WHALESONG

I was skimming the boulevard, its waters blue and still as Death’s cold old face. But now it lies mottled, harrowed by boats. Blood fans away in sinuous folds from the body and it turns in the water, and it turns with the wind with its back bent as if in sheer gloom. Soon, the boulevard will drink him, and then the Ocean. I will never know who he was, but I think he might’ve known that falling from such a height into deep waters was no different than being rammed between two heavy-duty cargo ships. He could’ve chosen a different way, and I could’ve been quicker, could’ve had the premonition dawn in my mind moments before it actually did, could’ve gotten a faster boat for myself or had a longer reach in my arms, but such counterfactuals only exist in words of a book and not in the spaces between them. He’s dead. He’s gone. There was nothing that I could do. And there is nothing that I can do right now. And what remains of him in me is a hollow that cannot be filled.

I saw him plummeting down from a whale breaching into the stratosphere—a sharp nosedive; no words screamed out, no palms joined before the veritable leap, no deferring by measuring the length of the fall or second guessing with backward steps—an honest jump—one that makes you respect the fellow, and then the undisturbed fall: hurtling through the shoals of fish, through the mantarays skirting the winds, through the darting wrasses and octopuses inching their way up the streetlamps and then a dull crackling of bones followed by a silence and a shriek.

I knew I couldn’t save him.

So, why did I move? Why did I storm down the staircase and leap into my boat? Why did I turn the keys, clutch the steering, holler and kick the pedal? When you see a man standing on a whale its either a whalemaster on his routine rounds or a man seeking closure. And I knew that he wasn’t a whalemaster from his lack of uniform, but why did I still wish that he was one and not the latter? Such things always made me curious, these mysterious about the heart, how it warms at the destitution of someone but remain cold at oneself. To me this shouldn’t matter as much—I’d be leaving this world one day just as I had come, and yet I was struck with a spark of kinship the moment I caught the sight of his body in absolute fall. He must’ve felt, in those final moments, a flash of unsullied freedom, or at least its faint verisimilitude. I can’t help but admit that I did indeed feel a tinge of envy from behind the steering as I watched his shirt balloon up in the wind.  

Forthwith a shadow falls upon the waters like a hurtling landslide. It comes down crashing upon the thoroughfare like a bolt of lightning and a blade of silence cleaves through the customary clamour and is gone, leaving a mist of anguish and dismay. Terror hasn’t struck the waters yet, but its anticipation weighed heavily upon them all.

Boatsmen began harking sharply. Their shrieks like the screeching of tires on the roads. A flood of whispers swept across the crowd. Gondolas halting; steamers swerving; bodies tumbling sternward; water-buses come to rest, their passengers lost under the sheds in conjecturing; drivers kick the brakes hard; their propellors turn in unison, sucking the bloodied waters towards them and away; the sun shines from a sky without a fluff of clouds; passengers on the footpath are perching and muttering and cursing and shouldering their way to the edge to get a closer view; hunters riding their dolphins swoop down for a brief glance, crinkle their face, curse, kick the steeds, and soar away till they’re a grey speck against the unyielding pale blue of the sky.

The body chokes the thoroughfare. The boats are gathering about it in a circle. From above, it has taken roughly the shape of an eye with ripped bloodvessels. The passengers past the perimeter are still asking about the cause of the sudden traffic.

Soon, the perimeter jostles up. The formation breaks. A narrow lane forms on the water. Two white steamers wearing the sheen of the sunlight on their bows drone in, and there is no hesitation in the whirl of their propellers, no wavering in the direction as their hulls skid across the water. The rangers in their dirty-blue unbuttoned shirts and grime-coloured cargo pants look jaded, their eyes vacant with familiarity. A traffic-boat chugs in right behind them. An officer in silvery white uniform stands on the swim-platform blowing the whistle with measured fury while gesturing the traffic clean with the firm sweep of his arms. I crank the engine and drive my boat away from there.

 As I speed past the square, I see the rescue rangers hauling over the deadman onto the boat. It rises woodenly. They are yanking it athwart the deck. But it had been roped in all wrong, so it rises leg-up first and gets stuck awkwardly along the starboard and just then, one of them walks over, clutches it by its soggy, blue shirt, hurls it over and it drops to the deck with a mournful thud. I see him now. Incruent face. Bloated and drained and haggardly. A face so robbed of the pulse of life that it seemed that it must have never coursed through his veins. And its eyes, Oh God, I’ll never forget it. Never.

