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Run for the Cliff

PariahLycan

Characters by Jagal Editing by MonkWisdom

A long, aching hiss cut through the air as heavy machinery fought inertia, before grinding to a gradual stop.

After a final lurch and a moment of silence, the train began to come alive. As the doors opened up along each car, a river of travelers poured forth, leaping jubilantly onto the platform and scattering across the station. Just as quickly as the tide left, a new flood rushed back in. A new wave of travellers freely washed through the train, geared up for their long voyage. Theirs was the last station they had before they would break free of city limits. This was the last bit of civilization they'd have before safe, comfortable streets and corner markets gave way to lush, green fields and untamed land. The open horizon was an exciting prospect to some. To others, it was absolutely terrifying.

All the while, a gaggle of harried, impeccably dressed staff buzzed about, shuffling passengers in and out; the introverted herded to their rooms and the miserly to their benches. Armed with a notebook and pen, one mousy-haired, wide-smiling attendant had been busying herself with herding a family of six out the correct door until she noticed a room still occupied and strode to it with her practiced urgency.

Opening the door, she half-glanced inside at it two occupants before turning to look back down the aisle. Were they limited to the neck down, she wouldn't have given them a second thought. On one side, a male, bearing a dark turtleneck and trousers, with a neatly folded coat seated beside him. On the other...she could not tell, but this one wore a rugged green jacket and a pair of brown trousers that may never have known a decent date with a dryer. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Sir?"

The male's head immediately snapped to her, dark pupils dilating and constricting in their sea of gold as they focused upon her immediately, and she let out a startled gasp. This man's face bore no hair, no lips, no expression to read...only blue feathers. She threw a glance to his companion, who looked at her with a half-present stare, dark eyes half-lidded and mouth...no, beak half open in a yawn.

They were birds.

"Miss?"

She started, and focused back upon the larger bird, whose aged face had the features of a wood pigeon. She looked into his eyes, his appearance startling but not at all intimidating, and he cocked his head slightly, patiently waiting for her to speak.

She cleared her throat. "May I take your luggage?" she finished, straightening up and reattaching her smile.

"We've not stopped."

She blinked, the smile faltering. "But, the train has just-"

"Our trip, miss," he interrupted. "We've not reached our destination." His voice was slightly deep, as if it came from his chest rather than his throat, and held a certain melody with the faintest trill slipping out along certain syllables.

"But..." she looked quickly at her notebook. "You got on two towns back! And there's not another stop for-"

"Miss." He lifted a hand, not a wing and yet not fully a hand either, and politely but firmly motioned toward the door. "Good day." The stewardess blinked, and the two merely looked at each other for a few seconds before she hastily went on her way, still trying to figure out what she could have said.

Back in the room, the pigeon sighed softly, stretching out and turning toward his partner. "Zion? Awake yet, my friend?"

Zion let out a yawn that ended in a warble, and they rubbed the sleep from their face and straightened their mane of black, white, and bright orange. "Awake enough," the young Firecrest murmured, sitting up ruefully and glancing out the window. "Trees," they churred. "Do I spy the end of civilization as we know it, Gustav?"

"Oh yes," Gustav chuckled, eyes wrinkled in an avian smile. "At least enough to recharge our batteries for a good long while."

As the pigeon spoke, Zion fumbled around in their pockets and looked around on the floor, finally spying their lifeline, a pair of earbuds attached to a small MP3 player that had fallen from their unconscious head. "Just promise me a place to charge this and I'll happily face the end of days with you, my friend." Just as Zion nestled the buds safely into the feathers above their ears, the familiar lurch jostled them both to the bones, and they began forward.

The pair's eyes met, the twinkle in their gazes painting a picture of a silent, mutual joy. This was their favorite ritual, these two peculiar friends. A chance meeting led the two, student and teacher, to walk side by side in their perpetual, self-propelled journey with no end in sight. No destination defined. From the moment they walked out the doors of their university, theirs had been a shared path. When the burn in their hearts would take flight, so would they: the pair were devoted catching rides in any direction, every direction, and stepping onto solid ground only when their eyes found a spark in the window outside. Theirs was a Bohemian life, literary Bedouins riding steel horses and living the comfort granted by a thermos of tea, a bag of books, and a shared wanderlust. The pair fled from home in great, grand arcs, starry eyes either turned to the window to indulge in the scenes flashing by or cast down at their laps as their thoughts were nestled into the pages of a good book. Domestic migration, urban flight.

Even as the train picked up speed, and they left behind the gray, angular blocks of city to hurtle into large, endless fields pleasantly flecked with trees, the pair's minds had left their surroundings and swam between lines of text, enjoying the harmony of their unusual kinship.

