Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  “What does—why are—” Drawing his eyes along the dome’s border, its stenciling, engravings, Atlas exhales. He raises his hands and yells, “What is happening and who, by the Absolute—don’t say it, Corvus—hasn’t been attempting to wage war on Earth for your sake?”

  “Iceland’s been staying out of it for the most part.” Corvus shrugs. “That’ll change once we overrun the airport via Minkar’s Nova Scotia Column. You call them outposts—strongholds, my Columns, though ‘strong’ is just. They’re protected by much more than rainbows masquerading as some magic, fantastical barrier.”

  Atlas curls his fingers. “How—”

  Corvus holds up his hand. “I have many errands to run. I just need one small thing from you, Atlas, before we move on.”

  Footsteps echoing, voice gaining and softening and honing, Corvus walks to Atlas, bends down so their eyes level, and rests his hands on Atlas’s shoulders. His irises burn a blue-hot flame his palms can well duplicate.

  “We have to be very, very sure. Your ultimate sacrifice—” Corvus whispers. “Do you love her more than anything?”

  Atlas’s heart pounds and eyes twitch.

  “Good.” Corvus smiles in his stare. Pupils fastened to Atlas’s, he doesn’t turn, doesn’t change tone. “Minkar, tell Eden to use any and every mean in seizing that tacky Mustang and retrieving Genesis Walker.”

  Atlas throws Corvus’s hands from his shoulders and yells, “You will not lay a finger—”

  “Open Pylon immediately,” Corvus says.

  Minkar vanishes. The spire room flickers torchlight that again highlights only two figures and casts only two shadows; but Atlas is unsure there were three when Minkar was present.

  Corvus turns from Atlas and paces in a two-meter oval. He rubs the pendant around his neck. “You’ve helped billions. Thank you for your service, Atlas, truly.”

  “Not tacky.” Atlas shakes his head and charges his hands. “It is not.”

  “Pardon?”

  Atlas locks his jaw. “Samuel’s vehicle is not tacky.”

  “Do you,” Corvus presses his lips into his teeth, “have another word for it?”

  “Eden 2.0.”

  Corvus stops pacing. “That was more than one wor—”

  Atlas snaps his palms onto sight of Corvus’s chest and outpours a gust. Hair blasting, cheeks rippling, Corvus staggers backward, to the left, off the path to the room’s door. He straightens and sighs.

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Atlas bangs his feet against marble as he sprints past Corvus, for the door. His breath cuts his throat. He angles a shoulder, leaps the last, and slams into the handleless, locked steel slab. His frame absorbs the full rebound in a violent jolt that plucks thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves shrieking. He inhales seconds delayed, shakes out emerging bruises, backs up. He lines himself with the side opposite the hinge and pushes off the floor. He crashes into the door shoulder-first with a fleshy, muted thud. He kicks the door. He retracts and repeats. He shoves his heel into a mountain and gasps through sweat and rams into the door with his side body again. He slows and wobbles.

  His pulse overflows his ears. His face reddens and throat constricts.

  “What are you doing, puer?” Corvus asks. “These walls can’t be vaulted. There’s no sky here.”

  Atlas slams his heel into the door.

  “All’s closed you in. Your aureus, your only return to Earth, was seized as soon as it was found in the plains.”

  Atlas stops and spins around. “I wish to know. Are—” He gasps. “Are you going to kill me or am I to continue running into this door until I lose consciousness?”

  Grimacing, Corvus smooths his lapel. “Kill? I love you. You’re beautiful and an engaging challenge. Our facilities should help you achieve recovery and welcome you home. I have high hopes for you.”

  Atlas glares.

  “My son.” Corvus opens his arms, palms forward. “Let’s heal as one universal family we’ve never known.”

  Unclenching his fists, Atlas steps toward Corvus and pauses and steps again. He catches his breath. He softens his jaw and scans Corvus’s knee-length, maroon jacket. He follows the stitch where Corvus’s sleeve meets his shoulder, his black sash slung across it, to the edge of a pocket peeking out from his open lapel.

  Atlas picks up pace. Corvus’s figure grows and heightens. Atlas holds his lungs, steps into Corvus’s reach, and stands rigid as the God of Sidera wraps his arms around him.

  “This is true peace, my Discipulus 27.” Corvus pats Atlas’s back. “Constancy and dependency. No more wandering. I’ll make your choices without flaw.”

