Grab the Fire, Ride the Wind, Eat the Lightning, Speak the Thunder.

Grab the fire, huh?  They make it sound so easy.  They say it like the thousand year old ritual it is, like the creaking, old bones that stood here before me.  It's not a torch to be grabbed by the handle, it's not some metaphorical flame, it's a naked flame flickering in the soot-stained brazier that sits atop this high mountain.  I can see the scars on their hands, aged burns, some more so than others as they stand on the other side of the light.  Their white robes plastered against the darkness and the cloudy sky.  I step up, trying not to look at their hands, their faces.  The shivering goes away, the wind slicing through me no match for the furnace before me.  Inside it, the deep orange slithers over the blackened logs which burn into little flecks of white caught in the updraft to sail up into the night.  The fire is not special, no strange, magical wood, just some pieces brought up from the kitchens down below.  The brazier is only special in its ancient nature, just iron bent and smelted into a rough bowl on thick, tripod legs.  I'm certainly not special, not fire resistance here.  Just a cup of tea, drugged a bit to dull the pain that will come.  I've been waiting for a while, but the elders don't show impatience.  They don't turn when the thunder echos down in the valley.  I'd rather get it over with before the storm moves up this way though.  A little fire is initiation but a lightning bolt is death.  Plus, the tea is going to wear off soon.  Down into the light I plunge my hand, grabbing and finding nothing.  This is, of course, the expected result.  I have to wait for it to catch.  It's hot, but it feels like there's a layer of something in between me and the fire.  The older monks say that's what the tea does.  A little tongue flicks its way into the cylinder of my hand.  I don't think, just grip down.  It feels cold, so hot that I feel the chill move up my arm as I yank it out, falling over.  My arm aches, and I see the flicker of flame on it out of the corner of my eye.  Above is just the dark clouds, an occasional flicker of light in them arcing from one high grey blob to another.  The bucket.  If I let it burn too far my arm won't fit in the bucket.  I can't see it right away as I pull myself up, scanning the ground to my left where it should be.  A hand on my shoulder, one of the elders holding it out for me.  Thunder.  Lightning.  It comes like a snake out of the cloud, and I can see it dart out at me.  White with little hints of blue to highlight teeth and eyes as it steams forward.  Maybe the tea is still working, because I don't try to dodge, can't dodge in time.  My mouth is the only thing to move, dropping open to scream, to shout a warning, to question my teachings.  I don't know, I just faint.

Its damp, lying here on the stones.  It must be a low patch because it puddles up around me.  The rain is still falling, causing my eyelids to jump every time they get hit.  I'm still outside, still lying in the rain.  Each strand of muscle feels stretched to its limit, strained and bruised.  I can't open my eyes to see, won't, really.  I don't want to see.  I should be inside, bandaged and resting, so something is wrong.  I didn't put the arm out, I let it burn on.  The lighting stopped that somehow.  A groan.  Somebody is still here.  I have to open my eyes, have to sit up.  I'm heavy, like a drenched log, and my body protests the effort.  It doesn't get to make up my mind though.  I'm upright, and now the eyes can open, free of the downpour.  Ahead of me lays Elder Marin.  He also is struggling upright, if a bit faster than I did.  I want to say something, but I can't hear my voice or it won't come out.  I can hear the rain though.  He was always so unflappable, and now his mouth is open, starting.  Past me?  I spend the effort to turn, but just more storm clouds sit over mountaintops that way.  Then I look down.  My hand is still shut into a fist and I see a speck of orange beneath the scarred fingers.  I relax it open, or try to.  I have to bring my other arm open to pry a finger up.  A spark, and a catching one flares out, settling back on my hand despite the rain.  It's warm in the cold dampness, sputtering angrily against the rain before catching into a conflagration that envelops my arm, scars and all.  I hear Elder Marin start mumbling a mantra, but I don't look up, can't look up.  The flames entrance me.  Beneath them I see my skin blacken more, going from the reddish crispy part it was before to a dark obsidian.  The flame draws into itself, burning hotter and the black flecks off into grey, then white ash.  The flame disappears entirely, red veins of heat in the flaky white skin.  The tea must still be working, because I can't feel a thing.  Maybe they mixed in some hallucinogenic stuff with the pain dulling herbs.  Then it goes out entirely, rain washing at the ash, running it off my arm in rivulets.  My whole arm.  My unscarred arm.  Then the pain hits, aches all over again I'd forgotten I had.  When they come to drag me back down to the infirmary, drag all of us down there, I can barely register things.  I might have fainted again.  Brother Milo is a liar, this was much more nerve wracking than the spring resplendent ceremony.

