THE AFTERLIFE OF FAULT LINES

OUTLINE TECTONIC/TOPICS OF CONCERN.

The discovery of the tectonic formation of time has presented historians with more than the typical challenges of periodization or organization by locality and movement; as such, they have responded with an unusual number of designations: "Dimensional Geophysics”, “Coincidences and Consequences of Chronological Drift”, “Epochal Collision Theory", in the hope of exposing, developing, or providing structure to this phenomena.

Proceeding with a parallel or cyclic era dispersal rather than an attempt at discrete codification, we will try to do justice to the heterogeneity and eccentricity of the seven incarnate continents (which form the outermost shell of the temporal surface), including Eos, Hestia, Themis, Eris, Amphitrite, Cybele, and Nyx, investigating their adjacent and overlapping concerns by topic, rather than by author.
These topics will include: the emergent category of “religion” within animal or written material; aesthetics and belief in relation to spectral activity; supracontinental methods of divination, collusion and transport; the composition and displacement of anatomical strata and anomalous terrain (sex, gender, subcognition); the Velocity of Entanglement and theories of interval collapse; accretionary and contracting archipelagos and coastlines, rites of passages, peripheries and sentiment; antiquarian impulses and forms (convergence, divergence, causation, value, etc.); societal skirmishes over “common” linearity, projection, memory, and the constitution of the "Afterlife of Fault Lines"; traumatology mechanisms and the emergence of islands, insular forms, and discontinuous incognita toward the "Transfinite Rift”; as well as experimental and resurrectionary cultures that may have occurred against, upon and inside the scar tissue of sunken, severed, or subducted time.

SEASONS OF CREATURE.

Seasons of Creature was a rite of passage from East Eos, occurring in several societies, settlements, and cities that survived consumption by behemoth. These ingested (also referred to as assimilated or miscarried) communities may or may not be identified prior to the threshold event, and many remained undisclosed until the decay of their captor.
Seasons of Creature and similar ritual initiations were considered necessary to the composition of Eos, not only to mark the transformation from waking to adolescence, but also as a means of transitioning from collective to individualized thought.
Due to the volatile nature of the behemoth’s environment, these rites of passage often involved codependent or traumatic bonding of some type, and irrational activity and cognitive dissonance was not uncommon among survivors. Certain initiates came to blame themselves for the consumption of the settlement, including the many who were lost upon devouring or those whom the behemoth tried unsuccessfully to ingest. Curiously, other survivors developed sympathetic or positive feelings toward their Creature, sometimes to the point of defending or identifying with the incarceration, calling it a form of symbiotic worship, or more commonly, a starvation of our smallest past.

1. We were swallowed whole and there we were, warm and inside, with the breath of that creature reaching over everything. Our city was captured, a crash site covered in skin. There was no exit or escape, every echo was an earthquake about to erupt, each exhale was a heat wave waiting for us. The outcome was over already, we were the creature's city now.
We woke up to stomachfuls of wrecking balls, wet food, worn debris. One storm after another, scattering against our shingles and gathering gray hair on the ground. The city called it the creature's rain, they collected it in their cellars and their stairwells, they carved their names into the cement it made.
You watched me there, collecting what remains I could, keeping myself unkilled in the creature's cartilage. Your eyes were on strings, swinging from a ceiling I couldn't see. Your eyes were wide as white flags, watching me.

2. This city here, the one we've been left in, it's a residual collapse, a heavy gasp. In the distance, the shape of it seems dimly scribbled against the inside of the creature, like the sketch of a spent explosive, it sprawls and then it shivers and then it sprawls some more.
The most of us that survived stuck to the center of the city, in small rooms in short skyscrapers, we searched for shelf lives that stayed just out reach. Beneath the buildings, the creature's ground was cold, coffee-colored, full of fault lines that caught fire whenever the fevers came.
You kept matchbooks in your pockets and I copied you. I rubbed gunpowder on my palms to get them pale like yours. I untrapped my hands as close to you as I could.
You told me maybe there were enough fault lines here to find us again. You said sooner or later the motion sickness might miss us both.

3. I spent the first season scavenging the creature for a skeleton key.
I searched in shrapnel piles and stolen terrain, I said over and over there had to be a way out of there. This creature was a relic, a remainder of made before times. Everything then had a trap door or tear away, a shadow where the warnings wore off.
It wasn't always true, but I said it enough. Even when my teeth were bleeding, even when there was an open moat where my mouth should have been.
Day after day, the creature's rain never stopped painting us the way we really were. Each time I looked at you and your hair was heavier and darker. The build-ups in your breath came and went like birds stealing bread. Your skin stayed sheet-white and still hid the stage whispers from me.
It wasn’t long before the constellations were catching up to every weakness we never had. When I woke up, my wrists were stuttering, I had a skeleton made of sweat sunk on top of me. I couldn’t wash it away, it walked with me while I waited for you.
I was your hang-wire, your hiding place. I was your charade of ways to count backwards from the couple we didn’t become.
Our city stayed a knot in the creature's stomach, a choke hold you couldn’t stop choosing over me. If there ever was a key, it couldn’t keep me from remembering it all too well.