  Atlas’s stare fogs the view over The Sovereign’s shoulder, his ears filling with wool. He lifts his arms and folds them around Corvus until the rims of his cupped hands graze his forefather’s shoulders.

  “You’re home.”

  Corvus withdraws and Atlas follows, sliding his hands down the shoulders of his Imperium jacket. His fingers near the hem of his lapel pocket, near the glimmer inside. Atlas remembers how Samuel slipped the keys from that man in the Mexican War Streets, the lithe swiftness of his theft, the imperceptibility and mastery of one fluid movement detached from the concert of a charismatic front; and then Atlas chucks his knuckles into Corvus’s jaw.

  Corvus’s recoil swivels silently, however flushed his cheek. Atlas grasps after him, after the pivot of his jacket, the lift of his lapel against air’s resistance, and claws a cool token from his pocket. Stepping backward, Atlas clutches his treasure in his ruddy fist.

  “Yikes.” Corvus stretches his jaw and, hands lazy at his sides, straightens before his assaulter. He buoys his eyes to ceiling’s dome. “I’m feeling a little duped, gonna be honest.”

  Atlas raises the aureus in his fist. “Earth is my home.”

  Corvus nods to the coin. “How did you know?”

  “You said the aureus coin was seized.” Atlas walks backward. “Sidera’s single gold piece, the most powerful object in this dimension, must have been seized for possession of the highest authority.”

  “Very true.”

  Atlas thrusts his free hand open and forward and wind slams Corvus. He flies off his feet, meters across the room, sliding to a stop on his back. Atlas pulses his palm with a lungful he hasn’t breathed since he first portaled to Sidera and looks above Corvus, through the wall, to the outside blue, where clouds sail their ocean and breeze whistles its fuel and irises drink their cerulean to brim with sight beyond constellation walls he respects no more.

  “You’ve helped billions.” Atlas pushes wind to the tips of his spread fingers. “Thank you for your service, Corvus, truly.”

  XLI

  Reality’s Downfall

  Atlas drops the aureus. It clinks to the floor and he aims his palms and releases their currents. Wind slams, quivers the coin, blowing it up off the marble until a fuchsia spark latches it in place. He deepens through his diaphragm and the aureus spurts blue-green shrapnel that dissipates after a meter’s flight.

  Tugging his jacket, Corvus gets on his feet and raises his voice over the wind. “Atlas, relax. You’ll have a respiratory attack. Do you know how many Siderans have died of lung failure? Almost half the rate of those who die of the Cold.”

  Atlas shakes his head.

  “Please don’t try to open a portal without direct sunlight. It’s stupid.”

  “Life will be stupid unless—”

  “Unless you let the wiser cradle that life. You can’t do it on your own.”

  Atlas gives Corvus a look of pure disgust. He increases his output; wind cyclones down his arms, blasts his tunic, dances torchlight half the room away. Violet sprays from the aureus’s gold. His jaw grinds and hand muscles seize and lungs shrivel under electric puffs pumping wind out fingertips. The coin wisps multicolored strands but slows its emissions.

  “I’m saddened you would do this. I’m saddened for what has to happen now.”

  Corvus lifts a finger. He twirls it. A tsu
nami of wind crashes down on the room, swirling with the tower’s curve counterclockwise. It extinguishes a hundred torches, hits Atlas’s shoulder, throws his frame from his feet soon trailing, and extinguishes the last hundred torches. Atlas rolls across the marble, arms twisting, hip popping.

  Air stills; he too. When he opens his eyes, he sees nothing. He grunts pushing himself onto his knees. Compact, boundless black swallows the spire, the aureus, Corvus.

  He stands. Wobbling, Atlas outstretches his hands and turns a full circle, and another. He holds his breath. Closes his eyes and angles his cheek to a coolness traced with wind.

  Something scuffs the marble to his left. Atlas snaps toward it. He swings his hands right and back, rotates his wrists, and thrusts his arms straight, his palms forward. Wind shoots for the noise; a bang responds. Atlas sprints after it and, crouching, reaches for where he imagines Corvus’s body fell.

