000. The beginning & the end, 1
Jahr 1 〜 Book of Purple preludes
000. The beginning & the end, 1
(Aïsshean)
Like many others, I saw the luminescent beacon drifting through the sky.
The latest of anomalies that had suddenly come to the world was by far the quieter.
After most tragedies had settled, we saw this drifting shape and glow, pulling its curtains of exotic waves along its silent glide.
We were curling up together, trying to rest and recover in the ruins of our former lives. We could see the open skies above our crumbling walls.
The colours of dawn had already passed, as we sat there together listless. And now we witnessed like a growing morning hallucination the colourful and whimsical show of a perpendicular sunrise.
From the south west, this colder and softer sun now was rising, colouring the sky differently. We all watched its shades and sheets of iridescence in the sky with bewilderment and worry.
As beautiful as borealis auroras could be, this new show was also stating for good how much the world had changed, and how much its shift would never be reversed. Or not in any nearby time anyway.
The empire we lived in had fallen, and through the sights of this cloak carried by the winds, what we saw was the answer from beyond our land. It’s over. Our world is definitely over.
I held my brethren unsteady hands closer, praying for our survival.
Something more immense than a land had died, and we’ve been nearly reduced to our animal levels of survival levels since. We were trying to hold on in the swampy aftermath.
We began to accept how the country as a society was unlikely to ever stand up again in any organised form for a foreseeable while.
And we began to fear that civilisation might have fallen as well, on a much wider scale.
That perhaps sadly, the tragedy and plague we sailed through recently, had far wider reality than our local country.
Gazing at this colourful sky, with the rising pale hollow, we began to accept with pain in our chests, how much had come to change. How far it was now real.
Our fingers melted slightly into one another. The solidity of our flesh was now that compromised.
I pulled out and away my hand from the other, ripping tiny blood vessels apart. It hurt Azzie a little, but her gaze remained in an absent daze.
Everything ends and the smells of decomposition still linger like dew into town.
I tried to speak, but now my voice failed. My larynx had begun to give up on my humanity.
Everything about us that kept us as one, has begun its gentle collapse.
As society died, leaving the smaller scales structures of groups and individuals free to evolve separately or compete again...
So do our bodies now I realised.
Parts of the rules keeping our unity are no longer enforced, and individual parts of our organisms try to resume an ancestral lower level of individuality. Cancers will grow and spread.
My brother’s hair is falling. My sisters consciousness are in constant lull, as we all try to survive this string of collapsing elements.
I stepped up, my feet leaving stains of sweat and fluids, where mould immediately spread, faster than spilled paint would have.
The parts of our brains still lucid realise that the world has changed.
Only some days ago, reality remained as solid an empire can be.
Then there was this flash and shift. This day came to be unexpectedly, unreasonable, unfathomable.
After this incomprehensible event we witnessed as an odd flash of light, everything structured into complexity felt reassessed. The stress we endured and the balance were abruptly shaken and tilted.
The world’s environment suddenly changed, and now we witness the endless decay.
We passed one of these legendary end of times, and now we’ve been abandoned behind.
I tremble, I painfully breathe, my body constantly revaluating itself like an unsteady union of strained nations.
I feel my fluids crawling beneath my liquefying skin. I know I might die or scatter at the slightest of provocations, but I try.
Because for the first time since that day fell on us, there is that pale hope for answers visible in the sky.
The new dawn that rises is a chance for rebirth and answers to our abrupt change in fate.
Now my animal instincts are supplanted by my desires to learn, to hope, to discover and to walk further.
My heart moves inside my chest, pushing my stomach and lungs around, each competing for space. I cough, spitting droplets that now go on their own chances at freedom in life. My saliva grows lichens over the tiles it touches.
The extent of understandable reality had changed, and if I were to survive, now I wanted to see and understand more... For myself, and hopefully a little for more.
I made another unsteady step forward, in front of my brethren.
Parts of my decomposed clothing fell. But my foot and bones obeyed. A new form of order might come to rise from the leftovers decomposed. Maybe a change in regime or dynasty, but still an overall organisation that I would describe as being me.
I mused, as it’s also the story of life. From decaying organisations and other elements, new ones will grow.
And the more I would be able to recall my past science, the better I could maybe repurpose my own self.
I could breathe and move again.
The city ahead was in ruins now, but the fires and most toxic fumes had now died as well.
We survived the harshest downfall, and now the challenges would be of simpler aims for a while onwards.
So I pushed further again, to see for myself, and to challenge my visible demise.
To make new links, new learnings and to help the next good structures rise.
My voice remained unresponsive for every subsequent attempt at talking. But showing my adventuring self to them, my family heard some of the thoughts perspiring from me as well. They understood me quietly.
The melting fleshes from their bodies chose with what remained of their respective minds to follow me.
Rather than embracing our spreading fate in this melancholy of our ruined past and home, we held hands to venture outside as one.
The world we once knew as for ourselves was all but gone and more wild.
The changing shapes of what once was human, now trying in new gasps to find new solidity and lights.
Embracing the painful challenges of the unknown, once the home nest could no longer hold.
I felt a little warmer seeing them moving to join me in this endeavour.
No matter the pain, the changes reaching deep even in the essence of our minds. Over the reasonable doubts, as we chose to dive and swim into the unknown.
Now the context and languages had changed, making us like lost and wounded foreigners inside a new greater game.
We were likely to meet our fate rapidly, even if the worst nights were now behind. But we would challenge our odds and selves against these drifting uncertainties. We might have the luck to find where some new of our competitive advantages lied.
I would still bet on human intelligence and tooling to insure fast adaptation and resilience.
Although that required us to remain mostly humans, which was a challenge in itself.
They heard the whispers from the sky, and so have I.
We would be together, raising our curious minds toward what could be our next or last chapter in life.
For our names as Aïsshea...
~
