Frozen Tears

I.

“They put it out of their minds

And thought not on it

Beasts wrought of Iron

Saviors of men.

To a star will thee fly

So swiftly in slumber

So fastly to death

Will thy frozen tears fly.”

Excerpt from ‘Icarus’ Star’

The Poet and Herald Isen. 123101.31

It had been nine generations since the others rose to strength and the strong withered. The earth had its vengeance and its qualm was not with the weak- its vendetta not with the disenfranchised.

A genesis still lucid in my memory. I was a child when the first ones left. The World King and his kin fled Basilica, my home planet, when I was nine and those from Polus escaped with treachery and bloodshed, before I turned 15. The rest languished.

We were hopeless and angry and hate filled, but also fools and we knew it. How could we have expected more ships to be built, or the meager many that were, to hold all of us?

We believed all was well and the things we wished to be kept out of mind, we kept out of sight.

All manner of Media and entertainment foretold this. Every muse and phantom of youth was woven with this theme; that time would wander off and luck wane. The greed of men would indelibly take hold and the earth's resource drain. A story told for eons. Told to me. Laced into every damn nursery rhyme it seemed.

My father and mother and their peers were part of a race of wealth and a society of nobility that helped manifest the reality of these portents. So exceeding the drivel of the under-ones were they, so transcendent thought I. But too dependent upon the succor of the machine on which they suckled tirelessly.

The very crux of their existence rode upon the embryo of an oiled and oily appliance, who’s serpentine belt of opulence had grown worn and frayed. It snapped that day, leaving the ample breast of luxe, desire and enterprise, so horrifically changed, into a wrinkled sack of sour alms.

So they had to leave. We all had to leave. Those from Nirvana, Valhalla, Heaven, those from Hades, Mecca, Basilica, and Polus- But we were ill-prepared. Too late.

A legion of iron bellied monsters, lay disemboweled at the cape, with no more flying power than an ingot of lead. Entrails strewn about the dock yards, organs left to rust in the salt air and nested in by the Leather Crest gull.

War came not long after. Seven armies from the seven planets of The Vale. Their gunpowder turned the swamps, marshes and everglades into a mire of ashen clay. Air schooners, like horizontal lightning, bolting over the Lily pads. Brimstone and death issuing from their muzzles.

Man, beast, bow and blade came together and became everything. Became nothing.

II.

“In soothe betide

Oblige’d be

To ride the tide

Of a starry sea

And to the dashing

Of the drum!

And to the killing

of the sun!

The din of war

Dark neigh has come

Down vale of vales

Spilt pigments run

Under your chest

A locket kept

Under your bones

A sleeper slept

On metal rough

A Burnished stone

She called us home!

We’ll be brought home!”

Ithaca's Canticum

The doomsayer and prophetess, Cantor-Equus.

Ithaca sat in the leather-bound sarcophagus of a bucket seat ambling into consciousness. The insulated hum of the fusion motors had kept her sleeping for hours. As she wiped crust from her eyes, she became aware of the environmental changes: pulsing, dull light shot intermittently between the skyscrapers of the citadel. Even the haziest beams of that damaged star shocked her vehicle and abraded her senses.

The dramatic color difference of alloys used in the printing of civilian and municipal structures, and the even more dramatic vibration beneath her carriage, a consequence of the non-levtrans carriageways, told her that they were close. They never came to the citadel, let alone left their dwelling sectors. But she knew they were close.

Partly because her father, who sat in the fore-carriage settee, started violently massaging the back of his neck, which he would do prior to dismounting at a terminal. And regularly her mother’s hand would calmly apprehend his, replacing vigor and angst with caress and reassurance.

Ithaca also became aware - again, that it was her ninth birthday and remembered the dual reasons for their pilgrimage. Not only had they come to bargain for a token of Trans-galactic passage to Icarus' Star, but to also revel at the great celebration; The Bruma Novem. The Ninth Winter it was called and those who were born accordingly on, or even near the winter solstice, every ninth year were also celebrated - heralded as poets, profits and doomsayers; the ones who would lead most circles of the venerable societies of Basilica and its celestial allies. She winced as her mental skirmish mounted. Ceremonial obligations and socio-political traditions didn’t make sense to her yet.