As I kill the engine and get off my boat, I see them rush away and moor to a pedestrian pier that started from a dark, vacant lot walled on all sides by buildings and I see them carry the deadman and lay it across the grass and cover it with a coarse white cloth while a cloud of flies, come out from the shadows and swarm above it. The rescue workers leave, and so do I.

When I climb back up the stairs, I see Moyna standing at the doorway, studying my face for answers. I know she knows it all by now, but she wants to hear me say it. I choose not to talk about it, walk past her and sink down on the chair that stood sideways just as I had left it. I breathe deeply. The air is cold and I can feel it rush down my throat and then disappear somewhere in my chest. I can feel my heart beating: its pounding light against the shirt.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here for, but I do know that its somewhere between ten years and ten days, or ten hours—I don’t know, anyway, it doesn’t matter, Moyna says that to me everytime I ask her what time it is. I figured that it was the fifth of December but whenever one of Moyna’s friends ask about the date I tell them that it is the eighteenth of Athyr, the third month of the Seshet calendar, the one everyone’s going on about and it’s been the eighteenth of Athyr for more than seventy-two hours now. The kind of calendars you’re using says a lot about you, Moyna stated once: Seshets are friendly, Tzolkins are grumpy, Lunisols are idiots and Gregorians are stuck-ups.

Whenever I see Moyna, hear her talk, or catch her smell when she sits beside me, I get this fuzzy feeling, an inscrutable itch buried deep under the layers of my unconscious. It is like hearing your name faintly in an overcrowded bazaar and then never finding that person who’s calling you. My mind is set on a spree of recollection every single time she nears me and still…I am all but left with this fuzzy feeling, a streak of nostalgia—metallic and serrated and humiliating—whenever I hear her talk, feel her naked shoulders rub against mine, catch the smell of her hair on dim evenings there’s a fluttering of the heart, memories rush at the speed of sound, and yet I am left with nothing, absolutely nothing, but there’s this fuzzy feeling, like someone’s calling out my name from the bottom of my unconscious and I won’t respond to it unless I know who or what that is.

Since our conception in the womb, we are, without our consent whatsoever, wedded to the dynamo of Time. We are attuned to her ebbs and flows, we rush with her currents, soar with her surges, drown in her floods; we are tossed from wave to wave, yanked along entire shorelines, cast into claustrophobic straits, dragged away from hospitable coasts, and flung into the bosom of torpedoes. There is some factor to the very reality of being, some ontological decree so pressing that it warrants the roots of life to clutch down into the stonebed of Time. But here, in this city, Time ran her own republic without the burden to incubate life. You can sense her raw autonomy when weeks grow as long as months and days pass slower than a diseased snail. Thus, when Moyna invited me to join her friends for the Ira festival this evening, I didn’t bother her by asking which evening she meant exactly for there were eight kinds that I had discovered during my stay.

Once every year, she says, the moon draws back into the night sky so far that the waters recede into the ocean for all nightfall leaving the entire city in its wake until its eventual return at sunup when the Ira festival concludes with gunshots. You shouldn’t miss it if you ever visit here.

I cannot help but admit that I don’t like it here. My brain is more accustomed to things that has a certain shape to them. It doesn’t need to be all too rigid, just firm enough for my fingers to keep on clutching. I would rather have my days have their afternoons between mornings and evenings than their evenings repeat thrice followed by a prolonged night with an hour of morning strewn across its length. I don’t like things to not make sense like that. Most of us don’t either. We don’t like the true face of chaos. We’d rather stare into an empty, dark well and pretend that it’s an abyss than catch even a passing glimpse of true madness. We don’t like absolute freedom, but fetishize its possibility. We are deeply infatuated with all forms, structures, systems, dogmas and patterns. We want to cling onto our plushies stuffed with purpose. Our walls are stained with our vision boards, to-do lists, and petty resolutions. And above our vision boards are those clocks like some cancerous grot; their digits cold, their arms lacquered as the face of death, and they are ticking away through the long hours of the night, that forever march of time that gives all, takes all, forgets all. We want our days segmented like the body of a worm forgetting that its segments don’t impair but enhance its essence. But these striated forms of our days, these mornings and evenings spliced up with transitory tasks, sewed up with vacuous chores, withholds us, restrains us and drains us. Yet we cherish the morning tea scalding our tongue. We chase digits on screens like blinded fools. We check our wristwatches when our car halts in traffic. We have forgotten how the leaves bend in the wind, how the river glisten in the morning, how sweet yet sad the loon sounds from a distance. We have forgotten all that because we don’t like the face of truth, only its brazenness that make the heads turn, only its bluntness that entertains a crowd, only its transparency that unburdens us. We don’t like the face of truth. We don’t. But I do know that there is something in us, some fire, burning in some corner of our soul. A tour de force of a billion years of evolution. An invariant pulse of life throbbing on, even in a fanworm furtive in the sandbed. An invisible heart that beats without. A heart that knows no body but has fathered it all. Such a force can be felt. You cannot ignore it. You cannot. And some even say that they’ve seen this fire burning only after it had consumed them. Its warmth only felt when one is in ashes, and these days I look at myself in these waters, longing to be turned to ashes.

