(Aïsshean)
Things became even weirder the longer they went.
Deserts usually look barren, and the world we left behind appeared mostly ravaged and depopulated.
So it came as a collective surprise beyond even us, to see so many people and things now coursing the same dusty roads and lands.
Skirmishes between monsters and humans seemed to fade each day, only to be replaced by others at dawn.
On the wake of the great cloud we all instinctively followed, most things alive came to interact and clash.
Our pilgrimage of a kind turned into a violent and merry caravan and festival, widespread and chaotically rushing across our ancestral lands.
After the new lights of hopes, for humankind and demonkind altogether apparently.
We saw monsters born from wild biology and otherwise, rushing not for blood or meat, but the light pulsating ahead like a lighthouse. They can see it just as we do.
We were ourselves struggling to keep our humanity together every step of the way.
And this race of all that now lived and boiled for something kept colliding into dreadful and majestic screams and lives. It felt like the violent times of earlier days again, when everything could abruptly change in the blink of an eye.
Times when adventures with the art of war could turn tides and create their own principality. It really is the fall.
The potential energies for changes such as before were still there and pouring from heavens.
We were swimming against the changing tide. All we could have considered symptoms lingering along after the cause was gone were mistaken.
The air vibrated from these warm and unstable forces ready to burst and alter biology.
Humans fell like flies. Monsters faded like mistakes just as swiftly.
Other things in between or different flourished over all the other fallen masses in matter of seconds.
Everything changed in this race that felt like a rushed collective hallucination.
We were dressing ourselves along with cloth picked up over spreading flower beds, sprawling from liquefied deaths from the one who walked just before us.
We nibbled on bones from an animal or another as they turned to soft jelly, like candies.
We didn't need to eat as much, as we felt invigorated under the shining and warm light. But we also felt how much more plastic and ready to melt we could become.
Aïssheah lost another part of himself, and his face now looked only like molten wax. His soul still shone inside, but his last field of perception outside was now surmised in the hands he could hold. How my sisters helped him walk was his last remaining grasp over what normality used to be.
I still felt the call, stronger than ever. The frustrating source drifting slowly, enough for us to not lose track.
The call for help from that thing within, echoing all of humanity's demise and misery, it ached in me as if it were mine.
That sentiment of fear and pain was shared to toxic levels all around. We weren't the only ones on that colourful road far from being the first or closest.
As we headed northwest over to the older lands, we passed by more and more sprouts from the dead ahead.
The further we went, the more the road turned into a whimsical garden, littered with colourful spots, shrubs, trees, stains, spoils, mushrooms, lichens and various slimes.
The gathering dusts of life along the cyclone of this hole in the sky painted the path it had taken with glittery shapes and shines.
Our unsteady steps, swift but drunk in many ways, they carried us over roads more clearly defined by what everyone and everything gathering around were turning into than the ancient roads paved between.
We passed by the collapsing sculptures of fading skulls, bones and hides.
We walked around the slithering eels of worms dividing through these pools.
We avoided the swarm of rodents turned insane by the same pain and melting time, showing us how even hives could transform. How did insects react otherwise.
Our social situation had been reduced from patriotism to family, but even these concepts might shatter eventually, or transform with heuristic.
Seeing animals hatching from the melting tissues of the dead repeatedly, we could begin to see it. How much they don't grow as phenotypes, but another form of intuitive design.
Eventually the road would end, but after the early outbursts of colours and sounds from all the animals re-enacting the early days, time passed to reach the quiet present anew.
We found ourselves oddly lonely again, walking rapidly over an incomprehensibly shaped and littered road. Clothing were abandoned and the bodies were all rapidly gone.
We were erased from this land in the end, wiped by the dust of times along these draperies the wind carries.
All that remained by our feet were the more simple or more autotrophic lifeforms that rose after our bodies failed. The simpler designs are the most robust in some ways.
Like countries and hives falling, nature returned after this crisis in most aspects to lower levels of organisations. Bacteria and plants trying to spread with only chemical imbalances for intelligent forms of guidance.
Without animals or other dark shapes noticeable any longer, we appeared to become the last surviving sensible minds still in the race.
Holding onto one another, confident and scared.
After the drifting hope and answer, eluding and challenging our resolve over and over...
~
We didn't really sleep anymore. But our jogging pace slowed to a crawl under the night skies.
Aïssheas still was enthralled by the sights of stars. Parts of her fleeting dreams were like colourful bubbles hovering around us, gently escaping and drifting away.
The memories continued to vanish from us, and spread around in sharing. As our bodies continued to change, so did our minds.
Every part of our bodies were dislocated and changed by fac simile tissues barely holding us together. The tears were long gone.
Merging and separating into cycles, bound by older promises and ideals like strings, but always drifting as individuals looking for themselves again.
It was a rolling bed of odd sensations, to lose and find each other all the time, ever unsure, always hopeful.
But over time as we found ourselves decaying but still alive, along this school road as if decorated by hudnreds of children free and wild, we understood we were the lucky ones. Most things as organised biologically and intellectually as insects and animals, they had finished melting and reducing their components to lower levels of complexity by now.
We were the only ones left in sight, still managing to balance each other at our level of continuous and arduous organisation of mind. We had mostly given up on ever living as human organisms ever again by this point.
But we kept our curious eyes, and a sense of balance in a shared purpose.
Albeit blurry and uncertain. Despite our shared inhumanity growing over ourselves, shapeless, metastable all the way, we kept a form of aim.
Moving ahead.
Catching the Tamźródlo. Moving forward together, until we eventually find the end or fall.
Continuing to process metabolisms and thoughts as long as possibly, for life, empathy, curiosity and care for a little more than ourselves.
All these ripples coursing through the world are causing an unthinkable rise of diversity, but at the greatest of costs to numbers and overall stability.
The world's life is in danger... In its entire integrity.
~