Silica

A sky with no stars, and the memory of Choking.

SILICA

The man’s face looms as a wisp in the accumulating fog. He’s smoking, but those clouds mingle with the shroud all around us. It moves like webbed tendrils, fingers stretching the bleak darkness all about.

He seems to notice where my attention is. “It’s not fog,” he warns. “You know that though, right? I found it hard to flip perspective too, when I first got Choked.”

I nod gravely and find that I’m shivering in the cold. I feel sorry for myself. I feel sorry for this man, too, but as less of a priority. He has been kind to me.

Elmen, he said his name was. It may have been a lie. It hit my ears strangely like a lie. I hadn’t bothered with a falsehood, myself – it hadn’t come to me that we would need to lie down here. But perhaps it is necessary, amongst the Choked.

There are no stars, I consider. Our little fire spews little heat, and it is the only illumination. The webbed tendrils of stringy fog seem to dance in the air nonetheless, as though white-lit from within.

But of course, there are no stars here. This place is a nameless Lostworld.

“How long have you survived down here?” I venture, hearing the timidity in my own voice after it has left. I need to steel myself better, I think.

He assesses me again. “Long enough.” I want more, and after a while he gives it – perhaps another kindness. “Five years, give or take, since they threw me here.”

“Were you with others?”

He nods, but with a distant grimace. “Yeah. I expect it was the same for you. But the air here makes you lose people, right? Makes you lose yourself, after a while.”

I rub my hands desperately before the small flame, though the chill is deep and seemingly irreversible. “Have you not come close to finding an artifact?”

The silence hangs, as though he has fallen asleep. It twists before us just like the webbed fog. “Don’t be counting on that.”

I shudder.

It had been awful, being Choked. At least now there was some quiet, and a kind man like Elmen. The Choking itself -- I had never expected it. Hundreds of us, pushed and prodded – and the shouting – and the fall – and the choking – oh god, as I hurtled through the black atmosphere I felt as though my lungs were on fire and coated in ice…

I can’t get upset. I don’t want my new friend to think that I’m weak.

I just wish there were stars here. I had heard of the Lostworlds, of course, but to see a world so blanketed in night and devoid of illumination – it’s unfathomable. This world is nameless. It likely had a name, thousands of years ago when such things mattered. Before the walls of civilizations all collapsed and left wanderers and scroungers and thugs and soldiers. Whatever happened to these nameless and forgotten worlds, it is a great tragedy.

Except, according to some, they hold hope. They might glisten with artifacts of old. Something precious to be re-found: a light to be reignited. I don’t know what it could be, but I’m sure I would know when I see such a thing.

“Did you ever see any of your people again?” I ask. I recollect my own Choking again – but this time the people that I arrived with. I had not known them: we had all just been collected from a variety of worlds, with the sole purpose of being thrust into this hellish void. I try not to think of how it felt to choke on this world.

Elmen closes his eyes almost reverently. “All the time.”

A pulse of chill runs through my hands and then to my heart. The man’s voice had become…strange. Distant in that same reverence. “What do you mean?”

“You know there’s no artifacts, right?”

I blink confusedly. The silence hangs again, until I try to rouse myself from it and the fright it brings. The incipient despair. “Well, I know it’s going to be difficult. But they say if I can find an artifact, they’ll send an arc to come get me. Perhaps – maybe we could help each other? Find one together?”

Why is my voice so desperate?

The fog seems to lick around us, and swell and dance in strange patterns. For a brief second there is the facsimile of a face in that fog, swirling and dissipating quickly. A tendril stretches out and I can begin to see that he is right – it isn’t fog at all. They are particles. Long fingers of silica and dust, flexing and gathering and falling away, dream-like.

His voice is sorrowful, but hard, as he continues. “No. They don’t want artifacts.”

Something like anger begins to foment in me. “Of course they do. Why bother sending us here? Throwing us down here – forcing us to go through all that – if not to find something.” I can’t think back to the Choking again. I would rather die than relive the memory of it.

He shakes his head, and everything around us is becoming darker. The shroud presses down. The silica-tendrils almost seem to form into great hands. “Something, yeah. Artifacts? No. What would they want with artifacts? Nah. It’s not about that. You know that, deep down. You seem like a smart kid.”

The fire is ebbing, but it is still light enough to illuminate a small patch of ground around it. I see that the earth is made from that same silica. There is becoming almost no delineation between air and earth: it is all one.

My voice wavers. “Then – what?”

He sighs remorsefully and gazes upward, past the silica and to the void of a sky: it is as though he is wishing there were stars, too.

Faces emerge all around him. I know that they are not illusions, not just make-shift patterns in the dark. Their eyes are wide and soulless.

“People used to live here. Millions of years ago, you know? On all these Lostworlds. But they all went and died, and guys like you and me, we got lost amongst the stars. Went traveling. And when we came back to these places, they were all dark. All the lights gone out.” The decaying embers glint lightly in his eyes. A silicate hand seems to grasp his shoulder as he speaks. “What was left wasn’t really people anymore, you know? But there was something here. They were all still here.”

I shudder again, and I wish that it were fog again. But I cannot force my mind back to how it was before.

He continues. “Those people who were left behind in the dark – well, some people think they’re all that’s left of being human. Whatever happened to them, whatever they are now, that’s humanity. And I guess the guys who Choked us – well, they see some value in that, you know?”

I can see it.

This world – whatever it was once called – is a ruin. A dark, empty ruin, except its emptiness only runs so deep. If one were to look closely, they would see the dust of humanity, in the air, and in the ground, and running across its surface like an ocean.

He grins. “Can you hear them?”

I do hear them. They want me to speak to them of the stars – the stars they can’t see any more.

They want to touch me.

They want to talk of the stars, and then they want to pull me into the earth, and choke me with their sand-like fingers until I can talk no longer.

They are all buried here. Alive, forever, but buried, as a distorted reflection of old humanity. Whatever happened here, they continue to suffer with it; choke on it; forever.

The fire dims into the void, and I can’t breathe.