Black Bottle

The sky was turning from pink to gold. The Goddess of Light was breaking on the horizon.

In a moment of mixed emotion Sena leaned forward and kissed Caliph. He felt it as a sticky soft plucking. His lips were thin and dry; hers were jungle slugs. Then Sena hurried to finish her work, composing the final dots and dashes of the glyph.

Caliph’s arm ached deeply.

There were forests of waterspouts holding up the sky above the ocean. The Great Cloud Rift had fallen into the planet’s core. Its god-tons of rock had sloughed away and released the radiant unsleeping horrors through cracks a hundred miles wide.

*   *   *

MEADOWS burn. Mountains and deserts dissolve like sugar in a buttered pan.

But Sena is not capturing the world in a glyph.

One of her eyes is already gone. She steadies the second sheet. Above the altar, Naen looms as the ink spreads. A yellow-white cloud in a sky gone black, shredding the atmosphere in her wake.

“I think I’m going to fall over,” says Caliph.

It is his first complaint. He has leaned on his impaled arm, put all his weight onto it, but having given so much fluid, even that will no longer support him.

“You did good,” she says. He cannot see the horror that is right on top of them, nearly blocking the invisible doorway in the sky.

*   *   *

CALIPH looked at the woman he loved. His insides were hollowed out and packed with fear—because he felt himself dying. He watched her incisors dig into her lower lip. The final words he heard her say were “Fight for it, Caliph. Fight for it!”

It seemed to him as if she had been writing on two different sheets of paper at the same time. As if he were looking at separate worlds. Sena existed in both of them, in all of them.

Then all separate realities collapsed into one and something horrible and amazing burnt through the fabric of every universe and melted their fibers together. An object. A great red orb. Its path and position was identical to the planet’s size and movement around the sun. A crimson world flowered inside Adummim, cold and gleaming. The white and golden mass in the sky reached out for him.

Caliph’s mind was far away as the end enveloped him. He was thinking that there would be no more new days. No luncheons or silk stockings. Bureaucracy, pastries, love, ice cream, vague connections on the street corner at the steaming vendor cart, the dirty hand delivering you your change …

The eyes reflected in store glass staring through themselves at what they wanted to be …

These had been burnt up in this ceremony in the jungle.

For a few spare seconds, Caliph saw humping mountainous forms judder in the red world’s unbroken oceans of mud. Risen. Shining with a slurry of clay and starlight. For that single instant, Caliph stared. Then the thousandfold tendrils of negative space splashed toward him. Naen reached for him and he screamed.

He thrashed brokenly against the hot suffocation, molten slag, organic compost instantly stewed to mush. Fumes of burnt obsidian and sweet methane filled him like a balloon but enormous pressure held him down. He was being squeezed. Crushed. Devoured.

Caliph flailed, arm and leg, across the brink of oblivion. His body came apart. He felt Sena’s hands adjust his bones. Her fingers slipped under the strips of his skin and followed them down with the practical brevity of a seamstress. Then he heard Sena speak a single word and he snapped together, hard and slippery. Strong as stone. He felt the tincture carry him out of his old body into this new one, into a new place, a place that was difficult for Them to hold onto. He had become a perfect orb, black and slippery, moving through Their grasp. He focused all his determination …

And then, fast, he was out. Like a melon seed pinched between thumb and finger, shooting from darkness into strange light.

He passed through the Nocripa and held his breath as if underwater. He kept his eyes in front of him and did not look back. He was fighting for every inch, every moment, going for speed, blinded by stars that did not move.

He did not give up.

In a different time, the light tunneled, natal and traumatic, but it also thronged with warmth.

The light became orange and blue—leaves in autumn. Supple black branches spindled over a canal, lit with catoptric perfection. In the water, dappled movements swarmed: fish like white lilacs. And through the trees, Caliph saw pale mythic domes and spires quaver—somehow susceptible to wind.

*   *   *

IN the dream, the tincture is gone. Burnt up. He has moved on. Someone in the dream asks him a simple question that he cannot understand.

*   *   *

CALIPH looked down at a girl on the path, divorced from logical timelines. Her hair was curly and dark brown. But her eyes were crocus–ice-blue. Her skin was pale and glittered with subtle platinum lines. The loveliest child he had ever seen. Standing in the cold.

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s a nice one, isn’t it?” She pointed at the ground.

“Oh. That is a nice one.” He crouched down. There were actually two shiny husks on the path at their feet, like stones, each resting by a strange whorl-like pattern in the clay. Both were like summer beetles fallen in autumn. Both were broken and empty.

Aislinn bent at the waist, like her mother would have done, and picked one of them up.

It was still beautiful. Caliph hadn’t thought of it as such until she said so. To him it was small and ugly. But Aislinn said it was beautiful and then she pressed its cold hard shape into his palm. It bit him strangely, like a talisman.

Aislinn touched his other hand. All her fingers wrapped around two of his. She tugged, swung his arm.

“You should keep it,” she said. She assumed her propensity for stone collecting was something shared by everyone.

He slipped it into his pocket. “All right, I will. You want to go home?”

“Yes.”

He picked her up. The girl rested her head on his shoulder, draped her arms over his back. He knew where he was going. Into the mist-drenched sweetness of unending autumn. He could smell it—whenever he breathed. He could feel it on his skin, a crisp pomaceous tartness: cold from hanging in trees against the stars.

His head was clear.

The girl traced the lines on the back of his neck as she always did. As she had done since she was half again as small.

He carried her toward Ahvelle, toward the shining crest of the jellyfish glyph. There was no one to ridicule their ascent as some mawkish final illustration in a children’s book. Even if there had been, Caliph would not have cared. He was glad to be mawkish.

He found no sorrow in having changed. No sorrow that he wasn’t breathing.

25Ulian ink.

APODOSIS

Though I fail, my success is enough.

Isn’t it?

Because when there is no way out, you must go deeper in. Then you will find that the direction you have taken does not end. Your walls will crumble. Your path is endless.

I learned this from you.

You taught me to be relentless.