Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “Do you know why there is no night in Sidera?”

  Atlas cocks his jaw.

  “Because there is no opposition. No joy, no despair. No pleasure, no pain. Siderans have what they need and contentment is my gift.” The Sovereign drifts closer. “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. ‘We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire.’ They don’t burn wandering in night, Atlas, because they don’t know the fever of desire for sunrise.”

  “Ignorance—”

  “Ignorance is freedom. Your Cartographer wants to free Sidera? My citizens are the only free beings in the universe. Accenda—do you think they feel free? Humanity? Seven billion earthly cattle bleating around in the pens they built and because they choose their dinner they’re free?”

  “You do not know freedom.”

  “And you do?” The Sovereign smiles in his voice. “Did you go to Helena?”

  He shudders. “Yes.”

  “Eden forced you to Helena through Minkar. Did you choose to save Gene in Elisium dungeons?”

  Atlas inhales—

  “Eden lured you. You spoke to Smit because she wanted it, because Samuel suggested it, and let Gene tag along because she demanded it. Eden compelled your Sideran return. You followed the fire to Corvus because I started it because I there instructed Kraz to lead you to my tower. You read The Presage because I told you to. You escaped Sidera because The Cartographer mapped it. Because of prophecy, you will kill your Genesis for Pylon’s opening because you have never been your own.”

  Atlas glares into mists of shadow and swallows knives. He glares.

  “I simply,” The Sovereign exhales, “help Siderans embrace the chains others dismiss. They’re happy enough, Atlas. Choice is a chain too heavy.”

  “I choose,” Atlas says.

  “None can lift the chains of choice without collapse. Humanity, Siderans, Accenda—all stumble in chaos silently begging for freedom from choice. Only I can uphold the weight.”

  “The Cartographer mapped me,” Atlas says, “to uphold Sidera.”

  “I’ve been carrying the skies much longer than you, Atlas. What would happen if Siderans actually fled through Pylon to live as humans on Earth, just as he wanted, just as you have?”

  Atlas tenses his forehead. Though the rumblings in his vocal cords rise for release, he keeps locked his lips. The Sovereign’s voice trumpets indisputable authority from which Atlas shrinks.

  “They would return, just as you have. Through your earthly days, Sideran garb wore you like a mannequin. Did you submit to returning because you wanted The Presage or because all the opposition on Earth made you homesick?”

  Lips unlock. “I returned to stop war.”

  “And readily handed me the keys to it.” The Sovereign circles Atlas, towing voice around his back. “Opposition does one thing and that’s convince everyone of the inherent need to return to infancy in the arms of authority. You too. Sprinkle enough chaos on Earth, break their pens of security, and those seven billion sheep will race to line up in the halls of my control, relinquishing every established tradition, possession, and connection for the redeeming order I will declare.”

  A chill on his neck, Atlas pivots toward him and lifts his pulsing palms. “You desire to open Pylon for war, exactly as the Accenda. You sent Eden to Earth—”

  “To, in due time, begin war on Earth, yes.”

  Atlas jolts toward the voice a meter from where he heard it last. He contorts his face. “Why?”

  “Fire needs wind to spread and earth to burn. A fire comes. Sometimes a controlled burn is what’s needed for that good green stuff hidden under debris to grow back strong.”

  Atlas’s voice trembles. “Why the Accenda—why—”

  “Anarchy!” Sovereign claps. “Have you heard the term ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”

  Atlas thinks of nodding.

  “Well, it should be more like ‘My enemy is my friend.’ The Artisan and I created the Accenda to naturally oppose Sidera—lawlessness verses lawfulness. My Accenda are performing beautifully.” The Sovereign’s volume deadens; he faces away from Atlas. “Funny thing—anarchy. No rules for anybody and no one to stop the guy tossing nets around.”

  “They’re the opposing army.”

  “For a war beginning right outside this tower. It’s exciting. Since my glimpsing, centuries ago, of the purple and gold of a consular toga blinding the dust it overhung, I’ve dreamt about this—Earth, my love, my first. Earth has always been the final stop and then three elements can work together in harmony. I’ll tie the reigns around universe and direct the chariot that once wavered. We’ll finally be free.”

  “You,” Atlas skews his lip and bares his teeth, “are not the universe.”

