On Dark Wings

On Dark Wings

A knock at the door.

It’s him.

Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.

It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.

The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..

I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted.

We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine.

His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.

I’m up.

All that remains are silent chambers, aglow in waiting, alive with hissing thought

Mausoleums for whole worlds, each cell a tomb, each tomb a memory, empty of the dead

The starless skies are shields and swords, forged by celestial might, an uneasy warning

A forge that burns, that makes: bones into iron, flesh into lightning, desires and dreams turned to screams and howls

Beware the Legacy, remember the Lament

Utopia lies in hallowed ruin, guarded by those who know only long, slow cycles

Waiting

Waiting

Waiting

You dig. You’ve been digging a long time. A featureless blue sky sprawls, staring down at you. It scorns you white-hot sunlight, painful and scorching. Judgmental as long vanished gods.

You’re dirty. Dust on clothes that in another world, another time, were expensive, implication of status. Now they’re just a shell. A hollow you live inside of.

Digging. Digging. Digging. A shadow crosses the sky on huge wings, plunges you into darkness for just a heartbeat. There’s blood under your fingernails. You swore you scrubbed and scrubbed, you were careless this time, so careless—

It’s done. Another doll in the dirt.

Dusk comes and chases the Sun over the horizon to usher in perpetual, desert midnight. Cold, unblinking stars manifest in silence. You numbly climb into your car beneath them. Driving away from this, from the thing you broke.

She’s there by the side of the road. Bloodied. Gazing at you.

Every mile is accompanied by that face.

No other cars. No gas station light, no haven town.

Just a cracked, porcelain face and bottomless, black eyes.

It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space.

There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.

And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.

Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.

It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.

The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridged with intricate carvings so small you have to feel them to know they are there.

Everything is too big for normal people, avenues are so wide and broad, buildings like skyscrapers that simply vanish up into shadow. It goes on and on. A labyrinth for titans.

Everything meets at the center, at a statue ringed by black water in circular canals, but it’s so massive that you can’t see it up in the gloom, just two claws on the mount, and giant legs bent backward at the joints. Is it a God for the vanished builders? A triumphant warrior? You feel an awful foreboding, an ominous realization that somewhere far above you— the statue is looking back.

They know you are here.