The Well of Mimir

Sing, poor Elvasa, sing like the wind across the dunes, sing to the bones of your father, and carry him with you all your life, until your children bear up your own bones unto the winds…

The song died away, drifting slowly away across the red evening darkness towards the blue edging upon the horizon and becoming lost in eternity. The gathered tribe drifted away, the ritual completed as Elvasa admired the shining ivory blade he now held, turning the thin crescent over to admire each side of the weapon…and to remember…

“Your father is with you now forever,” the old bone-singer’s voice broke into his reverie, and Elvasa looked up from the new blade into his milk-white eyes. The voice trembled with age, but there was still strength and tenor in it, subtle shadings of skill that remained eternally young lurking beyond the aged flesh. He wondered how the old man knew where to look without eyesight.

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You can’t have the lights on, it must be dark — your eyes must be blinded. That’s the only way to find them, because you can’t see them. They move at the speed of light, never standing still long enough for any fleshy human optics to glimpse, running through the wires. But you can hear them, humming and oscillating in the dark.

That’s why it has to be dark. They claim when one of your senses is lost, your other senses compensate. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure seems you can hear better when your eyes aren’t distracted by light and color, shape and motion. You become more attentive to your the signals your ears are sending you.

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“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

My mother’s voice wavered as she began to read the poem aloud; her voice flowed thick from her throat but quick through her lips, slowly filling the room as her lungs found the air and with it strength.

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They were part of a game — a strange variant of chess discovered on a secret and disturbing corner of the world-wide web — played with friends who were as repulsed and fascinated with the strange forms upon the board as I had been when I had decided upon its purchase.

I kept them under a glass case, carefully locked away every night, the strange pewter figures sprawled across a plain of unsteady blocks of black-and-white abutted by red and nameless colors that seemed to shift position when one wasn’t looking at them.

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The clouds curdled thick and gray in the sky; somewhere, a patch of brilliant blue shone.

“You’ve been corrupted by the forces you seek to control,” he shouted hoarsely at the back of the figure atop the rise ahead of him, who stared out across the city below and sky above.

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He had put all his anger into the black dog. Every ounce, every trickle, every whisper; he filled up on it and put it into the dog, away from him.

As such, he didn’t like to think about what was out back, out in the broken little house that stood at the far edge of the long, narrow lot. He didn’t like to think about what spent its days hidden in the dark interior, behind rotting wooden planks, beneath loose, age-curled shingles.

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I will not die…I will not die…I WILL NOT DIE..! The words, which would have been screamed if he had the air or the time, echoed in his head as the plasma burst surged through the ship’s bridge — an instant, blinding, killing flare that left utter darkness in its blazing wake.

It was up from this darkness he swam some unknown time later, eyes miraculously opening, body aching with a thousand agonies, but moving, not seared to atomic dust as he should have been had the plasma struck.

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Today, I came back to myself after two weeks. I don’t know where I was or what I was doing, only realized the vague disquiet that had been whispering its existence into my ear had been truth all along — I had been going through the motions for two weeks.

But how does a man find out where his soul has been for two weeks when he discovers it returning from having gone missing? It is not as though it returns with memories and recollections to add to those of the shell’s empty weeks of shambling through what we term life.

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It happened that long ago the people of Lim Xhe would labor in their bountiful fields beneath the brilliant light of seven suns that soared through the heavens each day, for the gods had created the world with seven suns in the sky that there would be light everywhere. But the people complained for the fields were too hot, as each of the seven suns shone with light and heat upon the bare backs of the men.

But what could they do? For the gods had made seven suns in the sky, and it was not their place to change it. Even if they knew how.

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Ghalek stared out across the red sands and broken orange-brown rocks at the thin white band set across the desert’s breast, and the shining spike rising up into the sky above it, the glittering hues of the god’s shields dancing in the empty, white sky above it. The bloated corpse of the black sun sagged on the rim of the world behind him, painted crimson by the dust hazing the air and throwing long, sharp shadows that stretched towards the distant city like grasping claws.

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