  The Sovereign talks from him. “No more hurt. No differences, no want, no struggle. We’ll fan the flames until they scorch the highest into submission.”

  “You cannot burn Earth and expect persons to sit, pleading for your saving.”

  “And what did the citizens of Corvus do?”

  Atlas’s brow furrows.

  “They call me Absolute, Atlas, because they want me to be Absolute,” The Sovereign says. “Absolute must harm to remind of the source of craved saving. Absolute must sever Elisium from Sidera and have them cut chaotic division through Earth to break the bone before the mend,” he bounces voice’s beat, “to draw all together again. One rule. One cause. Only divided can we be unified.”

  “Centrifugal unification,” Atlas mouths.

  “Good, Atlas.” The Sovereign lightens tone. “You’ve remembered your Praises.”

  “You began the fire in Corvus”—he cringes through memory—baking blood, the female under pillar’s collapse—“your own constellation, called by your name, and simply watched them burn?”

  “I don’t like Corvus. Nasty people. Ugly name. It’s like Chort.”

  Atlas squeezes voice from throat. “You burned them.”

  “And they hate you for it.” The Sovereign turns to Atlas. “Corvus’s citizens are gathering in the courtyard outside this tower to give report on your malicious attacks. The dissenter has returned. With their charred skin and bloody clothing, they testify to all Sidera that you, an earthly outsider, paraded around Constellation Corvus, burning things for Accend anarchy fun. A quick jump to hatred of Elisium. War fuel.”

  “Who spread the lies about me?”

  “Fire spreads.”

  “And you—”

  “I did.” The Sovereign vanishes and reappears on Atlas’s other side. He breathes down Atlas’s ear; his voice inflates till tripled, laying a shroud of freezing magma from a head above, where implied shadow quivers Atlas’s hair. “I lit the fire. I ordered five hundred bundles of ligneous foxtail, withdrew the guard, entered the constellation laborhouse and ignited each wall and barricaded inside ninety males, eighty-four females, fifty-one adolescents. I gazed in sensuous trance while the flames spread to the education house, resting area, and every centimeter in between. Screams and blood leaked from sunslots too small and doors too unshakable before they were cooked into a sweet charcoal, red, filthy decay for the sky to swallow. Two hundred and twenty-five bodies left to flutter upon scintillating blooms, into the air as carbon refuse. Maybe that’s the way to achieve night in Sidera: ash clouds by cremation. We go wandering, Atlas.”

  His words run down Atlas’s frame, down his back, to his feet, drenching him into paralysis. Atlas stands and feels breath against his cheek and slips kilometers into his depths where he forgets body.

  “Sidera’s liberator should understand—” Sovereign recoils centimeter by centimeter. “Sacrifices must be made.”

  Atlas’s chest draws Gene to where he hides within. His heart stretches, snaps, and his scalp sweats.

  “As we speak, Corvus’s citizens meet with a select chosen from forty-nine other constellations to persuade them to retaliation against their lawless brothers. The near-burned of Ara, Gemini, the Ursas, others stand too as witness upon Eos
’s black flat. In Arcade’s courtyard below, Sidera suits up for war.

  “This is why Minkar’s fortress was constructed. Why his one hundred and ninety-two outposts scatter eighty-four earthly countries. This is why, puer, Eden flung you this way and that, waiting to send you, willing, calm, to me at the exact right moment. You came to find purpose and here we are. You were born to open Pylon. You were born to begin war. The prophesied liberator will liberate blood and no one can be sure my Cartographer meant anything different.”

  Atlas steps backward; his feet wobble. “Millions of Siderans.”

  “Upward of twelve million.”

  “How many Accenda?”

  “Tens of thousands. But they’re feisty. It should be a fair fight,” The Sovereign drifts to Atlas’s front, “and we’re all about being fair.”

  Atlas breathes in but it’s too sharp; he chokes. “You’ve abandoned Rome to breed two opposite armies for the revolution of a world you could never have obtained with only one—”

  “Boy, I wish Julius could see it.”

  “—and you expect me to conclude this expanding of your empire to Earth?” Atlas says. “I will not open Pylon.”

  “You already have. Whether by your hand or mine, Pylon’ll open because, minutes ago, your eyes killed Genesis.”

