TELL ME ATLAS WHAT IS HEAVIER?
THE WORLD, OR IT'S PEOPLE'S HEARTS?
Well. It’s your dream—
and even if you know it, even if the back of your consciousness you turn your head fitfully on your desk and mumble something in your sleep, even if it is only a dream—
when you plunge into the sea
it feels like drowning.
More fire than water; a held breath that almost immediately expires. You inhale water as if it had once been your rite, as if the gesture is as habitual and mundane as taking a breath of fresh mountain air and when you do, you die all over again.
Don’t worry.
You’ve died before—and those memories are in the amorphous horses that follow you down, down, down,
and even as you dive you are living through a hundred multitudes of lives, lives you have already lead and lived and died in, lives where you were still not enough—
the spirits remind you what the spears felt like lodged in the breastbone (it punctured the lung just enough you drowned slowly in your own blood)
the spirits act out each visceral ending, each carnal and warlike defeat—
the weighted fish nets leaving you to bake in the sun you’d later worship,
the way in one life they cut off your head and brandished it from their battlements
The laughing follows you and so does that naked blackness, so does the vivid reliving of each of your deaths. You are looking now at the stranger who accompanies you; he takes the shape of another ethereal spectre aside from the light above his brow, luminescent and white, bright enough you can’t stare at it—you want to ask why he is there, some other thing, but don’t, but can’t—
deeper
deeper
deeper
have you ever seen the bottom of the sea?
No.
Yes.
It seems familiar; but the moon is familiar, too, when you stare at it from 238,900 miles away.
Your hooves sink into the silt; something slithers out from beneath the billowing cloud and is gone, gone. You glance at your companion, feeling—strangely—as if they should guide you. You are not even certain of their gender; you are not even certain if you know them. Only that they are not usually in this dream, and this is a dream you have had many times.
At the bottom of the sea the spirits do not follow.
“I’m supposed to die again.” you speak it aloud into the water; it comes out in a language you can’t remember how to speak when you are awake, primitive, like whales screaming into the deep.
There is something about the way even this far below the darkness is barren, naked. You begin to walk and each step you take your body takes the form of something else, gone too quickly for you to recognise your own changes.
You are speaking faintly. “There is an altar here…” Even as you say it you do not know if it is true. The confession emerges vaguely, from the many journeys to the bottom of the sea. Phantom shapes dance in the water near them; bulbous; sharp; billowing; if you look too closely they disappear.
And you are wandering in the dark, the deep, with a hundred lifetimes in your eyes, and a hundred ways to die—
do you remember,
—and the silt is billowing into intricate shapes—
do you remember when,
you jumped from a cliffside crying for peace
and
they
Bound
your
screaming
Soul?
Perhaps it’s here. And that thought carries you further, directionless; perhaps it’s sunk like your body was meant to when they sentenced you to death, when they bound you in iron and cast you into a storm—
“I’m supposed to die again.” And now your voice is quiet, contemplative. “... just one more time…”
-----
Orestes in his study furrows his brows; he coughs in his sleep and turns his face the other way into the spilled papers, the imprint of Novus's foreign map leaving sharp lines against the flesh of his cheek. His eyelids twitch. And the dream goes on.
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