Dark World Chapter One: The Scarlet Sprinter & The Iridescent Shadow

I saw prayers. I noticed kites and with nothing better to believe in than myself, I wondered if I could fly. I thought they were prayers, streaks of them which painted the ship, overflowing from floors and rooms and halls, sails amazing. Prayer was part of such places, colourful and welcoming, even if it wasn’t the deck the way I thought it might have been from a distance, it was still a part of the ship, a scarf of kites and flags. It opened my eyes and lifted my head. I smiled. I remember that and think that’s important. And it wasn’t the last time. For a time then, I wouldn’t have believed that some people refuse to look at the sky. At night sometimes, people would come up on deck and just light candles. On my first week or so, the city would be full or at least strewn with yellow starlight. But as days past, fewer people came up, I think maybe they just didn’t have anymore candles. They kept them on some nights, it would look like fireflies, dotted about and lost in the world, protecting people as they slept, promising them things safe in the dark and true in the light. And even as the number of lights dwindled, there was never a pitch black night, not below deck at least, not on my level which was quite low, below sea. It seemed to all go on forever. The words, the colours and smells, the heat. It seemed to go on. In stretches in depths innumerable and insurmountable in their stories, it just seemed to go on. And what if it did?

What if the world went on. What if it just went on, forever. What would that mean. If there were some hundred something lands, some hundred thousand tongues and some billion people, then that was some hundred something different ways to be and see and think and feel, then that was some billion different ways to grow up, to choose, to fall in love or to hate, to be. To believe. Some hundred thousand ways to make, and to destroy. And if it just went on, the way I was sure it did looking out across it all at night, where black met black and went on, where stars met stars and went on, then where was I in all of it. Where would I find me. How could I choose what to be in all of it. How could we not be free in such a world. Where was I going. Who would I find. What would they believe in. It was beginning to rain, but I didn’t go inside, how could I? How could I pull myself away from the world like that, out here, where anything could be at any moment, where I could find some new secret to believe in at any moment. With each rain drop. At any rain drop. So I stayed out in the rain and listened to the songs.

It was Maheda who helped me think it was okay, not Julian, Maheda they called her, the wanderer keeper who spoke of Orion, not of Raindance. Maheda who had written the book, they call it ‘i am prayer’, maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t, but it was she who spread word of the sprinter guardian, who took her deeds and her being around the world before disappearing. Some people thought maybe Maheda was the guardian, the Asem, I didn’t know, I didn’t think it mattered, I wanted to meet her more than the guardian, maybe I would one day, wandering like this. Somehow it made me feel okay to record my own story, to believe it mattered. Somehow, even if she was of Orion, I wanted to believe in the guardian too. Somehow, like none of her kind before her, she made us all feel like we mattered.

My diary wasn’t very big, but it seemed to go on somehow. I never seemed to reach the end. Then, it was my proof that I was real, that there were things that I believed in. It was my home, until I found that person, my place in the world which never ended. A people who loved lights called it the realm of candles. A world that stretches on forever in rows upon rows of lights. And in a world that goes on forever, what is there to look forward to? Why were all those people on those ships, in a world where some billion dreams are made every day, what is it people are looking for? What is there for me in such a world? How do we know when we find it? How can we even know we’ve found it, how do we look for it when we don’t even know what to believe in. What map do we use?

How do we know it’s the one we should be using. Someone very important to me would tell me, that as long as we catch light, we can’t go wrong, even in a dark, amazing world. People catch light.