Moyna is about to start a story about limo sharks. She’s been talking about them for the past couple of hours now. These limo sharks come to tell her their story every nightfall when the waters swallow the city, and chase the people away into the White Castle. The high tide, on full moon night, can sink a six storeyed building, but on regular moonless nights, only reach as high as ten storeys. Moyna, unlike others, doesn’t leave for the White Castle. She has no interest in its labyrinth of infinite rooms. She climbs to the top of her shelf, sits on it and watches the waters drown the cityscape. The marine life, that had grown accustomed to the dominion that was once reigned by birds, embrace the waters with a dispassionate indifference. Soon the shoals of fish that sailed between the skyscrapers in the morning, now swim with unchanged deftness at night. Octopuses take to the waters, their suckers loosening the grip around the poles, rays slice the surface, and whales plummet from the sky and slam the ocean with an apocalyptic slash. Moyna sees the waters rise up, one book-storey after another. She isn’t afraid of the tide.

I think the ocean has intelligence, she says. It knows things. I feel like it tries to communicate with me. What makes you think that? I ask. Every time the waters leave, they leave all my stuff messed up. Clothes are all tossed about. Chairs moved from here to there. Many a times I have to drag the bed in place. But there’s something more to this mess I tell you. The way the chairs and tables are all jumbled up, it looks like some script from the shelftop, I think the tide’s talking to me. Did you ask the limo sharks about it? a smile worked its way across my pursed lips. Moyna sees it and retorts, You want to hear it or delay it for another month? No, no, go on ahead. It’s just that tides don’t to talk to me in the same way that they talk to you…

She pays no attention and continues from the beginning:

It was a thousand years before the first Ira. No one lived in the city. The White Castle had just begun to show signs of decay, the Great Gulls were still flightless midgets in their far away continent, humans were still lost at sea searching for land. In those times, when the moon was still further away in the sky, and fishes lived in the ocean, limo sharks ruled the earth. Long and sleek and lemon-green. Swift, like the wind. Shrewd of mind, mercurial of movement, vengeful of heart. Their patron: the sun-god himself. And besides all this, they were terrific at playing hide-n-seek.

Every year, at the International Hide-N-Seek Tournament their kind would stand first. It was always a race for the second place for others. Sharks, eels, jellyfish, krakens all took part in this. But the limo sharks were so good at it, it almost felt like sorcery. Many thought that the limo sharks could camouflage. They couldn’t.

When the limo sharks would go into hiding, you couldn’t find them even if you turned the world upside down. It felt that God himself had briefly removed them from the earth for none of us to discover them. You had a higher chance of mistaking a clownfish for a bluewhale than finding a limo shark in its hiding spot.

This went on for centuries until…

Then the moon, one night, came rushing at the world, changing it forever.

The ocean expanded and new lands opened up. Cities were swallowed up. Whole nations came under the dominion of the Sea King. This caused an episode of great upheaval. Society went on a complete overhaul: the Sea King was beheaded, the old aristocracy were hunted down and killed, temples were burned to the ground, new nations fell into war, a country was wiped out with an antimatter torpedo, and lastly, Great Gulls took to flight. They flew above the ocean for months without landing, and their favourite food, by some unprecedented twist of fate were the limo sharks.

In this new world, the committee that hosted the World Hide-N-Seek Tournament resented the limo sharks. They stood for the order that they had long buried in the fires of the dying altars. They were a call to an older time. Of the times of the Sea King who sat dreaming on his throne with a trident at the bottom of the ocean; the times of the Old Gods: the Perkunas, the Wotins, the Ershwins; and the times of the merfolk: wild and cadaverous and barbaric.

