Axon Terminus

O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.

I knew the way without knowing the way beyond the Margins of Silence. It was a place with the feel and often the charge of the air like that of a summer thunderstorm only without any sound. Lightening. Flashes of intense light that streaked from where this world began all the way to where it was anchored on the other side. Brilliant. Beautiful. It was striking to me this absence, peaceful lucidity in the most disturbing way I had ever known. I passed the drummer who sat motionless. In his hands the hammers of his clan, chiseled with a perfection from bone were poised above the skin of his drum. Frozen.

It is a hollow world, is it not ... one without communication?

There was no looking back as I took ownership of his stasis. I made myself an inward vow to set at least this much right again. Not to make the plight of the great communicator of any less importance but there were more pressing matters to be seen to at this moment.

All is not the same in the Realm of Id. I sought the woman and found her. A giantess even among Tuchuk women reaching across the dimensions of the sky. I had to look up to her to find her. The inky blackness of her hair caught lights of ambers and reds gleaming in the sun that wasn't a sun. It spanned around her head like slithering osts .. no .. like spider's legs. One spider's eye both spoke and heard gaped open. Pulsating. It moved with all of the things unsaid, all that she screamed but no one could hear. I could not hear it either. Silence not of a blissful kind. It hurt to not hear her. The woman's arm, like rows of wagons on the trail of a move, extending its way across the Valley of Shadows. Her fingers like branches of a tree turned upon its side. She was reaching, reaching for the drummer yet not able to touch him.

There where the wagons connected I could see the break, the tongue no longer hitched to the wagon before it. Disconnection. It was clean and precise with only the canvas cover of the next had been ripped. The protrusion had caught against its side, loosening the hide and leaving what was within exposed. I prided myself and chided myself both in an instant. Almost perfect .. but not quite.

Time will make it better.

I could see the break even from this distance. That was where I knew I needed to be so I crawled my way up her fingers then crossed the back of her wrist. The closer I got the greater the roar of the ripped canvas, like the desolate flapping of a herlits wings in motion. It was deafening. The way was narrow from this point on with only margin for one foot in front of the other. I inched my way forward. Spreading myself thin, my back against the rails with fingertips catching in the rough surface, holding on until I could lean out over the abyss ... reaching to make the pieces fit together once more. Then there was that wonderful fluttering echo of a heartbeat beginning to thrum once more.

Time began again and stopped in the same instance.

The moment the channel locks clicked, marking where everything fell into place, I heard the sound of hushed hiss behind me.

Shh.

She.

She did not belong here. Why was she here ... here of all places? The unringed child, innocence personified. Her presence was startling. Precious. Terrifying. Confusing. The sound of her hush crumbled the ledge beneath my feet and I felt myself falling.

Falling head first into the lightning.

At the ihn just before the radiation burned my neck I felt the bronze disc slide across my skin, the tether that held it wrench tight. The heat searing its way across my chest, across my heart and I ... suspended by the one thing I had been unable to leave behind. Pendulum'd at the end of it, swaying in a rhythm of an unsung melody, I could not prevent my looking down into the horrors of the distances.

Motion severed the view below as I felt myself shift. Swung by the symbol that draped from my throat, I was flung like a wet dish rep to the safety of my wagon. Landing hard with a more than audible thunk that shook it on its axles. Before consciousness escaped me I looked into the face of my rescuer, into the white nothings of her sight.

She.

The other She.

Aunt.

I should have foreseen that between the darkness and the light lay the shadows. I had passed every test that had been given me but I had failed in this one in ways no one would or could ever understand.