4. This was what I knew about you: you grew up without a favorite cease fire.
Your mother was a pushcart, a towel rack, your father was the same. By the time you were five, every eavesdrop knew your name. By the time your flashback fell into mine, your face was still a fitting room you were trying to find.
We were living in a summer creature, one that had emptied out its echoes long before the leftovers fell in. The erosion was exposed, cloth wasn’t always an obstacle.
I found you in the back fields, burning bones in an old paper bag. They looked like black candles buried in there. I remember your face was ragged, bruised under the eyes and bluish on the blind sides. I remember what you told me first, "the big wars are over, and the small ones never end."

5. The creature was in complete control and some of them knew it and didn't seem to care. I watched them holding hurricanes in their hands, like they were hoping one day the creature would give in and kill them for good, like they wanted the walls to come down for a while now.
When the city slept, I heard them confessing in their beds. They held each other close and recited the creature's prayer:
"You are our creature and you will always be our creature. Whatever opens from your mouth, we will worship first. We have been swallowed by you and wish only to have you hold us here.
Our city is sheltered under your skin and softened by the sky inside you. Forgive us if we trespass in this body you have lent us. If we can help you as you walk this earth, we will. If we can keep the pit of your prey from you, we will. Carry us with you and let your hunger be our hunger, let your thirst be our thirst.
We are your city and we will always be your city. Now and forever, stay alive and with a small past."

  Hieroglyph Ornithology was a method of divination used in Hestia and Themis to interpret the behavior of predatory houses or their allies, as well as predict domestic entanglement and continental events to come.
  In the most common method, the bird (typically, a sparrow, finch or chickadee) was placed inside a circle of celestial objects around which were positioned esoteric and universal pictographs (originally twenty-four in number, since living, dying are the same as wind, current). Next the bird was allowed to choose a number of stars, asteroids, comets, or planets to orbit, thereby creating the divinatory message or sign. The chosen pictographs could be either read in order of selection, or rearranged to make an anagram.
Another method, supposedly used less often, was based on inscribing pictographs on skin or bone and noting those at which a sparrow or finch screamed or sung. Pictographs were recorded in sequence and then these symbols were interpreted as the answer to the question chosen by seers.
  Although it was mainly the melodic codes and orbital writing of birds that were studied, any characteristically avian text could have been interpreted to either foretell the future or relate the temperament of the house. These fluctuations of architectural and emotional intensity were thought to have absolute purpose by those in Hestia and Themis alike.
At the onset of the continental rift, conditions for divination were at their most difficult, requiring whole marrow pictographs, rigorous interplanetary measurements, and absolute silence for the validity of observations, a process that would come to be known as "Hollow Born Torture."

0.   My father and I watch a flock of finches flying around the fallout shelter. Their orbits are slow and worn in, they make it seem like the hours outside are smaller than ours. My father tells me if we wait long enough one of them will be Mercury, one will be Venus, one will be Earth, one will be Mars.
Even then, I could tell his astronomy was clumsy and domestic, a way of keeping track of dinner manners and developed etiquette. A way to make sure an elastic band is all he'd ever be.
Waist high though, I believed him when he said, "there are bread winners and there are bird feeders. Jillison, you are a bird feeder."

1.     And if the continent is flatter than we ever gave it credit for, and if the continent is already a dead bird drowned in mid-air.

2.     When we first met I was living in a blue house (as it grew out a red house). When I was tired I slept in spare shelves or scatter points. When I was awake I tried to keep track of the birds.
It was all to cradle a collapse, and then the candle came down.

3.     The curtains were as thin as shedded snake skin. I tore them off to get a better look at him. He was walking with his mother. Her legs were made of grey and brick, her head was twice as tall as his. It looked like there was a tunnel dug underground between the two of them, every time she moved a foot one way, he would follow a foot behind.
They had been walking that way for a while and then she stopped. She shouted something at him that I couldn't hear. He shouted something back at her.
It felt like there was a family of field mice sneaking through me. I was already nervous.
She reached into the sack she carried and pulled out a piece of wood with a nail at its head. I hadn't met her yet so I couldn't have known what was coming.
She swung the wood with both her arms and he crumpled. Like a mannequin who'd been up all night.

The Scaffolding's Teeth was a temporary structure used to support early Hestia and Themis cultures in the construction or repair of heritage, trauma, and other large hierarchies. It was usually a modular system of metal pipes or tubes, vital organs and eternal materials, the spacings of which were standard. Commonly constructed from Near Hereafter Architecture, only rarely was the scaffolding built upon a fresh surface.