But we cannot blame the new members of that committee. When the limo sharks watched the first of their kind getting hunted down by a Great Gull in a single, seamless swoop, they felt a part of their soul being carried away between its beaks and into the sky. It killed something vital that stood at the core of their kind. Something happened. No one knew what. But since then, they began to lose the competition, one place at a time. From first to second, from second to third, from third to fourth and eventually they dropped out.

These were also the times when the fishfolk were slowly taking to the skies owing to the notoriety of the Great Gulls, but most importantly, the new fishfolk, I mean the ones who were land mammals just two generations ago: giant bulls, schimitar cats, great apes, came into the Ocean in enormous quantities and began squatting wherever they could all the while being absolutely non-cooperative about everything. They said that they were simply coming back to the place where they originally belonged to, so they had a greater right over it than the ones who were already living in the Ocean.

Soon, the Hide-N-Seek competition started being held in this city. But the last of the limo sharks refused to swim out of the old borders of the Ocean. They said they wouldn’t brace the dry lands that was once home to the Great Gulls. By now, the Great Gulls with the land mammals had turned completely aquatic. That was the last time the limo sharks were ever talked about.

Once a Kraken, very popular in his times as an actor observed that the limo sharks in his time (this was centuries after the moon’s sudden shift), had grown rather apathetic as a species. They were lethargic, cynical, existential and great at irony. And nowadays, no one even knows them. Have you heard of limo sharks before?

Yes.

Where?

Just before you started talking about them, you said you’d be talking about them.

That’s hilarious, she said rhetorically, But the limo shark that comes to see me every night has some great news! You wanna know that?

We hear the bells in the distance. Moyna leaps to her feet, runs out onto the balcony and leans dangerously forward. I see that her face has come alive with a renewed flush of joy. She rushes back into the room and screams, It’s the Ira! It’s started! It’s started! She turns and addresses me grimly, It’s time you go back and get dressed. I realise that she was about to change too, so I take my leave.

And thus, with the tolling of the bells at the White Castle, the Festival of Ira comes back to the city. The buildings draped in maroon-yellow buntings flap in the wind. The waters have receded and the streets are only lightly wet. Advertisement banners hang low from balconies like dentations. Vendors from foreign lands hark in broken accents. People are pouring out from freshly-painted houses, from gaunt buildings decaying in old mossgrown lots, from shacks with gabled roofs and clothesline bellying from pole to pole, from apartment complexes pompous with swanky motorboats, and into the open streets, under the yellow cones of light from the streetlamps, forming an artery of a procession that marches through the city. There is a freshness to the city now that the waters have left. It feels strangely baptized. The thin film of water on all thing mundane steals the red from the setting sun and drapes the city and her people with it. The sun is distant and red and behind a ridge of buildings. A whale passes it as if a reef of cloud, barracodas trail it while sunfish see it all from the shadows in the thin, lost alleys. I see the thick column of people inching their way through our lane. Me and Moyna shoulder our way into it. Soon the column fans out into a congregation when we enter the bigger road. Here we are joined by her friends.

The pedestrian piers fold up into seats along the footpath. I see one of them and am struck with nostalgia. Long time back, there was a vacant lot there, but now a small convenience store stands closed. I see its owner opening its doors. His daughter is right behind her. She smiles at me and I smile back. I walk past her and we never see each other again.

At the thoroughfare, people are gathering in enormous numbers, from here you can see the White Castle. It has grown young now. Wild flowers have taken to its cracks. Its silver walls wear the moonlight and shimmers away before an endless expanse of velveteen blackness. From here, we just let the crowd carry us, and we ride it to the arena.  

We tail the people before us till we find ourselves some seats on the west end of the stadium. People rush before us endlessly in quiet desperation foraging for seats. There aren’t enough for everyone so many sits down on the stairs and on the walkways. Far away in the darkness, comb jellies feign starlight and billow silently through the vast hollow of the sky. They remind me of sheep in some other country. Moyna is chatting with her friends and pointing things out to them. The arena beneath us is an enormous circle of sand, and it glows a golden hue due to the floodlights. Moray eels are dustbathing in it. Their thick heads hammer the earth and raise veils of dust that hang over the arena like a spectral cloth. I can hear a faraway whalesong. It is mournful and melancholic and it makes me want to go and visit a place from my childhood when things were simpler. In those days you could see someone smile and think that it wasn’t anything otherwise. Just then, a thunderous blow of a conch drives the stadium into silence. The moray eels bury themselves into the earth, fishes move away from the centre. And so, its starts…

A man frolics into the arena. He is naked above the waist, wears a silvery white loincloth, bead-necklaces around his neck and arms and a comical mask on his face. The drummers fall in rhythm with his steps, and a flute plays a silly tune in the background. He is hunching forward, sunshielding and hopping from feet to feet, sometimes he pulls out a baton and waves it in the air, runs about in a circle, hunches forward again and peers at the audience. This goes on for about five minutes. After that, the GullDancers storm in. The drums crescendo into a series of thunderstrikes, the flute goes off, and the GullDancers with fearful shrieks, chase away the man into the audience.

