Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  Atlas saturates his fingers electric. “If reality yields to your whim, you can’t surely know anything.”

  “Whim. It’s not dirty choice. It’s existence. I am reality and ever expanding. That I know.”

  “Outside of you, I,” Atlas shakes off Corvus’s hand, “exist. I am real.”

  “That’s what yodeling giraffes say in my dreams.”

  His eyelids slouch. “Giraffes.”

  “Tall, spotted animals. Eat leaves, roam Earth—you know.”

  “What is this yodeling?”

  “It’s like sing—”

  “I’m not,” Atlas jolts Corvus’s head once, “a symbol in your demented dream. I am not your mind’s piece out of place.”

  “Oh, but Atlas.” Corvus clears his throat. “How do you know?”

  Atlas’s brow tenses. Cold shadow creeps down his throat and burrows into his stomach. “I know because it’s true.”

  “What,” Corvus taps the ground, “is truth?”

  Atlas clutches Corvus’s jacket and, yanking him off the floor, throws him into the wall. Stone shards tumble down wall’s centimeter-wide fissure and rap their heads. Corvus grunts through a smile.

  “The giraffes—they stopped yodeling,” Corvus angles forward, “and grew fangs out their eyes and their skin melted into pools of children’s scalps they razed with their bone saw tongues. I woke with a metallic taste in my mouth.”

  Atlas glares. “You’re extremely ill.”

  “One day, papilio, you’ll see the universe as I have and so many thoughts will fill your head that your skull will fracture. You’ll understand then that you should have lived content in darkness.”

  Corvus twitches a finger and Atlas launches horizontally, skidding across marble until pain registers and wind disperses. The wall opposite Corvus curves over Atlas’s upward eyes. He inhales; his lungs quake knives. He clutches his chest and, front aching, back smarting, holds his exhale as he lies under the sapphire-glittered dome, sinking into feeling.

  Corvus walks to the room’s center. He lifts his hands, twists his wrists, outpours two currents as he turns. Blasting Atlas’s eyes shut, wind streams crash against every centimeter of wall and wipe every torch flame.

  Atlas opens his eyes but they’re blind. Darkness blankets his body.

  He grinds his teeth, shudders moans, and pushes himself to stand. He slumps against the wall. He whets his hearing, straining to cast it past his pounding pulse, but stillness pails into his canals black that smothers his arteries loud.

  What is truth?

  Atlas gasps and shoulders up the wall. His mind distorts under imaginings of Corvus’s blood on his hands and his own smile that would follow and Atlas’s eyes dart for sight and ears drum deafness and he fears himself. Mind ticks his eyes to water. It whispers of Gene’s blood and Corvus’s as easily staining his palms. Mind rips thirty-one full cycles from his knowledge and replaces them with soot trampled into dirt once labeled shamefully unknowing—before all burned in clouds of unknowing he plummets through, down, down into nightfall so nameless as this.

  Black.

  What is truth?

  A breeze skims his knuckles. Back against the wall in the spire room he’d forgotten, eyes blind, Atlas looks to his hands without looking. He turns them in darkness. Wind weaves between his fingers; his blood charges and breath deepens, and he knows this current isn’t Corvus’s. He squeezes his eyes shut, steps from the wall, and raises his chin to the wind that guided him over constellation walls weeks past, the wind that drove him through Chicago alleys, that sailed him across Helena’s lake and between dimensions. It strokes his skin until mind empties.

  What is truth?

  “A feeling,” he mouths.

  The wind streams right and Atlas shifts right. It strengthens. Atlas steps, eyes closed, into black, where spirits dance and whisper a cooling salve mitigating sanctum’s post-fire heat. He opens his arms, steps. Air whirling up his sleeves, he teeters through wind tremors upon leg tremors and speeds his steps; the wind blasts a straight, narrow course; he runs.

  Air parts at his shoulders, breaks upon cheek, curves around waist, quivers up his collar, magnifies touch one hundred times, and Atlas sprints after—through a wind tunnel across a spire wide as the night on Midwestern highwaysides. He opens his eyes.

  When he does, fire seeks them. A volcanic missile—a blue-to-orange gradient shatters darkness and whirs from a thumbnail’s size to sea in a second. Atlas swings back his shoulder. The flames fly past. Corvus shoots another stream. Atlas whips his forearms up before his face and the wind driving him balloons a body-wide shield that splits the fire into halves. Petals graze his arm hair, draw sweat, but spring from his face before fizzling into room’s outskirts.