  But Corvus grabs him from behind. “Siderans and Accenda are the bloody ones.” He locks his fingers around Atlas’s sashes bulging his tunic’s front, smashes Atlas’s arms into his own ribs. “I won’t take human lives. Only their lies. Be mature, Atlas. The naïveté of fighting naïveté through quests for self-control—”

  Atlas yanks against him, but his heart heats, painfully. Tentacle writhers engulf his front and race for his chin, a rabid, sweltering orange in their wake. Atlas bends a knee, ducks, kicks Corvus’s leg, and, stooped down, throws Corvus over his back. Corvus favors the floor as he corkscrews out of his own momentum and staggers into dark. His hands retract their fire; Atlas pats the flames off his front. Black returns.

  “It’s not that dark,” Corvus says. “Siderans just don’t eat their carrots. And, well, they’ve never seen night.”

  Atlas whips toward the voice and fire blossoms where he looks. They unfurl tangerine-tapered sunbursts after their impressions already burning in his retinas. Atlas sidesteps; plaits of churning flame sweep his ear and graze his cheek blistered, tunic smoldering. Corvus’s stream explodes on the wall behind him. Patches of fuel clung to wall, molten wraiths scamper a slow death across the stone and a couple torches amass their flickers. The dimmest light gives shape to Atlas’s eye.

  Corvus cuts power, repositions, and again shoots. Atlas dodges the bulk but flames sideswipe his shoulder. Touchless, blinding knives burrow under his sleeve, into skin as his groans sprout from late lips. Atlas blasts a palm-wide tornado at his flaming shoulder; with a grunt, his shoulder jerks back and the fire blows out.

  “I’d like you to see.” Corvus steps from the torches’ cone of light, around Atlas’s left. “If you insist, I’d like you to glimpse the world you desperately seek beyond constellation walls. The real world. The world of confusion and betrayal and Samuel assimilating Gene and blades dragged up the gut because, when free will breeds like beastly infestation, the village changes chiefs from hungry to hungrier. Independence is selfishness. Watch with me as the tribal world unravels, as Sidera falls into Accend flames flourished across five hundred million earthly square kilometers and unites all under We unisonous in blubbering for the cover of my heel.”

  Atlas squints through darkness, tracking deep gray lines of a silhouette. At light’s brink, he turns his head with the figure’s drift for two seconds. Then lunges, throws his hands, throws a current. Atlas’s heart wallops his ribs when he glimpses Corvus’s hands thrown toward his own. The wind through Atlas’s fingers hits Corvus’s, ricochets, and slams Atlas’s front as a body-wide sledgehammer. Atlas flies off the marble, through seas of air until his back bangs the wall. Something cracks. Beneath lit torches, Atlas slumps to the floor.

  If he were screaming, a half-minute millennium of lying on cold stone, he wouldn’t hear it above the ringing in his ears.

  He stares at his feet; they double and blur. Another set of feet steps around his four—black boots. Tremors in his hands shuddering up his arms, Atlas presses his fingers into floor and props himself on an elbow.

  Corvus says something.

  Atlas blinks till vision unifies.

  “—at yourself. With all gentleness, Atlas is too weak to hold his sphere.”

  Atlas curls his lip and pushes onto his knees. He coughs. Grimacing, he grinds his joints and squeezes his fists and stands.

  He faces Corvus. “Yes?” Atlas gasps. “Do you know the future?”

  “A part of me kno—”

  Atlas swings his elbow into Corvus’s nose. It pops. Corvus cringes and Atlas twists, dodges a fire stream, propels his knuckles into Corvus’s cheek, sweeps a foot under his ankle, and catches him by the front of his jacket as he falls. With his dominant hand, Atlas constricts Corvus’s throat, senselessly youthful, vigorous arteries rumbling under his own beating palm. He dangles Corvus from vein-roped fingers.

  “Why is there no night in Sidera?” Atlas scoffs. “There is no day in Sidera. Light and clarity have fled.”

  “S—” Corvus pries his jaw. “Sun is day.”

  “Only if it rises and sets. Without night, the stars wouldn’t shine and sun wouldn’t warm and you express the pain is worse but I’ve seen skies at dawn more beautiful than—Siderans don’t know to use their legs to escape fire but walkers freely, daily construct skyscraping labyrinths without command so I’d reconsider: which of these worlds progresses and which regresses? Because I see Sidera—I see constellation walls and I see the darkest night growing darker.”

  Corvus waves flames at Atlas; Atlas swings his hip, sucks in his side, and the surge surges past, dances up the wall, lights another torch. Corvus grabs Atlas’s wrists. He squeezes them purple until Atlas’s grip weakens and then slams him against the wall.

