The Chant of the Sibyl
Nov. 9th, 2007 11:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsMy flat was empty. I was the only thing that breathed within it, and the air was cold for the open windows and lifeless space. I had sat down on the floor in the middle of my living room, pushed all the furniture out to the pictureless walls. In my mind, I pushed all the furnishings of my life out to the horizons of my consciousness, trying to focus. When I was younger, I couldn't control the things I saw beyond the vision normally granted to humans. It was the one secret I had always kept from my councilors, regardless as to how much or how little I trusted them. There was no frame of reference for how they might take something like that, and I'd grown up with the consciousness of how tenuous my situation at large always was.
Then, after Adrian had come along, he learned that he was able to coax visions from me... sitting in his incense-filled bedroom I could slip between those walls and look either way, painfully seeking things the world would prefer me to shield my eyes from.
I grew, though, and learned... my own meditations had been one of the few secrets I kept from Adrian, initially having hoped to have told him once he brought me out to the ranch, where I would be safe from the prying eyes of conventional society, who I baselessly assumed would react badly to my ability. It should have been a joke, like the television psychics of pre-war society. There were days when I wanted it to be, but I was so rarely wrong about even the smallest details, and never about the substantial themes of the things that I would glimpse in the half-light.
At rest there in this silent space, I breathed the chilled air with one hand flattened on my refugee book of days and the other on the letter that had come that morning.
I don't know how they found my name. I didn't know who they were – and though the man's name, Ivan Roque, was remotely familiar I had not researched them... I hadn't had time or focus to do so, and it was only with an afterthought now that it occurred to me I could probably gain some idea of who these people were that had written me. It was brief and economical of words – written, I felt, by the woman, by the name Isolde Lindman. A good German name to go with the Munich postmark.
They knew I was sick. They also knew that I couldn't get treatment from anyone in Brugge and made allusions to the fact that there was just no treatment available for the sleeping beast the coiled, strengthening, in the body that belonged less and less to me. They said I had to contact them at once. There was a telephone number, and an address – predictably, in Munich – but no more information than that.
Sanity would have dismissed this. It was uncalled for, dangerous, and without evidence of any kind to support the kind of claims they were making. Lacking evidence, of course, outside of my own suspicions which – I considered – had always been extremely heavy. Sanity, I was finding, was in short supply these days. Out of doors I felt myself short of breath in a way that exceeded the perpetual exhaustion that plagued me. It was a sensation like something was pressing hungrily against the back door of my mind, something waiting to be seen and tasted. Until tonight, I had been far too afraid to let it in. I closed my eyes tight at night, pulled into a sleep that precluded dreaming by Adrian's concoctions, and tried to turn my eyes away. I shut out the sound, whispering against my consciousness, but now I needed it. I needed that hum to lead me to the source.
Five minutes past, then ten, and then I began to lost count. I sank deeper and deeper into the room, the airy cold, and began to feel everything receding away from me slowly. My breath caught in my chest and the air plunged in temperature, as if thinning impossibly. This was the most awful part, standing on this airless bridge between here and there without knowing what was going to be on the other side after I managed to take those faltering steps. The blood in my ears was roaring. My eyes were beginning to come back into focus.
Ah, the burning in my lungs! I was running hard, feeling a renewed strength course desperately through my limbs. The weariness, the heavy feeling in my blood – that blood that was no longer my own – had flown me. This is how I knew I was not merely dreaming, that I had not just slipped away into some kind of contrived fantasy, because I was myself... not the self that I had occupied for the last few weeks, but the self that I knew deeply. The sensations that my body and mind understood of one another.
Brambles scraped at my arms, an autumn snap in the air intensifying the heat of the breath in my mouth as my heart hammered out a thunderous rhythm. As I slowly gained control, I focussed sternly and willed my legs to stop. I wanted to stand up and turn around, face what I was running from... this was a symbol I understood. I ran because I had been running. So concertedly I had been turning my back on this nagging premonition that, my spirit was actually flying it. Perhaps this was some part of the fatigue that hung about me like a stifling mantle, every hour? I could only hope. I couldn't manage to straighten right away, however, so breathless was I. I braced my hands on my knees and struggled to control my breathing, eventually slowing my heartbeat down to a manageable temper.
I listened. It had to be coming...
