Apotheosis

On top of the snow-covered mountain, whose billowy sides pile up to a central spire like a craggy pyramid of rock, stands a golden flag. This flag whips and snaps in the predawn air. It is the only thing that moves, as all else is cold, still and silent, even the dark man in furs who grasps the flagpole with a gloved hand. His grip is so singular and strong that it roots him to the side of the spire. On such a drastic slope, his stance is at a startling angle, and it takes all his concentration not to slip.

He is surveying his kingdom, which stretches as far as he can see across wide icy mesas that blend into uniform forests of evergreen trees, which in turn vanish into mist. No sound, no movement, nothing below him breaks the icy, still, lifeless perfection. All is so silent and unmoving that the air seems to vibrate with chilly ether, a shimmering and intransient idea of life within a single endless moment.

He likes standing atop this mountain and overlooking this single moment, but he also aches with anticipation. He is waiting.

The indefinable moment stretches on, and still he waits. His breath leaves him in icy clouds, mingling with the ether in the air. Still he waits. He watches the evergreens far below him in the gray haze, bristling and resolute. He likes to think they are standing at attention, perhaps waiting along with him.

Finally, on the horizon, he sees a band of pink light shine through the mist. It crawls up the sky, around the edges of the navy dome, chasing away the darkness and rolling over stars. When the sun peaks over an icy mesa, he thinks, at last. He’d begun to worry it would not return to give life to his kingdom.

It rises still higher, a mellow orange orb, casting his entire realm in swathes of deep blue shadows that stretch jagged over the forests but lie softly on the mesas like strokes of a massive paintbrush.

The shift in light and color awakens the kingdom’s only subject, the only living thing besides the resolute army of evergreens. From somewhere in the forest, the king hears a rhythmic batting of fragile wings. It is such a soft sound, yet somehow it shatters that silent ethereal moment. Now the world is awake.

He sees the bird as it flutters up the mountain slope. It is bright blue, like the violent shadows on the surrounding snow, and its wings possess the delicate opacity of the dragonfly’s while retaining the power and structure of the hawk’s. The tips of its feathers shimmer the purest white, so that, in the growing sunlight, the creatures seems powdered with a fine frost.

It flies around the king and the flagpole, spinning so every inch of it, every feather like an expertly crafted ice sculpture, catches the light. The king offers it a smile, and though the wrinkled gesture is almost hidden beneath his rough beard and thick fur hood, it is sincere. His eyes shine with fragments of silver, as if they held shattered pieces of that chilly ether moment so recently ended.

The bird lands on the king’s outstretched arm and together they watch the sunrise.

The sun is now totally visible, but instead of rising still higher and lightening the sky, it stops, quivering as it hangs over the horizon. Then, without warning, it descends. The bands of color recede back below the cold mist and the sky returns to a perfect dark velvet. The warmth and color seems sucked from the air, leaving the kingdom wanting. The shadowy forests and pale mesas no longer wait in that long moment of calm anticipation. Instead, they seem restless and yearning. The shadows across the kingdom no longer resemble the elegant blues of a painting, but the restless darkness of a fever dream.

This shadow seems to spread, its edges like a writhing deluge of insects, and the forests begin to ripple. The trees flutter their needles, which peel away and scatter in the wind, disappearing below the mesas. All that remains is immense fields of thorny husks. These skeleton trunks bend to the earth with a cacophony of creaks and crackles. It is as if, all at once, the king’s army surrenders to an enemy and every soldier falls to his knees.

With a frustrated intake of breath, the king lets go of the flagpole and slides down the spire. He skids over crags and jutting stones, and when the incline levels out, he plants his feet and runs headlong down the snowdrifts. The bird follows behind him with a succession of excited chirps.

He crosses an empty mesa, hoping to peer over the edge and discover the sun before it descends even below the lower realms. But before he reaches the edge, a terrible fatigue overtakes his limbs. He is suddenly cold and stiff, and a rotten smell drifts to his nostrils, something putrid and deathlike. He stumbles forward.