  Atlas jerks his chin to his chest and casts down his eyes. “You cannot touch her from Sidera. You’re confined here.”

  The Sovereign sighs. “Oh, puer, I am boundless.”

  Wringing his fingers, Atlas squints at nothing, shifts on his feet, glints two blind eyes. “And yet you conceal yourself in darkness. Why dramatize, Corvus?”

  He quiets. Atlas’s skin bristles.

  “I am Sovereign.” The Sovereign whispers a syringe through the skull. “I am bodiless.”

  “Oh? Certainly a being without body must be limited.”

  “Absolute is the physical and beyond. Absolute has no limit.”

  “And yet you cannot show yourself.” Atlas lifts his chin and chest and a prick of wind clicks his mind. “What do you fear, Corvus? That I might see your limitations? That you,” he tilts his head, “are simply Corvus?”

  “I am,” Corvus raises his voice, “sky and fire and earth. Whirlwinds roar my name as they churn the oceans of my omnipotence, in hymn, singing laud to the inexhaustible beat of sovereignty. I am Accend and Sideran. I am night and day. I scooped the darkness from Sidera and poured it upon this room, upon you, because I can. Because I am. Because—”

  A cobalt glare pierces the darkness. Atlas winces behind the pronged shadow of his uplifted fingers, palms outward, revving a breeze. The glare swells; he shuts his eyes; hot blue throbs them. When he peels his eyelids and splays the windows between his fingers, two hands of another hover among the black. They spurt spectral light around their knuckles, into point, one centimeter’s gap off the palms floating two bulbs. The Sovereign holds fire. Atlas peers through his fingers and Corvus ladles ghosts swimming starlight from his.

  Corvus shoots his palms toward Atlas’s head. Atlas ducks. Fanning as they launch, two cyan-swaddled, white cyclones spin into a bright orange past Atlas’s shoulders and singe the ends of his hair. The distort of shape at fire’s outskirts, where crackles snap at ear—the whoosh of air and hiss of horned vipers born of braziers pump Atlas’s blood hot and bend his knees and sear his eyes.

  “I am every being and every being is me. Your thoughts, friends, feelings, dreams and past and present and future—all under one absolute force—” Corvus booms his voice till it springs off walls thirty meters away. “I am you.”

  The last echoed “you” rides the streams clockwise; Corvus turns in a circle as he propels fire across room’s upper limits. It is: a room. Corvus completes his circle and warmth and wind and sound fizzle, shapes and colors emerging beneath the shade of Atlas’s raised arms. Atlas grinds his teeth, rocks with his pulse. Lowering his arms, he wrinkles his eyelids in light no longer attached to Corvus’s hands.

  Golden, softened light expands to soak floor swirling, glimmering stone patterns: marble floor, gentle blues, webbed silvers and blacks, the same as in the fiftieth floor’s entryway. Atlas stands on it. He sees body, quivering, concaved, for the first time since he climbed Administration Citadel’s steps eons past.

  He lifts his head. Smaller and bigger than imagined, the room curves its one, deep black wall around a circular space wide as the tower itself. Atlas twists. No furniture, windows, columns. The opening stretches nakedness to tower’s edge, tower’s liquid black arena of a blanketed birdcage, and flashes Elisium, constellations, courtyards and Roman temples and Pylon through Atlas’s memory till all spins with his spinning.

  He lifts his eyes. Onyx stone vaults a dome to its zenith ten men tall, studded with sapphires from drum to apex devoid of sunslot or oculus. Instead, an upward funnel closes its cupola into the five-point spire thrusting from the exterior. Two hundred torches gird the interior, all lit, bursting fire up dome’s base. Their basins of sun only tickle room’s center, where light degrades to its crowning mark upon the floor, one too feathered to classify as a circle and overlooked if not compared to the brilliance in distance: a haze of darkness. Shadow, the room’s target.

  Level fifty was smaller from the ground.

  “My meditation place.”

  Atlas flips around. A being stands before him, in the path to the room’s only door, his hands behind his back. A familiar being now more familiar.

  “Corvus,” Atlas says.

  “No, 27 Tauri.” He presses his palms to his front. “You.”

