Messe I.X-VI.X
Inspired by 'Messe I.X-VI.X' by Ulver
Lights flicker, shaking dust from their shoulders and casting it to the ground. Rubble litters the floor space occupied by a number of crouching bodies. A fading radio attempts to pick up something, fails. Birds sound muffled as their direction is unclear. A voice speaks from the radio, the diction garbled and unfamiliar. There are reverberations gently shaking the room, the strewn debris giving it the air of a recently-disturbed snow globe. A breath – young and female – is exhaled as the rumbling softens. They are moving on. A dog barks at the departing vehicle, and isn’t heard again.
As they clamber through the brick and mortar, the birdsong becomes clearer. Shafts of light infiltrate, and the sound of man’s thunder can be heard towards the skyline. As they walk along the streets, they register every sight and every sound, as plumes of smoke daub land and sky one and the same. They search for survivors to no avail; search for any trace of life without success. They stop as gunfire is heard in the distance, continuous, a stand-off. Suddenly, an arcing noise increases and explodes as a plane screams overhead. No, not a plane; a bomb. The sound of it falling sends everyone into disarray, and then into silence as its detonation, dampened and calm, quiets the gunfire. Another surge of distant rumbling.
They move faster, desperate to outrun the storm already born. They reach the epicentre, now vacated of all sound and able bodies, leaving behind a monument of flesh and bone. Here lie brothers, allies, fathers, sons. Heroes? Heathens. A young woman kneels to cradle the head of one, buries her face in his neck. Another drapes a shawl over a twisted body and agonised visage. Weapons clutched in a vice, they died with no honour but a life’s worth. Taking what they can from the scene without disturbing the dead, they regroup with what little strength remains, and press onward. Faces grim, and resolve by a thread held taut.
Walking past the cavity-ridden buildings, another wireless crackles cursed gibberish as it decays. Noises can be heard that could be mistaken for people, and not one of them is distracted. Rain falls, hot and heavy. Their pace slackens as the precipitation conjures steam. Vision obscured, the street suddenly appears almost bereft of anything at all. The weather falters; the air clears. It is night.
In front of a church (a church?), a lone man in a broad-rim hat stands inside the wrought iron gates, looks to the stone crypt on his left, then to the headstones on his right. He is reflecting. The macabre setting is where it all began: love, honour, cherishment. His memories in a luminescent aura as he recalls the shining candelabra, the smiling faces, the ceiling mirrors. He spun; he spun her, pulled her close, then, dark.
He opens his eyes and looks to the heavy oaken doors closed before him. His lip quivers. He opens his mouth to scream, but instead smiles. Smiles as tears stream down his face. He screams anyway, laughing all the while, and collapses to his knees. Was this all as the war had been? Nothing but a dream that any moment he would wake from. He lays his head on the stone pathway, still laughing, still crying, but silent, fading.
The movie theatre is empty. The reel spins way past the final credit roll. The noise it creates is distinct and haunting. The mechanics of ageing technology; ancient lighting fixtures, worn cables still shivering with the sparks of fresh electricity, the lifeblood they yearn for. The outdated world is possibly considered the most beautiful. Lights up.
All the horrors of a world outside forgotten as those stoic doors snuff out the light and it begins again. The seats are empty, deformed; regal boxes along the wall utilised by the bodies of mass storage and the inconvenient. An old dust sheet obscures a carbuncle down in front – the voice box of the theatre, now parched and mute. The lights still shine, giving life to the haggard yet. The screen flickers as a lifetime’s worth of clips dash across the canvas. The animated and the fantastical, the real and the heart-wrenching. Motion skips a beat as an audience enters and leaves at speed. Lights down. Eyes of projection, reels spinning, sound in rusted speakers cracking, trying to break free. Lights down.
The cover falls from the organ, as the theatre darkens.
The sprawling metropolis draws closer. No city has buildings to this scale. They claw at the sky and become obscured by cloud. Just like now. Thick cloud. Thick snowfall. They are all dressed in black, hands in pockets, mouths quiet behind thick scarves. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A city with no water. Landlocked, every edge an exit. To nowhere.
Why would they leave when everything is here? No neon lights, no striking illumination. Blunt street light. It is winter, but it is early spring. How gay we look in the pall cast by the sun unseen. They are called city dwellers for a reason. Violence in blackened alleys. No one cares anymore. Chaos, anarchy, madness. Violence. Violence. Violence. Violence. Blackout. To the quiet.
