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Monday, November 23, 2009

THE FOLD: 9

by G. Alden Davis



A pause seemed to interrupt the roar momentarily and my stomach dropped. I had reached a waterfall in the jagged canyon, and I was now in the dark air with all that debris, dropping quickly into the twisting slots. The fall felt forever. Then with a slam and explosion of pain the trunk caught like a bone in the stone throat of the tight, and the branch in my foot cracked off. Again I was falling, this time into swift waters that followed the initial violent front of the flood.

For a while I was under, while my lungs craved to explosion beneath the coffee-stained boil of black. I could not force my eyes to open, against what I knew would be stinging, sandblasted grit. After several crumpling impacts with the canyon and large debris, I dropped once more into a free fall. This one stretched even longer, and with the added mathematical horror I calculated the velocity, terrified.

I dropped and dropped, first resisting the sheer scream at the back of my nerves. Then I succumbed to it, bellowed aloud. I yelped as loud as my howl would allow. My hand was stung with poison through the palm and now my foot was punctured; these stigmata should have seemed suspicious but all I had within me was a scream.

The sound stretched out behind my fall, chasing me down and scattering long echoes into every corner and crack. It became an eagle’s cry, a trilling flute, and then I struck the water, where my scream pushed back the drowning boil until I could resurface. Heavy shapes pounded past beneath me, and driftwood all but choked the top. I drew my arms up to protect my face and pulled in a burning lungful of dawn. I held like this and bobbed downstream with the churning logs while the sunrise hid just beneath the rim.


FOUR




The canyon widened out and water slightly slowed. Gradually the steep walls dropped until I reached a shallow flood-plain stretching for miles. Looking out I saw no sign of civilization- no gas stations, houses, not even a rusting junker abandoned in the wastes.

Across this space, from behind the far rim of redrock hills, something began to emerge. Heralded first by an enormous tentacle of energy that uncoiled into the sky, a blinding curvature crept up, bulging like a blister on the skin of space. Around its rim flared curls of fire, jets that stretched away for what seemed miles, coiling back like slow lightning returning to ground. As it continued to expose its radiant surface, these coronal discharges were lost in the overpowering glare of the thing itself.

My pupils shrank against the blast of light. This was no sunrise, I knew, and this was not the sun.

It rose like a predator, eating the night and consuming the stars in the sky. It was a hissing ball of golden light, an enormous jittering flare. It dripped gleaming liquid that spattered on the desert flat. Blocking the bulk of the unbearable glare with a hand, I could discern feathery plasma around the orb which spread like wings on either side. This image resounded in a memory, of history and hieroglyphs engraved in stone. It was the winged wheel of a gone time, the sky-chariot of a dead god. Its glare was frightening, and eerily familiar. It grew larger as it moved across the hardpan, gaining on my position with sudden intent. The wings at its side flexed and spread feathers. Hot slag sizzled out of the light, leaving a trail of fresh glass in the desert behind.

With breath caught in my thickened throat, I choked back awe and fear, held my ground even as my own blood fled from my face and fingers. My eyes were wide and rimmed with dirty tears, pupils minute in a sea of bloodshot white. My mouth was dry and my teeth crunched grit as I bit back my fright. Of all the wonders and horrors I had seen in this land of delirium, this single presence was the apotheosis, the stunning summit of all I had ever dreamed. It reached me in some interior sense, and awoke some dormant organ akin to my heart and mind, a third eye in my flat region of forehead. This bright in my eyes, including this newfound third, was a beam of information, a communiqué from far inside that searing orb to the deepest part of me. It stuttered out eons, whispers of history, of ages gone and those to come; of orbits, rotation, ecliptics, and drift.

As it neared I could hear its noise; a dim hum composed of one part sound and nine vibration, lower than audible but felt in the teeth and chest. The sizzling drips fell with the dying hiss of frying snakes. It was enormous, larger than any aircraft, and yet it gave no impression of mass. Energy scintillated like a second skin across the unseeable hull of bright, and the feathering wings were gossamer phased with gold. Intermittent sparks cascaded over the sphere, forming odd geometries. Then it slowed and stopped, hovering a few hundred yards away. Again it spoke, in broken words, of prayer, intention, and the treasure of knowledge. It existed at the behest of its pilots, given form by their current desires, and thus shone bright like a winged sun, a star chariot. It dominated the sky and chattered out those hissing, warding sparks.