Given time to sufficiently cure, the Scaffolding’s Teeth may have been secured to the alimentary canal or molded concrete of an existing structure (such as the predatory shelters and their successors), increasing the capturing area and restricting access to escape. In this respect the scaffolding acted as a staging locality for anticipated or unconsented outcomes of desire, such as separation, consequence, or denial.

To provide stability for the Scaffolding’s Teeth, fabricated coupling and framework ties were often fixed to the mouths of the moving dead, or else forced through the foundation of the left and living and known by a variety of contradictory terms, including skeleton, house, splinter, or skin.

  Her house was hollow born and hungry still. What it wanted today, it wanted again tomorrow. There was Jillison and those over Jillison. They told us to bury the ghost in the body of a dead bird and dig around it. We did. Jillison shoveled the corners and charred the air. When the storm closed, no one crossed the door.
  It happened once or else it was only practice. Every wall was a stranglehold or a complete stop. They were caught under my eyes and at the end of spine. Jillison said I wouldn't last. Someone would have to come and carry the skin over me again.
  A yellow hour came and then a red hour followed. Those that could speak left a stone in the throat of the corpse they chose. Their hearts beat twice all night. They weren't wrong. The house had an hour that would hunt them too.
  Wherever we went we knew the scaffolding could swallow us somehow. I did my best to keep my eyes down. Jillison taught me to untie the skeleton knot and I tried not to make mistakes. She said every obstacle was coiled and conditional and circled around us.
  I did anything they asked me to. I wore cold clothes to keep the house forgetting me. I salted the corridors and unpacked their accidents in the attic. My backup hands crashed and survived. They watched me without moving. They covered themselves in charcoal to keep the house calm. Jillison carried the dead bird to the basement and tried to wake it up again
  There were alarms we could pull and disappearances we could practice. But we knew the instincts of a predatory shelter. We knew the house was patient. It wouldn't change no matter what escapes we tried to carve or engrave. When we slept, it slept. When we were awake it sent the storm to scratch at our skin, it searched for us like our shadows were the last living things.
  I belonged there, or else Jillison was alone again. I was her simplest form of self-defense, her camouflage from the scaffolding's teeth, her only room to hide when the house was too hungry to hear us scream.

THE MIRROR COLONIES.

The Mirror Colonies were a collection of near reflective settlements that may have served as a temporary route of migration and trade between Hestia and Themis, as well as a perceptual isthmus for internal conflicts and hidden motives of the continents.
  The territories themselves were myriad in origin and objective, sometimes founded by vanished children who left their homes to escape subjection at the hand of a foreign enemy (convex settlements); sometimes as a sequel to domestic disorders, when the losers in internecine battles left to form a new family elsewhere (rear view settlements); sometimes to get rid of surplus population, and thereby to avoid inward convulsions (concave settlements); and sometimes as a result of ostracism (one way settlements).
  Far from being an incidental exodus or mere series of unrelated migrations, the Mirror Colonies had historical value as they marked a decisive turning-point in the development of the continents, acting as a societal land bridge from East Hestian culture, which was often characterized by illusions of domestic coherence and continuity, to the increasingly perceptive communities of West Themis, where a discrepancy of conceptual outposts and unresolved personal settlements was considered necessary to inhabit a distant identity or resurrect the dead one called ‘home.’

They said our reflection was not the ideal shape to make a lens, but it was the simplest form to which glass could be ground and polished.
If my body was off-axis when the curvature was chosen, then the coma always came. It was a common symptom of the migration, no matter what mirror they used to let me in. I made a comparison when I had Jillison's eyes. I watched them piece together parallels until I was two points of a decomposition, a profile in off-white, dampened and shedding.
Jillison told me they were looking for the point where the selves lose step with each other, they were trying to detect the smallest unit of "identity". She said it was an sort of old fashioned experiment where they didn't know what the result would be.

I crossed my fingers, walked with a crutch, kept the window open. I knew a kind of ghost lived in the hypothesis. I caught them staring at a capillary and calling it a certain ripple, I saw a still life disappearing on the inner corner of each hand.
  Jillison spilled water for luck, painted pebbles with circles and crescents. I kept the reflection indoors to keep the local climate away. On the colonies every shelter was separated by silt and sediment and still consisted of a standard infinity. Jillison said they were a collection of lost and founds fit for forgetting us. I pulled at my spine like it was a page from a book, and tried to guess which place would hide it best.

The coma didn't leave me all at once, but slowly withdrew into a level of living interference. The only distinguishing figures being diffraction and refraction. The ripples on the mirror showed up as shadows underneath the house.
  I wasn't asking for a habitat of aftermaths. I wasn't stacking the floors with wood and kindling. I limped toward the colonies, struggling against the leftover senses that covered me. I didn't know what was a short term effect and was evidence. My reflection was always a step slow, and Jillison told me to leave it there, stopped and exposed, another stillborn stolen from a long time ago.

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.

  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.