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We were not warned. We could not have been warned. The islands do not look back. When at last we all abandoned the crumbling cover of the timid blue woods of island sequence 11 and stepped through the portal on the sands of our new home, we found the first settlers standing by the gate, eyes fixed to the sky. It was midnight. We remember it well. Our friends, partners and esteemed Council members were trembling as they stood, legs weak from exhaustion as they could not divert their eyes from a spectacle only they could see. We carried them to their pristine homes and tucked them into bed.
Palms swayed in the wind. The midnight sun crashed fiercely on our skins and we all wore crypto-sunscreen so that was okay. That is when I first saw it – like a faint rustle in the corner of your eye, a breeze, an apparition flashing through thick foliage. The citadel existed in the space between the blades of the palm leaflets, a rippling awareness of monoliths too total to be perceived at once. They could not fill the sky. Not yet.
I threw an empty can on the beach to see the waves carry it to my feet and back again with each retreat. Pale golden sky, soft waves, yellow can bobbing on the water surface. When the sea drew it back once more it did not reach my feet. The tide had been funneled by invisible walls to follow glyphs on the sand; the little can turned strange corners along with the current and echoed like tin against stone. The air was very dry and old then, at midnight on the beach. Isn’t dust beautiful? When the light hits it just so, it is like a sparkling galaxy which you can inhale. Breathe deep. A tiny star will explode inside your lungs.
“Can you see it?” asked my friend. “Do you remember what it is?”
I could not confess to her that the palm trees shielded me and I let them bear the burden of the visions beyond. It was a comfortable life, in those first days. I knew the sky was full and kept my eyes on the ground. All in all, I don’t think she knew what she was seeing either. Things just happened to her. You know the type. As we bought our midnight lunch to eat in the gardens, we talked about the clocks instead. Small talk. She said the island’s going wrong, time is out of joint, and I asked her what was up with that. We are getting one minute a day, she said, stretched one thousand four hundred and forty four times. What do you mean, I said. We met at midnight, she said. Yes, I said. It is midnight right now, she said. What about it, I said. Apparently we are meant to care if it is always the same midnight pinned to the present until it frays or a different one? How can we know? Are we stealing minutes from the future? That looks like the regular flow of time to me. This island’s as good as any. Just mind the post office’s opening hours. She laughed.
The citadels waited on the horizon.
Great stone citadels rising on a distant planet that filled the sky, stairs and columns and labyrinths, long forgotten alleyways crumbling into ruin. The pinprick windows puncturing the lower levels of their dilapidated buildings staring with dark pupils, promising to whisper mysteries to anyone who would reach them.
We all saw them, by then. Palm trees can only go so far. Was it years we spent under their shadow? Decades? One day our field of vision gave in. The citadels erupted. Cascades of arches and dry sand waterfalls filled the niches and corners of our lives. Pouring cereals into the bowl in our kitchen at midnight, we were surrounded by walls beyond walls beyond walls as ziggurats rose in the distance, carved within the walls of our own home. They followed us in the woods, like abandoned ruins never touched by the undergrowth. Going out for a swim in the clear waters of our blessed home we knew that proud cities with their stone domes had fallen and rested at the bottom of faraway oceans.
What could we do? We contemplated. Visions like these, you get a lot of contemplation done. Some of us more than others. At midnight these contemplators, the whole lot of them, they assembled in circles like the first settlers, careful to sit down to rest their legs and maybe bring chips and sodas. They sat on roofs, on the cliffs, in the middle of deserted streets and let the citadels fill them and mirror their bodies and the winding pattern of their thoughts and the soles under their feet. They wondered and they talked. It all felt all the more real, at midnight. They compared the rapture of their visions in the sky with the secret vaults and cobbling that did and did not exist on our island, drew maps of the citadels and found that they joined at weird angles, one immense surface of crumbling stone shattering and reconstructing itself over and over. In talking, they too created new mazes in the stone, and brought the truth of the citadels deeper into our lives. We huddled together on our island and felt at the bottom of a valley, surrounded by steep carved mountains. Nothing much got done on Island Sequence Twelve, but it sure was scenic.
My friend sad she saw a god in the supermarket one day, past the frozen pizza aisle. My friend never lies. It was there! Frozen peas, frozen broccoli, ruined stone on another planet superimposing a maze on the once-linear aisles, frozen seafood, frozen pizza, god: a single terrible eye carved in stone, alive, peering from the darkness through an empty spot on the shelves. What deep and ancient tomb had she traversed on the twin surface of another planet, corridor after winding corridor, to be admitted to its presence? Glyphs flickered in the corner of her vision. The air crackled with apocalyptic omens. The god blinked and was never there.
“This is great news!” I told her over a midnight bubble tea on the beach, holding her hand in my enthusiasm. It felt like we had reached an ending, like all this gazing amounted to venturing deeper and deeper into the vision that had blessed Island Sequence Twelve, past the temples and the towers, the winding passages, the colonnades. She alone had found her way beyond the horizon and pushed forward until she had reached that inevitable fugue point: a god.
What god did she think it was? Could it be Moonlight Petal, terraforming our home through the dreams of dead cities? I would like to go on a walk in an endless city. Just for an hour. Or was it Damned Harmony on his alabaster throne, and does it mean that in our visions we are seeing Earth, distant and destroyed? Was it a goat stone eye? Goats host long streaks of gods in their spinal cord. Nightmare Revival hosts a long streak of goats. His scores of alien scholars might fancy a trip to our beaches in their free time? It could be! Going out on a limb, and I acknowledged that she would have told me if she had seen an endless quivering mass of skeletons, but, hear me out, what about Beautiful Spectre?