  Atlas jumps his eyes down the figure, up, and heart sinks into gut. He wears dark maroon Imperium garb, glossed black boots, jewel-embedded leather straps strung across a thick, sharp jacket extended to the knees. The two differences between his attire and a vigil’s are the tarnished pendant around his neck and the absence of catalyst gauntlets. Atlas’s insides churn, though, because the citizens of Corvus were right:

  The being before Atlas has his jaw, eyebrow shape, cheekbones; and Corvus’s now fully grayed hair, too silver for his middle age, drives Atlas to see it. Like his own, Corvus’s hair sticks up, this way, that, jagged and uneven, as if dried after a contamination purge by a jog in the wind.

  Corvus steps forward. His cerulean eyes meet and mirror Atlas’s, but glint in a manner Atlas’s don’t. Atlas steps backward.

  “Few of your peers shared your age growing up,” Corvus says. “Am I right?”

  His sore legs swaying upon room’s shadowed center, Atlas whips his head around and back to Corvus, to the door.

  “This,” Corvus gestures to himself, “is why Decree Expulsion skipped over you on your first full cycle of living. Analysts labeled you along with four percent of your male age group as satisfactory.”

  Atlas looks between Corvus’s hands and thinks he asks about the other ninety-six.

  “You were a beautiful child. All living Siderans are but you—” Corvus takes another step forward. “Look at me. Few have the privilege.”

  He looks at Corvus, a head taller than himself, knowledge in the wrinkles around his eyes, stability in his step. Atlas sees his superior self. His vision blurs.

  “Why is man? Why is Sideran? You are because of me. You,” Corvus taps his head, “are here. Consider it. How do you know Deity doesn’t look like, talk like, act like me, and how do you know you’re not a disorganized piece of my existence needing my attention? You’re in my image, Atlas.”

  “Because I choose,” Atlas says.

  “You can’t choose to leave this tower, puer. I have all control.” Corvus looks over Atlas’s shoulder. “In a moment, my friend will greet us.”

  A breath slips down the nape of Atlas’s neck. He pales and jerks around. He flitters glassy eyes over the empty room and crackling torches, their flames streaking soot-black somehow grayer upon a canvas of black deepest. His eyebrows tense.

  “Has she prepared Pylon?” Corvus says.

  Atlas whips back around.
Corvus faces another being a meter from himself, a being without expression, without intonation. Head bald, he wears a pointed suit. Atlas glares and the same disorientation that overcame him in a forest stronghold squeezes his brain anew.

  “She has,” Minkar says. “Eden is prepared to retrieve the Walker as soon as—”

  “As soon as I get the affirmative from Atlas.” Corvus swings his right foot over his left, twists toward Atlas, and smiles.

  “How did you—” Atlas eyes Minkar. “You are here how?”

  Minkar looks back. “My Sovereign called for me. I need no coin for travel between planes.”

  Atlas gawks.

  “Go ahead, Minkar. Tell him how.”

  Corvus waves forward his hand, and Atlas notices an additional difference between his hands and that of a gauntleted guard of highest order: a metal band encircling his forefinger. Like his pendant, the ring’s metal smolders with the weathered dullness of age, unembellished and unpolished. But when Minkar speaks and Corvus lowers it, the ring flashes a spark of life new as steel off Taurus’s cooling beds.

  “I once was Sideran but now am fragments,” Minkar says. “I am a shell for my Sovereign to fill. I were not to speak or be had he not tied my soul for his keeping. You will exit at death but I remain a relic, sustained between life and death, existence and nonexistence, traveling beyond boundaries of time and space as Sovereign requires.”

  “Corvus controls you.” Atlas squints at the calcified middleman, at his micro blinks, both in eye and body. Minkar flickers, and Atlas sees and questions his seeing it. “A soul: such intangible being is what Accenda assimilate. Are you a soul—a spirit?”

  “Accenda assimilate humanity.”

  “Are you a spirit?”

  “No. I am everything but humanity.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Minkar stares. Atlas stares back. Minkar disappears for half a second, returns half a centimeter out of place, and vision warps and gut stirs and Atlas diverts his eyes. Words abandon him.

  “Hey, now.” Corvus twists his ring and faces Minkar. “You’re making him uncomfortable. Tone down your influence. Not everyone can handle it.”