Travel Log of a Raven
Day 22 - The Spectacle
- Details
- Written by Michelle McCollyer
The earth opened up and swallowed me. I am the cracks and fissures. I am the doom that lurks in the deep black. I am seamless with all that crept before me and all that lunges on ahead of our time. The sky has rained into my ears and spun me to the earth. The moss twitches its secrets; their vision speaks a language older than words and caresses my fingertips with the lips of ghosts that wheeze like the last gasps of the old.
It’s been two nights since the Spectacle. Fractured words finally flow into streams once more. My quill catches up to my mind.
I thought my mind had cracked; I kept reaching behind my ear to check for blood. The Tarraleesovian boy I passed today told me the moss caused this madness. I should have known. On this trip, the usually brown mountain moss glowed a vibrant magenta. They say only the shamen travel the pass this time of year when the moss blooms.
I had just passed the summit that morning and made camp in one of the alcoves beside the trail. Moss covered the walls.
I can still hear the earth breathe; it escorts my own breath. It was the first sense that the Spectacle awakened: the Earth’s Breath. So recognizable that I barely noticed it at first, a faint bellow from the lowest end of a hmm, guttural like pushing out an infant from the womb.
The stars crept, not twinkled, crept. I watched several stars etch their way, bit by bit, from one mountain crest to another. When I blinked, the stars crumbled apart into small grains. I tried not to blink, but progressively their radiant ancestral sand filled the sky more and more. Blanketing the black, the star sand wove together, squirming distinctly as an ant hill does at a distance. They danced, gathering and parting, pitching and pulling away. Together they undulate, weaving ribbons of darkness and bright across the sky, forming patterns like the chasms on the mountains. On and on they did this, swelling and sinking until finally ...they burst and fell downward towards the right side of the jagged horizon. As they tilted, I did too, my head easing slowly to the ground.
Fear was my mistake. My fast frightened breath fell out of sync with that of the earth’s. I clawed at the rocky, dusty ground, trying to keep from sliding off the mountain. As I did so, I drew buckets of swarming dust into my mouth. Its powder settled into the crevices of my tongue and lined my throat. It tasted salty. I coughed, hacking from the realm of the Earth’s Breath. I vomited and retched, but the dust wouldn’t leave my body. My voice dropped, reverberating in a deeper realm. I speak for the earth now.
My cough rang with such thunder, I lost my sight. Though awake and my eyes open, I could see nothing but black. I felt certain my eyeballs had fallen out. The skin around them felt inflamed and raw. My fingers fluttered across the ground, searching for my eyes; I was sure they lay in the dust somewhere. Could I put a dusty eyeball back into my head? Should I? Perhaps here is where the fear began; I cannot remember. Did my panicked breathing make me cough, or did the coughing’s blindness cause my panic? Had the ancestral sands of the sky filled my body with its dust? Was I one with the sky now who could only see the blackness of the crevice before me?
In the darkness, the tightness in my guts released and I felt a warm, peaceful sensation come over the middle of my body. With it, returned the belief that I still existed, for I had just urinated on myself.
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-- My King, forgive my negligence and deduct the cost of the pages I tore from this book from my pay. Please spare my life and your respect, for nothing good will come from what I wrote there. Never again will I use your book for my own observances into the bizarre. Confessing myself a women a few entries ago, you may find my character already tarnished, but I will not further degrade it. I left some of the insanity I wrote, my King, for you to truly understand all aspects of the nature of the mountain moss. --
My vision returned. I don’t know why it left.
My perception of life awakened under the guidance of the moss. I now understand dying; death cannot upset me. A dead man is a body returned to the dirt to grow anew. Every crumbling man blows a new breathe into another; all that remains are the lies that the living scribe about the souls of the dead.
Killing a man cannot be judged as right or wrong; you can’t label wrong an action that eventually produces new life. Only the living carry the burden of morality; only the living manipulate and deceive one another. One may “know” lying to another man is wrong, but the only real judgement placed upon that lie is after other “person” knows you lied. Morality exists as a common “law of behavior” between two equals. I, as a commoner, know hundreds of lies, but their wrongness does not exist unless I reveal them to the liar's equal, another Lord or King. I detract.
Under the moss’s perceptions, if killing a man cannot be judged as wrong, could a warrior with such a view on death be hit by the Spiritual Kingdom’s blue arrows? You, my King, are famed for being a veteran leading many battles against the Spiritual Kingdom. Your knowledge of war and the blue arrows far exceeds mine, a Raven who carries away the bodies of the dead. But, everyone who ventures to that battlefront knows that blue arrows only kill assholes. Those who enjoy inflicting pain on others qualify for blue arrows. But what happens if the emotion of the killer is removed? What if all the remorse, joy, pain or anguish of killing another gets replaced by the mundaneness of gazing up a shallow stream, and knowing it continues on around the bend. Could the blue arrows of judgement kill that warrior? Could the Spiritual Warriors even target men with the moss’s perceptions? For if the blue arrows can’t kill such a warrior, then perhaps many of these mossed-up warriors could crush the Spiritual Kingdom’s army.
My King, I feel we should investigate the nature of this moss. We could use the moss induced perception to our advantage. There’s value in the moss, I know it. It might be worth even as much as that indigo some nobility in their clothes. I could call it Magé.
After the boy said that the moss induced the Spectacle and its perceptions, I praised my ancestors that the madness was temporary. When my sanity returned, I praised it all the more, for this Magé may bless me with more coin than I ever imagine. I'm going back up the mountain, my King, to scrape the pollen off for you and the benefit of all the Warrior Kingdom. I have enough food to last me the extra two days. Now that I know it’s a “pollen” in the air, I will wear a scarf about my mouth when I collect the moss. If all goes well, I should reach the region where the moss blooms tomorrow. In two day’s time, my empty food satchels will be full of Magé, my hatless head will be full of sun, and I will finally be free of these mountains.
