PLAGUE WATER WORSHIPS.

         Plague Water Worships were a series of Hypothermic Inquisitions (drought toxins charged with suppressing heresy) from North and Midwest Eris, including the Drowning Cure (North Eris) and later the Ataxia Trials (Midwest Eris).  These interrogation tactics were established in response to movements considered apostate or sacrilege to the island.
          Compared with other routes of administration, Plague Water Worship was perhaps the most potent way to correct cultural imbalances and allocate penance and punishment throughout the society.  Typically, the condemned heretic had their skin forced or wedged open and held still with pincers or strips of cloth.  By means of Hypothermic Inquisition, their inner liquids were then rapidly drained and interchanged with one of many variants of Plague Water, including acetic acid, choking glass, or formaldehyde.  This transfusion of drought toxins could be adjusted to induce stupor, memory lapse, or temporary coma in the accused, allowing the inquisitors to access and extract personal disclosures, dehydration codes, and other conversion ingredients.
          When repeated or prolonged Plague Water Worships were performed upon a specific victim, it was not uncommon for their body to grow dependent upon the torture, no longer able to regulate or reconcile the circulation of confession material on it’s own.  In this case, it was necessary for the water of the victim to be beaten back into the skin, creating a soft containment for those concessions still to come.

         Some built it up as a burning thing, but I knew it as a pierce through the window, there were too many small bites to let the heat show.  I lost track.  The bones inside kept moving.
        Jillison had a red incision and a face with various backings.  Chalk, gypsum, pigment, or any combination of these.  They told him it was a pose for sleep, not for here.
         The room was in linear form, the interior was cut out of dark paper.  I was restless and nervous, uncovering and covering cloth, turning ingredients on and off, checking over and over to tell whether the charges had come back on.  The walls offered advice on how to distinguish between a drowning (water in the lungs) and strangulation (broken neck cartilage).  Jillison read them in front of me.
         You start to hate yourself and you don't even know it.  A crow storm at the corners of your mouth.  A silhouette split open with an ice pick.  It becomes every day.  

         There wasn't anywhere to crawl away, no even footing, no pulse to begin.  
         Head wounds matched perfectly with a piece of wet paper they kept in their pocket.  When the body and the confession were the same, they treated the water like it was a common wound.
         They told me to wait, so I did.  They said it would hurt, and it did.  

WHILE MINING A WHALEFALL.

          A Mechanical Whalefall was a potential trap which geologists believed may have contained precious metals, electric current, or recyclable nutrients. The traditional methods of Whalefall prospecting involved combing through the countryside, often through creek beds and along ridgelines and hilltops, often on hands and knees looking for signs of breaching in the outcrop. Visible surface features such as oil seeps, lobtailing, and pockmarks (underground craters caused by escaping organisms) provided basic evidence of a Whalefall (be it shallow or deep in the Hereafter). 
          Mining a Mechanical Whalefall was an expensive, high-risk operation and consisted of digging tunnels or shafts into the afterlife to reach buried carcasses and deposits. Many Whalefalls were buoyant and had to be interred within a structural (e.g. Anticline, fault block) or stratigraphic generator to harness their current. When the available carcass suffered from magnetic fracturing, the remains were occasionally partnered with other forms of power, such as the line shaft, subsoil mill, and rotary mill. 
          Though various signs of carcass electricity had been evident in soil strata for thousands of years, it wasn’t until Midwest Amphitrite when certain isolated and rural communities were thought to spread along fissures in the reflectional faultline looking for these specific areas to settle. It is possible that these communities specialized to the subterranean current could also be found on both sides of the afterlife.  However, precisely how they could reorient, realign, and resettle remains an issue of unclear consequence and symmetry.

