Rites of the Renouncer by Benjamin Kamphaus

Author:Benjamin Kamphaus [Kamphaus, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PatternShift
Published: 2019-02-13T22:00:00+00:00

5

I had covered some distance. The texture of the landscape had changed from sharp to pillowed, sections here and there worn down into soil. The parent material was old enough for the green worms I spotted from time to time to have broken it down into finer grains. A rust-colored, spongy moss covered several free-standing rocks that poked out from the dark basalt. Stopping a moment to look closer, I could see the rock had a different color and texture, probably dragged here from elsewhere by the repeated lava flows that had laid down the majority of the land cover.

Then my eyes were drawn to the first signs of the Cenotaph; it hung like a thread from the clouds. It reminded me of schematics I had seen for space elevators and similar proposed (though never realized) structures in the archives. I have used the word ziggurat in describing it and other monuments in the Dream World before. I mean to convey the mythical effort that appeared to be behind its construction, much like in the ancient tale—the cosmological justification, if you will—of the Tower of Babel. Here the architects had not had to contend with any gods, or had bested them. Perhaps it was only a single architect, and no trickery of the gods could divide its purpose and set it against itself. Either way, it or they had won their victory and had constructed a building that reached into the heavens.

Or perhaps the architects were the same as for the Dream World itself, having projected the form of this tower with the same effortlessness with which we populate our own virtual realities; not needing to mine, transport, or reshape any of the stone—that dark yet shimmering obsidian—that comprised its surface. It exposed nothing of its construction: no seams, no remnant of stone scraping stone, no mason mark. Even if it had simply been woven into the fabric of the Dream World from its beginning, I felt it had been a weighty effort.

I continued to advance as I contemplated it. The soil and the worms I had noted as the soil’s source became more common, the pillow lava giving way to patches of rock made up of the same material as the stones I had seen standing upright earlier. Here and there were spires of that same rock, suggesting that the lava had flowed around them when carrying the boulders away.

The rock spires appeared more frequently in my left field of view than my right. Part of me noted this detail, still tracking my orientation, though the increasing prominence of the Cenotaph made other landforms less necessary for navigation. It was taking up more and more of my vision, and I knew then it would be as when I dreamed in this region before, the width of its base a few hundred times that of my own body.

And then I was close enough to feel the compulsion of the seeming, an initially subtle manipulation in perception giving way to the direct transfer of emotional state.

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