I listened for a long time, until it hit me. The silence... a silence even deeper than the room I'd just 'left', a silence that rushed outward from the point of my standing for miles. No sound of the world outside, no thrumming of technology and motion dropping below the perception of the ear but not the perception of the skin, barely stirring the air in a thousand minuscule vibrations. No restless stirring of beast and insect underneath the growth that sprung up, tangled and wild around me in every direction. How far away was I from the cities I had known in my life? How far would it have taken in order for me not to feel the presence of my fellow man, massed and downtrodden. And why were there no animals...
Barely daring to move, I finally stood up and turned in a slow circle. The sound of my feet on the earth was shattering against that stillness. I looked down slowly, because that earth I stepped against was uneven but unnaturally hard.
Below my feet, old fragments of broken concrete stood at angles where brambles and saplings had pushed them carelessly aside. I looked around wildly, feeling my heart pick back up again... it was evening and the light wasn't good, but I could make out a structure a little way off. Or, once I got there, I realized... it had been a structure, but I couldn't tell how long ago. Unsteadily, I tried to scale it, but probably only got about one story up before I felt like any further would risk my neck worse than I already was. Clinging on to a rusty piece of metal – a beam that was mostly corroded and twisted off viciously a few feet above where I stood, precariously, on a crumbling ledge of brick – I turned slowly to take in as much of a radius as I could.
I don't know why I could see it... perhaps the map of the city was etched subconsciously enough into my brain that some key shapes to the ruin tipped me off... but there was no question in my mind that I stood in the center of Brugge. Or, more aptly, what had been Brugge.
I climbed down and fell to my knees, shattered asphalt painful against my skin as it pressed through my clothing. Everything was gone. No bird flew overhead to cry a lonely eulogy, no maurading rat took the opportunity to seek out some forgotten morsel of debris. I could hear the story pulsing just beneath the scaly skin of the earth. It had gone so fast... the breath of man was swept away in a maelstrom that not even the old legends that suggested the wrath of a god could compare to. The empires of humanity had been snuffed as carelessly as one might extinguish a candle before retiring to sleep.
I fought my way kicking and crying out of the vision, flailing about on my floor till I had flung my book of days so that it slid underneath my couch and crumpled the letter tightly into my wound fist. The paper hung on, stiff about its top and bottom edges, looking sad and helpless and undeserving in my white-knuckled hand. I gasped for breath that did not come easily, heaving and coughing as if a great hand was closed about my throat or my lungs were half filled with heavy water.
I have now lost all pretense of writing this story in order.
Wordcount as of November 9: 13,082
Then, after Adrian had come along, he learned that he was able to coax visions from me... sitting in his incense-filled bedroom I could slip between those walls and look either way, painfully seeking things the world would prefer me to shield my eyes from.
I grew, though, and learned... my own meditations had been one of the few secrets I kept from Adrian, initially having hoped to have told him once he brought me out to the ranch, where I would be safe from the prying eyes of conventional society, who I baselessly assumed would react badly to my ability. It should have been a joke, like the television psychics of pre-war society. There were days when I wanted it to be, but I was so rarely wrong about even the smallest details, and never about the substantial themes of the things that I would glimpse in the half-light.
At rest there in this silent space, I breathed the chilled air with one hand flattened on my refugee book of days and the other on the letter that had come that morning.
I don't know how they found my name. I didn't know who they were – and though the man's name, Ivan Roque, was remotely familiar I had not researched them... I hadn't had time or focus to do so, and it was only with an afterthought now that it occurred to me I could probably gain some idea of who these people were that had written me. It was brief and economical of words – written, I felt, by the woman, by the name Isolde Lindman. A good German name to go with the Munich postmark.
They knew I was sick. They also knew that I couldn't get treatment from anyone in Brugge and made allusions to the fact that there was just no treatment available for the sleeping beast the coiled, strengthening, in the body that belonged less and less to me. They said I had to contact them at once. There was a telephone number, and an address – predictably, in Munich – but no more information than that.
Sanity would have dismissed this. It was uncalled for, dangerous, and without evidence of any kind to support the kind of claims they were making. Lacking evidence, of course, outside of my own suspicions which – I considered – had always been extremely heavy. Sanity, I was finding, was in short supply these days. Out of doors I felt myself short of breath in a way that exceeded the perpetual exhaustion that plagued me. It was a sensation like something was pressing hungrily against the back door of my mind, something waiting to be seen and tasted. Until tonight, I had been far too afraid to let it in. I closed my eyes tight at night, pulled into a sleep that precluded dreaming by Adrian's concoctions, and tried to turn my eyes away. I shut out the sound, whispering against my consciousness, but now I needed it. I needed that hum to lead me to the source.
