DUSKLIGHT ODYSSEY

Chapter 16

As Ion and Naim left that solemn church atop the mountain behind, they found that the eternal storm of dust that had previously raged all around them was entirely gone. Just as the church had changed—as if it had aged a hundred years—the very world was unfamiliar. Where there was dust, now there was snow.

Ion stepped forward and heard a sickly crunch. He looked down. Littering the snow-dusted peak were bones bleached white, a dozen skeletons or more. Ion knelt to examine them. Bobbling heads attached to stubby bodies by a thin stalk of vertebrae. Skinny arms as sharp as knives. Its long mouth ended in an acute point as black as ink instead of white. The creature's once watchful eyes were now nothing but hollow holes in the thing's skull.

"The birds..." Naim rasped regretfully.

Ion nodded.

West—that was their direction; so the pair took to the icy slopes of the mountain, descending to a deep valley bereft of anything but the blankest sheets of cold, cold snow. For the first night they travelled, Ion was perpetually anxious that they might not find shelter before the sun rose. Rise it did, and without a single sanctuary in sight that they might use as cover. But the clouds—forever a thick pavilion of grey over their heads that rained snow at a steady pace—was seemingly enough to block the sun's rays sufficiently as to prevent the stalking shadows from appearing in the world.

Across the valley, perhaps a hundred miles from where they started, was another tall mountain's peak. The snow-capped monolith stood as an imposing tower at the edge of Ion and Naim's view. At night, curious swirling lights of emerald and magenta broke the veil of clouds and spiraled down from the heavens, resting its own inverted peak down upon the top of that mountain. It made a sort of primal sense to the pair that this spot—the top of the mountain across the way—should be their goal.

The egg and its power to bring the dead back to life was ever on their minds as they journeyed on, though only manifested in the silencing of all discussion between them. Where there was quietude, any break in overt communication, there was an unspoken dialogue between them about Vio's strangeness, its divine nature, the mystery they had witnessed, and the miracle they had participated in. Where there could have been a glance, a cough, a sneeze, or a cleared throat—though there was none—that's when they knew the other was thinking of it. But what could be said? Unspeakable, that's what had happened. The impossible made possible—how could it not occupy their minds incessantly? And yet, though the impossible occurred, though a miracle indeed happened, it seemed to slip from the tongue when it might have been questioned, and faded from thought when it might have been pondered more thoroughly.

Ion and Naim would never forget what had happened in that church, and yet the events that transpired there had no grounded reality to latch onto. Naim's death and subsequent life were as real as anything else was. So real, in fact, that they could only be thought of within the realm of reality. But in reality, the dead stay dead, egg or no egg. Thus was the miracle detached from all else, in a realm of its own, as their minds would not fully accept the reality that so closely mimicked fantasy.

Ion's subconsciousness refused to fully bend its knee to the dictates and demands of his consciousness. Ion had witnessed the girl's resurrection through his eyes, and his mind had encoded the information into memory, but his conscious mind was not the ruler of the body which it inhabited. The conscious and subconscious Ion was, in reality, two separate entities. A man cannot order his body to do anything, nor truly influence it. Indeed, a man is trapped in a prison that he is allowed to move, though never rule. Information recorded through sight and encoded into memory had no bearing on Ion's enforced reality, the reality enforced by his subconsciousness, the reality that a miracle could not have happened because miracles were impossible. Thus was the ease with which Ion and Naim were able to pretend it didn't happen at all, to go on living the same as they had. Still, the truth did not lie, and their wonderings about it all still bubbled up wherever there was silence enough for the egg and its miracle to slip into the forefronts of their minds.