Underneath

Wrecked and broken, whole and sturdy, fear and fearing all go down, down into the hole of a city.  Spiraling round like gutters on the pit walls the roads empty their people in.  None leave, not by that route.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage for them, soaked in religious fervor mixed with pragmatism.  What little shade and water that hides itself down in the depths draws them in, flowing like water down deep to soak into the tunnels, caves, and cavernous buildings that make it up.  We all abandoned the dying surface, that or died on it, parched in the sun.  What's left of us is darkened, even the hopeful casting their eyes downward, away from the light.  I blend into the crowd, blackish cloak with a thick hood, nothing showing from underneath it.  Anonymity for each man woman or child, though nobody seems to care either way.  Some people take quick glances up, burning the surface into their eyes, a moment of pain to remember humanities moment of pain.  It's a passing thing.  Most are lost in thought of what happens next.  What is life like down there, how do I survive, who can I trust, how did it all happen.  Pointless, most of it.  Life just happens, dwelling over it before you even know anything just muddles the mind.  How it happened is worth something.  It won't help now, not for a few generations.  Think on it enough and it will leave a mark, imprint something in us that might be a little respect.  Some of that down the line will help.  Might not take the ground beneath our feet if we have it, might not end a way of life same as how the sky above our head came crashing down.  Still, we exist, we trickle down into our hastily dug holes to hide.  Hundreds of thousands of them scattered all across the globe.  Plans are to connect them all, form a network between them.  Some of them might, most will have to fall down into chaos before they get up as a society again, if they get up again.  This city might make it, should make it.  I knew these people once, and they were strong, they were brave, they were honest.  Some broke under the sun, withered and shriveled into monstrous shapes, but under the black cloaks there are strong men and women.

Day doesn't fit anymore, even with the lights.  There are periods to sleep and periods to work, periods to play and to congregate, but it is not a day.  A night, perhaps, but everything is night, pillars of scattered through the city like stars, a great round chamber in the center shining like an inside-out moon.  We live in seasons now, life progressing for the person despite being crammed in with so many others once the ceiling was closed off.  We are shut in, closed to the sky, and to each other.  The moon-chamber is our openness.  Our center, our light is always alive with the singing and dancing.  It is sad, it is happy, it is brash and shy.  Ecstatic, somber, ritualistic and brave.  There we share ourselves and our emotions, the tender smiles and the flares of anger.  When we spend ourselves there, enervated with our souls bleeding out, we flow back out into the canvas of the night, to the silence.  The moon our heartbeat and the stars our work, sleep, and thoughts.  All that is left of our sky is the food and our clothes.  The sweet tastes of sun and clouds, grass and rain.  Some of that is in it, vitamins that we produce and mix in, chemicals that flavor it like what we used to eat.  Of our dress, it is of the beaches.  Little bits of color tied and draped on around us in certain key places.  The heat forced us to it, and the fashion of it charmed us.  As we work, tunneling, laboring away in it the fat melts away and the muscle stays.  We walk leaving a trail of it in our sweat.  Even the long days of working the machinery or calculating out rations is bathed in the sweat and movement of life.  We are industrious in this, working like ants in a hive.  When a lack is felt somewhere, a man might step in to fill the position; where we fall short, a woman pushes through our lack.  We live here now, these past ten years are the awakenings of a seed that was planted in the midst of hopeless winter, sprouting in the spring of our new way of life.

Where there is darkness comes tragedy.  We put up lights and it seeps in, hearts and rooms alike filled with shadows.  For twenty-five years, the earth was still.  Small shifts as we settled into her, digging our tendrils into clay-flesh and rocky-bone.  She moved this sleep-cycle, cracking apart and flattening in a swathe.  Just pockets left glimmers of light that I cling to.  I push back, forcing my way towards sounds, other shifts in the rock like my own drill.  Where we had once felt proud in our precise cuts, measured calmly and with deliberation, I stab out again and again, moving with instinct.  Loose stone grinds above, reminding me of my folly.  I must check the panic, harness the fear.  Drive and not be driven.  Breathing lets the explosion that builds within settle.  With a care, a thought to our ways before I head out for the moon-chamber.  A great crack runs through it, the center half buried in grey-brown mess.  There are dead all around, many more than passed in the whole of our time here.  We had grown, expanded, and prospered in our fall.  I see others, recognize the dread, the looks from twenty-eight years ago when the sky began to fall, from twenty-five when we assembled that first day in the moon-chamber.  We forgot that lesson, perhaps.  We feel it again, and curse ourselves for it.  

