Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Power pumps through his lungs, to his heart, into his arteries, back through his veins with saturation not sampled in Earth’s troposphere. Pain fades. Atlas sifts the dust from his hair and again laughs.

  His breath cuts and smile falls. He thinks of Gene and Samuel. He whirls his head around, land and sky only, limbs stiffening, brows tensed, and walks onward.

  He plans his return.

  Insidious, the nagging pocket of emptiness embedded into Atlas’s chest since his arrival unveils his attention’s second omission. He stops. Then flips around and scans the dirt from feet to island edge for his golden coin; but wind’s swells roil all northeast into a copper mist. He braces against the opposing batter and sways with wind and pulse, gaze probing the dust storm for one floral fairy ring far too far for recognition. He turns around again. He bites down, peers over his shoulder, budges toward his portal spot that may or may not hold the only true gold in Sidera. You did not keep your coin close on descent, Atlas of Taurus. He exhales and surrenders to the gust pushing him southwest.

  Leaving the coin lost, he walks after the coolness stroking his knuckles. His only two doorways off Sidera—Pylon and the coin’s—are shut, and his two possessions—the coin and Presage—lost, though something of his driving flecked flurries soothes wider his airways.

  Atlas swings loose his arms and legs and runs with wind and doesn’t ask why. He shakes his head and hands. Vaults a rendweed patch. His charge weakens, stride quivers. Each step, Sidera’s mass, its underbelly lengthens and deepens and ravines’ downward reach strains harder in scraping sky.

  Atlas’s toe catches a crack: a centimeter-tall cliffside encircling a meter-wide island, crevices too shallow to show sky; and he stumbles. He steadies and sucks breath through his nose. A new scent touches it.

  Crispness and grass’s bend under heel and its sweet juices scuffed free, wind curling upward their petrichor aroma, decay. Atlas’s forehead crumples. He sniffs. Something potent, lying in Elisium’s soot, tinge of metal—

  We go wandering.

  Kilometers ahead, a stone-strung twine of haze braids up the sapphire expanse. Its snaking shadow pollutes sky too sacred, taints the blue that, apart from smokestack spouts, hasn’t changed shade since Atlas’s first cycle.

  At night.

  He jogs a wavering path, chin lifted, eyes narrowed, and angles his hands after winds that shift; another current streams in from the distance. His gut knots. He’s before smelled this smoke but never seen it, not until recently. He always stood at the back of pyric ceremonies.

  And are consumed.

  Atlas thrusts to a sprint for the charcoal on horizon. Its upper white and sagging gray billow bulging puffs that ride the gust that sprints toward him. The wind driving him wilts. The wind ahead ejects iron and sulfur and rubber meat on slabs of leather burning in gunpowder and caves of corrosion that bake crusting, molding molten, rotten, ancient, bloated death. Atlas inhales and hands melted under laborhouse’s binding tar slip down his throat and smear his insides black and blood.

  He heaves midstride. Nothing comes. Stomach shrunken to two fingers’ width, a place for saliva, he grabs his center and staggers toward the scent. Smoke climbs. Darkens. His eyes reflect panoramic screens of pollution spinning light’s veil, devouring his charge, defiling his sky.

  Atlas runs, coughs, pulse and eardrums synched. Sidera discovers dusk as her unsetting sun falls behind a sheet. He forgets where he is and what his feet do, until he reaches a stone wall marking the end of his island, props his elbows on its rib-high lip, and heaves himself over a mainland edge. The next wall he sees is Sideran-made. Misted red flashing on their brink, black and buttressed walls burgeon from their golden stage and slice up a filmy backdrop, through the smoke. They near, grow. They grow to sink Atlas’s heart soon remembering the slope of walls’ vertical braces, the height of their uppermost ridge. His knees shake. Miasma licks his lip. The walls widen, focus, stretch to contain buildings and courtyards, and their constellation blooms flames sixteen persons high that exhale Elisium.

  Eden. Atlas blinks gray tears and sees her hands exploding resthouses orange. But he imagines next her body squeezing through his coin’s portal, trailing at his heels, and shifts his jaw. She couldn’t have followed.

  Heat rams his face and sweats his skin. He leaps for the gates at the constellation’s northern entrance, their hinges bobbing into detail. He wheezes. Feet thud ground and lungs fill and sputter and Atlas’s grimace skews when he envisions the on-shift Imperium century—eighty to one hundred guards—letting slip a constellation fire.

