4.1 KiB
title, date, draft, type
| title | date | draft | type |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Day of Spirits | 2026-04-16T20:38:09-07:00 | true | thevoid |
The humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up again. From a distance, vortices of the spirits' malleable confetti travel along plains like benevolent drunken djinns. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at each other in passing, or hold each other in waltzes often perturbed by the breeze. Big luminescent white eyes take in with wonder and awe the only day they are ever to see.
Among them, Hex. An exception within the colorful milieu, he remembers, if vaguely, the mornings that precede this one. He feels an unbroken thread of identity dissolved somewhere within his red-pink body.
His life proves to be not quite that lonely. It's true, spirits disappear at dusk, bursting like soap bubbles while the last rays of the setting sun still caress from behind horizon-clouds the darkening sky. However, it's true as well that they are born each morning, leaping with passing fish out of streams and accumulating in drops of dew. An apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and a spirit from the landscape that gives it rise. Again and again Hex encounters similar motifs.
Take Molly, who hangs now with Hex from a grapevine, the both of them agitated by the wind and decidedly resembling pennants on some carnival string. The first Molly he met, who serves now for him as a departure point for a whole lineage of kindred spirits, was a deep red. She was born during a Fire. That day, dark overburdened clouds that covered the sky like dense wool unleashed after much unwanted loitering their promised downpour, and with it streaks of lightning. The flames spread quickly through the birch forest beneath. The Fire raged for days, sucking in its gluttony the surrounding atmosphere and spewing it upwards mingled with ash. A haze of purple, pink, orange and yellow replaced the thunderclouds.
Hex was swept that day by the Fire's incessant breath towards the birches. Flames danced among charred silhouettes that used to be trees. A great many spirits were being born, sizzling out of ember-glowing stumps and erupting in geysers above the flickering dance to drift upwards like hot-air balloons. Molly was among them.
They sat together on a ledge. By some trick of their geometry, the surrounding cliffs gave them refuge from the wind. Hex sensed for what felt like the first time the weight of his body, a sort of permanence. He wanted Molly to understand. He kept stumbling, espousing one flawed analogy after another, sketches of a painting that he didn't know how to finish, unable to get across the feeling, no, "comfort" isn't quite right, nor is "boldness", nor... She might have vaguely understood.
Molly herself wanted weightlessness; he saw the spark in her eye when she talked of waking up in the arms of a great column of air, carried up, towards the ash-filled sky, one of the first that day to glimpse the whole ball of the sun. She spoke heatedly of the warmth and excitement, but also of the danger, of the many ways in which the Fire was capable of reclaiming the lives it just spawned. That's what she was doing, her face lit from behind him by the setting sun, when the first Molly popped out of existence.
For days the Fire and its remnants precipitated reddish spirits among whom Hex often heard tales of burning, rising, destruction. Thoughts of the Fire were in the air, exchanged by passerby spirits carried in its currents for brief moments along similar trajectories. He found a Molly and reminded her of her of the day before, and saw that same spark in her eyes. They spent that day rolling like tumbleweeds through a nearby valley, talking in voices oscillating with their rotation.
The fire, though burning still now with the peat from a swamp into which the birches receded, was becoming forgotten. Gusts of wind swept trees that remained.
- drunk djinns: dust devils in Blood Meidian.