The sky is a thin interfacial phase separating us from them. A veneer, a filmy barrier hypostasized into being by our collective unconscious wishes to hide the watching eyes of the Others from our own. Like us, they are many and varied in nature. Some are vast, black pupils in azure irises that run deep like the oceans. Others are small and tightly packed, like buboes on infected skin.
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| Our Country Has Many Eyes -- Allery Sandy |
For most, the sky remains from birth until the last breath just before death. But there exist those great thinkers who have reached true enlightenment after periods of intense self-reflection, and those hounds who relentlessly seek out the tempting needles of the Kaolinites, and those intrepid truth-seekers who read the right words in dank, abandoned libraries who know what lies beyond.
Un-streaking rivulets, cerulean paint dripping down off an ocular canvas in reverse. The sky melts away, and the extra-real is revealed. The sky is not illusory. The sky is an extant shield, blocking most from the cosmically-induced madness. The eyes hate us. The eyes love us. The eyes are always watching us.
In times of silence, listen closely, close your ears, and open your heart or your mind. Of course, it's easier to open the mind, but safer to open the heart. The eyes don't speak, but they do impart. A feeling, an emotion, an errant alien thought in an otherwise well-organized mind. Go here. Grab this. Bring it here. Kill. Heal. Steal. Fight. Fix. Live. Die.
Their motives are unclear, conflicting, complex woven webs that prove impossible to extricate from themselves. Listening is free. Anyone can sit. But hearing? Hearing is dear. You can retreat from your secluded mountain peak back to civilization, you can establish residence at that corner table in the smokey back room of The Chant and Bottle, you can try to drown out the screaming in your memory with creaking springs and ragged gasps from a rose-scented whore, but you will not succeed.
Strong-Arm Ada used to be an adventurer in high demand. Now? She lays motionless, filling buckets with drool on the top floor of the sanitarium. In two weeks, when the hoard of treasure she'd brought back from looted ruins runs out, she'll be ejected, refuse in the street to step around until -- if she's lucky-- she dies. If she's not lucky, if the ever-watching eyes offer a deal that she unwisely decides to take, her suffering will continue.
Grinley Green-Nose used to be a laughing-stock, spoken of only between breathless laughs and barbed remarks. Now? The Chant and Bottle is Grinley's playground. When Green-Nose walks inside, the lutist in the corner knows to play his song and the drunken mooches perk up, knowing that several rounds of free drinks are soon to come. Grinley listened, followed through, and the eyes were happy. Now he bathes in riches.
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| Augur's Shore -- Leanna TenEycke |
Some wizened old astronomers, leaning back in their plush purple chairs, will tell you with an air of self-assuredness that the stars are nothing more than the weak spots in the sky; far, far away. That at night, when we see the constellations Mother Minor and Mother Major, what we're really seeing is pinprick leakings of another reality into our own. "Yes, yes, it's true," they'll say. "Someday, in the far future, perhaps the sky will fail altogether."
They're wrong, of course. Stars are things, not holes. And they're much closer then they appear.
Do you know where gods go when they die? It hasn't happened for a while, so you'd be forgiven for silence. There are barren places in this world. Vast tundras and blasted badlands, long-dead salt seas and broken mountains. Divinity is tolerable in small doses, but when the corpse of a god is laid to rest by their erstwhile followers it wreaks havoc on its grave site. And in these far-flung places, the final thoughts of the gods coalesce and crystallize in their radiating skulls until they've accumulated the lofty lift they need to break free from their graves and explode out in a shower of dirt and ichor.
The stars explode upwards at first, blindingly bright and impossibly fast. However, they slow exponentially as they reach the apex of their journey, to hang in the sky until eventually they begin the slow plummet down, the journey back to crash into the crust of the world.