  A couple dozen meters from the fences, Atlas bends his elbow around his nose and mouth and, ash raining into tear ducts, hair, nasal passages, skirts the constellation. His vision fogs, head spins. His legs tire.

  Screams.

  A female’s. A male’s. Atlas stiffens and three other cries peal a chill up his back. Blackened honey, wet rust, carcass under baking sun slither into his nostrils and he tastes every morsel. He swims streaks through soot, touches the constellation wall, but cringes, retracts and instead grabs in a fist the heat hopped from wall to hand. The next screams clawing from the gates sound their drought in garbles.

  Smoke sears his eyes. Atlas squeezes them shut and gropes for gate hinges, sweeping his hands over hot bumps and bolts that keep his touch light. His fingers bob across a vertical gap. He steps and a new wall bends his fingers twenty degrees toward himself and he pivots and follows it. Dropping his right, he picks up pace alongside his trailing hand. The metal ends; his left hand falls through air. He opens his eyes, crinkles them narrow, bares his teeth as he centers before a funnel of heat fluxing from the constellation’s gates.

  They’re open. The northern gates hang wide open and a spark in Atlas’s breast reminds he’s never seen such a dream; but a stone in his stomach reminds again he’s never seen such a nightmare.

  He gasps. Crouches. Shuffling through the entrance, Atlas peers forward and glances for the deep maroon of Imperium jackets. White flakes flutter. Black smoke reels. A silhouette darts and departs and three more whoosh past his shoulders. Atlas lunges through snow he’s never seen and grabs the next blur of a silhouette’s arm. He yanks the male citizen toward himself, coughing clearer his throat’s rubble, thinner the cloud clouding vision.

  Atlas yells, “What happ—”

  The Sideran shrugs him off. He runs past and into cloud.

  Paces to Atlas’s left, a female voice quavers. “Assist us. Save us.” She sobs. “Absolute.”

  Atlas turns and squints at the walls’ interior. Their bands leather, white tunics washed gray, a line of two dozen visible citizens cries and mumbles and shrinks into the fences. They sit in the dirt, their backs against the walls, the closest an arm’s length from the gates. Atlas looks to his right. A similar line borders the fence right of the gates. Atlas steps toward the sobbing female. She and two others look up, to the gates, out into cleaner air, and bow their heads again.

  “Absolute,” the female rocks back and forth, “come. Send your Imperium, Absolute.”

  “What constellation is this?” Atlas asks.

  She mumbles into her knees.

  Atlas bends down and yells, “Is this Equuleus? What constellation is this?”

  “Corvus,” she says.

  “Where do the flames—” Atlas chokes. “What is happening?”

  “It is the,” she bursts a sob, “persons of fire. The enemy. The ones called ‘Accenda.’ ”

  Atlas inhales a sharp lungful and coughs it back up. “Did you see a female with white hair?”

  “Absolute. Absolute, save us.”

  “Did you—where are all the guards?”

  The citizen claws the specks clumping pallor into her hair’s brunette.

  Atlas sighs. “Leave.” He raises his voice, turns to the right line of citizens, whips back to the left, and throws every molecule from his lungs. “Leave! Go. Run out the gates—they are unguarded and open. You will asphyxiate here.
”

  The female citizen buries her head in her arms and breaks into cries. She and the others stay.

  Jaw clenched, Atlas turns from them and jogs into the constellation. Walls of black steel recede as walls of gray close their talons around Atlas’s back, replace all, bury shape and light and cognition. He presses heel to ground and breathes solids.

  Orange flashes to the right. He angles. Tucking his chin, Atlas pulls his tunic collar up over his mouth and jogs toward the light. The orange grows, glows a bright yellow-white base, and he grimaces and recoils. The distance between him and the fire distorts under fog that, stealing depth perception, clothes three-dimensional images two-dimensional. A citizen’s silhouette flashes as it passes through the smoke shroud, wafting hotter the swelter it flees. Atlas outstretches his hand.

  He channels a gust. It strikes away a few meters’ smoke and clears a path. Depth perception returns. Atlas jogs down his path, copper grass under slag underfoot, flames in distance, and scoops fresher air from below the knee into another current riving firebreath.

