(Rose)
The sun rises on this new land I'm discovering. The city is similar in structure but different in many details. Everything is new.
Is it presumptuous to say that I can feel I'm not in the same country anymore?
I feel that way. Maybe I'm just happy...
I'm like you now, father...
I'm rather happy about it. My steps lead me to a city that lies just there, silent and still. These buildings are like giant dead trees. They're frozen in time until they erode or fall into ruins and then history.
The city has walls I cannot climb, but damaged and open here and there. I can get in the empty streets of this forsaken land.
Trees grew along every kerb of every street, making a sort of forest grow along all the streets, in continuous gardens.
Most buildings still stand at their rightful place while the streets themselves however became paths in woods and fields. Some plants and trees grew along the walls of the buildings and climbed onto them.
As usual I can't hear anything but the wind through this city. Just its song. No dog, no child, nothing else but the giant wind instruments the ruins have turned softly into.
I wander through these streets, only exchanging a few words with Blume at times. There is something majestic when you wander through these monuments now part of Antiquity. We both look around with our different eyes, looking for anything peculiar to investigate and wonder about.
Everyone is gone here too. There aren't even many vehicles left in the streets. Maybe the city had been evacuated?
I find at the end of day a very surreal looking building. Its architecture looks like a twisted sculpture, a work of art with more curves than straight lines in every direction. Modern buildings I guess? It's not a company building, but a museum probably.
I reach its long gone door. They've fallen in a small channel along with the small bridge to enter.
Blume grins as I step back. Being reckless again she thinks loudly.
Of course.
I run for it and jump above the small channel and broken bridge. I reach the entrance and barely keep my balance. I made it, and step inside the building.
It's darker within oddly, given it looked covered with glass and not walls of stones, seen from outside.
The glass panels are there, only covered with a thick sticky paste and aging layers of dust. We can't see through from inside. The building has no longer glass walls, rather mirrors from outside now, and dust inside, to the point that day light barely gets in.
That grease mixed with dust is sprayed not only against every glass wall segments, but everywhere inside as well.
I step into this one-centimetre-thick greasy mud. As every particle of dust in the air gets stuck inside this glue, the air itself is rather clean. What made this glue I don't know.
I see ghosts flying away without a sound. Bolts of coloured translucent things just vanished.
Blume is looking in the general direction they fled toward. She's puzzled.
My shoes stick a little in this mud, but I can move on.
We pass rooms with odd architecture, there isn't any straight wall and the height of ceiling keeps changing.
Blume enlightened one of my eyes, like before, so I can see in the dark most things. I keep the other eye shut meanwhile, and I can change which eye I use to see depending on the ambient light.
My monochromatic eye sees only empty places still covered with that sticky mud from floor to ceiling.
We venture toward locked doors in the back, probably near the other end of the building.
Grand doors, from renaissance style that would suit an imperial palace. They're locked.
R - Blume, it's up to you.
B - Just give me a moment.
I feel an itch. Her ribbons sprout from under my clothes and plunge around the door frame and the hinges. I feel what she feels as if I was letting my fingers follow narrow fissures all around the doors. She inspects them and looks everywhere. She finds the locks. It's not locked, it's welded? The door had been welded shut, condemned.
Behind it, I can't see it, but I feel through Blume that a corridor goes further, with doors on both sides.
Blume begins to heat the metal on the various welded spots she can reach. She tensed her thin muscles. Metallic deep noises begin to rise. The doors and me begin shaking slightly.
The locks melt, they break as the doors begin to open in an awful and deep metallic shriek.
My ribbons are like thin and very long arms. We open this door together.
The roof above us is actually the exterior glass tile structure darkened by mud. Some panels broke and fell because of the vibrations.
This giant door seems like a gate to heavens, though the decay surrounding us and darkness behind make it look like the gateway to something else.
Either an unconventional hell, or more likely an abandoned heaven... A realm of heaven deserted from its inhabitants and rusting in silence, abandoned...
Dear sister in heaven, are the heavens as abandoned and silent than our human realm now has become? I wonder...
What if everyone in hell and heaven was suddenly gone too?
What if nothing guards their respective boundaries anymore, as everyone has fallen into a deeper oblivion?
R - What of all the gates between the realms of existence had fallen, since no one inhabits any of them anymore?