  In firelight, Atlas glimpses a glimmer at Corvus’s feet. The aureus. Fire explodes on the walls, scatters, and blackness takes the coin’s reflection.

  “Explain the answer as you’ve desired, Corvus.” Atlas slows and pants. “Tell me. What is truth?”

  Corvus ignites another handful and propels it at Atlas. Atlas tosses it past his shoulder. Wind cyclones the flames to the floor, splashing upon collision.

  “It is what?” Atlas yells.

  Corvus twists together his hands and conjures an inferno. Atlas thrusts off his heels; he runs toward the flames in his enemy’s eye pools, and Corvus pitches his charge.

  Atlas drops. He hits the marble sliding on his back, feet first, under the flames. Red licks snake past Atlas’s toes, chest, wide eyes, and glide into the black.

  “Truth, Atlas—”

  Fingers splayed, Atlas slaps his arm out, and as he slides past Corvus’s feet, motion scoops the coin into his hand. Atlas rolls onto his knees. He squeezes the aureus and reels to a rough stand.

  “—is mine. And this truth is simple.” Corvus faces Atlas. “You can’t use that coin in this tower. The truth is that you’re stuck within these walls.”

  Atlas laughs. He muffles it with a face-wipe.

  “Oh,” Corvus conjures fire, “kay.”

  Face ruby, Atlas bursts another chuckle that brims his nose before breaking his lips. He shakes his head. “I apologize. This is humorous. Everyone is entirely correct. I’m very stupid.”

  Corvus cups together his hands; he grows a microgravitational, spherical bonfire that roars beyond knuckles. Atlas tucks the aureus under his tightest armband. Then sprawls his hands to Corvus’s. Corvus curves, sculpts living light between his fingers, and Atlas squints into them, flushing wind’s last drop from lungs to palms.

  One second, Atlas waits. Two. Corvus twitches his forefinger and the flames gather and thicken. He opens his palms. Three. Atlas stands resolute.

  Corvus shoots. Shot’s velocity slings bent Atlas’s elbows, and he catches the flames at his sternum. Wind pours from Atlas’s hands, wind he sculpts as did Corvus his fire, as he swathes Accend issue with its fueling counterpart. Revolving his fingers, flickers blistering them, Atlas spins an invisible vortex between palms and flames and smooths the inferno condensed. Wind whirs a hundred meters per second in a space fifteen centimeters wide, batters his hands, jars his bones and eddies around an orb—a fistful of flames feasting on oxygen enough to engulf Constellation Corvus.

  Atlas thrusts his arms up and his fingers out. The flames clap open. They burst from his hands into an umbrella the span of the tower’s dome. As they rain, they bash the walls and scurry across stone and crackle alight two hundred torches. One million petals twinkle into air’s whoosh, dissolving as stars at dawn. Level fifty glows gold.

  Corvus and Atlas stare at each other.

  Corvus pops his lips—

  Atlas hurls himself into Corvus’s shoulders, gripping his jacket, and runs him backward across the room housing shapes and highlights again. He pivots Corvus to the wall’s crack. Corvus grabs Atlas’s shoulders but Atlas accelerates, jerks his elbows straight, flourishes his push, and gushes a wind wave. Corvus flies from him. Atlas scuffs to a stop, and wind flings
Corvus the last paces, into the wall, where his back slams the fissure. The wall cracks its crack into a crevice shedding pebbles.

  Propping himself on his hands and knees, Corvus drools blood and sways.

  “I wouldn’t have constructed a tower as this. Do Aries’ citizens hardly labor?” Atlas points to the crevice. “Truly. Examine this wall.” He shakes his finger. “Have you noticed this? That is unsafe.”

  Corvus staggers upon standing. Wall’s dust settles.

  “You embedded sapphires into the ceiling,” Atlas looks upward, “but this—” He looks at the wall. “I would have constructed it differently.”

  A gash across Corvus’s shoulder seeps the same red he wears. Atlas swings back his hands, thrusts them forward, and Corvus leaps out of his stream’s path.

