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+--- Thread: Alluvion (/thread-1205.html)
RE: Alluvion - Patricus I - 04-15-2020
The end was coming, but Philip was unsurprised. The end was foretold eons ago. He spoke for years on the subject, imploring the faithful to prepare their hearts and minds for the day of reckoning. Nimeda was disturbed. Most were, but Philip watched her unraveling without interference. His stillness held like a shield of fortitude against the breakdown. An edge of intolerance sharpened his presence, but it was not one that cut bloody marks. It was one that broke the swells of a rising storm. As expected, the surge within Nimeda passed by the time she took the dreamstake.
Calmer waters flowed, and Philip found himself a witness to the soothing effect wash over Nimeda. The crystal stake glowed in her hands in a way that reminded him of the blue light from the Pillar beneath the press of the young woman’s hands. After a few moments, a wind rose. It ruffled the back of his neck, then rustled the edges of his neatly laid hair. Finally, the wind pressed against his back that he had to stand against it. Nimeda cried out in surprise, the wind died, and she dropped the stake. She seemed timid now, but Patricus was not. After smoothing his hair to neatness, he scooped the stake back to ownership, pondering the pulse that emanated from some silent call.
The light inside the shard twisted into two halves before settling at the points. Endings came. The slumbering dragon arose. Philip once told the Regus of the Archives that he disregarded the truth of man and trusted only to his own emotion for illumination. The holy flame of justice lit his expression. He knew his own purpose. He was the Pope. The prophet. The saint. The sovereign ruler of faith.
With that knowledge, Patricus twisted the faceted faces of the stake. Light pulsed and he gulped for air as though plunged deep into the waters surrounding the garden. Tuuru lifted a farewell arm. The Pillar sank away. The trees disintegrated. Nimeda remained, a tether to himself, which was also tethered to the key until nothing remained but emptiness, the stake, and themselves. It was only a heartbeat, but time stretched oddly in dreams. A heartbeat or an Age; they were one in the same.
“The key called to me,” he corrected her and the stake snapped into place. Instantly, the stake vanished. White light flushed his eyes until Nimeda burned away within it.
Shortly after, he woke in his bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. He folded back the blankets, undisturbed and smooth from a motionless slumber. Tightness crimped his eyes, but he stifled a yawn and planted feet upon the cold floor just long enough to light a kerosene lamp waiting on the bedside table. His gaze laid with weighty contemplation upon a well-worn journal. After a few moments, he penned some notes upon a new page, dated it, and abandoned it to a lonely drawer.
Dream all but forgotten, he slipped to his knees at the bedside and communed with the creator for a great deal of time.