Elemental

 Everything is slick, everything is wet, beautiful and vivid in its sheen and the firelight as water tumbles down black stone steps. The illumination dances. Throws phantom red flame over everything that recedes and redoubles crazily. Familiar hands reach out from the passage way, pulling me in. An embrace. Her skin is ivory-pale, smooth as the expertly masoned stone we pass as we go down and down like the very Earth is being unraveled. Pages of history roll pass. 

I hear Warren behind me, praying. Something inside me wants to laugh. He is at the place of the Gods themselves, I think, and he prays to one dead on a cedar! Suggestions of forms spill in and out of the pitch blackness, given shape by our passing torchlight. Human voices, human pleasures, fill the air in their familiar musk and murk and draw. Tangled bodies against rock, metal, glass. 

I have walked countless pilgrimages. To the Rock in its far off desert, to the River of Tears nestled amongst so many fierce mountains, down and across Hagira herself where the fires beneath make the land brighter than the sky and sun. My feet are the worn, battered, hardy soles of someone willing to walk wherever salvation or ascendancy may await. My hands are dark and pocked by ferocious needling insect bites which marked my transition from boy to man. One of my eyes is crimson as wine and blood, it’s pupil twinkling with a gilded cornea. I gave birth once to a thing hard and skeletal and chitinous, a beautiful terrible child that for seven grueling months nursed itself by the very marrows of my spine. Even now, this close to infinity, I hunch with the memory of that pain. 

Abruptness makes me stumble, fall. Skittering to my knees over wet, worn rock. Warm to the touch. Like something alive. Our guide says something guttural and it sounds like so many words in a prayer being strangled, harshly. Warren is silent. My singular-seeing eye tells my mortal brain that the room is vast, that the walls and ceiling are made into sketched abstractions by so much distance. My singular-seeing eye tells my mortal brain that there, here, in this place that unmakes and tangles quivering senses— something is before us. 

Ice. A glacier, a chilling frozen thing splintered into impossibly fine shapes and geometric forms. Rings encircle rings, banners and kites of thin frigid substance layered atop each other with the grace and simplicity of holy texts. Beneath the surface are huge, yawning things. Dark. Mammoth. 

An intention unfurls far into the essence of who I am.  I suddenly understand the hapless fish in their tiny watery kingdoms, overwhelmed by huge disembodied hands sinking upon them to snatch and steal. Tears freeze on my lids, my cheeks. 

The Voice calls. Catastrophic as northern winds. And in the dark beneath the Earth, I can do nothing but listen.