While I watched from behind the safety of a boulder, the sphere itself began to slightly dim, and the sparkling lines and forms that danced on its surface revealed themselves to be complex sacred symmetries. The whirling runes and ley-lines revolved and spun down, until I could see that what had appeared as a sphere was actually a pair of pyramids overlapping to form a star. This star tetrahedron, counter-rotating in on its self-intersecting spin gave the illusion of a solid, spherical shell. At rapid speeds the energy that seeped from the centrifugal pull were drawn out into this whirling shell, much like the trail of electrons will form a basic, resistant sphere as material’s inner workings spun in orbits unseen.

Now slowing, I could discern that within those great, spinning energy fields there were shapes caught in half-shadow. I could tell little about these distant figures save that they were alive, moving with purpose.

The wings of the sky chariot spread to their limit, then collapsed in a fold as the two pyramids spun to a halt. Balanced at their base, they seemed less substantial than a dream. It lowered, until the discharges from its field lit the sand beneath it. As everything slowed, that sand patch cooked, and within minutes a thin disk of new glass had formed just below.

The roar of energy and force wound down to an oscillating whine, then died to a moan, a ghost of a hum, and within minutes, gone. Everything grew very still. Nothing crept through the wire-like desert scrub. Nothing sang songs at the dying night.

With a shuddering chuff a bright slit lined the lower edge. The light that came through was like a sheet of blue glass, a wide cobalt laser that grew taller as a panel slid silently up on the half-seen hull.

One by one emerged the processional of figures that I had seen in my dream the night before. In the dream I watched as they danced, demigods that seemed half animal dressed in armour of hammered gold. Did that not foretell of their intrusion into my waking life? Now here they were, emerging from some mystical craft and coming towards the very canyon that had just spat me out.

Behind me the water had slowed, over the initial flash stage, and it was more like a thin, snowmelt stream than the monster river roaring me over and out through the night. My body had been punished, to some unknown interior limit. My mind was the same, in a state of shock, its pain receptors blown and cohesive logic formed only on occasion.

I took an inventory of damages before looking back at the bright exit and what was making use of it.

The being in front carried something in its hands that shone white light around them. It sparkled off of bronze scales, golden feathers. Strange eyes shone from each.

Among the column I recognized an eagle, a lizard, a bat.

From the pages of myth and tabloid these beings strode, each one an agent of some animal-human composite. I saw the jackal-headed Anubis striding from that glowing portal, and behind him a host of slave-beings in tow. They drug unearthly burdens behind in their tracks, ransom that this god of death had once succumbed to. All these being bore a weight of glamour, a sheen of wealth unheard of on our world or the next. The creatures wore armour of gold, silvered inlay studded with precious stones. Even from where I hid I could tell that a great deal of their power was derived by a sublimation of precious metals and gemstones. They had magic, of a sorts to be certain. Where these animal men actually the demigods of legend? I did not at that time know.

I watched as the line stretched out, more and more of these breathtaking beings stepping through that tetrahedral port. Skinwalker, Manitou, Mars and the Lord all seemed to emerge from that slit in reality that formed about the counterspinning shapes. I dreamt and yet was awake, hypnotic in the grip of the sheer force of might that shone from these creatures. They had dominion, I felt this and still do. They had rights to this world that no man could grasp, only kneel and succumb to. A lump formed deep in my throat as one by one all the gods I knew stepped from the Mer-Ka-Ba chamber.

The feature each one shared is that they heaved under a burden, a weight of obvious treasures and chests whose contents remained more anonymous than their struggling trouble to carry.

By me they all walked, and I crawled to the deepest dark of the shadow I could find. Quiet as they were to noise, I crept into a hole in the sand that dipped beneath the stone. From there I peered at the brilliant parade, reminded of times as a child, in dream-parks all night and the young misunderstanding of prayer.

I could not believe the rattling procession of metal and bone that corrupted and blessed the narrow corridor of stone. That was the crack that had minutes before thrown me headlong away from the crags and bone-shattering quicks of a flash flood. Now the processional thundered up, through the mud and across slicks I hoped to circumvent.