Then he is lying on the icy ground, unaware of his fall. He cannot rise. Something weighs him down, his own limbs perhaps, or merely the perception of his dying kingdom. His gloved hands can find no grip on the smooth, dead ice, and his feet lie numb and useless.

He manages to roll over onto his back, where he stares up into the oppressive sky. He imagines the stars are laughing at him.

Then the bird flutters into his field of vision. He cannot see through its gaze as it watches him with impassive, emerald eyes. But though he cannot sense the creature’s emotions, he understands its intentions. As his only subject, it is willing to do all in its power to aid him, and it seems to tell him this simply with its lingering presence.

Then it zips upward, shattering the impassive air with its wing beats. It slices through the stillness with the detached desperation particular to a loyal animal, and when it has risen higher even than the spire, it hovers in the velvet night and looks down. It sees the whole kingdom, that haphazard pile of forests and ice fields spanning out around the spire, but it also sees the lands below, beyond where the mesas drop off into shear cliffs. From such a height, these lands seem smooth and uniform, blanketed in swirling mist. Coupled with the curvature of the distant horizon, the lower lands are like a massive smoky marble, from which the familiar kingdom juts like a fantastical crystal.

The edges of this marble are ringed with orange light, but just as the bird glimpses the sun, it vanishes again below the mist, hiding behind the hazy sphere and taking its color with it. The bird has no choice but to follow it. Already, it is passing below even the lower lands.

So the bird dives. It tucks in its frosted wings and lets itself plummet toward the edge. It sails over the mesa where the king lies motionless and over a forest of gray trunks. Then it shoots out beyond the kingdom. For a moment it feels utterly vulnerable beyond the icy cliff-face that marks its edge, with nothing below it but that smoky, curving expanse, but then, with determination, it tilts forward and falls straight for the lands below.

It falls parallel with the cliff, which transitions from glossy sheets of ice to massive icicles that drip profusely. Their droplets plummet in streams that congeal into glittering waterfalls and spraying mists. As the bird passes down through this watery veil, the cold droplets freeze on its wings.

But it does not slow its descent. Eventually, it reaches the lower lands, where the waterfalls thunder into restless pools that lap at stony shores. This land is still cold, but it is far less barren than the higher kingdom, with its abundance of red trees whose twisted trunks intertwine like brambles. There is a vibrancy about the place, but perhaps this is only an illusion caused by the setting sun, which casts the tranquil snowdrifts in shades of yellow and blue and sets the forests into a violent contrast of flame and shadow.

The bird speeds through these fiery trees, dodging rock piles and zipping into dark mazes of gnarled branches. It passes through peaceful glades where the snow lies deep and even, past jagged streams where it dips its wings in a spray of cold silver, and under arbors shadowed by the sun shining through the leaves.

It will set soon, but this does not worry the bird, who will continue to follow it, even if that elusive orb travels further into the mist and around the curve of the earth.

As the sun dips below the horizon once more, the bird flaps its wings with renewed vigor. Ahead, it sees that this land ends in a cliff as well, this one rocky and tumbling, leading to another misty world below. It descends down the slope of snowy boulders, a wreckage of rocks, sometimes passing high over a jagged monolith and sometimes diving below the stones into twisted icy tunnels that swerve as randomly as the carnage above.

When it pops out of one of these caves, it sees that it has reached the bottom of the cliff and is now sailing across yet another land, this one all gentle green hills and young forests. It is perhaps happier here, but also hotter. Much, much hotter. If the bird could emote, it would have expressed surprise at the heat, at least until it sees the sun.

With a jolt, it realizes it has caught up with that celestial body, which rolls over the hills, trailing heat and vapor, a floating mass of writhing flames stubbornly moving toward some unknown land. The bird flies in a circle around the hovering mass and stops in its path. As the sun slides toward it, the ice that had crystalized on its wings melts away. In spite of the oppressive heat, it does not move, but stares into the white-hot energy surging toward it. It knows the only way to reverse its journey around the earth.