          Here, in this place given to us, we were digging for prayers in the pit of each pulse.           We lived in an abyssal town, dreamed of a sky of faint engravings on hammerbeams.  We were homesick and hollowed out.  We had a gray ceiling spilled above our heads and still more threats waiting below.           How many whalefalls had we forgotten now? They waded there in place, gears and levers hung in their ribcages, firehoses held in their throats. Sacrificed like electric conductors, I knew their breaths could blackout the whole town.    
          Jillison said if we walked slow enough, we might keep afloat to find one of our own.           Day and night, each one divided by recycled minerals.  We wore novocaine masks over our eyes and mouths.  Devoid of organic material, we were unable to tell what was a collapse and what was a curtain call. We watched them swimming toward the oldest stage, an entire ecosystem of decomposition.           Prospectors.  Sleeper sharks.  Pickmen. Mechanical arthropods. Drillers.  Sulfophilic bacteria.  A framework of full surface envy.           And if the scaffolding ever stopped to say our names, I wasn’t too shy to admit we would act just the same.           We dug to learn the differences between density and death and dirt.           Fog tugged at our ankles, outlines of oxygen dressed each step.  Jillison said not to believe in intent, there was delicate, and then there was the debris that would develop us.           Gemstones and rock salt and granite and clay.  An orebody to abandon what we knew. We took a crosscut to leave it there, looked for a crawl way toward a whalefall to lose.   
          Yes, there was an opera of nervousness the closer we got to it.           Sunken.  Too cold to prop up the sky.  Never mind the timing. We took her home on a boat.  Each of her severed fingers turned into a different feature of the body.           A dorsal fin, a baleen plate, a flipper, a fluke, and so forth.

          At the edges of another carcass, we excavated scars and called them our cave to mine.
          It was how we came to strike solid ground, incinerating a disposal site until it was just splinters and shale, until the aluminum cans and scrap metals were splayed and spread for hundreds of yards around.
          We soon would call it our Summer of Carcass.  We used shadow tools to sharpen away a silver kind of heat.  We scattered snakeskins in a search for spores and seeds.           Repercussions were crevassing, released to start the cycle over.  Jillison showed me when and then she left me to separate saline from scaffolding.             She was out of sight of our town for thirteen days, trapped on a conveyor belt of surrendering things.           Grain, salt, coal, ore, sand, overburden.           Her fires were set and I wasn’t going near there alone.  I dug until I had a handful of red eyes and run over lungs, I shoveled until I had more empty minerals to mistake than to retain.           One breath was like building over an unburied sun.  Avoidance wasn’t going to work and certainly not in the span of a second week.          Another coal halo to hold the clouds in place.  A slipstream spread over a steep-dip seam. A moat full of marrow removed. One day of only us. I understood them now, the scenes of her last resort rehearsal.
          My eyes were swimming between set designs and shallow water.  I could feel my face sinking into its pockets, the winces and incisions chiseling against my skin.           Tissue and topsoil thinned in the night. I slept in a vein of of almost vertical remains. Even my bedspread was soaking wet (more or less water), mostly withering.
          That was where it was. It wasn’t meant to be the same.
          I found our whalefall, collapsed flat as a landfill, I followed fault lines and flood lights where flowing blood should have been.          Pure dusk underground. I was tearing a path out of a general pulse, walking past another wall of invasive organisms and promises stripped from point and purpose.  It was all I could do to stay on the slow side of the skeleton, to sever an instinct and make sense of where it ends.           Saline split from scaffolding and I was stubborn enough to search for her still.  I had to stop and breathe.  If Jillison trusted us to leave silver linings alone, I would listen for her whisper to know.           If ever I thought our whalefall was waking back up, it would only become an echo of us.

DAWN BEYOND DIAMOND.

          Dawn Beyond Diamond was an unprecedented period of discovery during which back-scattered potential coalesced and crystallized above the coast of West Amphitrite.  The spread effect of this phenomenon  (“adamas mirabilis”) had greater power than that of a second star or sun, but was similar in scope and resolution.  
          As the Dawn Beyond Diamond approached the horizon, all former reflection (diffuse, inelastic, diffractive, elastic) was forced to travel through a solid latticework of cloud and sky, reducing the intensity of glare and creating a direct path for catalyst activity to reach the continent.  In addition, small intersections of mineral and atmosphere were capable of producing angles of unbreakable clarity, commonly known as aftermath material, omens, or miracles.
          The character and duration of the Dawn Beyond Diamond was determined by a known history of the witness and an unspecified entanglement that remained beyond their reach, which may have varied widely according to continent of upbringing and intricacy of hardship.  The term “Dawn” was used figuratively; the period had no clearly defined limit and could even form in aggregate or past itself.  Due to the lack of fluorescence and high dispersion of hope (“the contrast ratio”) caused by the phenomenon, it was often observed before or after shipwreck, when an outright transformation was necessary to balance across the face or body, when survival depended on the unsharpening of every shadow once considered decorative, hardened, desirable, even whole.

