@flashfictionfridayofficial
'Till Human Voices Wake Us' by @jack-of-crowns
An ocean; shimmering and silent, hard as diamond.
Their limbs; infinitely heavy, yet strangely hollow.
Leigh's bodies are her planes, whomping upon topographical seas only millimeters deep. Herselves remember the feel of the surf back on Earth; magnetic manipulation of a neutron star's crust is not that release into a rumbling conversation between cyclic rhythms of water and salt. It is a high-frequency shriek, a siren song as the mass of a billion suns grudgingly fractures, yielding secretive treasures to the glim lures of an operator's hooks.
But that is why she came to Calvera, because Earth's blighted oceans could no longer pacify her soul, could no longer drown out the grief from helplessly listening as everyone she had ever loved was swept away by the ravages of irreversible time.
Here in the Tombs, floating weightless in tanks of cold mercury, herselves together at once with ghosts and Glinter's guiding minds, a timeless now of harmonic frames; here she can lose herselves amid the shudders of shí kōng, let the neutrino blooms spread through the spirit's marrow, at peace as waves of stillness in the wake of that passage recrystallize the crust from strangelet extraction.
In the wénfáng of her mother's house, that was the room she first dreamed of somewhens and wheres.
Only after Leigh finished with all of the day's lessons would she be allowed into the study, and always found herself drawn to a camphor wood chest that sat underneath the threshold window. The lacquered reliefs caught a late afternoon glow, and her mind dazed as shadows danced upon the intricate figures carved into the central panel.
"The Eight Immortals cross the sea," and the lilt in her mother's voice every time she recited the first half of that chengyu was forever etched in memory, surely as the words she completed the saying with.
"Each reveals their divine powers." Then Leigh would tell her mother all that she had learned that day. If the glass-off in Liu'ao Bay was favourable, it was time for what they called the 'Fifth Art' - surfing.
The imagery of windless calm upon the East China Sea, the jing of patient waiting upon the next wave.
That was Calvera, a dying god dreaming in the depths of spacetime; quiescent crust belying the unfathomable forces beneath. That was why everyone came; to ride upon the ripples of dreams.
Or to not drown in the undertow of nightmares.
"Of paramount importance, hold focus on those mnemonic anchors, the ones with strong positive attachments. Operators, the urge to decohere under a neutron star's gravitational fields will be stronger than any noetic state of consciousness you've ever entered. Remember, 'Yi Dao, Qi Dao'."
The words from the station's chief artificer echo; how the best melds are a dance on the edge of ego dissolution. The electromagnets breaching the crust respond to an even flow of direction; pull too hard and the mind will shatter, too loose and self identity is cognitively crushed under near-infinite density.
The first shift; her heartbeat is Calvera's rotational spin, she tries to visualize catching a break but the sensation is more akin to the feeling of being ragdolled and never reaching the shore. Long rods of strange matter rise through the bubbling superfluids of the inner core, shivering up through the fractured surface in vibrant kaleidoscopic auras.
She has to keep herselves from hearing her parents' message from that final fatal day on the xiāo xi, keep herselves from hearing their voices in the torsional screams of magnetic flux as Glinter tears apart the dead sun beneath them into a neutrino haze. She holds fast to Immortals in the light of a threshold window, and lets go of the day Blightfall came to Lui'ao Bay, bringing death in a choke of red algae.
The light of distant constellations are the notes of a recursive script, celestial sheet music bent into jagged halos by the weight of a god no longer dying, but being reborn; gravity's adoration as sung by the dreams of all the Leighs at work in all their reveries.