At that time I knew that I must be here to witness this, it could not be heat-induced delirium. I was here to note that Gods still rode their chariots across our skies. They still fought in the cloudbanks above us and let thunder discuss their eternal struggle with anyone who would hear. They hammered in the waterfall at the back of a cave, they howled with the crying beasts who mourned beneath the moon.

Before me strode forms I had seen only in pictograms, strange beings of shadow on stone, and a herd of ghost buffalo thrummed lumbering through with buckskinned braves behind them. It was a stampede of a sort not matched before by the crashing pressure of flood. This flood of energy spanned the breadth of space, expanded time, and erased moments wasted in the grasp of disregarded pasts.


~THE FOLD continues tomorrow with Part 10~

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Archive of Stories
and Authors

Callum Leckie's
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J.R. Torina's
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J.R. Torina's
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Sean Padlo's
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Sean Padlo's
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Sean Padlo's exact whereabouts
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He's already been known
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Konstantine Paradias & Edward
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Konstantine Paradias's
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Konstantine Paradias is a writer by
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plays and anthologies. People tell him
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like, quit whenever he wants, man.
His work has been nominated
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Edward Morris's
ONE NIGHT IN MANHATTAN


Edward Morris's
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Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for
the Pushcart Prize in literature, has
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Tim Fezz's
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waves and people's minds in the
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every now and again. We are
delighted to have him onboard
the FREEZINE and we hope
you are, too.

Daniel E. Lambert's
DEAD CLOWN AND MAGNET HEAD


Daniel E. Lambert teaches English
at California State University, Los
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2012, An Island of Egrets and
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wife, poet and author Anhthao Bui.

Phoenix's
AGAIN AND AGAIN

Phoenix has enjoyed writing since he
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Phoenix has written over sixty books,
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and literature. He spends a good deal
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Adam Bolivar's
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Adam Bolivar's
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Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
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Sanford Meschkow's
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Daniel José Older's
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Rain Grave's
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Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
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G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD


G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
in high school, and received a creative
writing scholarship for the effort. Soon
afterward he discovered that words were
not enough, and left for art school. He was
awarded the Emeritus Fellowship along
with his BFA from Memphis College of Art
in '94, and entered the videogame industry
as a team leader and 3D artist. He has over
25 published games to his credit. Mr. Davis
is a Burningman participant of 14 years,
and he swings a mean sword in the SCA.
He's also the best friend I ever had. He
was taken away from us last year on Jan
25 and I'll never be able to understand why.
Together we were a fantastic duo, the
legendary Grub Bros. Our secret base
exists on a cross-hatched nexus between
the Year of the Dragon and Dark City.
Somewhere along the tectonic fault
lines of our electromagnetic gathering,
shades of us peel off from the coruscating
pillars and are dropped back into the mix.
The phrase "rest in peace" just bugs me.
I'd rather think that Greg Grub's inimitable
spirit somehow continues evolving along
another manifestation of light itself, a
purple shift shall we say into another
phase of our expanding universe. I
ask myself, is it wishful thinking?
Will we really shed our human skin
like a discarded chrysalis and emerge
shimmering on another wavelength
altogether--or even manifest right
here among the rest without their
even beginning to suspect it? Well
people do believe in ghosts, but I
myself have long been suspicious
there can only be one single ghost
and that's all the stars in the universe
shrinking away into a withering heart
glittering and winking at us like
lost diamonds still echoing all their
sad and lonely songs fallen on deaf
eyes and ears blind to their colorful
emanations. My grub brother always
knew better than what the limits
of this old world taught him. We
explored past the outer peripheries
of our comfort zones to awaken
the terror in our minds and keep
us on our toes deep in the forest
in the middle of the night. The owls
led our way and the wilderness
transformed into a sanctuary.
The adventures we shared together
will always remain tattooed on
the pages of my skin. They tell a
story that we began together and
which continues being woven to
this very day. It's the same old
story about how we all were in
this together and how each and
every one of us is also going away
someday and though it will be the far-
thest we can manage to tell our own
tale we may rest assured it will be
continued like one of the old pulp
serials by all our friends which survive
us and manage to continue
the saga whispering in the wind.

Shae Sveniker's
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Nigel Strange's
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Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
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