Is this what opera is all about? The set could pass for the actual nave of a church (or maybe that’s where this is all taking place). The reverend steps forward, hands outward as the bell ringers return to their resting places. He preaches to the fourteen kneeling before him. It is night, dozens of candles the only illumination. He pauses, and twitches.
The windows shatter as they storm the church. Everyone screams, but still the reverend preaches. They capture his flock. Some are shot, shot dead, blood following the grooves across the stone floor. They ignore the man of God. It is empty now. Left are bloodstains and a man speaking of sin and deception. There is no amen. It never ends. As he silences, he closes his eyes, bows his head, and kneels. The bell ringers reawaken, calling out to the lost and afraid. Sanctuary. Sanctum from their own hells and the hell they reside in. Rainfall. Those outside in their tattered rags and bedraggled existence flee to the church, doing all they can to escape the horror. Feet battered and bloodied, outrunning the screams, the gunfire, forcing the heavy doors apart, and entering.
The bloodstains are gone. They know nothing. Nothing but brief respite. Hurry. Close the doors. Shut out the dark, and open your hearts once more.
The needles jitter upon the dial. The only illumination comes from the green lines flickering on the circular screen. An exploded bulb lodged, shattered above. There isn’t any room to even sleep in here. The door can’t open fully with this desk in the way. For a larger man it is a coffin. For me, it might as well be. I can just about hear everything outside, but no one suspects a disused storage facility, let alone a meagre cupboard. I have to keep watching, for a break in the sequence. Suddenly, explosions outside, a change in pitch, and a sound I’ve never heard splits my ears, causes me to recoil. They’re changing the rules of the game as we speak. The bombs stop, and now a melody, older than this equipment, invades. I hear them banging on the doors outside, and I know this song. I’m singing along. A tear for nostalgia. Or is it a tear for my death?The door opens in silence.
Green hills, another life away. It is all quiet now. The dead are buried, or are still being consecrated. Embalmed bodies laid into crude graves. Words of life. Rough crosses of wood mark the latest internments, far from the centre of the past. To what do the crosses mean to us? The son of God staked out in the sun. They say crucifixion. No one wants to feel it, yet we use the marker to feel through it. The graves are many.
No one ever considers the extent of rebuilding a shattered city. All the ghosts lie silent, but they left their mark upon the land. Mementos of a hero, or the blighted relic of the murderers. Winds still bring in heavy storms of debris. Earth and stone can reform, but with heavy hearts they remain. A bottle clinks against a step to nowhere. Some districts are completely devoid of any and all, perhaps forever. Maybe one day the ghosts will return.
Planes fly overheard, and there isn’t a body below that does not shiver at the sound. Any day could be a relapse. Prayer cannot save the condemned. A loud cry of agony. The pain will always be here.
The Slate Carapace Field
The Scarabs – spawned from the sand of the Eternal Hourglass – were the custodians of the pre stages of Time. They kept aspects in motion, and avoided paradoxical elements, which in turn could distort or corrupt the flow of ages. In these earliest of periods before sentient dominance, they were regularly at war with the embodiments of Inertia – an element living outside of Time, which could not interact directly with Time itself, but instead utilised the planes of the Fourth Dimension, and sent scores of interventions to conflict with the natural flow. As they were conjured by Inertia, these embodiments were capable of moving within the four dimensions, giving them a distinct tactical advantage over the Scarabs. Though the Scarabs were borne of the gift of Time, they were unable to ascertain or predict the movements of Inertia's hordes, and constantly came under duress; the only resolve came from their swift recovery of numbers. Every time one Scarab was defeated in battle, two more rose from the Silver Desert, the great ocean of exhausted sand surrounding the Eternal Hourglass. Across these glimmering plains, the struggle went on for aeons; an infinite loop that could not be broken. The forces of Inertia would appear, overwhelm the Scarabs, who would retaliate en masse, and drive their foes back through the Fourth Dimension.
