Catalytic Timespace Shift
Max wants to believe himself the giant of this grand adieu. The dunes of the silt desert shift as the blue gryphons walk towards him, but he isn’t the one calling them. I sit on Max’s shoulders, my red cape brushes his ankles, he holds my thinning shins. The mask I once wore for his delight has become my face. Totemic gryphons face each other across my nose; the one on my forehead turns to the west. That’s how I’m able to call them from the fractured shoreline. The bearded men on horses approach from the east, full of their coastal metaphysics. Gold-shadowed, their faces burn and flames rise from their helmets.
The golden wheel turns; its inscriptions release new meanings. Distant equations appear to me. Max sees only my mask. He doesn’t want to see the flamehaired horsemen, who press upon us anyway. The gryphons’ wings shimmer green, white and blue in the sacred order, bringing the wind that turns the wheel. I can’t stop it. Max begs me to.
Behind us, the four sìth wait. Or after us, I should say, because they don’t yet exist and are present only in their evaporating forms. Bound in wraps, only their feet are bare. Their heads disintegrate into streaks that rise into the umber sky. They’re afraid for themselves. One of them is angry at me. Max bears my lessening weight as I draw stars from the sky, then the silver egg that outshines them all.
The four evaporating sìth hum a high pitched note, believing it will halt their disintegration, that they can hold themselves together if they maintain this frequency. They don’t know that they’ve already dispersed into the future from which I’ve retrieved them. It’s nearly time. Under my red cape there’s little left of me. Max says I’m growing heavy, he doesn’t want me to disappear into the umber dark. He wants to believe I need to stand on his shoulders.
The golden wheel turns and the sìth atomise. The silver eggs shimmers and the gryphons beat their wings. There’s nothing more I can do but remove the mask. My ancestors scattered long ago, far into the future, before they even knew what they were, what we are, what we could now become as the golden wheel turns to remake our equations.
The final gryphon brings the fading sun. Haloed by many rings, it’s almost spent, carried like an egg beneath the gryphon’s breast feathers as he wings down to us. Without realising, Max steps onto the golden wheel and accelerates the shift. There’s nothing more I can do but join the sìth and dissipate, bound in the white wraps of time, which we’d suspended for a little while within the limits of the grand adieu.
But the flamehaired horsemen, my kin, won’t allow it; they’ve been marching upon me since I ran away to the past, in which I discovered Max and he discovered me behind the totemic mask. I summon the gryphons and ask them to inter me, to wrap and bury me all over again so that later I can meet Max again and he won’t remember what I did to him in my hyena form, how I fed only myself, how I left him white and lost, how I abandoned him to the golden wheel and its endlessly reforming equations, with only my red cape for blood, for food, for memory that vaporised before it was ever made.
Then I flip the picture; the equations allow the grand adieu to happen in reverse.
Upside-down the flaming horsemen descend –– they’re a grand welcome. The sun isn’t a sun, it’s a hole. The evaporating sìth are pegs in this ground. The golden wheel is a shield, twelve-figured, protecting Max. My hyena form flows with the dunes of the desert as a silt-storm approaches to rub us all out. Fire-headed, my horsemen kin are the sun’s rays. Not here to collect, after all. In this configuration, I’m free.
Behind the stone door, the whitewolves listen, their red eyes almost seeing what’s beyond. They can’t join our loop while bound in their own tomb. Axle feathered into her silt, us catalytic cubs angry now. With rise gold all ancestor imprint. This mask to hyena almost, cape egg until sacrifice Max. Fissure on afraid, adieu gold in sìth. A haunted place.