They are covered in white. Their bodies fully painted in silver, their mouths smeared with sanguine, a thin, dark cloth cover their genitals: all in all, they resemble a band of aghoras returning to their cave after a night of cannibalism. To me, they seemed scary, demonic, otherworldly; and they danced to a music that had no discernible form to it, a song that eats itself, contradicts itself, reinvents itself for the sake of reinvention, it is a melodic nothingness, an anterograde amnesia, it is like the sound of a raindark street at the heart of a metrocity with neonlights burning bright on billboards, on titanic shopping malls with rows and rows and rows of things that you can buy all you want but you’d never need. It is like the hurried steps of its people, asynchronous and frantic and restless. On some other day you’d be pleasantly surprised at its auditory gymnastics, but now its ambiguity shivers your soul and buries you in a brainfog. I watch their bodies contort, sinuate, convolute with a lithelike elegance, these alien forms that their bodies take, makes me squeamish, it is like watching a horror movie, I want to look away but I don’t want to miss it.

As the GullDancers go on, they are joined by neophytes dressed in jetblack army suits carrying rifles with gold-plated stocks. Unlike the GullDancers who have lost themselves in a hypnagogic trance of nothingness, the neophytes are sober, prudent, abstemious, and they march about the perimeter in short, measured steps. They resemble humanoid robots. Strong yet hollow. Estranged yet inseparable. Doctrinaire to a fault. An undeniable, and essential antipode to the anarchy of the GullDancers. A great equalising factor. They are like the folding up of the mountains on one end of the world while the ocean floor giving way to a gaping abyss on another. And slowly, as the evening rolls into the night, and comb jellies go brighter from the moon’s dull, dry, striae face hanging large in the sky, choking the night’s dark, drawing the sea farther back, there is a change in the tempo of the dance. The GullDancers’ wildness rubs onto the neophytes, and the neophytes’ sobriety rubs onto the GullDancers. It happens ever so steadily, ever so discreetly, like a magician’s sleight of hands that pops the paisa from behind the ears, that by the time I notice the change, the two bands have joined their steps to a new rhythm, to a new tune: synth-heavy, electro-pop, anthemic and festooned with hooks.

Up on the moon little things are moving. Like smudges on a spectacle. Moyna told me once about the moonfolk. I wonder if that’s what they are. By midnight the arena is deserted. We take a break. Commercials are being played on screens. I excuse myself to the toilet. The next batch of dancers would be arriving by one a.m in the morning.

I can see the moon from the toilet window. It is like a fading dream that we try to hold onto after we wake up. When I finish up and step into the corridor, I see two performers standing outside the waiting room, smoking. I didn’t see them on the arena so I suppose they’re the ones coming up next. They’re wearing a fanshaped headdress, marquetry depicting the arrival of their clan is told on it in delicate gold that glow dimly under the blinking lights, they’re blindfolded with deep, purple satin and a single eye is drawn at its centre with wet chalk, their cheeks are hollow, jaws strong, lips broad, thick ring of gold lightly strangle their necks, several more intricate necklaces of silver, beads and jade sit on their collarbones and cascade down to their breastbones. They’re both male. Both around six feet. Heavy built with strong arms. From under the jaw till their feet they’re painted in blue and they wear embroidered Ionic chiton with sanguine chlamys drawn over it. As I eye their attire, they turn to look at me. I break away and make for the stadium.

Oi! You there!

I walk on, pretending not to hear.

Oi! Oi!

I turn around and add pleasantly, Yes?

One of them has their blindfold lifted up, he asks me, Brother which ways you on?  In this city, it means he’s asking me where I’m from. I feel a bit irked at this question and so I choose not to answer honestly, I am from Anemonetown. Which ways you from?

Brother you’s not from there. You’s not from the city, right. Which ways you on?

I shrug and reply, From outside.

Outside where? Briggsby? Crooksford? Humberton?

No. Further.

Wexlow?

I smile and say, Further.

Cragganaugh?

No.

Brother any further and I falls off this world, right! He chortles.  