However, Inertia, who had grown weary and disinterested in being able to control the realms within Time, made one final attempt, and created a wormhole that would open up within the very distant Past, long before the first sands had been expelled from the Eternal Hourglass, when there was nothing. In doing so, Inertia became drained of all power, and would only remain in motion if the embodied forces succeeded in shattering the Hourglass, and thus open a rift that would lead to the untold oblivion, and destruction of all matter. Inertia's forces arrived, and found the Hourglass vulnerable, suspended in the spatial plane. As they moved to attack, the first Scarabs rose from within the sand of the Hourglass itself, shortening its span across generations, delivering it from immortality to mortality. Inertia's control over the amassed army was weak, and the embodiments were acting out of frenzied chaos, rather than in conventional logic. They struck the Hourglass blow after blow, and every chip and every crack restored Inertia's power. Attacks became more coordinated, hitting weakened spots simultaneously and relentlessly. Though the Scarabs did their best to repair the damage, the power of their enemies proved too much, and their forces were greatly limited by the mere trickles of sand falling so gradually within the Hourglass.
One tremendously executed flay by Inertia's forces finally cracked the pane, and the sand began to drain out. The Scarabs attempted to close the hole with their own bodies, but were swallowed up by the tides of darkness smashing all around the Hourglass. The last of the sand fell; the last Scarab that could be mustered rose, and the surviving ones banded together, unafraid of their inevitable defeat. As the cracks rose higher in the glass, the darkness of the spatial plane became colourful, and a magnificent aura enshrouded the Eternal Hourglass. From high above, the physical manifestation of Time descended upon the scene. Thrown into disarray, the embodiments moved chaotically once more, thrashing wildly at the glass. Time entered into the Hourglass, and was surrounded by the Scarabs, whose expressionless visages gazed upwards. The manifestation curled up into itself, and became a stunning sphere of light. Blinded by the intense luminosity, the embodiments scrambled to get away, screaming wildly to be called back through to their Present. The glow intensified, until finally – like the supernova – it exploded in an awesome, destructive display, which obliterated everything within the plane, shattering the Hourglass, and evaporating the embodiments entirely. The sand of the Hourglass was strewn far and wide, creating a vast desert that gleamed with the golden touch of Time. Inertia, who had felt the annihilation of the embodiments, was trapped beyond the realms eternally, and became the namesake, frozen dormant outside of Time. Fragments of the Hourglass solidified within a patch of the desert, and became a hard, durable surface. The Scarabs – whose exoskeletons had shielded them from disintegration – lay upon the solid field in rows, caught between Time and Inertia, afflicted by the aftermath of both.
Their carapaces remain, metamorphosed into grey, immovable stone.
Inspired by 'Messe I.X-VI.X' by Ulver
Lights flicker, shaking dust from their shoulders and casting it to the ground. Rubble litters the floor space occupied by a number of crouching bodies. A fading radio attempts to pick up something, fails. Birds sound muffled as their direction is unclear. A voice speaks from the radio, the diction garbled and unfamiliar. There are reverberations gently shaking the room, the strewn debris giving it the air of a recently-disturbed snow globe. A breath – young and female – is exhaled as the rumbling softens. They are moving on. A dog barks at the departing vehicle, and isn’t heard again.
As they clamber through the brick and mortar, the birdsong becomes clearer. Shafts of light infiltrate, and the sound of man’s thunder can be heard towards the skyline. As they walk along the streets, they register every sight and every sound, as plumes of smoke daub land and sky one and the same. They search for survivors to no avail; search for any trace of life without success. They stop as gunfire is heard in the distance, continuous, a stand-off. Suddenly, an arcing noise increases and explodes as a plane screams overhead. No, not a plane; a bomb. The sound of it falling sends everyone into disarray, and then into silence as its detonation, dampened and calm, quiets the gunfire. Another surge of distant rumbling.
They move faster, desperate to outrun the storm already born. They reach the epicentre, now vacated of all sound and able bodies, leaving behind a monument of flesh and bone. Here lie brothers, allies, fathers, sons. Heroes? Heathens. A young woman kneels to cradle the head of one, buries her face in his neck. Another drapes a shawl over a twisted body and agonised visage. Weapons clutched in a vice, they died with no honour but a life’s worth. Taking what they can from the scene without disturbing the dead, they regroup with what little strength remains, and press onward. Faces grim, and resolve by a thread held taut.
Walking past the cavity-ridden buildings, another wireless crackles cursed gibberish as it decays. Noises can be heard that could be mistaken for people, and not one of them is distracted. Rain falls, hot and heavy. Their pace slackens as the precipitation conjures steam. Vision obscured, the street suddenly appears almost bereft of anything at all. The weather falters; the air clears. It is night.