The couplets of her Canticum rang through the belfry of her mind. On many planets and in many tongues, poems and sonnets were sung and chanted in similar stave and stanza, over infants of the ninth year. Taken to memory, cast in mysticism, fear and hope. Sometimes it made her angry; such pressure and pretense, but today she would try to be excited. At least grateful. What it meant to her parents was unknowable and she, just mature enough in adolescence, conjured up ample foresight to be hopeful in her gifting; hopeful that the further days of her race and its vassals would be benefactors of what she had been given. She held the locket on her chest and her finger followed the heart shaped contour of the timeworn talisman. She felt comfortable again. She allowed herself to be swallowed by the well of her cathedra.

III.

It really came into view. Hastafax, a once thriving vein of merchantry and stability amid the Circumstar Vale, had been reduced, in less than a lifetime, to a tincture of thick unrest and vast brokenness. A skeletal apparition of atrophied industry and culture. It was shocking to behold and even more so if you had beheld the girth of its former prowess. Time out of mind, a radical world order had come into the minds of the rulers of the earths. "A phylum of unity", "a currency to bring together", “All peace, all praise, all days..” Iterations of their ancient anthems. And the Seven Planets of the Vale, throve for many years under the rule of the Septum Concilium, until corruption seeded in paratrophic politicians, drove harmony into the distance. The dissonance then, between the high and low became acutely volatile - a desolate isthmus no might or man could navigate through.

Ithaca reclined, naive of the missteps of her forebears and was taken aback by the violent, beautiful juxtaposition that surged more clearly into her view. One thousand airships; a menagerie of their multi-colored lights and flags and escutcheons coerced in the gloaming. Docked in the lower stratosphere, their shuttles moved like liquid, in endless procession between sky and earth. Shrouded deep in fume, they funneled between the silhouetted fingers of the citadel, outstretched to welcome them. It was dangerous for a convoy of her race to be skirting the roots of the outer citi thoroughfares. Even during the time of such exuberance. The escort headed towards the toll fields however prepared or ill prepared they might be. Ithaca’s parents argued gently as they approached the bays.

Butterflies filled her stomach as her vehicle lifted from the dust, only about seventy-five feet in the air, to merge with the confluence of visitor transports. The buggy jolted along a side-ward plane as the lev-lane found a spot for their mass. They were pulled by the invisible force, between lanes and shuttles, too far she thought. Right to the opposite side of the lev-way they were brought and as her parents tidied up there argument, they came beneath the awning of the toll bay. She observed as the toll officer exchanged goods and glances with the visitors in vehicle in front of theirs; checking identification, confirming class, age and race of all passengers. They made it through. Her turn. As they approached, Ithaca locked eyes with the officer through the hexagonal porthole next to her seat.

The next moment a slurry of air and pressure. The lights of the airborne ships became a storm of luminescent confetti and she couldn't make out whether she was traveling up or down. All went dark. She came to and was freezing. Wind passed her body accentuating what felt like moisture on the back of her neck, shoulders and chest. She brought her shaking hand to her nape and a pang of heat shot through her body. A thin laceration cupped the back of her neck from ear to ear. Her pendant was gone - ripped from her neck, the chain of which, tore through her flesh. She noticed blood dripping past her face and realized she hung upside down. Suspended from her seat, held fast by the five point belt, she retched and then cried.

Ithaca woke up. Still hanging from her leather bound gurney, she heard sounds in the distance. Sirens. Voices crying out. Basilica shook. She forced her head ninety degrees to the left and peered through the shattered glass of the hexagonal aperture. She knew it from books and stories at once; Leviathan 1. The premier deep space shuttle, the first of many, that would take her people to Icarus' star. When the time was ripe- when her planet reached the end. The Exodus missions weren't even scheduled yet. She was confused and in excruciating pain. Her arm nearly asleep from blood restriction, barely reached the release lever. With a mild crash she crumpled onto sand where the shuttles skin had been torn open. It was warm, though the air was cold.

There in the ardor of the sand, as Leviathan 1 raged upward, toward the star heralded for generations as the savior of the seven worlds, the couplets of her Canticum rang through the belfry of her mind. She fell asleep.