SAGES: A SPACE-TIME SAGA

We begin at the end of the world. 

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A wind curls around the semi-circular podium, gathering dust and light, swirling into semi-substnace to her left: another presence ready to converse in shimmering time with its lulling music. She barely registers the lyrics under her enthrallment with the song. 

MELLOW:

Melissa, be calm. As promised, we have come. We find this lost one, your Earth, just as you said, soul planetized, stripped and bled in orbit as a slave, spinning out days in place, crying.  Abused, choking, dying. Harmed! Infested! We must act! Take eir life back from the rampant growth that’s run amok. If chance favours luck, we will rid Earth of eir cancer, heal eim, claim eim home. Yet here your species roam, maybe conscious manifestation, so we first take deliberations to test your claim. 

Blooming plumes, both presences grow into view while Melissa watches them, fascinated. Smoke dancing with light; colour twisting with shadows. The more animated they become, the more particles they draw together from the air, creating intricately complex spirals of glittery specks swimming like shoals of fish in a dizzying smoke of constant movement that keeps rhythm with their laguified expressions.

The swish-swoosh-wind of their movements creates a white-noise percussive undercurrent, a tug on the ear, a pattern of thrum. They rise together from either side of her like they’re the genie and she’s the bottle, expanding out and back in, swirling and dancing their air, dust, and vapour trails into an ever-shifting mandala of movement that soon covers the entire ceiling in a masterpiece of beauty-in-motion, a backward waterfall of air currents captured and contained by the walls of the room. 

Melissa can’t look away, but most of the dignitaries remain oblivious, despite the gusts blowing down on them, despite the beauty of Mellow and Brink’s expressive windsong. It’s amazing. She feels absolutely amazed.  Terrified, and amazed. Back when they were still safely far away, these entities treated her to light shows that spanned galaxies, but that wasn’t real, not really, or at least that’s what she’d thought, when they were still just an exercise in imagination. This is something else. Mellow and Brink are embodying the elements directly; they are manifesting on this three dimensional planet using the matter here. This is actually happening. 

They have arrived. 

BRINK:

Hold, hold! No claim! All life here rose in place, races of creatures native to the plane. 

 

 

 

MELLOW

This refrain? Make the case.

It takes all Melissa’s concentration to pull words from the musical intentions flying around, but establishing coherence from those words is another story. She tries to let meaning wash over her even when she can’t make sense.

BRINK:

All and everything here is waste from one soul’s manifested longing for home. Earth’s desperate reaching, self-conscious glomming, just feeble tries for escape gone wrong. Scraped-off spirit. Solid song. Each cell imbued from one source alone.

MELLOW :

Both dwellers and home. And so, even so, they may hold stake. 

 

BRINK –  Overruled! Slaked consciousness subsumes or returns to source in due course of the weather. Earth will only be better, by meaningful measures. Nothing is taken, no balance owed. And so, even so! If conscious, they are killers, failed losers or cruel abusers, at least wasteful users, thus no consideration comes due. The entire question is moot. 

MELLOW :

A branch, not a root. Nothing yet precludes a test.

BRINK :

And Melissa is the best sample?

A swirl of smokey dust winds around Melissa’s head, wrapping itself in a clench that fills her nose and chokes her throat for three full seconds before dissipating. The coughing fit that wracks her body burns her lungs like hot steel wool, leaving her voice hoarse and painful and her eyes, streaming. Her hands involuntarily grasp as she gasps for air. She feels shocked. It’s not that an entity has never hurt her before, but never from the outside, never as an external force. She shouldn’t be facing this alone. Where is her intermediary, her protector? Where is her guardian angel?

MELISSA :

Mav! Where are you? I’m afraid.

She doesn’t really expect an answer, and she doesn’t get one. 

Ribbons of smokey glitter twist together, like snakey ropes hanging down from the overhead swirl, knitting and weaving themselves into something human and familiar emerging from the patterns. Static and shade form a larger-than-life visage as Brink prepares to taunt her moment of weakness.

BRINK:

Are you abandoned, betrayed? And so, even so, debts must be paid. You pretend this is all a surprise, like you haven’t been trading potentials and lives all this time! So the rent comes due, and you whine? 

Pink, white, and green prismic light glint off the air ribbons that spin themselves into Mellow’s embodiment of choice, the bulging eyes and triangular face of a translucent praying mantis, looming in and out of swirling focus. Giant orbs grow to fill half the room, inspecting Melissa like she’s the bug under the microscope.

 MELLOW:

Melissa, know: if conscious life has beneficial control we will not simply roll the weather over, we work together, try to leave you whole. But on the whole, we contend you measure short for such concessions, your apparent consciousness seems simply a reflection, a reflex of Earth’s manifested tension and wish to go home.

MELISSA:

What? 

BRINK:

You are hair growing on Earth’s head. If you dance it is the wind that raises your dead weight. You are polyps, grown legs. Cancerous waste.

MELLOW :

Enough. You don’t need to understand to call that bluff, you only need be something more than Earth’s sluffed-off skin, not just detritus and kin blown asunder, but an actual wonder, matter imbued with life. We have full evidence to contradict the view, but in retort, we present you. 

MELISSA :

Well, shit.

Is she supposed to stand in for some kind of proof in one of their convoluted tests? Without Mav to mediate she has no idea how to parse this. She stands, utterly alone, without protection, at the fucking UN, barely holding on to her senses  Surely this must be a dream, but clearly, it’s not.

First Mellow, then Brink, dissipates face, releasing excess particles in a quiet, dusty rain to the ground. Melissa feels they are losing steam – the thrum of movement slows above, the air thickening rain clouds, their complex patterns congealing more and more into diamond stones up there. As the gathering solid pieces gain weight they fall like little bullets, but instead of hitting anything they burst and scatter in mid-air after only a few feet, snowing dust that blows into the corners and crevices of the floor. Melissa senses that her not-imaginary friends are having trouble corporealizing; holding solid matter is resource-heavy work, even when it’s just particles and vapour on air currents. That’s good, she thinks, or hopes. Maybe we still have time.

One of the dignitaries has stopped struggling and watches Melissa with eyes half closed, trying to see what’s really going on. Another soul in the room who can see something, that’s helpful. Melissa tries to simplify what she’s taken in from the Shakespearean garble of the entities’ rhythmic intentions. She’s pretty much translating for the other woman at the same time as for herself, but editing liberally along the way. She doesn’t owe anyone anything she doesn’t want to share. 

 MELISSA:

Well, neither do I! But, if  Earth is a soul that got stuck out here, in space, solidified, planetized, then we’re just gloms of Earth trying to venture back out into space. Which we did, a long time ago, so that basically worked. But these entities, Mellow and Brink, they figure if they change the weather and kills us that’s okay, since we’re really just bits of Earth , anyway, like the grass or soil.  

Sages continues

Sages continues

Sages continues