Rose Blumen ~

(Aïsshean)

A place lost and drifting, eventually would sink and vanish, burying its ghosts and secrets.

Maybe someone dying scuttled this castle from the other end of the world it came from.

But in a different spectrum of shaped memories, one that looked yellower, I also saw the remnants of that event.

How it happened, when the world was flooded by this catastrophe.

~

It was in already tumultuous weather.

It was far above the beautiful city apparently, but it felt like another time and place entirely.

The weather was so hostile and ferrous, even he had been injured and his suit damaged.

Maybe it had been an unlikely natural cataclysm already, that had caused darker consequences for these people and this peculiar technology.

Now the young man was alone, hurt and scared, venturing haphazardly through the unlit corridors.

The tunnels back then were not as exposed to the deadly storm raging outside, and not yet to the bleaching light. They were dusty and dark, albeit windy.

He went deeper through these very uneven rock corridors, without any remaining source of light to show his way.

I barely recognised the place, as when I arrived everything had been polished and whitened by the light.

But originally this place really looked like a piece of a wider cave apparently.

He was breathing heavily as much as this suit allowed. He walked through the carved rocks that looked unnatural. Even though he had no experience in speleology, he could guess fairly that this place had not been shaped by nature.

Whether this place had been built or caught around here was unclear. He didn't know much, and he could only observe.

For a moment as he crawled deeper to relative safety inside this tomb, he could mostly notice how the architecture seemed uniform and aligned.

He couldn't tell whether it was old or just recently damaged, but it was clearly made by humans to his eyes. I would later concur.

He stumbled further, with the weight of being alone.

Everyone else from his team sent to investigate was now dead or missing in action.

He was keenly aware of what going missing in this mission really meant.

His chances were slim to ever return alive to his city, maybe a few kilometres below through the bad weather.

He barely avoided panicking in this state of despair, as his helmet finally broke.

All his equipment had been malfunctioning, and was now entirely out of commission. In this place, electromagnetic fields were unreliable and electronics eventually stopped functioning.

He tried to breathe, struck by anguish. All he had left to rely upon were neither others nor technology.

Only his trembling body and terrified spirit were left.

He went deeper, to shelter first from the noxious particles and dusts blowing heavily outside.

The walls were moist inside, with a heavy smell of rust. He walked slouching, the gloves damaged by acids gradually, but still following the wall.

He was breathing unevenly the spoiled air through his clogged filters.

His journey of less than an hour felt endless inside. He often made it to his knees through crevices more than corridors, but headed further.

The obscure tunnels though eventually came to an end, with a wide hexagonal tile, a rubble that had found itself blocking the exit. He pushed this obstruction with all his weight to make it fall behind.

The brutal noise on hitting the ground made him jolt.

He went inside the wide room now open. A noise continued to echo in the dark. He couldn't see what lied around there.

But there was a pale glow somewhere around he could notice the effects of.

The source itself was unclear, floating perhaps softly, but drawing a few shapes and shades in that obscurity.

He approached what he couldn't decipher yet, a little more swiftly.

He tripped over rubbles or other things, but eventually made it closer to them.

These odd shapes surrounding the glow. The three statues with curvy shapes were loosely evocative of feminine figures to him. More importantly he looked toward the only place where light allowed him to see clearly.

The ground was uneven and muddy. The glow was surrounding where he and the statues stood, like a floating mist.

He felt oppressed by the shady figures before him, but they were nothing more than statues.

They were oriented toward a central spot he conjectured from their look. Their triangle was irregularly defined, but their abstract shapes seemed to define a point or thing between them.

He couldn't really define heads nor arms on them, or only tilted down.

He had never been intrigued by the meaning or purpose of art in the past. Now his situation more than their coarse nature made him wonder. As he stood between two of them, he wanted to examine what they were a little more, to try understanding what they meant.

He stepped through that mist shrouding them slightly. He walked his way closer to the third one, feeling weirdly fuzzy. The sensation in his ears became a violent tremor, making him fall heavily.

It shook the building along.

Everywhere else on Earth, maybe there had been a subtle glint.

~

Slowly, the young man managed to raise his limbs and stand up again. He was exhausted and hurt, now with a severe pounding inside his head.

When he could understand what his eyes were looking at again, the intensity of ambient light was rising to levels forcing him painfully to squint and close them for a little while. His eyes felt damaged, burnt.

The room around him was with a wide dome, made from stones with dirty colours, bigger than expected.

He heard sequences of incoherent sounds that were either damaged machineries or a very foreign tongue to him.

All his senses felt tested dangerously and saturated. Trembling, he managed to endure and keep standing.

Around him the statues remained as ominous to him as they did before, even under daylight. He couldn't tell how much was real or an hallucination, but it seemed to him that the blue sky could now be seen through the circular wall and ceiling. It was ever changing and uncertain.

All he focused on for a moment beside standing was how ghastly these designed rocks were before him. Their supposed faces were of unclear or molten features, but where his pareidolia could see skulls with grim hollows.

He was afraid and intrigued.

Meanwhile, the daybreak and horizon lines of sight were more clear, as if the place was now opened to the outside, and the weather had cleared out.

As he was there between the statues, he noticed the sunrise about to blind him again, and how the storm had seemingly vanished.

Maybe the previous shock had come from that storm abruptly collapsing.

Another composition of noises and sensations though swallowed him while his eyes again went blind.

Pain ran through his body in surges as he tried to make his way out, feeling on fire.

It was too late. A succession of painful and intense sensations ripped him and his sanity away.

It felt like logic and reason were gone to him, and his struggle returned to a primitive attempt to survive a different kind of storm rising.

He had seen something rising through the light and turning into a different kind of turmoil.

Now it was too late to decrypt or describe what he had experienced.

He ran for his life while the killing light was growing.

The sky vanished, along with everything of this place.

His brain saw more sights defying his understanding of reality. Other sights spread from and toward this exploding or imploding source of light, burning his eyes and soul for good.

He witnessed the start of the white day, and parts of its extent unfolding near to him. And as much as he tried to escape and survive, he was torn inside and across.

The white day appeared in there.

And soon this was the scattering end, everywhere outside.

~