She couldn’t say. Didn’t really follow me in these bubbling educated guesses, either. My friend lives in the moment. But me? The prospect of an unknown god made me giddy with anticipation. Our grand plan – the Council’s grand plan, Monserrat’s grand plan – sparkled at last on the horizon like a guiding star. A god reached out to us, a god breathed in our midst. We hoped for transcendence for the first time since the Great Betrayal. It’s cosmic! It’s cosmic! Even out there on the beach, I could feel the sacrality of our breakthrough pass through me like gentle sine waves. Or a vision of citadels.
The Council, for their part, reached a different conclusion.
“Brothers! Sisters! Siblings! Citizens!” blared Leader Monserrat’s voice from a holographic screen on the beach for an unannounced island-wide transmission. White-clad and self-assured, he towered against the indistinct shape of the cliffs at night. I listened with bated breath. Wasn’t the far-off obelisk beautiful that night? All citadels had a far-off obelisk. That was what first tipped off the unified citadel theorists, sending them into a map-making frenzy for the better part of a century. I once saw it rise from my bathtub, surrounded by the dust of aeons. It was okay from up close.
“Listen not to the lure of deception!” I held onto the image I had crafted in my head after my friend’s retelling of her encounter. It fluttered like something fragile and very much alive. “If a god talks to you, kill it! We shall resurrect it later, on our own terms. No unauthorized gods shall infiltrate the islands. Do not listen to intruders. Our plan shadows their plan and lies in its worship, but their plan is not our plan. This makes sense to theologians everywhere.”
Monserrat took a deep breath. “Yet tragedy has struck! The Council has reason to believe that the god Dying from Sadness has, in spite of our careful plans, manifested itself on our island through cunning artifice.”
“Who could’ve seen it coming? A god? Here? I quite liked those citadels, myself. Nice architectural touch,” chimed in a different voice offscreen, I didn’t pay attention to whose, didn’t parse the amount of sarcasm either, busy as I was feeling like I had just lost a bet with myself. Our visitor was Dying from Sadness, the Sedimentary Despair, It Who Kind Of Just Happened, or so the Council said. The despair philosopher. To gaze into that mineral abyss...
Our Leader Monserrat continued, unaware of my plight: “If you stub your toe against a rock and cry, you are committing a crime of unauthorized worship. Watch your step. If you gaze longingly at the abandoned towers of a citadel and bemoan that rent down here is too high, you are committing a crime of unauthorized worship. If you let your mind wander through stone-walled alien alleyways instead of our own painstakingly landscaped town centre, you are an idiot. You heard it: an idiot. Enjoy it until it lasts because we are legging it out of here. Island Sequence Twelve, done like a dog’s dinner!”
“Boss is right. Can’t have gods mucking up our gods plan,” said the other voice again.
“Tomorrow, in order to detach ourselves from Dying from Sadness’ beguiling grip and begin transfer in earnest, a session of communal laughter has been scheduled at midnight for syndicate and citizens alike. Individuals who are not deemed sufficiently elated will be shot on sight, so give it your best. Practice at home! Ha ha ha!”
The transmission cut away on his echoing laughter. I stared at the waves breaking over the dark ocean’s surface. The white foam broke up and muddled the reflections of great arches and passages unraveling right past the corner of my eye. The citadel grew behind me. The ocean knew. The ocean always knows. It knew before I did. A wave broke. A path formed through the distorted reflections on the water surface.
In a thousand years, a god would still be waiting at the fugue point of great stone citadels on an alien planet hidden from our thirteenth home, with no-one to witness it.
I had until midnight to make my peace with the Council’s orders, which made sense to theologians everywhere.
I did not.
So at midnight, when the whole island came alive with fake but enthusiastic laughter, when the citizens were felled in ritual slaughter and the gates opened, when I could see Monserrat and his inner circle cross one by one and leave the citadels behind once and for all as a footnote in their exalted plan, I ran. I ran to the coast and knew that my feet were hitting a hard pavement, not sand. In the distance, the obelisk could guide my steps. The truth of the citadels carried me and when I ran out of beach, instead of the water I stepped on the old stones I knew were there. I ran and ran some more, on the ocean’s surface, through blackened courtyards and past statues sanded off by aeons. I ran in cobbled streets that opened on plazas as big as the horizon and caught my breath as waves ebbed underneath me. I was awed by the indomitable beauty of the citadels and I ran toward my end, where all lines were joined.
At the end of a canyon of high rises I saw the eye of a god peering through the rubble. I could not say if it was the same one my friend met, the one the Council was running away from because they could not cut it up and box it into their neat little plans. I do not think it was Dying from Sadness, anyway, or if it was, it was doing a shit job of it – I had never felt more alive. It was a god, reaching out through the stone. That is all I knew. For one moment, and I am sure that it was midnight, we were both real. The air flickered. Far behind me, the gates were closing.
“🏔 📦 ✔ ⚫ 🕨 🚑 🛈 🟈 📦” it said. It gave me wings and I flew away into the last narrowing circle of sky as this reality collapsed.