  Wind smacks the crevice and shifts its stone. A chunk of rock aged and brittle, thick as his fist, thuds the marble. Atlas concentrates, throws another horizontal tornado that grinds stone loose and quivers aftershocks down meters of curved wall. He throws another. He gasps and slouches. And thrusts two more waves. Before building heaps of shadowy detritus, the crevice breaks to exterior steel thinner than he knew from tower’s bottom; and a light streak, the slightest, wavering shimmer one nailhead long, shines through. Sun. He strains his fingers, aims his palms, and throws another.

  A ringed hand flashes in the penumbra of Atlas’s tunnel vision and Corvus’s wind collides with Atlas’s. Its cascade hits and diverts Atlas’s rivulet, shears and minces his airborne circuit in a backbent gale. Atlas folds, breathless, after the rend in his current. Expression neutral, Corvus bends in his finger and the same unyielding wind, static prickling air’s motes, skids Atlas toward him. Corvus catches Atlas by his tunic, yanks him up, and punches him in the gut. Atlas buckles over. His spit trickles after his expelled breath and his guts climb to follow.

  “Why, Atlas?”

  Corvus bends into his ear; his whisper draws purple to Atlas’s face and pain through his corded veins.

  “Why aren’t you like the others? Why,” Corvus plunges his elbow into Atlas’s back; “must you always be so separate, different, so,” he repeats the blow, “resistant?”

  Atlas crumples and hits the floor, choking, gasping. He curls on his side. Corvus steps on his fingers. Atlas spurts a gargled scream.

  “Why must you molest Absolute’s order? Break walls?” Corvus tilts his head and twists his foot. “Why did you—do you escape?”

  Atlas gazed through the education house skylight while Instructor Tauri paced the room’s back, swaying to her words. His lips parted and neck stretched and eyes dried.

  Atlas stood in the Praises field before the stage and moved his mouth to their scripts but blurred his vision. Above shoulders, between heads of the many, he looked to sun’s halo. It glimmered; he lifted his eyes beyond stinging sweet flares.

  Atlas dressed in the corner where the others caught only glimpses of his bones. He followed the line through resthouse doors, to bed, hair dripping purge chemicals down his tunic’s fresh, white shoulders. He slipped into place. He laid back his head. Under his thigh, he felt for the comforting round of his coin through bed mat’s canvas. Letting pupils expand to murk stewing within windowless walls, he kept his eyes open and listened to 26’s breathing, 29’s elderly wheezing until they murmured static ambience over sleeping mat rows. He saw through the ceiling.

  Atlas dropped the last steel beam of the labor cycle; it thudded dirt and wafted an ankle-high bronze cloud. He groaned. A couple blisters on his right toes bled, his back creaking aches. The guardian called the cycle’s end. Atlas squinted at the line forming outside the contamination purge pumps and then at the laborhouse and counted his moments. Restraining cries, heart erratic, he jogged around the laborhouse, to its back, where one of three wall-hugging flues shaded a nook. He whipped his head this way, that. He leaned against the wall. He slid down it, sat, and looked up.

  No forging in Taurus that cycle so vistas of blue sky descended into his irises and burned them bright. His legs throbbed. His load lightened. He rested back, lifted his chin, followed a white wisp streaking the blue over constellation’s wall and wondered how low it flew. His brows tensed. He lifted his hand and ran his forefinger along the wisp’s outline and felt a spark under skin. Blood boiling ice, the corner of his mouth curved up and twitched upon imagination and then fell with his hand.

  The blood in his shoe dried. He looked; up, the expanse brimmed. Up, sapphire sang crashing dimensions galaxies distant and, trickling closer, hummed lullabies of sleeping, safe, lucid dreaming of buoyancy up. Beyond and universe and the nudge that clicks into motion indescribable cogs that turned before time and himself and everything else. Sky looked back.

  The others lined up and Atlas looked up.

  “You—” Atlas groans and sucks breath. “You can name millions after stars but they’re not yours.” His voice shakes; he steadies it and leans upward, toward Corvus’s gleaming eyes. “I’m the only who sees. I look up.”

  For the first time since Atlas entered the tower, Corvus scowls. He steps off Atlas’s fingers, crouches, claws Atlas’s tunic, and lights his free hand spectral blue. His scowl vanishes. His eyes smile.

  Corvus thrusts his hand down and Atlas thrusts his up. Wind and fire collide, bulge two swirling, converging hemispheres; and, shreds of flame whipping his turned cheek, Atlas blinks and orange wind explodes. Corvus flies off him. Atlas jerks into the floor.