It took a full day for the ships to change passengers. I got up a little before dawn, just to be alone and to see the dogs. There’s a kindness in animals that you don’t really see in people, it’s the kind of trust we wish we could give each other, but somehow don’t believe we can, I think maybe that’s why some people hate animals. Because beasts say- I believe- with every breath. It’s clear as whales shattering unknowable waters for an impossible world they can barely imagine every sunrise about the boat. They just know there’s light up there, and that’s all. It’s that human people are either scared because they can’t meet that kind of courage, they lack even the faith in themselves to believe in others or often it’ll be jealousy. Humans are jealous, so we took to the waters and the sky, and then even to hearts and the sky beyond the sky when an angel came to find us, hoping to find ourselves somewhere in it all. The dogs would bark to greet the whales every dawn but that dawn, the day I lost my diary. The first superheroes were dogs, I think everyone knows that. They're kind and sweet and gentle and have all the meekness and might that all living things have. They can hear the stars and they could hear him deep in the stars, he was the chime in the echo waters, they knew he was coming long before he knew he was, long before he knew he was from us. Just like they can hear her.

But on the morning of the long day I lost my diary, they didn’t bark, not in greeting, but they stood or crouched wary, to some terrible or incomprehensible thing to the south, something on our path, warning us of secrets hidden in long shadows, of what things cast them, lay at the end of them. They could see and hear things we can’t, we know it’s there, it’s what fire is made of, the northern lights, warmth and lightning, at the core of living things. It’s everywhere in streams. That’s what the sky lights were, what everyone dreamed they could see, really see as they gathered and swam high, bold and real since he came and left. It made the world hot as a lakh of people moved across the dock and up the other way. Running, walking, crawling, pushing and giving way, carrying one another and holding hands, whatever they had to. It was hot. I crouched down on my knees by a ventilation shaft, I couldn’t really see that much. I made myself stand up every now and again, I wasn’t sure really how I was meant to be counting.

I wanted work on deck, but my past jobs were in kitchens, so that’s where I ended up. That was fine, it meant I got to feed the dogs, and it meant I got to be around food. I was sent up to check the situation with new arrivals, come up with an estimated number for how many more people we wouldn’t be able to feed. It did occur to me to ask the crew, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t know, no one could. The city ships were named that for a reason, they were large, above and below the water they towered and dove, floors upon floors of spaces meant for living, filled to bursting with people who could make it on however they could. People seeking something to look forward to, to believe in. Reasons were many, since the great storms began, flight was no longer as feasible as it had once been, so the world came to rely on trains, ships and the gates. Our lands lost touch with one another, and worlds once familiar once more became strange and secretive. The Purusartha and the Weed broke the world asunder, then came the raindance and then the Raindance and their nightmare and people reached for something to believe, all across the face of the Earth. Sprinting on land, waiting across the seas.

I’m not sure why the chef sent me up there, or if he actually expected me to be able to do the job. I figured I couldn’t go back empty handed, so I thought maybe the best I could do was ask crew or captain from the alighting city. The difficulty was in actually seeing the ship past the crowd and kites, let alone boarding it. I decided to wait until I saw some kind of opening, but remembered how naive and spoiled this was of me. It would be harder than boarding the Babelon, or was it the Dove- I can’t remember, it never really mattered. 

 So I mustered what might I could, pushed myself off of the ventilator and dug my way into the crowd as gently as I could, only to find it really was a case of twelve steps backward and half a step forward. Most of those people intending to board the other ship wouldn’t make it, I wouldn’t make it there, let alone back and I was set on making it to Pangaea. I also realised I may be stopping someone who urgently needs to be somewhere, so I let myself go and be herded in the flood of tongues and colours, shirts and hijabs, robes and dresses, scarves, saris and jalabiyas, bones and emas and bags, sacks and patoos and rags and bare torsos upon bare torsos in the blistering sky of sapphire fire.