I am not from here, I smile and leave. Honestly, I don’t remember where exactly I’m from and I didn’t want to embarrass myself before them.

You walk weird brother, I swear to God, watch it around here!

I hear their words fading. But soon, I merge with the crowd. I find my seat and crash down. I can’t see Moyna anymore. Someone else is sitting beside me. For a moment I wonder if I’d chosen the wrong seat but then I remember that Moyna was going to participate in the final dance, dressed as a fanworm. She must’ve gone into the dressing room, I think.

Soon, the Ira starts again. Dancers in chlamys rush out into the arena. They’re all dressed up as the men I had talked to at the corridor. The music in the background is a folk one with undertones of synthwave. It transports me into another time when mecha beasts roamed the earth and man fought man with whetted stones fashioned out of condensed rage. Boots thump, chlamys swirl and fall, swirl and fall, hands clutch and leave, boots go tap, tap, tap; shoulderblades graze shoulderblades in tamed passion, headgears cast shadows on us all, and tells it all; chlamys swirl and fall; hands clutch and fall; boots go thump, thump, thump; the dancers dart, turn, cavort, jump; the music in the background is folk with undertones of synthwave; you cannot recall such a tune once it’s gone, you cannot hum it in moments of idling quietude, and I feel a great tide of joy crash over me and leave, crash and leave, crash and leave, and never stay. I don’t try to hold it in my palms. I let it slide. I let it be. The boots on the sand go athumping. A cloud of dust is rising. Chlamys swirling and falling. Moray eels twisting between their maddening legs. Arms flailing. Headgears cast shadows on all. Tales of sailors whose names Time never cared for. And the music is folk with undertones of synthwave. Their shadows pass over us all. The blur on the moon is growing, and I wonder what that is.

Pause.

Everything stops. Then I realise it’s only the dancers. They’re frozen mid-step. And then, a familiar note goes up. It is the performer who started the Ira. The mask on his face is still inquisitive. He is hunching over and peering at the audience. He scans the perimeter of the stadium. Everybody is raising their arms with flushed excitement. I believe an audience member is going to be summoned down there. He stops. Then hops around the frozen dancers; tries to shake them into motion, tries to chat them up, lends his ears to them and nods gravely as if receiving some hushed advice. Breaks free. Hops around gleefully again. Hunches over, scans the perimeter, scans again, and on the third scan points at me.

I realize that he is pointing at me the first time his index finger falls dead straight at my face. But I refuse to believe it. One, out of shyness, and two out of probability. People rise and fall back to their seats before me as his rejection creeps up the wall of audience until all eyes are on me. The actor nods a ‘yes’ and people erupt around me with envy and thrill. I am led down to the arena by two guards.

The sand is hot. I am told to take off my boots. The audience is cheering, and it is only making me more nervous. I can feel my heart thumping at my throat. I feel the sand sift between my toes. I try not to step on a sunfish, and walk to the actor who has reached out his arm to me in acceptance. He shakes my hand, pats me on the back, turns me to the dancers, nudges me forward and whispers in my ear: Don’t mess this up!

What am I supposed to do?

You don’t know?

No!

There’s no time to explain! Just go with it! You’ll get it!

He runs off.

Music starts.

Dancers break their forms. The smudge on the moon is now a veritable blur.

And then, what passes before my eyes is a perplexing rush of events: hands merge, faces merge, tunics merge into a single bluish-gold column sheathed by a dust storm; a chalkwhite iris shoots away from the white ring along the column and skitters about me stopping now and again for a brief stare down. They’re hooting and, it is boring into my skull. I can’t hear any music. I can’t hear the audience cheering. Perhaps, the stadium has been completely abandoned. Time seems to be moving at a different pace within this circle. The eye gazes into the deepest pockets of my soul. The hooting is splitting my skull open. A titanic dust storm towers above me, it is swallowing the heavens itself, and a darkly cube is descending through its eye, blocking the moon’s face. The blue-gold column closes in, choking me, the dust storm intensifies, the hooting makes my ears bleed, the iris is menacing and piercing, the cube lowers down to a claustrophobic halt, a hand reaches out to be, I reach back and it pulls me in. 

When I come to, I realise that I am with the Therrans. The cube is transparent from the inside. I stagger to my feet and look beneath me to see a blue world slipping away silently into utter blackness. A sense of relief passes over me, but even in that bottomless void where I coast about foolishly, the whalesong still rings in my ears and stabs my soul with a merciless cruelty.