Aeolia

38: Central Point

Frost shut his eyes tight against the sight of Spire's stone-still body. He felt his breath quicken and his legs began to shake. His tail swept across the floor, an agitated pendulum.

     "Stop." The Kingfisher's voice was hard.

     Frost forced his tail to still. "I'm sorry," he said.

     "This is not something to quail and quake over, Frost," the bird chastised. "This is not anything in the scope of greater records. I don't plan to restate much of what I have said—all you need to do is narrow your brows and feel  the songbird. Feel and filter and find. You have become something bigger than yourself, Frost. If come to be in dire danger, run. We are intruders-in the mind-field the Ensnarer has most power, followed by the ones it has captured-in this case, Ravine and Spire. We are not welcome, so be wary. That is all."

     Frost swallowed and nodded. "Yes, Dreamfisher."

     "Now hush. I'm going in."

     He heard the large bird fall limp into the Lattice's embrace but resisted the urge to look. Eyes closed, he took a deep breath and focused. Small darts of rain kneaded his fur. Open your eyes, Frost, they said. Open your eyes and run. But he resisted—and after a moment, he felt the air begin to shift around him.

     Sunlight bathed his pelt in a slow recrawling of the senses—sun that perforated through the Mist, piercing down from the last layer of the peeling planet, where heat and time fused to one in molten clouds. Frost's whiskers quavered with the weight of unfurling forms. Behind his eyelids, frames and figures danced in wild undulations, breaking and binding, crying and calling, growing tired as the sunlight dimmed—until—at last—the light had fallen away entirely, everything had fallen, and he was falling after it, a hopeless boundless mass in continual pursuit. Roaring sights and sounds flashed by.

     Music. Was it music his screaming ears heard? Or simply the mad shout of wind as its stretched arms strained to catch him, but failed, catastrophically so?

     Whatever it was, it quickly passed. And now his fragments were beginning to align, atoms drawn together to a central point. Central point. What a relative phrase.

     To suppose everything had a central point! It was physical appropriation. To assume a body had to be bound to one defining thing! Frost glared at the world that wheeled around him. The seasons that fought over nothing on the savanna plain had no central point, they were more so ideas that harnessed shape to their own whims. And they were just fine.

     And this was Aeolia! Or nearly so. Wasn't this the end of the world? The Great Coast? It was a place where everything dangled so precariously near the cliffs that the discord one encountered at the planet's end was frightened into harmony again.

     And near such a fantastical place, gravity dared to assume something had to have a central point! The Lavender Sea rippled on for infinitum, warped in every direction but east, below the First Cliffs—and it was the most beautiful thing in the world! One could hardly say it had a defined central point.

     What really was a central point?

     Frost was still falling towards what the mind-field had to consider its point. If he wasn't falling to a point, he would be able to dart aloft wherever he pleased—without the confines set up by distant, foolish, and unsympathetic laws!

     This whirl of thoughts led at last to the question he'd been restraining.

     What was his central point?

     Was it his love of the Aeolian Outskirts—or the wish to enter past and live there, contented and accepted? Was it the fire he had entranced the woman with as the snow sheathed all color, else? Was it the spring in his muscles when he walked through the winter? Or was it the icy marrow in his bones, ever contracting, drawing himself to its unsure core? Was his central point that unsure core? The word core  implied that in itself.

     Or was it simply the laws of gravity as his body became itself once more?

     Gravity, gravity, what a sickening idea. Gravity. It made him plummet, made him plea, made his legs palsy and poor.

     It aligned him and broke him all over again. And at last he hit the earth.