  His chest collapses into recoil from the firestorm above. Glare dims, heat tapers, and Atlas forces his lungs to expand several stabbing pains later. He crawls onto his feet and staggers through fire tails wagging a breeze into dissipation. He squints through stings.

  Hair singed, face scarlet, Corvus balances on a knee and hand. Atlas looks elsewhere; he scans the wall’s fissure glittering microscopic stone fragments in descent, its one sunlit incision streaking a golden wedge to the tips of his toes. They warm.

  “Truth is light,” Atlas says.

  He sprints for the crevice. Corvus runs after and shoots cobalt from the quakes in his hand; a reddening cone rushes at Atlas’s back as a hundred whipped warhorses. Atlas twists, stretches both palms behind him, releases his power. Reversing their charge, a wind ocean crashes its crest over the flames and hurls them the way they came. Corvus’s fire bashes his own bruised face, rent uniform, tarnished pendant and iron ring, and drenches his body. It floods level fifty.

  Twisting forward, Atlas drums his feet into cycle. Fire and wind splash the room’s far end and ricochet.

  Atlas gasps and runs and wall’s sunlight brightens and crevice grows. Hot wind hits his back. He doesn’t look back.

  He throws one last current that smashes wall’s stone, shrinks behind his angled shoulder, and leaps. He flies a meter. Flames slam his back; he slams the wall as the smoldering shockwave does and scrapes through the fissure crumbling around body, eyelids wrinkled shut.

  Exterior steel gashes his upper arm. He clears it.

  And falls.

  Breath skids down his throat and swells his lungs tight before he opens his eyes. His gut suspends. Atlas waves his arms and flails his feet; but his limbs fight yanking toward his right side and he spins. When pupils contract, vision swirls, grays, and he’s plummeted the first fifty of four hundred meters of Administration Citadel’s height through sapphire sky.

  He glimpses his toes blurring across sun. He glances below at some black mass blended halfway up blue. His blood jolts to his head and then from his eyes back to his feet and he forces an inhale that returns color to sight in bursts he breathes. His skin tingles acceleration. Atlas dives through air slipping down the wrong pipe at a rate that quickens senses past velocity’s pull; and so he sees his coughed saliva string before his nose, toward Citadel’s point that tops the mass he now identifies.

  He watches a ripple in his tunic roll between leather bands. Feels it lap like lake surf. His insides’ suspension, blood’s drift, loss of direction pound his heart but f
uel his palms. He swears he dreams and forgets the waking. But he cuts gasps through his teeth, wind through his fingers—he swallows sky he thought he’d before tasted and, for the first time in existence, awakens. The exterior, the unseen wraps around hip and limb ribbons he only feels, and it soothes, whispering of his fragility, vulnerability, his limitations acceptable among star seas flittering his life’s thread. His reality falls; the reality rises.

  Atlas fans his arms, arches his back, and slows his spinning. His stomach turns down and legs float up. Jetting upward, wind smacks his face, waters his eyes. He bats the distortions from his lashes.

  A gentle sunny gossamer tells instinct he travels one of Citadel’s latitudinal sides. Arcade’s north branch, its arches merely two-dimensional hatches upon a busy backdrop, approaches as Atlas’s landing place. Its marble bustles with white. Thousands—tens of thousands of figures sharpen into shape between Eos’s five towers, upon its black flat and connecting highways. Citizens brim the courtyard and spill into the side streets. They, the constellation walls, white attire, marble ground wane blue sky as all civilization launches toward Atlas.

  He flips and ground again turns to sky fleeing. His legs fly overhead. He tumbles till nausea seethes, throws out an arm, spins counterclockwise, jerks the opposite way, spins clockwise and then backward, forward, capital’s walls bobbing diagonally and Citadel’s stretching black night in the flare of its base.

  Citizens’ heads grow into detail. Atlas cringes his eyes shut and, at view’s next flash, counts individual bodies. Flinging one stiff arm, he gropes for his armband. He pinches the aureus tucked underneath, flips, sweats, and the coin slips from his fingers into air.

  He pales.

  The aureus drops beyond his reach, toward nearing heads.

  Atlas locks his vision on Sideran ground and, though he turns and turns, tracks the gold flicker shrinking into grayed mass. His eyes follow, release, catch, follow the coin. He narrows them. Citizens’ shoulders shuffle in grids of formation. The coin glimmers, twirls between stripes of white and black canvas, between obscurity and clarity. Atlas spreads his palms.