          Dear Jillison,

           I miss you.  Shipwreck’s here and sometimes the continent already looks like it’s been struck through, another storm of white noise in a waiting room.
           But not always.  Sometimes my lungs are bent upward and blushing and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. 
           I tell myself, this time, on this continent, and just put another tomorrow away and then another tomorrow away.  I wonder how your days are, what sort of materials and fabric have grown too loud, what ways you have learned to keep the glare down.  I wonder if you feel like your weeks are dead on a fence or falling across the current or something like sand stuck to your lips.  I wonder what you do when the sky is quiet, what shapes you sleep in when you’re lying down and the landscape is a surrendering thing.
           It’s hard when your senses are ready for everything next, and the rest still resists, like cellophane wrapped too tightly over a windowsill.  But still.  It’s there.  Just a beginning, solutions ankle deep, birth marksmanship.
          It’s soon enough for us Jillison, sunlight under sutures, sky stretched thin, all the same, it’s more than an instruction to stitch the skin back in.  Even if it’s all only a shadow, Jillison, it’s a shadow with the walls of a room.
          If we're this close, then let it leave us here, call it a miracle, call it everything we ran away from. 

THE CORAL INFERNO.

          The Coral Inferno was a complex of archipelago-owned factories and armories clustered together off the coast of North Cybele. It was one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in offshore, sunken or sub-continental history.  The principal characteristic of the Coral Inferno was the use of the invertebrate combustion engine, a mechanism which incinerated live colonies of small animals embedded in calcium carbonate shells for fuel and electricity.  The cylinders of this and similar machinery were originally powered by seawater or sediment and later by steam. 
          Reef factories of the Coral Inferno complex may have made either discrete products or some type of continuously propagated material such as chemicals, pulp and paper, or refined algae forms.  Additionally, certain habitats served as warehouses for urban runoff, and hosted much of their equipment – tanks, pressure vessels, chemical reactors, pumps and piping – within an outer skeleton operated by control room.
          Conditions for those working and living in the Coral Inferno complex were considerably hazardous, with any contact between skin and coral creating an intense pain or cindering sensation that could last from two days to two weeks.  Despite the perpetual risks of the environment, workers and their families were expected to work long and grueling hours for little to no compensation.  Since neither the machines nor the methods of work were designed for safety, many incendiary and maiming accidents resulted.
          According to collected legends of the archipelago, it was possible the Coral Inferno existed as an eternally-burning manufactory, with the potential to endure for decades or even centuries until either the fuel source was exhausted, a permanent groundwater revolt was encountered, or natives of the continent intervened.  However, with high walls shielding the complex from public view and armed guards protecting its perimeter, the Coral Inferno would have been extremely difficult to extinguish, and would unlikely be suppressed without the whispered support of worker’s siege or willing strength of insurrection.           They called us orphans working over an open fire. Whatever didn't kill us was a way to keep them warm. Our days were covered in tired patches, a pattern of violence prepared in ultraviolet. It was an ongoing sabotage in case they ever asked for us.
          I felt Jillison’s shape pulling against me.  We slept on the reactor floor, with the raw materials, reinforced by the makings of attempted graves.  Our arguments were nearly permanent, like a type of agricultural runoff provided to keep us in place.   Jillison said maybe we had been hired here to die, to watch the ash make a home for us.           I knew his addiction was a factory condition. I had a plan, a putting out system. Build my eyes to burn down what wouldn’t come back.  I started taking the medicine.  Three times a day.  I remembered the weight of the cage we came from.  I was going to say yes.           We would come kicking and crashing, machine wrecking from within.           A Coral Inferno lasts longest in shallow, clear, or agitated seas.           The most complex factories grow in parts of the reef exposed to the most violent surf, where corals are weakened or absent due to the accumulation of loose sediment.           Employment in this environment may be contracted in various ways, including current rings, indentured servitude, internal waves, kidnapping, and voluntary tidal changes.           