A Bit of Black Fire (2)

As we followed the powerful One, others Ones passed us, moving in the opposite direction.  They were distinctly younger looking.  Upon Their backs, tall packs bulged with a wealth of something globular.  As They moved by us, They made sure to nod politely to the One who led us and the guide who led me.  Me, though, they ignored utterly.  The passageway elbowed to the left, and as we took the turn, another large One, nearly identical to the One who had waited for us behind the last door, confronted us.  Behind him, I could see that there was another chamber, and the peculiar black fire that illuminated the tunnel also lit the Hall.  Unlike the tunnel in which the four of us stood, however, the Hall was alive with it.  The gently rounded walls crawled with it, the popping and crackling drumming a cadence to which time is made.  Sometimes a wild vine of it forked from the wall like a black solar flare, cutting through the expanse of the chamber like a bolt of lightning.  I could hear an odd whirring emanating from the unseen floor of the chamber.  Curious to see the source of the noise, I moved as if the pass the One that guarded the entrance.  He held an appendage out, stopping me.  Irritated, I feinted to his left, and again tried to pass him on the right.  He impassively stopped me again.  "Wait," Virgil instructed me sardonically.  "No human has ever been allowed into the Hall of Time.  A One will bring you that for which you came."  With that, I settled back unto my heals, and resolved to bide my time in agonized frustration.  Sometimes, to linger is to die slowly.

After a few minutes, or hours, or eternities–it was tough to tell in that place–I felt a slight dampness at my feet.  Looking down, I was alarmed to see a trickle of water slowly circle my feet, soaking them, before entering the chamber before me.  It disappeared from view.  A few minutes, or hours, or eternities later, I heard a sizzle, like water turning to steam, and an inhuman scream.  A One, I imagined.  A thin plume of smoke emerged from the distant ground below, curling in and out.  Quite suddenly, a One appeared before me, having, presumably, climbed up the staircase that led to the unseen floor below.  Hurrying to the guard One that had blocked my entrance, he handed him something.  I could not see what it was, as the One blocked my vision.  Virgil spoke.  "This is where we part ways, Traveler, though I expect that we may meet again.  Your return trip will not be as easy as the trip here."  The guard One turned toward me, holding out a tightly woven, black basket.  In the basket, small spheres of polished black flame glowed.  "Here are your scrips and scraps of time," Virgil continued, "the reason for which you came.  Insert them into your day wisely, and remember the words I shared with you as we entered the riverbed."  He removed the cowl from his face, and the specter of his appearance nearly made me faint, if such a thing was possible, there.  Tattoos of stylized vines, like the ones that adorned his hands, curled around his sunken eyes, his dessicated nose, the thin, bloodless cushions of his lips, and his purple skin glowed nearly incandescent in the eerie lighting.  "I’d advise you to run, but I’ve the suspicion you might be swimming."  He left the way he came, his steps meticulously avoiding the trickle of water that concentrated in the bottom of the tunnel.  The guard One placed the basket at my feet.  I held some of the spheres of time against the side of the basket, in order that I could place the plant at the bottom.  When I let the spheres go, they fell back and settled around the base of the plant.  Standing up, I picked up the basket.  I was a little shocked to find out just how heavy it was; I couldn’t tell if it was the plant, the time, or if the weight was more than the sum of its parts.  Virgil’s reminder to hurry fell on deaf ears.  I wish I had listened.  Armed with all that new found time, however, I did not feel any sense of urgency.

I gathered the memories under my left arm and held the basket in my right hand, and headed back the way I’d came.  Hearing light footfalls behind me, I figured the One who had been guarding the door was following me back to his station.  As we made our way, what had been a little trickle of water became a toe-deep flood.  Still, I felt no alarm.  After all, it was only toe-deep; a minor irritation that had yet to become a real problem.  The door beckoned me forward, and feeling an invigorating sense of victory, I jogged up to it.  I had a moment of panic when I realized that I didn’t have a method to open it.  No handles.  Scratching at where the leaves joined, I hoped to gain a finger of purchase against the weight, even though I knew it too heavy for me to budge it.  I sensed the One looming over me, then, and intuiting what might happen next, I scrambled back around him.  The One put his hand against the door, and they abruptly swung inward, admitting a waist deep torrent of water.  It bowled me off of my feet.  I frantically attempted to regain my footing while keeping the memories, love, and time together.  The current slowed and the depth grew more shallow as the water settled, and I was superlatively relieved to know that I’d kept all of my possessions gathered and intact.  The water was knee deep, now, and subtly tugging me backward.  I pressed forward.  By the time I arrived back at the door, it was thigh deep.  The effort of slogging through had stolen some of the air from my lungs, and the muscles in my legs were burning.  Still, the basket was buoyant, meaning I could let the water carry a lot of its weight. 