Perhaps the knowledge should have upset the creature, but it does not. It is perfectly content, even as the suns rays begin to enfold its fragile body. Light and heat pound against it from all directions, threatening to tear it apart with sheer energy. It cannot escape the flames and the pull of gravity; it cannot so much as flutter its wings. But it knows this is the right thing to do. For a moment, its thoughts linger on its own life, its own underdeveloped sense of self-preservation. It thinks of itself only for a moment, as it remembers the king lying helpless in his frozen, dying kingdom.

When it passes through the veil of flames, it finds itself floating in a formless void, the dark hollow within the sun. It cannot see or feel its own body. Its only sensation is one of vertigo, and perhaps a vague sense of gentle backward rotation. It spins helpless as the sun continues its stubborn journey.

It lies like this for a moment, listening to some distant echo. Then it feels a sudden sensation of a tearing, as if its entire body is shredding like a piece of paper, or as if every one of its feathers is pulling away and spreading outward to the edge of the sun’s hollow. If its body is indeed rending itself apart, it can still feel each piece. They expand all throughout the hollow and connect with invisible strings of energy, like a spider web threading through its shattered body and anchoring it to the inside of the sun. It is no longer itself, but rather an inner part of the sun. Now it wears the writhing orb like a shell.

It leans forward and begins spinning the opposite direction. At first the sun turns with immense effort, as if pushing against a powerful current, but as it gains momentum, it moves effortlessly back the direction it had come. It barrels over the grasslands, vaulting up the craggy cliffs and across the red forest. The trees streak past, and the snowdrifts are mere glittering blurs in the hazy motion. As the bird-sun rises up the final cliff, it dips into the waterfalls, which explode into hissing steam that shines in the sun’s rays. All the ice glows gold, reflecting the sunlight a thousand fold like an immense organic mirror.

The sun shoots above the edge of the cliff, and the entire kingdom is bathed in light. The ice mesas are a pure, intense white, and the dead forests cast ragged shadows. The bird-sun can see the dying king, a speck in the center of a bright expanse. He does not rise, but this does not bother the bird-sun. It knows it has not finished its mission. There is still one thing it must do to restore this dead kingdom.

With its next intention dominating its mind, it flies above the golden flag on top of the spire. As it hovers there, surveying the kingdom one last time, it feels the sun’s energy building, as if its hot and bubbling surface is welling up from within. If the bird could still feel, it knows it would be in terrible pain, but now it is only aware of an immense pressure pushing it outward in all directions. It is a living explosion, spreading across the sky in swathes of light that ripple and froth and descend across the whole dome of the sky. Seething orange and yellow chases away the star-specked navy until the whole sky is an inferno.

Then it dissipates, leaving behind a calm expanse the color of a robin’s egg.

When the king awakes from his hazy stupor and feels life and warmth tingle in his limbs, he rises. A wave of nausea threatens to bring him down again, but it passes and leaves only a biting sense of clarity, like a spring breeze. He first looks up at the gold flag atop the spire, flapping against the mellow sky. Then his gaze lowers to the surrounding kingdom. A warm light has settled over the icy plains, and they glow rosy like something from a nostalgic dream. And as for the forests, they no longer scrape against the earth as gray skeletons. They stand taller and greener than he’d seen them in years. They seem to salute him with their wide boughs.

He then notices an object at his feet, and after bending to examine it, he sees that it is a nest made of red-leaved branches. In the nest sits a single egg, as blue as the shadows on the snowdrifts at sunrise and flecked with white spots like frost.

Upon seeing this egg, he is suddenly aware of a movement in the air. He rises and listens. Something oscillates with life; something, or many things, moves imperceptibly in the distance. He can sense them beating against the still mountain air, a constant reminder that the endless moment before dawn has ended at last.

Then he hears the chirp of a thousand unseen birds.

Now the world is awake.