  He trips. Grunting, he catches himself and looks at the mound that struck his foot:

  Reddened coal lumped into shoulders and back and neck, slumped against another mass splaying two logs—peeling layers, flaking fringes—Atlas blinks. The bodies still smolder. He breathes their clothing and skin no longer attached.

  Hand to his mouth, Atlas contorts his face and turns. He trudges into a heat wave that blisters his cheek. He ducks under a flame riding airborne debris, steps over a patch of ground fire, looks to their source: meters ahead, a restless, blinding flower twirls red petals into sky. He lifts his head to the fire worlds above it.

  In either direction, the blossoms burn halfway across the constellation. Wind whispers on orange waterfalls whipping pops and cracks and specters that burst bright the last of their life before gliding into purgatorial mist. Sidera must float upside-down; Atlas, the walls, dimension hang off the ground and only fire, so effortlessly fluid, pours to gravity’s pull.

  The flames roar. Atlas centers his eyes on their bulk.

  They bloom from a structure he knows. Lying diagonally, its foundation uprooted, one of two portico pillars dissects the house’s entrance and sinks a crater into the LABORADOMVS carved into the door frame. Both pillars bathe in flame. Charred clay brick and cement mortar span a rectangular structure the size of ten of Gene’s apartment buildings and Atlas stares at a laborhouse. His eyes dart between the fire bulbs bursting from sunslots high in its walls. The brick doesn’t catch, but the house’s bowels spew flame out every open crevice and window, fed by unbroken winds skating through architectural perforation, like an expertly crafted oversized draft furnace. Squinting over the fallen pillar, Atlas glimpses some type of weed or stalk before it flies out the door, toward the roof, where it burns to cinders midair.

  His brow furrows. His lungs shrivel. Yanking his collar off his mouth, Atlas gasps and hacks up soot. He cups together his quaking hands, draws a charge, and throws a gust at his feet. It explodes out and upward his clothing, hair, the smoke and ash flapping to flight. He breathes; his coughs soften. His view lengthens.

  The laborhouse fire spills out its portico ten doors wide and washes over courtyard grass. It creeps up the walls of Corvus’s supply, toward storage. On the laborhouse’s far side, flame brushes the education house.

  A shriek erupts, stabs Atlas. Behind the laborhouse’s pillar, among the flames, a female screams and blisters her front, chars her arms grasping for the triangular gap at the entrance’s top corner: large enough for a child, high as her head. The pillar could roll free, Atlas thinks, but not by hand. He snaps straight his arm and throws a current twenty meters before his mind finishes. Wind smacks the pillar. It fans its flames double their original size and they devour the space, the female. Her cries quiet. The pillar lies unmoved.

  Fingers convulsing, Atlas pulls his hand into himself and gapes. He jolts with his pulse. He glares into smoke swirling about his knees.

  Something smacks his shoulder. A figure staggers past it, looks over his own shoulder, and glimpses Atlas. Black tears streaking his face, the citizen whimpers and coughs and, tripping on his twist, collapses into himself, onto ground. He reaches to roll off his back.

  Atlas crouches at his side. Eyes wide, soot tucked in their wrinkles, the citizen sees him and chokes. He claws dirt and writhes, drags himself away from Atlas.

  “Absolute,” Atlas coughs, “is myth. He is not coming to save you. Cover your nose and mouth.”

  The citizen chucks a handful of dirt at Atlas’s eyes.

  Atlas winces away. He rubs his eyes but dirt and soot combine to plunge deeper their desert journey into his sockets. His tunic collar droops as both his hands retreat to his eyes. Two kneaded revolutions, and his groan cuts short; spine to feet, he shudders another round of hacking.

  His molars grind their final frustration. Blinded, biting restrained his coughs, he bares his palms ungluing from his eyes and cocks back his shoulders and arms. He waves them forward.