The One was still standing guard, seemingly impervious to the water that was only up to the bottom of Its knee.  He paid me no mind as I struggled through the doorway.  The Nursery of Love, far below, languished beneath a hundred feet of water, not visible through the murky depths.  I carefully stepped off of the ledge and went down the first few steps, until I was neck deep in the lukewarm, nascent lake.  I placed the memories atop the surface, and was relieved to see that they also floated.  Putting the basket filled with time and the plant upon the memories, as if a castaway on a raft, I pushed off from the steps.  Like a beaver pushing a stick across a river to its dam, I shepherded the love, memory, and time across the partially submerged basilica.  My kicking legs and pumping arms occasionally threw water up and into the basket, inadvertently feeding the plant.  It also struck the fiery time, but it small enough increments that it did not affect it.  By the time I reached the far end of the basilica and the landing that awaited me there, the water level had reached my chest.  Although I knew that I was traveling incrementally upward, the water was deepening too quickly.  The strain of fighting through a current pushing against my chest was too much, particularly when I reached mouth of the passageway onward; with asigh, I removed a sphere of time, and dropped it.  The water sizzled furiously, and the steam it turned into was so thick, I had trouble seeing.  It clung to my eyelashes and hair, condensing into droplets that fell back into the stream around me.  Even so, I knew that the level had lowered, burned back to a few inches below my waist.

I hurried on.  I leaned forward, pushing off my planted foot, completely throwing myself into my exertions.  The brick-lined tunnel–canal, really–buzzed with its visceral light, and the murky water looked like red wine as it flowed around me.  I don’t know how long I pushed toward the next chamber, but I do know this: accepting that I could move much faster if I lowered the water even lower, thus spending more time upfront but saving it in the long run, I used four in quick succession, and evaporated the water down to my ankles.  The steam rose in billowing and buffeting curtains, a waterfall flipped upside-down and pushing at the sky.  I couldn’t see.  So I pushed into the white madness, blind as love itself.  My heavy footfalls sprayed water against the kiln-fired walls, the memories again tucked beneath my left arm and basket secure in my right.  As I hastened onward, I absentmindedly noticed the shapes that coalesced and swirled all about me.

I nearly drowned when I ran off of the ledge in the next chamber.  Fighting my way back to the surface, I glanced around.  With cold despair, I noted the vines that covered the inside of the basilica.  I had become lost, blinded by the steam, and somehow ran back in the Nursery of Love.  I whipped my eyes around furiously, looking for the memories and basket that I had lost during my unplanned immersion.  Moving with the current, they were pushing back toward the Crucible of Time.  I freestyle swam toward them, gathering them back together, and knifed through the water back toward the Studio of Memory with speed born of frightened desperation.  I regained the landing, and was worried to feel water back up to my chest.  I spent two spheres of time, returning the water level back to around mid-thigh.  The steam was still thick, but I could see.  The plant in the basket uncoiled, no longer hindered by the ballast of the time.  Indeed, unhindered by the black globes, it had spread out, its leaves uncurled, and a bit of color was pushing at the point of the bud and along the edges of its leaves.  The water burnt to mist seemed to be feeding it; the rough flesh of it had thickened, softened; the plant was swallowing time and spitting out flowers.

As I hurried to regain the lost territory, I knew that I would never regain the lost time.  On every instance that the level reached my belly button, I dropped another sphere, and kept moving.  I wanted to keep the clouds of steam behind me, and the feeling that festered in the pit of my stomach as each sphere disappeared to nothing was suppurating my soul.  The One who had spoken to me on my original passage through was still in his cubbyhole.  As he watched me struggle past his little byway, he broke out into wild laughter.  It wasn’t mirthful, or particularly cruel; just a creature laughing, reveling in the absurd.  "Swim," he chortled, "if you don’t want to drown."  I remembered my passage through, when he’d told me, "Run, if you don’t want to swim."  If only I had listened, or even believed.  When I reached the Studio, I, with courage born of terror, did not consider the overwhelming task before me.  I simply went at it, gasping for air as I floundered toward the opening across the basilica.  When I put my feet down at the top of a submerged staircase I could not see, I made a difficult decision.  Turning back toward the Studio, I heaved five spheres back into the cavernous room.  The water descended back past the landing, and, once again, it was only my toes in the water.

I ran.  I knew that I had one sphere left, one little scrip and scrap of time, and I was determined to keep it, to share it with her.  Sprinting up the passageway, feeling my knees, and then my thighs, and then my chest fight against the rising tide, I remembered that this leg of the trip  had been the longest.  As I entered the final chamber, wherein the river had burst from its banks, I was swimming.  I knew that the water had risen too far past the entrance for me to escape.  As I removed the final sphere from the basket, I recalled the words of Virgil as we entered the dry riverbed an eternity before.  All of this time spent searching for time might have been time enough.  I considered the love and memories I had amassed in my travails, the esemplastic jewels that shine brightest when put against the forge fires of time spent, time treasured, time lamented.  I knew them beautiful gifts, wrought without thought, frustrating machines devoid of the single piece that might make them function in the manner in which I intended.  And damn that half-man, that inhuman creature, that dastardly yet intrepid guide who had led me through the innards of the self to the epicenter of the central tragedy:  there is never time enough.