THE NIGHT SWIRLS around me like a chill fog and microscopic ice crystals assault my face, numbing it as the wind rushes past. The particles melt and drip back across my cheeks, flinging into my hair and off my ears as I fall.
A deep, craggy land stretches out below me, with obelisks and toppled standing stones cluttering the hilly landscape. There are only broken and burned trees, trampled grass, and small patches of scrub across the ground. Large tufts of unkempt weeds protrude from under fallen rocks, suggesting they’ve been there for years.
This world is old. I can feel it, sense it. It’s a world whose time has passed on. There is nothing here for anyone.
As I coast towards the top of the hill, I can see the stones becoming more dense and cluttered, some toppled against each other, forming crude arches. They are smooth, with little or no detail on their non-iconic patterns.
There is no meaning here. No life. No hope.
But there is music. A whisper of music, dark and forlorn. It’s the music King was playing at the club. No, it’s somehow different. Even darker, sadder, and slower, played on different instruments, or perhaps whispered on the wind. Voluminous, heavy wind chimes bleat out this sound. Now less of a song, and more of a heavy sigh from the land itself. It sounds of hopelessness; of death.
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa
The sea stretches out to infinity, past the rocky shores of the narrow plain. The hill rises higher, bathed in the deep, iridescent blue of the cloudy sky. There is only the light of the moon, now burning through the heavy canopy.
Two. Two moons cast down upon the blasted hillside. I fly unhindered up the slope, past the rocky detritus of the fallen ancient city.
The only punch of color is yellow. A tiny speck of yellow at the top of the hill, near a cyclopean arch at the hilltop. As I near it, I feel dread rising, as I know what’s coming to greet me.
I suddenly soar up and away from the hillside and its craggy shores. Up higher and higher I fly, the ice and rain pelting against me, tearing against my eyes.
The pressure slows me down, my escape subverted, prevented. Everything falls still around me, and the silence, the lack of wind, of music, of any other sensation, fills me with foreboding. I float high above the distant landscape.
And then the fall begins, the wind picking up again, and I tumble back towards the blasted island in a sea of emptiness. I spin, and try to right myself so that I can at least see my ultimate fate as I careen to the city at the top of the hill.
The yellow thing appears, grows. I can see it now as I fall towards it. It’s a flag of some long-forgotten nation, blowing in the gale, stiff fabric doing an obscene dance at the top of a stone arch. As I close in on the blot of yellow, it appears wrapped around something, stuck against a protrusion from atop the arch. Flapping, tethered, rippling.
And it’s no longer a rag of fabric on a spire, but I knew this already. It’s a cloaked figure, clad in a yellow hood, and the blackness of the hood is watching me fall towards it. I am about to fall into it.
And the music becomes louder and sadder than ever before. It’s the loss of all things, of faith, of hope, of virtue.