When surrounded by few surface nutrients, certain workers may come to mistake the terms of their contract for a form of compulsory bondage, a never ending agreement.           Guided by basement lights, we should have had nothing to hide.  It wasn’t because of age, it wasn’t because of interchangeable parts, it wasn’t because any of the lows were that extreme.  If we whispered in a widow maker’s language, none of them could hear what we meant.           They kept us on an out of body assembly line, operated our organs from a control room.  The fingers in my hand were half asleep from the accidents, the shape of my palms were near perfect shards.  So many wrong answers they told us to swallow, mouthfuls of cinder and smoke, more poor excuses for solid land.  That’s how I came to know what they wanted from us.           Even with something of an idea, estimated water pressure, etc.  What was their investment in keeping us alive?           Hazards of the Coral Inferno may include a kind of trauma caused by crawling through underwater tunnels, mental convulsions such as compulsive self-deception and hallucinations, various forms of fatigue worship and withdrawl, as well as addiction to poisonous materials (water pollutants, spoiled coral, paralysis equipment, toxic exhaust)           If the person who has come into contact with Coral Inferno develops burning tears; shortness of breath; swelling of the tongue, face, or throat, or other signs of codependency, the symptoms may become irreversible.           Seasons shackled together, still, a sunken year has a kind of rhythm.  Locked and compressed. Beaten and blinded and nearly boneless.  Jillison said, move on, it wasn’t happening.  It never would, it never had.  He told me not to blame anyone.           I could hear the motives of their incinerator splitting us apart, all that charred and fractured exhaustion he tried to force me to forgive.  I couldn’t say it to his face, I could barely recognize him at all.
He actually called to demand an apology from me. I couldn't believe it. Best-case scenario, the Coral Inferno was the vicious circle he always imagined. Worst case, it scratched the surface of his survival instincts, shaped them out, prepared an addiction to complete him. A freefall fatigue as his form of self-fulfillment. I'd seen it too may times before.           Almost made me leave a note to burn it down good.           Coral Inferno is perfect for you.  Took enough of my life away.  Hope you rot there.           I said nothing instead.  I crossed it all out and wrote a countdown in my head.           There was more than a factory of reasons not to trust them.  Coral crowded into skeleton, coal stuck to bone.  The shape of it was standing there still, a constant shadow overlooking what was lost in us. Industry as a dull buildup of dishonesty.           Jillison’s lies were on automatic, his throat was tense, a trigger mechanism.  He worked for a void around the neck, a prefabricated reward with proportional voice included.  There was no point in complaining, I had my choice, I could cope or try to change what I could. It was an easier and easier commute from reminders of denial to makeovers of decay.           Watched him wake up each morning like a corpse on a track.  Take a crowded train to a place where he only ever moved through empty rooms. His self-portrait was still missing and intact, a canvas for ghost transactions, always gone when I needed him.  And Jillison said I was the one who used to live for a climax to resist.           His whole world was frozen infrared from the factory glare. There was the deadline I had to give him.  I moved on from pills to shots in the leg.  I said stay the fuck away from me. And so that’s what we did.
          The following guidelines are suggested to treat prolonged exposure to the Coral Inferno:           Rinse the skin and skeleton with fresh water.  Avoid seawater because it will increase pain.           Apply topical acid (truthful decay) to each illusion, cut and lie. This treatment can inactivate the venom (deception).           Sever the extremity to allow the relationship to heal.  Reworked confessions may only cause the stinging to spread. Coral Inferno was a chalk outline, I could see it clearly now.  If Jillison wanted to mix up birth marks and burn marks, that was a mistake he could make on his own. Cinders of a child's addiction, he said so. Orphan in a fire and it was fully ordinary now.
I didn't want to leave him to his own intervention. But I did. I wasn't sorry he was alone. I had nowhere in common with the Inferno he called home.
I picked a new afterlife far from there, quit on a day when his coincidences were coming to pass.  Almost thought it would never possible, but signs were good, it was actually happening.   I wasn’t watching for anyone’s verdict anymore.
          I got a new job. Learned to fake a regimen of surface appearances.  Smiled through the interview.  Gave them a different name, first and last, with nothing left to wait for.
          What happens when you rebuild your own ending? They say no one remembers what brings you back again.