We few reach out to the rest of the city, stretch our power to regain what we had.  Enough to live.  In the tunnels we find the dead.  I know them, the blank faces.  Excavating more room in the graveyard takes as much time as finding them.  It had been left untouched somehow, the peace of the past dead at least left undisturbed.  These are still the strong men and women that walked down here, but we stand hunched and worn down.  With us all the moon-chamber is still left with room for more and more.  The great crack is still there, cracked around us, into us, and between us.  In the large emptiness we create sparks, words like rocks smashing against each other to argue our path.  Some leave, tunneling off into the darkness even beyond the flickering stars of our home.  Most of us stay to rebuild.  We have known other ways, the sun and the sky, and we could change again, but running away just reminds us of what we lost.

A monument of sorts has been erected into the moon-chamber.  The names of the lost, dead and departed, we carved them into the cracks, the opened fissures that run through the dome and the sloped floor.  It seems short of what we should do, but it gives us some peace.  In the months past the collapse, we have been quieter.  Loneliness is less present, most travelling in groups, coming together for the presence of others to lessen the emptiness of the halls.  Then and in the moon-chamber we speak less, sing less, dance less.  Noise will spring up, continue on, and then die with a glance at a remembered name or the slope of a wall that reminds us.  Sometimes it just takes the echo of space to give us pause.  I see the wound as much in the stone as in the hearts.  We heal slowly, and our scars remain.

The face is done, one of them.  They are to be sisters, both scarred and weathered.  A stone pillar I found holding up the center of an unused chamber.  It was once a church, I think.  The earth comes first, as she is the older.  Her face is soft in the hard stone, a smile for her sister wrapped within her arms.  As mankind's features emerge, cycle after cycle into the carving,  I am driven to longer hours.  Her face upturned towards earth's, a wonder in her smooth eyes.  Every so often somebody passes by, drawn by the sound of stonework.  I am not done, I have no time to see them, to look to the door.  I eat quickly, sleep what hours I can in the room, and build up a stench of sweat.  Perhaps it drives away some of the visitors, I am not sure, they never say anything.

Toes complete, and now the base, thirty feet in circumference.  I have reached the place where some inscription must go, yet nothing appears to me.  Each fold of their short dresses, each scar scattered across their bodies cried out to me its shape and form, but this blank loop whispers only of its emptiness, its unfinished blankness.  I sleep, bathe, eat, each time returning to an enigma of my own creation.  It is not done, I cannot move on.  Some days I sit and stare at it, circling it in impatience before sitting again, back against the door-frame.  Other days I wander in the tunnels, reinforced now against a quake of greater magnitude than our collapse.  I have cut myself off from the rest, and I begin to feel it.  Even when I step inside the moon-chamber I stay at the wall, staring out into the people.  I wait, for what, I don't know anymore.

Night gives way to day as day moves ever onward towards the night.  This is what it shall say.  I looked down at the white emptiness for so long I had begin to forget up existed.  Above us there is a sky, past the deep layers of stone there pounds down sun's rays, harsh and blinding.  I looked up, finally.  Water dripping on my nose did it, reminded me of the rain.  I want to see it again, long to in this long night.  So much of it all I have forgotten in the name of remembrance.  Where there are grave lessons of the past, tragedy and pain there were also happy things.  We have forgotten that, somewhat.  It seems to me that it is part of our humanity to forget.  This is why the stone, the earth, is our other half.  Carve out our memories in stone and they last where in flesh they soon disappear.  One day, when I'm old, I will go back to the surface, see the sun with my dying breath.  Now I live in the night, carving out our history for the ones who follow.  First of many, the sisters were the easiest to put into concept, far harder tasks of folly or vivacity will follow.  When I pass them, glancing in, there is often light, one or two figures staring up at the faces or down at the letters.  Perhaps they will gain something from it as I have.

