all the roads we have to walk
Oct. 6th, 2011 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
levityLook, I even have an explanation. Billy, Allison, Orven, and I ate dinner at Ping Mang, and on the way home Billy made a throwaway comment about how the walk home from anywhere always seemed so much shorter than the walk there. It evolved into a writing challenge, of sorts, to be completed by midnight- so that there is my excuse. Billy and Allison wrote sharp, coherent things (Allison's is here, and Billy's is here), and I wrote this.
Title from Oasis, and yes, I know. Unedited. Mostly here for posterity.
There's only ever been one fall that merited capital letters.
---
This is the simple version: there is a train that runs through the underbelly of the world, and he drives it. Okay, that's a misleading way of phrasing things. It implies that the train wouldn't just go on its merry way if he weren't there behind the wheel. There is a train. It cuts through the cities that cities are built over, through galleries made out of light and tunnels held up by stone arches and sewer pipes your average elephant herd would have no problem using as a highway. It runs on a track of rusted rails and thick cables strung out over rooftops and he sits in the driver's compartment and- well, he doesn't pretend to be useful, per se. He just makes tea and walks through the cars and talks to people, and sometimes he forgets the crossbranching of worlds and worlds that he can see when he looks out the windows, and sense when he doesn't make the effort not to. It's a good enough, if temporary, reprieve, but that's what reprieves are almost by definition.
---
He's seen the castle that lies under the first kingdom burned down in the name of revolution and not conquest. Grey and green stuff coat the walls that are still standing- he's not sure if it's evolved enough to count as moss. In the center of the castle is a spire, and in the room at the top of the spire the golden princess sleeps. One day she will be kissed, and she will wake up. That day, the world will end.
---
This is the marginally less simple version: there is a train that runs through the underbelly of the world. As with trains everywhere else, people get on, and people get off. Once a young professor seated in the compartment nearest the front door of the last car regaled him with the idea of a train that moved faster than light, time inside passing by more slowly than time everywhere else.
"Close enough," the doorkeeper said, when he told her.
"Time's not one-way," he said.
"He'll get there. But you knew that."
He also remembers when there was a zero point and there was existence, and time was pure numbers ticking on until eternity. There was an end in mind before there was mass, but he supposes time will have to work as a word. Kairos. Chronos. There's a compartment in the train that is all clocks. It'd be nice to say that a Catalan painter once came across it and fell in love, but it'd also be a lie. An Italian multitasker once did, though, but to be fair, he fell in love with everything.
---
There are parts of the labyrinth that still make him uncomfortable. There is the domain of the sea-dragon kings, who coil around the earth and will never die. When they move waters rise and envelop bits of land. There is the cemetery of the gods, which never stops growing, and which will never be visited. There are the charred remains of libraries long since burned and buried for- they say it's the good of humanity, but of course he doesn't believe that. The fact remains that they're dead, which means that they were once alive. There is Father Time, chained hand and foot by sunlight to the floor of a cavern. Every quarter eternity a chain breaks, and once they've all gone nothing will be the same again, and there is only one chain remaining.
He's seen the chain around the doorkeeper's right ankle, locked there when she was eleven years old and too proud to even consider that there was anything she couldn't do and close enough to him to make him want to shake her. There's a watch-face attached to it, with four markings and a single hand. He knows what they are for.
---
On a tiny crag of an island in the middle of the ocean there is a rooster. One day it will crow three times. That day, the world will end.
---
"If there are-" the doorkeeper waves her hands, the way that means that she wants to a point to be made but she does not want to actually make it. She tries again. "There's a world where I am not the doorkeeper, right? It's why I'm here."
He gets the point. "I'm not interested in looking for it, thank you."
She grins. They're not the same, but they both know when acknowledgement of fear will not benefit either party.
---
The road leading away is always longer than the one going back, but there's no road that exists that doesn't end in a noose and a hinged square of floor ready to give way. Well. Perhaps it's a good thing that broken necks don't give him problems.
Title from Oasis, and yes, I know. Unedited. Mostly here for posterity.
There's only ever been one fall that merited capital letters.
---
This is the simple version: there is a train that runs through the underbelly of the world, and he drives it. Okay, that's a misleading way of phrasing things. It implies that the train wouldn't just go on its merry way if he weren't there behind the wheel. There is a train. It cuts through the cities that cities are built over, through galleries made out of light and tunnels held up by stone arches and sewer pipes your average elephant herd would have no problem using as a highway. It runs on a track of rusted rails and thick cables strung out over rooftops and he sits in the driver's compartment and- well, he doesn't pretend to be useful, per se. He just makes tea and walks through the cars and talks to people, and sometimes he forgets the crossbranching of worlds and worlds that he can see when he looks out the windows, and sense when he doesn't make the effort not to. It's a good enough, if temporary, reprieve, but that's what reprieves are almost by definition.
---
He's seen the castle that lies under the first kingdom burned down in the name of revolution and not conquest. Grey and green stuff coat the walls that are still standing- he's not sure if it's evolved enough to count as moss. In the center of the castle is a spire, and in the room at the top of the spire the golden princess sleeps. One day she will be kissed, and she will wake up. That day, the world will end.
---
This is the marginally less simple version: there is a train that runs through the underbelly of the world. As with trains everywhere else, people get on, and people get off. Once a young professor seated in the compartment nearest the front door of the last car regaled him with the idea of a train that moved faster than light, time inside passing by more slowly than time everywhere else.
"Close enough," the doorkeeper said, when he told her.
"Time's not one-way," he said.
"He'll get there. But you knew that."
He also remembers when there was a zero point and there was existence, and time was pure numbers ticking on until eternity. There was an end in mind before there was mass, but he supposes time will have to work as a word. Kairos. Chronos. There's a compartment in the train that is all clocks. It'd be nice to say that a Catalan painter once came across it and fell in love, but it'd also be a lie. An Italian multitasker once did, though, but to be fair, he fell in love with everything.
---
There are parts of the labyrinth that still make him uncomfortable. There is the domain of the sea-dragon kings, who coil around the earth and will never die. When they move waters rise and envelop bits of land. There is the cemetery of the gods, which never stops growing, and which will never be visited. There are the charred remains of libraries long since burned and buried for- they say it's the good of humanity, but of course he doesn't believe that. The fact remains that they're dead, which means that they were once alive. There is Father Time, chained hand and foot by sunlight to the floor of a cavern. Every quarter eternity a chain breaks, and once they've all gone nothing will be the same again, and there is only one chain remaining.
He's seen the chain around the doorkeeper's right ankle, locked there when she was eleven years old and too proud to even consider that there was anything she couldn't do and close enough to him to make him want to shake her. There's a watch-face attached to it, with four markings and a single hand. He knows what they are for.
---
On a tiny crag of an island in the middle of the ocean there is a rooster. One day it will crow three times. That day, the world will end.
---
"If there are-" the doorkeeper waves her hands, the way that means that she wants to a point to be made but she does not want to actually make it. She tries again. "There's a world where I am not the doorkeeper, right? It's why I'm here."
He gets the point. "I'm not interested in looking for it, thank you."
She grins. They're not the same, but they both know when acknowledgement of fear will not benefit either party.
---
The road leading away is always longer than the one going back, but there's no road that exists that doesn't end in a noose and a hinged square of floor ready to give way. Well. Perhaps it's a good thing that broken necks don't give him problems.