DARK SWAN ASTRONOMY.

          Dark Swan Astronomy was a military treatise and text of subterfuge set during the Great Zodiacal Wars. It tells the tale of an interstellar siege of the dust cloud known as the Dusk of Cygnus by a coalition of astral states, and has had an influence on Eastern Nyx martial logic, celestial combat, twilight defense and beyond. 
          According to canonical star charts, after a unsuccessful blockade of the Dusk of Cygnus, the survivors of Nyx constructed a dark nebulae in the shape of a swan (the swan being the silhouette and namesake of Cygnus), and hid a cache of incendiary constellations inside. An initial stratagem called for a single constellation to remain outside the structure; acting as though the siege forces had abandoned it, leaving the nebulae as a gift. An inscription was also to be engraved on the volunteered constellation reading: "For their place in the never-ending night, Nyx dedicates this offering to Dusk of Cygnus."
          When the fixed stars appeared to retreat, the dust cloud pulled the nebulae into it's walls as a victory trophy. That night the hidden constellations exploded from the dark swan and opened a hole in Dusk of Cygnus for the procession of asterisms, which had returned under cover of night. The remaining variable light and celestial remnants entered and destroyed the dust cloud from within, thereby decisively ending the conflict. 
          There has been modern speculation that Dark Swan Astronomy was a veritable arcana of astral fraud tactics and stratagem, and could be thought of as an military discipline alongside Rayleigh Manipulation, Light Pollution, and Averted Vision. In part this was due to the general mystique that accompanied constellation warfare in an era where much of the population was star chart illiterate and relied upon the naked eye to trace the course of conflict within a claustrophobic, nearly charcoal sky.

         The sky was so small that only scattered light could leave the splint.  We stayed out, half awake, until the constellations were corrected again.
         Every survival was between exposures.  It took us three lives to give a corresponding image.
         Jillison counted south.  Unarmed and poorly defended, without serious resistance.

         We slept with sixteen windows along each spine. If the Zodiac was our size now, I saw no compass arrived, no scar tissue, no scale.  If a redshift was still under our skin, it was the furthest anyone looked for a while.
         Jillison understood the curvature of carrying nothing, back starting to bleed, an accuracy of the dark.  Our eyelids shed by example, observing distant supernova as standard candles, almost close enough for the swan's light to show.  The present often meaning a single event being considered, infinity is not that which has nothing beyond itself, but that which always has something beyond itself.  
         Time becomes ambush and ambush becomes time.  

THE GREAT ZODIACAL WARS.

        The Great Zodiacal Wars were a series of interstellar (subcellular) conflicts, the largest of their kind, and perhaps the ultimate cause of continental demise.

        The vast majority of these Wars were non-hereditary ("sporadic aggression") and often related to upheaval of organic, celestial, or behavioral material.  Common contributing factors included constellation infection, memory loss, orbital and ecliptic defects, psychosomatic disease, and certain horological pollutants (foreign or naturally occurring contaminants, such as sidereal waste, light trespassing, and radioactive therapy).  In this sense, the terms “celestial” and "organic’" were not limited to the biophysical environment, but referred to composite or prophesied phenomena as well.

        It was nearly impossible to prove the exact arc and chronology of each Zodiacal War, as any subcellular conflict could have had multiple possible intersections and outcomes, and the onset of War invariably produced no symptoms.  Martial conditions may have only appeared after many constellations had already decomposed, ulcerated, or reached an even greater state of impairment.

        Though significant efforts were made to screen for and detect serial episodes of organic and celestial decay, the Great Zodiacal Wars continued to spread violently and largely without warning throughout the anatomical landscape and the Hereafter above, eventually dividing all divine powers into two eternal and opposing alliances: those with the potential to attack or take over the continents and those with methods to protect them.         And medical knives in Midheaven too, even if Jillison said it was all still preventable.