Guiding Spirit

Light seeped in under, tickling eyes that his hat brim had failed to protect.  Up the hand to pull down the shade.  The man wasn't ready for the day yet.  It wasn't the fierce growl of a hangover that moved the hand, he didn't get those, it was the sizzling activity the sun brought.  Come dawn the people of the town were up, brave enough in the day to leave their wooden shells to explore the dusty plain that town was situated on.  They'd find the corpses.  Twisted things that may have been as much man as they were beast once the light got to them.  Birds picking at the entry holes for his bullets wouldn't help the shape much either.  They would see it all.  Not understanding any of it they would see it and they would fear.  They would fear the things that went bump in the dark and hide away in their shabby fortresses, but they knew that fear.  If the things in the dark were gone, a new fear would take its place somehow, and he wasn't in the habit of sticking around to become a target.  Still, the old one had been there again, and that powerful a spirit took something out of you a drink only massaged away for so long.  He felt it leaving him, that asuredness that he could keep going against any foe, evaporating in the morning sun.  He needed a rest, and he feared one in equal measure.  When they were done with the pre-possessed corpses they would find him, the barkeep first when he heard which way the man had left in the night.  It hadn't been a long walk away, a few blocks down and then into a side street, an alley, if something so small could really be called one.  It was some effort to brace himself to a wall and slide up to standing, took the man a while of real concentration to get it right.  Figured he would wander off toward the next place he felt callin' him, the next destination that thing men called a soul propelled him toward.  Least, any of the ones he had asked had called it that.  Soul was a tricky idea to get a grasp on.  He only knew if he kept walking the way he felt was best he'd get to the next bar or the next abandoned mine, or the next stone cathedral.  The cathedrals were nice, they let him stay and rest a while, didn't ask many questions before he headed off to the next place.  Just kinda kicked the dirt to see where it would go, feelin' about in the mind.  Towards the sunset as usual.  Always a westward trek these days.  Got to cross the main street though.  Draw as little attention as possible with his head down.  The rifle might have drawn some attention, but without the moonlight it lost its shine, more iron in the grip with yellowed ivory inset.  Not a looker.  Barkeep lookin' down the main way saw him go through, one of his best customers in years.  Wasn't sad to see him go though, he had a nose for things and he could smell trouble like a cloud from all the way down the street.  Wasn't there last night but now it sat like an aura around him.  Somethin' would be happening, and it was happening in the west.

West Don't Mean a Thing

The band lost its heart by his third drink, a strong shot of something fancy, yet powerful.  He wouldn't remember the name afterwards.  It was hard to play for a one man audience that spent most of his time looking the opposite direction.  When they stopped at the end of one piece and didn't start up, he didn't seem to register the loss and so they packed up and headed out into the night with their cased instruments.  He got his fifth shot.  The bartender figured for a lonely night earlier, let the band leave on account of that, and had a hard time figuring out what to do with the man in the dark, almost black it was so dark, green overcoat.  Lizard hide it looked, the way that it had bumps all over and ridges at the collar.  Man didn't talk, just dug into his pockets and flicked another few coins onto the bar.  He hadn't even said a word when he came in, just pointed at a bottle back behind the bar and dropped some money down.  His lips were like old monks to speech, and like them they seemed to hold their alcohol well.  Clock in the corner wound itself around 'till it hit three am.  Bartender would shut down earlier, but the man kept the money flowing and he had needed an excuse to stay up and clean out some of the gunk that accumulated on the floor behind the bar.  Three o'clock though and the man stands up, click of his boots match the tick and he leaves a few more coins on the bar.  Leaves through the saloon-style doors.  It's a bright night out, moons both shining out and the stars in compliment.  Bright enough to have real shadows.  Shadows some men hide in.  Despite the drinks his hands find the holsters easily, practiced.  Draw like a spark and the aiming happens half-way through the trigger pull.  Other man's out before he saw the motion, before his carefully aimed rifle could fire off.  Night like this you forget the sound of gunfire, it gets drowned out in the silence.  Minute later and you doubt you heard anything at all.  Next morning the crows will find him though.  Walking down the streets, the other few filled shadows empty out their occupants, slumping over in mid-shot as he walks.  Some near the end just slink off deeper before he comes.  Too many to forget now, the scent of the powder mixing in a trail that leads back to the bar's steps.  Maybe people are awake, bartender still is, but they don't appear from inside the wooden shacks.  Other end of the village a man sits in the moonlight.  No hat on, silvery hair bright in the moonlight and a gun across his lap.  Stops a good twenty yards back from him.  Looks deep in that direction, seeing more of the gun than the man.  Inlaid silver handle, ivory carved out in the shape of a wolf and carefully tapped into place.  A long steel barrel with a polished shine to it.  Man nods in recognition of it, looks up after a while.  Chair man is just grinning.  Doesn't seem to perturbed.  Man's shadow creeps closer to the chair as the moons set behind him.  Touches the leg and he draws.  Fast, like he means it.  Eyes hard and clear.  Other man disappears, clack of the gun into the chair.  Man walks up and holsters his pistol.  Gingerly grabs the gun where it lies.  Other man watches, leaning up against the wall of a nearby house.  Fades out to leave the man with his old rifle, goin' to exist himself elsewhere for a while.  He'll be back, never does leave the man for long, always shows up after a night like this.  Lone man in the street turns around and walks back to the bar.  Bartender's just about to go to bed, putting away the mop and the bucket right then.  Can smell the burnt gunpowder and registers the rifle slung over the man's shoulder.

"Sir, I'ma need that last drink if you don't mind.  On a night like this one, spirits are genuine powerful in a man."