Infinite ecstasy. A new canticle heralds the dawn of a new circle. We wander, lost, through the forgotten creation. Neither of the two seas lives. We have forgotten how to walk, where we are walking to, convinced that we had followed a light which, in truth, had always remained fixed upon our backs. We kept searching for it in the darkness cast by the palms of our hands, by the air itself. At last, innocent as we were, we noticed an inscription:
Stop crying.
Imprinted vertically upon the Creator's arm, which only moments before had been clean. The characters and lines were disgustingly human, forming something akin to a crack that polluted the limb deemed sacred by the nameless one. The small, mysterious little man had already vanished into the hollow of the wrist. It was all some sort of physiological reaction.
Long and slow were the seconds that passed as the angel vainly attempted to decipher the message. The temptation to touch the arm, to examine those strange yet somehow familiar characters more closely, suddenly made itself felt. The Creator did not seem to pull away. That black disk beneath the hood reflected the sky above, erasing its mosaic shades.
Stop crying.
Stop crying.
top crying.
op crying.
crying.
A miserable drop had fallen at the beginning of the sentence, censoring the first two words and leaving room for the last. What it described was, as it happened, taking place within the young angel. But it was happening against his will.
From the very beginning, it was not so much the final word, the verb, that uncannily matched his sudden weeping, but rather the colour of that drop, and of the tiny cascade that slowly trickled downward, concealing the letters like an avalanche. He knew that shade far too well.
It brought only one individual to mind: the saviour of the abyss, whose blurred image, preserved by memory, had not the slightest intention of abandoning him. And why, now, did that very same liquid refuse to stop streaming from the cheeks of the winged creature? Even its scent came to overpower the now-familiar, habitual fragrance of the Creator's mint. No matter how many hours one breathed it in, there was no way to grow weary of it. A new fragrance, renewing itself automatically with each passing second, capable of altering the very perceptions of the olfactory bulbs. Yet to the angel, it was utterly repulsive for reasons beyond all logic.
Even after rubbing his cheeks, leaving glittering specks where wet patches had been upon his skin, he could not stop smelling that unbearably delicious scent. He felt mocked. Mud was far better. The earth that had created him was far better. Or rather, with which the Creator had conceived him, for that was his true and primal essence.
And so he seized handful after handful and smeared them over his arms, legs, and body. Wherever fists of soil accidentally fell upon the clouds of his light garment, they slipped away in little bouncing leaps toward the ground below. How delicious was that mighty roar that burst violently onto the scene, and how delighted were the three little creatures who suddenly emerged from the darkness beneath the Creator's hood. The sensation of still belonging to a group was not an unfamiliar one.
Had a new mother-flame therefore been born, albeit in such an unusual form?
How horrible, and at the same time alluring, was the little dance the three men began in perfect synchrony, dancing upon the hard, smooth surface of the dark glass turned toward the heavens. They would often kick as though running across a thin thread of water, trying to make the invisible drops suspended in midair dance along the line of their arms. And the angel could not help but imitate his new brothers, following their every movement, sometimes making mistakes, at other times copying them perfectly.
"You knew, didn't you? That I am a part of you? Come closer, closer, closer! For I am the reason there is nothing to be done. The reason things go the way they go?"
A song devoid of solemnity, rhythm, or melody. A simple line, extinguished by the bizarre dance of the three, soon to become four little creatures.
"Then walk with us, son of the Coward, upon legs plastered in the mire. Cry out with us while swollen tonsils refuse to let even a thread of air pass through. Write with that ink you know so well, the one that gives off no scent, devoid of taste. Raise your eyes toward the surface of our black waters, for there is no way to reach them, not even with thought alone. For what does it matter... what is the use? Look upon that single red thing abandoned there, and circle it. Let it fall! Make it rain upon us!"
It would have been impossible to stop the filthy angel, in that state which was far more horrifying than the aged form in which he had first come into being. And now, it was this very thing that he had begun to loathe above all else and everyone.
"For what does it matter... what is the use?"
His spinning upon himself, in the midst of the strange dance, became increasingly frequent, until it was the only movement that defined him. His eyes were turned toward an above that corresponded perfectly with the below. And so, why did the above possess that single, inexplicable red speck which the below so envied? Then one had to do as had been done with the two seas, with or without God's permission.
"FOR WHAT DOES IT MATTER... WHAT IS THE USE?"
Who said the angel could not make it fall?
"NOW WATCH, YOU DEAD OF THE TWIN KINGDOMS, FOR THAT WHICH IS RED SHALL PAINT THE WALLS OF THIS SCENE. THERE! THE POINT HAS BECOME A SERPENT DEVOURING ITS OWN TAIL! AND AS IT CONTINUES TO DEVOUR ITSELF, IT STRETCHES INTO OTHER PLACES. RAISE YOUR ARMS TOWARD THE HEAVENS, AND WELCOME THE SCALES IT HAS RESERVED FOR US, FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE NEW AND FINAL MOTHER-FLAME. NO... MOTHER EARTH!"
Each of them rejected the once-consoling warmth of the angel's solitary swim through the midst of the burning ocean. His pose, forever rotating upon itself, resembled a diamond, whose upper and lower vertices were represented respectively by the tip of his index finger and the tip of his great toe. His wings, one hundred feathers lost, flapped arrogantly against every breath of heat.
A barren land was born, its celestial boundaries marked by a blood-red hue near the horizon, fading ever further, first becoming purple, and finally merging into the blackness above. In such a place, the stars would only have stained the horrific spectacles that would soon be born there, just as the gold of the bonsai, no longer visible in the distance, would have done.
But... where had they all gone?