In front of a church (a church?), a lone man in a broad-rim hat stands inside the wrought iron gates, looks to the stone crypt on his left, then to the headstones on his right. He is reflecting. The macabre setting is where it all began: love, honour, cherishment. His memories in a luminescent aura as he recalls the shining candelabra, the smiling faces, the ceiling mirrors. He spun; he spun her, pulled her close, then, dark.
He opens his eyes and looks to the heavy oaken doors closed before him. His lip quivers. He opens his mouth to scream, but instead smiles. Smiles as tears stream down his face. He screams anyway, laughing all the while, and collapses to his knees. Was this all as the war had been? Nothing but a dream that any moment he would wake from. He lays his head on the stone pathway, still laughing, still crying, but silent, fading.
The movie theatre is empty. The reel spins way past the final credit roll. The noise it creates is distinct and haunting. The mechanics of ageing technology; ancient lighting fixtures, worn cables still shivering with the sparks of fresh electricity, the lifeblood they yearn for. The outdated world is possibly considered the most beautiful. Lights up.
All the horrors of a world outside forgotten as those stoic doors snuff out the light and it begins again. The seats are empty, deformed; regal boxes along the wall utilised by the bodies of mass storage and the inconvenient. An old dust sheet obscures a carbuncle down in front – the voice box of the theatre, now parched and mute. The lights still shine, giving life to the haggard yet. The screen flickers as a lifetime’s worth of clips dash across the canvas. The animated and the fantastical, the real and the heart-wrenching. Motion skips a beat as an audience enters and leaves at speed. Lights down. Eyes of projection, reels spinning, sound in rusted speakers cracking, trying to break free. Lights down.
The cover falls from the organ, as the theatre darkens.
The sprawling metropolis draws closer. No city has buildings to this scale. They claw at the sky and become obscured by cloud. Just like now. Thick cloud. Thick snowfall. They are all dressed in black, hands in pockets, mouths quiet behind thick scarves. Hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. A city with no water. Landlocked, every edge an exit. To nowhere.
Why would they leave when everything is here? No neon lights, no striking illumination. Blunt street light. It is winter, but it is early spring. How gay we look in the pall cast by the sun unseen. They are called city dwellers for a reason. Violence in blackened alleys. No one cares anymore. Chaos, anarchy, madness. Violence. Violence. Violence. Violence. Blackout. To the quiet.
Is this what opera is all about? The set could pass for the actual nave of a church (or maybe that’s where this is all taking place). The reverend steps forward, hands outward as the bell ringers return to their resting places. He preaches to the fourteen kneeling before him. It is night, dozens of candles the only illumination. He pauses, and twitches.
The windows shatter as they storm the church. Everyone screams, but still the reverend preaches. They capture his flock. Some are shot, shot dead, blood following the grooves across the stone floor. They ignore the man of God. It is empty now. Left are bloodstains and a man speaking of sin and deception. There is no amen. It never ends. As he silences, he closes his eyes, bows his head, and kneels. The bell ringers reawaken, calling out to the lost and afraid. Sanctuary. Sanctum from their own hells and the hell they reside in. Rainfall. Those outside in their tattered rags and bedraggled existence flee to the church, doing all they can to escape the horror. Feet battered and bloodied, outrunning the screams, the gunfire, forcing the heavy doors apart, and entering.
The bloodstains are gone. They know nothing. Nothing but brief respite. Hurry. Close the doors. Shut out the dark, and open your hearts once more.
The needles jitter upon the dial. The only illumination comes from the green lines flickering on the circular screen. An exploded bulb lodged, shattered above. There isn’t any room to even sleep in here. The door can’t open fully with this desk in the way. For a larger man it is a coffin. For me, it might as well be. I can just about hear everything outside, but no one suspects a disused storage facility, let alone a meagre cupboard. I have to keep watching, for a break in the sequence. Suddenly, explosions outside, a change in pitch, and a sound I’ve never heard splits my ears, causes me to recoil. They’re changing the rules of the game as we speak. The bombs stop, and now a melody, older than this equipment, invades. I hear them banging on the doors outside, and I know this song. I’m singing along. A tear for nostalgia. Or is it a tear for my death?The door opens in silence.
Green hills, another life away. It is all quiet now. The dead are buried, or are still being consecrated. Embalmed bodies laid into crude graves. Words of life. Rough crosses of wood mark the latest internments, far from the centre of the past. To what do the crosses mean to us? The son of God staked out in the sun. They say crucifixion. No one wants to feel it, yet we use the marker to feel through it. The graves are many.
