch as its skull closes around, and its engines fire blue-heat upon the ashen world. You climb into the sky, and race beyond the confines of this worthless world.

You remember the Word he spoke. What a word. Even he barely understood it. Its meaning, its depth, its complexity, its use. You will. As space, the stars, the burning world, fade away, you close your eyes and remember what he said. It was impossible, no human tongue could pronounce. No vocal cords could create it.

You will have it. You will dispel this… discomfort. You will answer that dreadful question of why. Why did you leave us? Why do you hate us? Why don’t you want us? Where have you gone? Why won’t you come back? Why?

comment