Fiction
Greg Sendi
In the time of the Pentarchs, toward the end of the first summer, when his mother lay sick of a fever, they arrived severally in apprehension and wonder, he from the west or from Airyaneum Vaejah some say and she from Ur as it is written in the prophets and they came to where now we gather at the water for healing and to glean grain from the fields and harvest of the maples and the catkins of the alders there, as has been our way since that time.
Of their first meeting, little has come down to us and yet less is known for certain. That they arrived we know, and that they departed three days onward, we learn from the items in the cloudregisters and from their exchanges afterwards which had in that time begun to archive, though during the days and nights themselves, all record has been lost, or rather was never made, scorched to untelling by what came to pass there. Whether by cataclysm of flesh or divinity or by a minerology or a tectonics now unknown to us, the old screens melted and the old drives fused hopelessly in ports. All seems to have been burned to vapor and then beyond vapor to evanescence, no trace found even on the walls or in the dirt or affixed in the latesummer pollen as was often detectable by the forensicists of that age who were trained exhaustively in the recreation of lost things.
And so also the second, a year after, when rains drew channels in the mud there that then filled with the glittering dust that settled after their collision and that became the crystal branches of the Labyrinth of Pau that we walk today in solemn prayer. And yet still so little is known to us of this, the second September, despite the obstinate, cloistered study of our sages and academicians.
Between times, from the first to the second, it is known that in the loam surrounding the cottage had bloomed whole gardens of improbable things, blood oranges and cherimoya and enigmatic persimmons and ranunculi of colors unknown there before, each drawing from the streams and the alteration of the sunlight, wrought by what may have come to pass, some finding their place in the shade near the red dwelling and others splaying fully in tendrils and vines to the sun, forward from its porch in crawling branches and rays, so that where once the land had been barren and broken to all but corn and soy, fertility yet remains to feed and delight our encampments of pilgrims and prevail upon those of unbelief.
And as before, how they arrived and what happened there can be surmised but not known, though of this their second visit, augurers and auspices in dominions as remote as Uaxactún and Luoyang reported and enregistered in their cloudworks, a furnace gust on their faces at the moment it may have begun, while others in regions still more remote, whose names are now lost to us, record that the air of their cities and freeholdings and heaths and marishes became redolent of warm almonds and sage.
Still no voice or image or even written record has come do