B - In a way, that is why and how beings-like-me suddenly found ourselves free to go and do as we pleased into reality. So my guess would be that the survivors are now free, free to wander in wider worlds... I don't believe in heaven or hell though.
R - You don't?
B - The worlds I know are upside down. Where I go and remain when I die is just an awful void. So my heaven is life in this world with you at my side.
R - So... Shall we see what lies behind then?
B - Probably just some museum archives... Sounds good!
It does sound interesting! We step inside the mausoleum. It's much darker inside.
At least the door doesn't shut itself behind us.
~
A corridor of vaults. They are open. They contain books, folders, crates of papers and so on.
Also lots of these apparatus and tools I don't know much about. Computers and such.
The corridor reaches in the end a last room with some sculptures inside. A winged angel. An Aquarius. A griffin. None came to life as I slightly expected.
Some magnetic dust flew toward my sword and got stuck to it, well, to the cloth surrounding it.
Some crates and chests hold treasures. Jewellery perhaps millennia old.
Even though I never was one for jewels, I must admit they're tempting.
Somehow looking at the rings reminded me of you. I have no clue why.
Looking at the sword, I remember your face as I pierced the chest of the Ogre. It's last mockery...
There's nothing really worthy of pondering about somehow. Nothing unusual. We should leave.
A translucent colour flies away. It heads into another room we've been to before. For the sake of it, we take another look.
Crates of folders and computers. Piled up desks and chairs. Less mud on the ground but still some.
I take a closer look at the mud. Footprints can be seen.
Do I then hear crying or sobbing in the distance? No that was my imagination.
R - Do you detect anything queer?
B - Nothing worth noticing.
R - Is it me or have your senses got slightly dull over time?
B - Oh...
R - Forgive me. I have the feeling you missed a lot of things over a few times already.
B - Well... It's true that I got tricked a few times already yes... I'll see if I can make my senses evolve a little. Meanwhile, I don't sense the presence here of anything alive but us. Like you, I think that all this mud is the doing of a sentient being, but apparently it's gone. I think nothing has moved in here for at least a few years.
R - I see...
We leave the muddy sanctuary.
Back in the city, I look around. I end up turning back and heading inside the museum again. I think I forgot something.
On the other end of the building, there's a garden. Behind a broken door, there's a rough staircase. I climb it to the top. There, an opening leads to the roof.
I go outside, on top of the curvy roof of the artsy building. There's a magnificent reflection of the sky and the whole city all around me.
It changes over the course of this curvy structure of dirty mirrors.
It's a beautiful sight and even Blume is touched. She finds it beautiful too.
I sit there, looking at the abandoned city, the first one visited on this new continent.
The sky at dusk is glorious in colours and shades, between skies, horizon and the many buildings in this forest of human-made construct. It floats above the forest of trees growing in every streets and gardens.
It's a very nice view... My heart is actually a little heavy seeing this. I brush a tear away.
R - I did it father...
The wind. All the colours of dusk. A fantastic scenery, in another land... A travel of mine.
B - Did you promise him to travel?
R - Oh... No, nothing like that. He never made me promise anything. Except perhaps to take care of my sisters... I'm not sure I was very successful there, but...
I rise my eyes toward the stars that begin to appear.
R - But I... I always dreamt of seeing this wonderful world he had seen living abroad for years. We were never leaving our hometown, and even though we were happy... Deep down, I dreamt of doing such a journey sometime. To see and learn more of the world than I could ever imagine even in my wildest dreams... Reality can easily surpass imagination. Travelling is a little like following in the footsteps of someone I truly admired... What I experience right now, it makes me grow and sooth a feeling of miss for him in a way... Well...
B - Being here means a lot for you. For your father too it would have.
R - Yes... Because of how much I love him and admire him, even years after his death I want to act in rightful ways, for the memory of him that is a piece of my identity. And travelling abroad... It's the second epitome of what he would have found righteous and great... And I feel like he would have been proud of me. I feel proud, I feel nostalgic, and growing in maturity too perhaps. I feel happy.
B - I do too... I have no past like yours to build my identity onto. I simply didn't exist before you arrived. But I truly feel and share your emotions. I'm truly happy too that we're here, even if it hasn't the same depth as your happiness.
R - Your history may be lesser than mine, I know your persona isn't. Dear flower on my heart. I'm happy to share this with you.
Night falls quietly. We look at the stars in the sky and around us.
Father, dear father in heaven... I'm not alone in this new and beautiful world.
~