No one ever considers the extent of rebuilding a shattered city. All the ghosts lie silent, but they left their mark upon the land. Mementos of a hero, or the blighted relic of the murderers. Winds still bring in heavy storms of debris. Earth and stone can reform, but with heavy hearts they remain. A bottle clinks against a step to nowhere. Some districts are completely devoid of any and all, perhaps forever. Maybe one day the ghosts will return.
Planes fly overheard, and there isn’t a body below that does not shiver at the sound. Any day could be a relapse. Prayer cannot save the condemned. A loud cry of agony. The pain will always be here.
The Slate Carapace Field
The Scarabs – spawned from the sand of the Eternal Hourglass – were the custodians of the pre stages of Time. They kept aspects in motion, and avoided paradoxical elements, which in turn could distort or corrupt the flow of ages. In these earliest of periods before sentient dominance, they were regularly at war with the embodiments of Inertia – an element living outside of Time, which could not interact directly with Time itself, but instead utilised the planes of the Fourth Dimension, and sent scores of interventions to conflict with the natural flow. As they were conjured by Inertia, these embodiments were capable of moving within the four dimensions, giving them a distinct tactical advantage over the Scarabs. Though the Scarabs were borne of the gift of Time, they were unable to ascertain or predict the movements of Inertia's hordes, and constantly came under duress; the only resolve came from their swift recovery of numbers. Every time one Scarab was defeated in battle, two more rose from the Silver Desert, the great ocean of exhausted sand surrounding the Eternal Hourglass. Across these glimmering plains, the struggle went on for aeons; an infinite loop that could not be broken. The forces of Inertia would appear, overwhelm the Scarabs, who would retaliate en masse, and drive their foes back through the Fourth Dimension.
However, Inertia, who had grown weary and disinterested in being able to control the realms within Time, made one final attempt, and created a wormhole that would open up within the very distant Past, long before the first sands had been expelled from the Eternal Hourglass, when there was nothing. In doing so, Inertia became drained of all power, and would only remain in motion if the embodied forces succeeded in shattering the Hourglass, and thus open a rift that would lead to the untold oblivion, and destruction of all matter. Inertia's forces arrived, and found the Hourglass vulnerable, suspended in the spatial plane. As they moved to attack, the first Scarabs rose from within the sand of the Hourglass itself, shortening its span across generations, delivering it from immortality to mortality. Inertia's control over the amassed army was weak, and the embodiments were acting out of frenzied chaos, rather than in conventional logic. They struck the Hourglass blow after blow, and every chip and every crack restored Inertia's power. Attacks became more coordinated, hitting weakened spots simultaneously and relentlessly. Though the Scarabs did their best to repair the damage, the power of their enemies proved too much, and their forces were greatly limited by the mere trickles of sand falling so gradually within the Hourglass.
One tremendously executed flay by Inertia's forces finally cracked the pane, and the sand began to drain out. The Scarabs attempted to close the hole with their own bodies, but were swallowed up by the tides of darkness smashing all around the Hourglass. The last of the sand fell; the last Scarab that could be mustered rose, and the surviving ones banded together, unafraid of their inevitable defeat. As the cracks rose higher in the glass, the darkness of the spatial plane became colourful, and a magnificent aura enshrouded the Eternal Hourglass. From high above, the physical manifestation of Time descended upon the scene. Thrown into disarray, the embodiments moved chaotically once more, thrashing wildly at the glass. Time entered into the Hourglass, and was surrounded by the Scarabs, whose expressionless visages gazed upwards. The manifestation curled up into itself, and became a stunning sphere of light. Blinded by the intense luminosity, the embodiments scrambled to get away, screaming wildly to be called back through to their Present. The glow intensified, until finally – like the supernova – it exploded in an awesome, destructive display, which obliterated everything within the plane, shattering the Hourglass, and evaporating the embodiments entirely. The sand of the Hourglass was strewn far and wide, creating a vast desert that gleamed with the golden touch of Time. Inertia, who had felt the annihilation of the embodiments, was trapped beyond the realms eternally, and became the namesake, frozen dormant outside of Time. Fragments of the Hourglass solidified within a patch of the desert, and became a hard, durable surface. The Scarabs – whose exoskeletons had shielded them from disintegration – lay upon the solid field in rows, caught between Time and Inertia, afflicted by the aftermath of both.
Their carapaces remain, metamorphosed into grey, immovable stone.