        It only had to be somewhere to help us remember the surgery coming.  An equivalent guilt.   They told us possible risks, radiation therapy, more possible risks and a third of the horoscope alone.  They said accidental catastrophe, including carcinoma, faster than average speed.

        Another puncture passed through the undercurrent of your face.  A pain exhibit.  Like a constellation killed in slow motion.  Almost even carelessly.

        Of course I wasn’t the only one who was watching you.  Any split level adjustment could be seen as a sky donor, a silver lining, a second chance at a successful incision.

        You might remember all classic signs were kept alive since stars can’t alter cancer.

        Abnormal bleeding, a prolonged cough, unexplained weight loss.

        As a result of coordinated attacks, water triplicity was also a concern.  Constellations infected your reflection in unpredictable ways, cloud reservoirs were polluted to a point where neither of us could drink from them anymore.

        They tried an asymmetrical insurgency, using magnetism and electrolysis.

        You prayed for precovery to calculate a more accurate half-life.  One with appropriate tectonic and volcanic activity, occasional softness as a twofold surrender.  

        Memory and anatomy, an atlas of chaos terrain.  Replayed over and over again, and then an afterlife and a fault line came.         We had to test the hypothesis on the night side of the continent.

        I hid behind a coal breath like it was a kind of recording equipment, walked in your tracks, followed the old ways of forcing back weight.   

        The myth had many variations: the creator and the raven, collaborating in a coequal way; or the creator alone, using the birds only as interventional assistants.

        Either way, born and died on the same day, raised on a treatise of medicine.  An ecliptic of newly connected tissue, and then the coordinate for relapse.         They took over a table of dates, described a location and an ability to view the damage by land.

        Dissection was doubtful, blood flowed from the right ventricle to the left ventricle.

        Fence cutting wars were almost inevitable.  It was already the advent of barbed wire, an organ range closed off, or shot and wounded.

        Undeclared symptoms may manifest themselves in fatigue cases, confusional states, conversion hysteria, anxiety, obsessional and compulsive states, and character disorders.

        When you reached a passing condition, the ascendant and vertex started switching hands.         We were in the center of the zodiac’s avalanche, oncoming constellations striped red and silver, our sky just a square box to stay in one place, sun after sun after sun collapsing from sight.

        Several factors may have contributed to a body being accidentally debilitated, including the cancer being: faster than its average speed, retrograde, combust or aspecting a malefic planet or fixed star.

        But, they also cited the placebo effect and psychosomatic disease as prime examples of how celestial functions exert power over our us.  

        You said you would use whatever your had left. Lost comets, lines of advantage, sympathetic or contagious magic. The discussion was over before it begun.  Just another reminder of all the things I never learned how to talk about with you.         It was the last known killing with either hand, of course the Hereafter could be a cause or kind of cancer.  

        Given an intervention at the split of the spine, you told them it was more like sleeping in a brickpile all night long.  And they said even a perimeter was a lot to ask, we were already talking about a place without seasons or time.

        Heavensick, if you wanted to call it that.  The final continent consists of two parts and it could be proven by the fact that we still disintegrate in the middle when the denial ends.

        Duskless, incurable and not dead enough yet.  Without sleep, still writing the astronomical diaries.  Childless, obviously.

        A circle of stars started in reverse, in retreat, holes in the zodiac like an obsolete name, yes, they still called it the shortest way home.  Anyone lucky enough to live to an unborn age, perhaps less in the world than in a whole year today.  Because the divisions were regular, they did not correspond exactly to the twelve constellations after which they were named.

        You and I there, twin signs still known as the living.   

        Not dead enough yet.  Not dead enough yet.  Not dead enough yet.         Stop it there, and it only had to be a third of horoscope alone.  A slip away just a silent century long, structurally and socially invisible.  They probably wouldn’t even be able to tell.

        Like a sketch of sunspots from a start over sky.  A zodiac trial easily lost, or won.

        It would become a just war agreement, a targeted tumor treatment, an unequal treaty and the nearest we could get to zero was zero.

        Nothing was a form of far away and only once before.  We hoped that was right.