Five minutes past, then ten, and then I began to lost count. I sank deeper and deeper into the room, the airy cold, and began to feel everything receding away from me slowly. My breath caught in my chest and the air plunged in temperature, as if thinning impossibly. This was the most awful part, standing on this airless bridge between here and there without knowing what was going to be on the other side after I managed to take those faltering steps. The blood in my ears was roaring. My eyes were beginning to come back into focus.
Ah, the burning in my lungs! I was running hard, feeling a renewed strength course desperately through my limbs. The weariness, the heavy feeling in my blood – that blood that was no longer my own – had flown me. This is how I knew I was not merely dreaming, that I had not just slipped away into some kind of contrived fantasy, because I was myself... not the self that I had occupied for the last few weeks, but the self that I knew deeply. The sensations that my body and mind understood of one another.
Brambles scraped at my arms, an autumn snap in the air intensifying the heat of the breath in my mouth as my heart hammered out a thunderous rhythm. As I slowly gained control, I focussed sternly and willed my legs to stop. I wanted to stand up and turn around, face what I was running from... this was a symbol I understood. I ran because I had been running. So concertedly I had been turning my back on this nagging premonition that, my spirit was actually flying it. Perhaps this was some part of the fatigue that hung about me like a stifling mantle, every hour? I could only hope. I couldn't manage to straighten right away, however, so breathless was I. I braced my hands on my knees and struggled to control my breathing, eventually slowing my heartbeat down to a manageable temper.
I listened. It had to be coming...
I listened for a long time, until it hit me. The silence... a silence even deeper than the room I'd just 'left', a silence that rushed outward from the point of my standing for miles. No sound of the world outside, no thrumming of technology and motion dropping below the perception of the ear but not the perception of the skin, barely stirring the air in a thousand minuscule vibrations. No restless stirring of beast and insect underneath the growth that sprung up, tangled and wild around me in every direction. How far away was I from the cities I had known in my life? How far would it have taken in order for me not to feel the presence of my fellow man, massed and downtrodden. And why were there no animals...
Barely daring to move, I finally stood up and turned in a slow circle. The sound of my feet on the earth was shattering against that stillness. I looked down slowly, because that earth I stepped against was uneven but unnaturally hard.
Below my feet, old fragments of broken concrete stood at angles where brambles and saplings had pushed them carelessly aside. I looked around wildly, feeling my heart pick back up again... it was evening and the light wasn't good, but I could make out a structure a little way off. Or, once I got there, I realized... it had been a structure, but I couldn't tell how long ago. Unsteadily, I tried to scale it, but probably only got about one story up before I felt like any further would risk my neck worse than I already was. Clinging on to a rusty piece of metal – a beam that was mostly corroded and twisted off viciously a few feet above where I stood, precariously, on a crumbling ledge of brick – I turned slowly to take in as much of a radius as I could.
I don't know why I could see it... perhaps the map of the city was etched subconsciously enough into my brain that some key shapes to the ruin tipped me off... but there was no question in my mind that I stood in the center of Brugge. Or, more aptly, what had been Brugge.
I climbed down and fell to my knees, shattered asphalt painful against my skin as it pressed through my clothing. Everything was gone. No bird flew overhead to cry a lonely eulogy, no maurading rat took the opportunity to seek out some forgotten morsel of debris. I could hear the story pulsing just beneath the scaly skin of the earth. It had gone so fast... the breath of man was swept away in a maelstrom that not even the old legends that suggested the wrath of a god could compare to. The empires of humanity had been snuffed as carelessly as one might extinguish a candle before retiring to sleep.
I fought my way kicking and crying out of the vision, flailing about on my floor till I had flung my book of days so that it slid underneath my couch and crumpled the letter tightly into my wound fist. The paper hung on, stiff about its top and bottom edges, looking sad and helpless and undeserving in my white-knuckled hand. I gasped for breath that did not come easily, heaving and coughing as if a great hand was closed about my throat or my lungs were half filled with heavy water.
I have now lost all pretense of writing this story in order.
Wordcount as of November 9: 13,082