The pair were two kindred spirits trapped in the bodies and fortunes of apparent opposites. Gustav, though long used to the world and weathered by the years, had not yet let himself grow weary. A veteran in a khaki coat,he never let his gait falter even as fate tried to break his back. Now, the wood pigeon gleefully wore his graying plumage like scars of battle. had decided to spend his days gleefully revelling in adventure.

While Gustav may have felt no concern for the future, having already endured the worst he felt life could offer and now content to face it with a pleasant nihilism, Zion's heart still knew worry. An old soul locked in a young frame, the Firecrest was drawn without boundary and not reigned into any one identity, instead casting either aside and walking away from such a game. Regardless of the many years they had left, Zion's studies and travels were all still training wheels, an attempt to better pave the path they'd eventually have to follow.

The young bird knew someday they'd have to get off the train, but today was not that day.

"What's on the menu, greybeak?" Zion murmured absently, scrolling through their playlist.

Gustav let out a baritone trill of a chuckle before lifting his tome. "Hegel."

"Hegel? Wasn't he Enlightenment era?"

"Good eye. I swear, I quote the Dialectic method in every other paper I publish."

Zion's brow furrowed. "Dialectic method?"

"Yes!" Gustav nearly chirped. "His famous triad of 'Thesis, Synthesis, and Antithesis!' A simple concept, but one with so much potential." The firecrest's head tilted in question, and Gustav eagerly leaned forward, speaking in earnest. "It's like this. You are faced with the Thesis, not the type my students have come to loathe, but just an intellectual thought or concept. It may represent a discovery, an introduced notion, the existing paradigm, whatever. But then, in comes the Antithesis. It is an idea, which may be contrary, amending, or just plain different...and they must clash!" he clapped his hands together theatrically, earning him a bemused look from his counterpart. "And they fight, they differ, and when the smoke clears...the Synthesis. A new paradigm, somewhere between thesis and antithesis, maybe more or less, maybe barely different...and yet forever changed by the encounter. Think about it: for all intents and purposes, contemporary argumentative writing owes its structure to this idea. Present an idea, offer a counter, rectify the two. Simple and clean. I've made sure it's taught in all the lower writing courses, I'm sure some of your work could be bettered if you remembered it!"

Zion blinked, rather hurt, and opened their beak to protest, but the well-meaning yet oblivious Gustav carried on. "Anyway, I'm wanting to brush up on some of his other work. Master-Slave, Negation, Aufhebung, all that good stuff. And you? What's that you're nursing?"

Pushing the annoyance back, Zion slowly replied. "Poetry. Just poetry. Sento me entre as Árvores."

It was Gustav's turn to look confused. "Sento me...is that Spanish?

"Portuguese. 'I sit among the Trees'. Picked it up a few towns back, some Brazilian author. He writes in a lot of styles, mostly in English, thank God. Don't know if we'll ever see him anywhere bigger than a coffee table, but it's not bad."

Gustav let out an approving titter, nodding and lifting his own book as if in a toast. "Interesting. Well, dive in. Tell me what treasures you uncover deep between the lines."

Zion chuckled, mirroring the silly action, and they tinkered with their MP3 player until all else was silent, each note and melody wiping away a little more of the outside world, until all that existed was paper and ink.

Many miles passed beneath the pair, content to dissolve into their works, the only communication being the occasional shared glance and nod at each other. This was enough, pleasant company and good literature, coupled with the knowledge that a whole new world awaited them. After some time, Zion's playlist warbled to an end, the final note a wakeup call. As they fumbled with the little device, the young bird's eyes flitted from the page to the window, and then lingered.

Outside their window, a single, lonely mountain peeking over layer upon layer of fields, barely breaking the horizon. Such a gentle slope, with strips of treeline climbing the sides, all lines arriving at a dull point barely seeming to hang in the warm afternoon light. The wide fields that sat before them looked empty, though Zion could pick out tiny splatters of civilization, from telephone poles to a single truck burning down a dusty road. However, their mind barely registered these distractions, only seeing the mountain. They could almost see how it was before pavement was laid, tools tore the ground, when all that roamed that mountain made its way on four legs, not two. A line in the trees, grass green and thin, cut through the deeper shade and wound down the side, and Zion swore it met the fields they sat parallel to.

It almost looked like a path.

The moment of interest passed, and Zion's attention returned to the book. Page 147, the continuance of a previous poem, "Run for the Cliff". Free verse and Iambic tetrameter, nice and classical. They shook off the thoughts of the mountain, and began to read once more.

i see the clay of life below

so unrefined and yet it holds

potential bright, but sadly lost

for many poor will turn it down

the field, they know, quiet and safe

and free from dangers just beyond

for stray too far, you cannot see

and what is worse than walking blind?

