Acrylic: Prologue - "Coda"

Coda

Prologue:

Coda

...and there, cresting over the edge of the horizon, the sun parted the darkness with a gentle bloom of light that began to grow. He blinked then, shuttering in the landscape as if it had been a photograph. He watched the stars for a while, as one by one they had been absorbed by the light of morning, beginning to fade from view as if they had never been. He looked to the sky before him, letting the filter of light shift all around him. He began to see the world more clearly then.

Along the horizon, the sun cracked over the edge of the earth, rising... a glowing orange ball of fire amidst a black and purple sky. There were gentle clouds drifting there, and touched in purples, dark blues and greys... but along the edge of the clouds, the radiance of the orange glow of the sun itself in curved outlines. He watched for a long time, listening to the sound of the earth waking up as if it had been many nights since he had felt a sort of peace within. "I did it," he says aloud with an exhausted triumph. His hands lay flat along the earth beside him, gripping gently the drifts of sand that had collected. He closed his eyes for a time, listening to the sounds beginning to rise up from all around him, as the first of the birds had begun to call out. His eyes opened, and he let the filter of the world refract off his retinas... revealing to him the world as he had known it.

"Such a beautiful thing," he said almost unsure of himself, even as the words had left his lips. The ground before him had broken away, almost eons passed... the crash site of some enormous meteor that had fallen from the heavens to this very place upon the surface of the earth. The ground before him was a sunken crater, miles beyond. His eyes traced over the lines of the canyon walls as the first of the sunrays cast out, parting the darkness with a gentle wave of warm light. It fell upon the land before him, the cratered divide that he had now been sitting beside... his feet dangling over the edge of the precipice. He looked down, studied the jagged rocks and boulders that had littered the ground below some two-hundred feet down and with revelation he felt the force of the wind at his back, gently nudging him forward. His eyes looked up; watching as more light spilled out from the sun and the world around him began to grow brighter, revealing the soft orange color of the canyon rocks, striped with hues of reds and browns as shades of purples clung to the walls in drops of shadows slipping downward at strange angles. The sky had been changing, shifting into deep blues as the purples were being stripped from the sky itself... where the beginning shades of blue began to emerge. It started as a wash of deep blue, then faded over the course of the next several minutes... until eventually the sky was lit up in the most beautiful light blue hue that he had ever seen.

The stars were losing their light, only the few that were bright enough to sustain the immeasurable brightness of that of the sun remained. Jupiter, maybe Venus, he thought, watching their reminder hanging there low in the sky, being blotted out by the incredible glow of the hot Mojave sun. He squinted into the light, trying to see the planets there, orbiting on their own distant plane, and was almost to sad to realize that he could no longer see them. His eyes watered, he clenched them shut a while, pushing the tears from his eyelids and when he opened them once more, he wiped them away, squinting and blinking the world back into view as best as he could. The sun was almost a deity, it had a mind of its own, and the painter was forced to look away.

He shifted his eyes, staring for a time at the few black birds that had taken flight and he shivered. They defied the laws of gravity, gusting their large wings beside themselves as they drifted soundlessly over the surface of the earth. He studied them, remembering then bits and pieces of imagery... dreams that had come to him in the days prior to this moment, but for the life of him he could not recall. He saw flashes of bright lights behind his eyes, and then... watching the birds with a calm expression a splinter carved into his mind. He winced, his head falling into the palm of his hand, he ran his fingers through his hair trying to soothe the sharp pain that had risen. After a while, it subsided. He looked up, knowing. "I'm still dreaming," he said. He looked over the edge of the cliff where he had been seated, wondering what would happen if he had jumped. He stared down at the sharp rocks below. "If it's a dream, then none of this will matter anymore anyway."