  Wind streams through his blood, out his fingers, over the citizen, into what would be sky. His stream gushes into a cone that snatches ash in its fanning stretch, and pollution begins migration from the laborhouse. Atlas tenses his hands. He revolves his wrists and pivots, chin to the fence line lining sky’s waist, fingers as hooks off his forward palms, and spirals his torrent over the courtyard. Smaller flames perish; larger flowering climbers bellow their perennial claim as they brandish oxygen-fed eruptions out sunslots and crumbling brick. Though the fire fattens, windswept chill relieves Atlas’s scarlet skin. The laborhouse burns; the constellation clears. The prickling under Atlas’s arteries pounds pupils’ dilation and vision’s remedy and churns an air ocean wide as the constellation, tall toward sun. He holds his breath and flourishes his fingers. The wind booms louder than fiery roars and sweeps gray murk out of constellation’s bowl, carving a channel over fences that natural breeze follows. The vermillion serpents remaining slither away from the courtyard and gates and for the western walls, chasing the temptation of planar winds beyond. Soot spills the journey Atlas leapt weeks past. He sucks his first real breath, and clean air swells his lungs.

  He drops his arms and spins around.

  Fleshy lumps scatter the courtyard. Embers singe grass patches. A haze drifts dust enough to lighten the far walls’ black a shade; but sight, light, breath again traverse the constellation. The laborhouse’s flames continue; but breeze carries them from the education house, where the children no doubt obey one unspoken command in anchored cowers. Its classic rotunda walls smoke but stand.

  Supply catches fire. Atlas scuffs a shoe and waves it off. He turns toward the citizen on the ground. Twenty—thirty—more gather behind him, all in white tunics and pants and common citizen leather bands.

  “There’s no guarantee of prolonged containment.” Atlas hacks loose a throaty clump and hurls his finger at the gates. “Go! Leave! By the Imperium.”

  He falls to his knees. The charge under skin slips out his mouth with dizzying finality and leaves his muscles to atrophy. Body detaches from command. Atlas lifts a hand off the ash he sags toward, his other pressed flat, and it weighs twenty kilos.

  Screams hush and fire crackles. Footsteps thud soil.

  Corvus’s citizens walk toward Atlas and he raises his head with strain.

  “Do you all wish to die?” Atlas yells. “I could gladly assist.”

  An adolescent’s mouth falls open. A young female flinches. Atlas slows his breathing and, hands thrusting off the once-living powder that swathes them, hauls himself to his feet. Three older males jerk backward; they watch his hands, however void.

  Atlas sighs. “That was—I could gladly assist. A humorous joke, yes? I was merely ridiculing you.” He grimaces. “I intend—”

  “You killed our citizens,” a female says. “It is you. The one who carries war.”

  His forehead crumples.

  Her words shake. “You have
already begun. You brought the ones that burn and defiled our laborhouse.”

  “I saved you.” Atlas motions to the crowd, again gasping after breath nearly caught. “You w-witnessed it. I saved you all from asphyxiation. Now, some of you should loose the contamination purge valve and unreel the hose—”

  “Traitor.” A middle-aged male steps forward. “We know you are the Earth-bound. You will attempt to pry the gates of death and dismantle our empire for a profit of chaos and satisfied lusts. For your Accenda.”

  Atlas lifts his hands and the group of sixty cringes. He lowers them.

  “They aren’t my Accenda. Did any of you see a female with white hair? She would have spoken with a strange dialect and been dressed in strange fabric. Did you see any being dressed in colors or dark attire, apart from the Imperium?” He looks around. “Where is the Imperium?”

  “You know the answer, deceiver,” another says.

  “I,” Atlas holds a hand to his heart, “did not begin your fire.”

  Another Sideran yells, “He is a heretic!”

  “The heretic. The infiltrator,” a female says. “We beheld you pouring the flames.”

  “The enemy of progress.”

  “Pure envy.”

  “The one who retained his air-altering affliction as a stain of pride.”

  “He will lead his Accenda—”

  “How, in all the universe,” Atlas ducks toward crowd’s forefront, “do you know that term?”

  A male, about age sixteen, leans around a broad loading major of Generation Concidens and straightens his own sash indicating Generation Nova, one younger than Atlas’s. The junior laborer clears his throat and says, “The Accenda, the savage enemy of many names. They have overrun Earth and found a course into our Sidera. It is what Imperium,” he touches his right fingers to his left shoulder, “has newly declared in the decree dispatched to Corvus by Legate Rigel, himself, of Sidera’s Boreas. War is upon us. We must fight.”

  Atlas scans their faces, inhaling through his teeth. “The Accenda aren’t on Sidera. If not by Pylon, such is impossible.”