wb :

I walked a road, beneath a boulevard of trees that gaped and arched like the ribs of some monstrous whale that had swallowed me but was empty inside, ravaged by time and hunger and pestilence that it had to swallow something as small, pathetic, insignificant as myself to stave off its mortal pangs. As though its flesh was already half-eaten away, the sun poked its rays between the branches, stabbing spears of some great fisherman with a shield of shining gold that blinded the Medusa to take her head; so I walked down, its throat impaled by the terrible splendour of a vengeful god.

I walked that road alone, as though there was nobody else to walk with; the oldest monster of old, the last leviathan, its beached corpse sucked every breath with labour, swept every morsel into its mouth despairingly as its gargantuan bulk thrashed, twitched to keep warm, even as the rays of the sun warmed its carrion-to-be. I strolled beneath its hide, left my footprints on the flesh of that which wrecked ships, broke nations, wrought devastation on Earth so complete the ancients named it and feared its name.

So pathetic now!- but I walked the road, paved in pools of blackened blood, clotted and hardened in a profusion of pebbles, and stared as the sky sprung another salvo at the Earth, the two locked in a mortal grip like titans wrestling. At the dusk of day, even Atlas falters and Hercules wavers; I let the two rest in their writhing embrace, and brought my feet ahead of each other, intent on finding the end of that throbbing maw, the bowels of the great creature that even I called home now and walked the alleys of in search of something I only had a vague picture of.

That vague picture I held in my hand, a map or painting or torn shred of canvas on which the directions to salvation could be found. Perchance perdition, but the road I walked led me onwards, and there was nowhere else to go; so much for a map. Still its presence in my hands reassured me, as though the path I walked down, lined with the specks of shadows sprayed from the rays that spilled across the ground, was Destiny, was Fate, was the straight and narrow way that I should never stray from lest I lose my soul in damnation.

When the gods give you a road, walk it!- there is nothing else you can do, when the bars of your cage are the ribs of a nameless beast that yet flails its final breaths, shaking the world with the tremors, the inhumanity of its suffering, each quiver of agony rocking your path as a bolt from heaven splits the air and roars of its power. Each step I take is at the mercy of my maddened master, which might crush me in the labyrinthine folds of its gullet with the slightest sneeze. Stalwart I stride, but travellers as myself already know that any moment we might find ourselves less a breath and a heartbeat.

I am a traveller, and my journeying never ceases. Even on a road as straight as this, wrought by the same divinities that built our frail flesh from mud and air, there is a wanderlust in my heart that drives it onwards. May it be the patterns that the sun throws on the ground, or the shapes the leaves form in the whimpering wheezes of the grand entity that wrapped its jaws about me, there is always something different to see, something else that lingers at the edge of remembering, then bids me goodbye in the blink of a half-woken eye.

The shoes I wear are old, but scarce as old as the monster of the sea that gasps on land like a drowning man, scarce as old as even my own race, who were infants huddled around campfires when the oceanic behemoths had watched countless mountains rise and fall. Now the last of their kind lies with the last of mine, and we are two waltzers to the strains of some melody that ears cannot hear, notes that eyes cannot read, and instruments even the devil cannot hope to play. We are harmonics on the same frequency, the same flesh in different form, our hearts beating on the same accord.

I am a creature of the universe, that journeys down the throat of fearsome time who in his age lies dying on the shore. So long ago he counted all the grains, each one a day that he would live to see; now he has counted each and every one, and found the last beneath my feet, which walk and step their path because a merciless deliverer of judgement: fate, demands the souls of time and man alike.

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In the tradition of posting once a month to keep the ol' blog on life-support.