WORLD’S END

in #fiction6 years ago (edited)

World's end - Pixabay CCO


While I keep pondering if I want a part 2 for the cybernetics I dropped last night, I bring you this:

Slowly the traveller looked around, a satisfied smile etched on his features which had been hardened with the erosion of time. He had arrived. Everyone who had called him mad, who had said he had lost touch with reality, would be definitely shocked, and not a bit ashamed to know that they were wrong. It was such a pity that none had followed him here, to this lone island in the middle of the vast sea. Of course, if anyone managed to bear his tale to the rest of the world, they would surely find it too incredible for “reasonable minds”, but the man could scarce be bothered. This journey was for him; he cared not whether anyone believed what was happening to him now.

He turned for the last time to look at whence he had come. The sea, moments ago having wrestled with him for his very life, was now calm, almost as level as glass, as if inviting him to return; he could almost hear a whispered promise that his voyage back would be smooth and trouble-free. He laughed. He was born to face difficulty; as a matter of fact, it was difficulty that spurred him on, instead of dissuading him. Which was why he had never listened when they called him mad, and tried to lock him up.

Dragging his little skiff across the white sand, the traveller set the ocean behind him, and trudged forward, to where he had so long dreamed of, where he had struggled so much to come to. World’s End. He could see it in the distance, its stream shimmering silver in the twilight, as the cascade of otherworldly waters flowed upwards into the firmament. What people called the Milky Way. It’s just many stars bunched together and stuff, they said. The earth is round, they said. He laughed again. If they only knew.

To those who sought to travel around the world, it was spherical for them. To those who sought the edge of the Abyss at the end of the earth’s bounds, that too was waiting for them. He, for his part, sought the end of the world, but he had no intentions of throwing himself headlong into the atramentous deluge beneath the foundations of the earth. No, he was drawn skyward, like a spire of flame reaching for the heavens, but stuck to the dry wood that gave it life, lacking the faculties to ascend. Unlike the flame, however, he had found the means to disentangle himself from dry wood and make the climb.

The wood, of course, in a bid to remain relevant, had antagonized him. He was called crazy, unsociable, and many other names. He was denied freedom and often pumped to his eyelids with drugs that would keep him controllable. But he had been growing. And when he had grown too large for the earthy bands which held him, they had snapped, and he had ascended. To the place of his dreams. To the Spring of Stars at the End of the World.

He was close now. The Spring made a pleasant murmuring sound, as he stepped up, and put a questing hand into it. He had been told that stars were unfathomably hot, but this astral stream was cool to the touch, and coalescing drops, iridescent like semi-liquid pearls, rolled off his palm. He could spend a while examining the spring in wonder, but it was just a means to his final goal.

Exerting his ageing muscles, the traveller pushed his skiff into the Spring. It began to rise, as if uncertain of its desire to leave the terrestrial ball. Grabbing the side of his boat, he struggled and flailed as he strove to enter the rising vessel. In a moment, he was in. It was graceless, his boarding of his vessel, but what mattered was that he was aboard. As if it had been hesitating for his sake, the skiff suddenly began to move faster now, as though it had been caught in a rapid current which bore it away from the confines of this world. Everything seemed so little now, so dark and miserable.

He was aloft on the Spring of Stars. He was free.

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lovely poem, the traveller goes all around the world