I think I fell asleep, or passed out, not sure which and I’m sure no one noticed, how could they, there were so many more tired, far more hungry than me. I don’t think Abele would have noticed anyway, or if he did, that there was little he’d be able to do, even if he or someone he sent came up looking for me, he wouldn’t find me, nor I him. He had a single kitchen with which to feed people without count after all, hungry having carried centuries worth of stories in their bodies which lasted barely even one. When I awoke, the sky had gone scarlet and stars had begun to usher off the sun. The crowds had mostly disappeared, I managed to sit up, heavy with sleep and awake with water, I was sure from someone I’d never know, still wet at my mouth. The other city was leaving, it was larger, but otherwise looked the same. I felt the need to see it off somehow, so I waddled off towards the railing, too scared to lean, not even realising the stranger who helped me up and walked with me, as if I knew where I was going. The ship was the same as ours, the same vast shielding which composed the outer hull dug deep into the water, protecting and letting swaths of oxygen into the complex of inner floors which buried themselves deep. Colours, many. “Thank you.” I said instinctively. I was staring. The whole deck went deaf with silence as three people walked across. Two blue helmets and a meek looking man. I knew his face, everyone did. He never looked up, not a shred of defiance or pride, he looked straight down, hunched over. I was sure, he was starving. If he was who I thought he was, then there was no way he could be like that. A single person breached the crowd, a woman I think. In her hands she held a small fire. And handed it to the man, whispering something in his ear before disappearing again into the heat. He looked up at her, that I remember. He was sad.

“Don’t worry about him.” Said the person keeping me up right. “Let’s worry about you.” Only one arm held me up. “I’m fine.” I told them, noticing that they were shaking. It would be even hotter below deck now and people were keen to lodge on top, but the crew seemed adamant that inhabitants head in. It was bad enough down there without the storms, people would be desperate to be near the edges, as unsafe as it was, the open air saved lives. But tonight, if there really was a storm, the shovel would have to close and everyone would have to make due. Somehow. And somehow, the thought of the storm didn’t seem as bad as being down there, or so I thought then. I loved the rain, but I’m never eager to sleep in it. One of the captains had to make an appearance and an announcement, requesting everyone get below deck and that they were changing course for reasons of safety. It would have been embarrassing back then to admit they weren’t even sure it was possible for a storm, even a nephilim to simply materialise the way it seemed to in the deep distance, but everyone believed as the distant crash of incandescent fireworks shook the otherwise serene scarlet dusk. It blasted away the sweet scent of evening sea, made it bitter with gunpowder and salt. “We should wait.” Said the stranger. “No.” I was sure. “We should go, the sooner we’re in and have somewhere to sleep the better.” “In your condition-” “I still clearly know more about sailing a city than you.” I stood upright. I had my diary on me and really, that’s all that mattered. Saving up food was risky. If the heat didn’t get to it, fights often did.

This wasn’t always the case, much of the time, people just wanted to be left alone, but people needed to eat. I know I need strength to believe in something next, so I never saw why anyone should be different. I’d robbed a man before, I wasn’t proud of it, I think I lost what I stole too. On purpose I think. I looked up, I could barely believe there was only one sky, so I was never really sure if I believed in the streams, even as the burns reached out across the eversphere. It was deep red and a shimmering white which shone with the rush of green. Violet was setting in. The two soldiers had to pull the man through the crowds, people both jeered spitting and seemed overtaken by adoration and joy. Some lunged forward as is they wanted to grab him, but never came close enough to do so. The crowds did there best to part before him while he stared at their feet. In moments he disappeared into the sacred dark of the hull, filling with bodies, hopes and words. Thunder clapped again, as though the world was shattering as it filled with voices and thoughts and colours. At that moment, everyone seemed sure the sky would be destroyed and abyssal space itself would flood the world and smother us all. So we rushed and pushed and helped one another up, deep into the dark where maybe people would still light candles.

If the shovel had to close, and you were travelling in summer, the best place to be was sleeping against the inside. This was dangerous if you overslept the warning siren which signalled that it was opening. The entire mechanism was unsafe, but the cities, I believed, were still a thing of miracles. Built by the bedouin machinists and lost librarians, they answered the world’s pleas for movement and futures, even as continents were devoured and torn apart. “You’re young, but do you remember the internet?” Asked my companion, who had given me water, helped me to my feet and watched with me as a beast king was carried a prisoner down into the ship. 

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