  Breath burst out his mouth, Atlas kicks and squirms, but Corvus lights both hands a radiant blue that wraps his prey’s wrists. A frigidity melts halfway up the nerves in Atlas’s arms and reaches his brain scorching, searing. He screams within. His sleeves char and flake.

  “I am day,” Corvus says.

  “You are,” Atlas mouths, “a very lost human.”

  Smiles in his eyes, Corvus reabsorbs his power. He retracts, Atlas coiling forward, and then springs his grip to Atlas’s neck and shoves him back into the wall. Atlas cringes as his skull bounces to a stony rest; but he stretches one swollen wrist, sprawls his free fingers, and blows a gust into Corvus’s eyes. Corvus blinks. Atlas leans bending a knee and kicks Corvus’s gut, which lurches backward with his lower body. Inclined still, Corvus locks the iron bars of his arms forward, the clamps of his hands solid around the windpipes they close. The bulge of his ring cinches Atlas’s jugular.

  Twelve seconds, thirteen, fourteen with no breath. Atlas’s face flushes, chest vacuums shut.

  He flings his arms up between Corvus’s, palms together. He discharges the lees of a dying current that blasts open and outward his palms and arms; they throw Corvus’s. His grip breaks and their clothing and limbs ride wind’s explosion outward.

  Atlas steps around Corvus as he stumbles. Neck pounding freed blood, he heaves new breath from a paling face and clutches Corvus’s arm and twists it behind his back. He jerks Corvus’s wrist up, into his shoulder blade. It cracks. Corvus doesn’t wince.

  “They ask for me,” he says, turning. “You’ll see it. Someday, trust me, puer, you’ll see it.”

  Atlas turns with him. Pressing Corvus’s arm into his upper back, shoving his spine concaved, Atlas steps back with his right foot and forward with his left as Corvus does; they pivot. Corvus raises his free hand over his shoulder. He sprays a river of fire. Atlas ducks, jerks into Corvus’s other shoulder, and they spin a full circle, flames nipping at one’s jacket, the other’s ear. Fire spirals outward, fans from floor to dome, swatting the walls with igneous tailfeathers, splashing them solar. Sixty percent of the torches light. Pupils contract; shadows sharpen. Corvus cuts his stream and Atlas sees the room’s entirety.

  Atlas breathes.

  He yanks down Corvus’s arm, forcing his back to bend, and kicks his lowered shoulder. He releases the cracked
wrist. Corvus’s back bends the opposite way and he staggers into the wall.

  At his stop, a pebble clacks to the floor. Dust drifts after.

  Atlas’s eyes, stung with sweat, climb a drizzle of debris to the wall above Corvus’s head: the section Atlas was flung against moments past. The black stone holds a fracture deeper, a thousand times longer than the one in Corvus’s wrist.

  Sweeping hands overhead, Atlas uplifts a wind geyser that hurls Corvus off his boots; Corvus arcs over Atlas and slams the marble behind him, residual breeze twirling torch flames.

  “Atlas—” Corvus hacks and rolls onto his back. “Thank you. Ah, I love to—” He coughs.

  Atlas pries his fingers open, curls them in, open, in, roiling the skybreath that sings upon Sideran plains. Nostrils flared, he strides to Corvus’s body.

  “When I see one join mine—” Corvus chokes and gags and it’s laughter. “You’d be a fine Accend. I expect humanity to show themselves like you have.”

  Atlas crouches and lifts his head by his hair. Corvus laughs. The scarlet in his teeth spatters Atlas’s chin. Atlas cringes.

  “Blood is so, so important.” Corvus wipes his mouth; blood smears up his cheek. “It’s my charity. If I don’t spill theirs, they’re allowed to keep it. Then they know: I’m giving the life.”

  Atlas pops back his fist. “It’s unfortunate you can’t give it to yourself.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Don’t worsen your death.”

  Corvus grabs Atlas’s sleeve and leans toward him. “If I can’t, how am I still alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do.” Corvus smiles, swallows blood, and speaks to the rhythm of his palpitations. “My mind shifts with universe but I know everything because what I don’t know doesn’t exist and what I do is all there is. Reality is relative. You, along with this room, your friends and enemies and billions—you, along with the cosmos, are no more than an image in my head, a chemical in my brain, a string of my spirit. I live how I want and do what I want within whatever state my current reality lies. I know I give life, Atlas. Because I am life.” He drags a red stain down Atlas’s sleeve. “And I’m just trying to manage it.”