Zion saw the field; the grass stretching from horizon to horizon. In the distance, the landscape curved upward, all of reality bowing before the great, lonely mountain. It was quiet. It was calm. There was no worry.

upon them all their lines are drawn

by their own hand they are now locked

these lines collect what should not stay

so still inside their cages cold

Slowly, they came into view, the children born of the clay of life. Desperately, they tried to gather up their lost mass strewn across the field, stuffing it within their crudely sketched forms and caging it in with more thick, dark scribbles. But even when they'd collected themselves, they only continued to draw, cutting their insides off from the rest of the world. They could have been free, let the breeze carry them, but they decided that that was not a path worth following. Zion pitied them, these blackened lumps painted into their shells, limiting themselves to terms and ideas, and ignoring all that they could be.

but cracks in armor still will crease

this light they bear will find a way

to seek respite and find their place

toward the peak those few shall go

The figures had contented themselves to stay, and grew heavy under the weight of the lines that cut them off from the rest of the world in greater contrast. But...Zion could see someone moving away from the flock. A lone figure, walking away from the crowd. No, not just one, more were following, leaving the field behind. But where would they go?

The mountain. They found the path and began to hike, faces turned to the peak, a purpose that built with each step. And with each step, the figures seemed to grow...more bright! The heavy binds that caged them fell away as they ventured farther from the safety of grass and ignored the calls of those left behind, urging them return. They would not, something greater called.

they do not stop. they know the way

the path beyond the mountain calls

for open air the sky will give

a path no longer underfoot

so tumble, little weeds, and find

the path so sought is not your own

the soldiers march, their lines as one

they will together be erased

No longer a splinter, but an army. A great mass left the field, rose as one up the mountain. All eyes to the peak. More and more, their edges were blurred, until they stood, barely distinct, at the peak. The field a universe behind them, nothing the eye could discern before them. Blue, empty sky, with no more road to follow.

There would be no more steps, no movement, nothing that was not the world. With one more step, what they faced was for destiny to decide. They would be swept away in the shifting of events in their shared universe, the current so strong they could never swim back.

And fate stood before them, beckoning them come.

her hands outstretched, she calls for them

"run to me now, my children cold

the earth has bid you locked away

my light in you is fading fast"

"Momentum carried you to me

stoked by the fire you hold so dear

into my arms I bid you come

a world so real awaits you all!"

The hands would embrace them, lift the clay from the ties of the earth and mold them, shape them. They would have purpose. They would be given direction. They would embrace destiny and follow the path they knew to follow, no longer bound by the ground calling them to order.

They were poised to jump...but one turned. Their eyes trailed back down the path, down the mountain, past the field. And Zion gasped, the eyes found them, dark eyes in a wreath of feathers. Their own.

their feet are quick, the time has come

for earth is gone, it played the part

their future hangs upon the wind

They called, many voiced raised into one. Invited the youth to come. Follow them home. The end of concern, the end of the days of question. The end of Zion. They would...

"So take my hand. Run for the cliff."

...they would be free.

The great hiss, and then the lurch.

Zion blinked in shock, the void no longer before them. The window, the floor, the cabin. The train.

The mountain was gone. The fields were gone. Everyone...gone.

Where the great grasses and soaring hills had once stood before them, the sight was now filled with clean, paved streets lined with lamps not yet ignited and well-lit shops ripe for patronage. The sun, now much farther down in the sky, shone directly on them; even as Zion struggled awake, they could feel the soporific pull of the warm rays calling them back to slumber.

A yawn made them turn, and Zion's blurry eyes focused upon Gustav, similarly slumped against the wall on his side. A deep yawn, and Gustav stretched, turning to catch Zion's eye and chuckling. "Look at you, finally awake! Then again, look at me. I lasted maybe an hour longer than you, once our friend Hegel got into his 'Absolute Idealism' and 'A equals A' nonsense, I fell apart. Although, with how focused you seemed to be on your poetry, I was surprised that you'd fall asleep again. Did you get very far?"

Zion blinked, realizing they still held the little book, thumb keeping one page bared. Their eyes found the page number.

Page 147. Run for the Cliff.

All this time, they'd not left the page. They'd not moved on at all. Nothing had changed.

"Yeah..." Zion murmured, perplexed. "Made a lot of headway."

"Umm...I...Excuse me, sir?"

Gustav blinked, and as Zion continued to stare at their lap, he glanced at the door and caught the eye of another attendant, an entirely new face and soul with the exact same smile plastered on as the one before.

"Need help with your luggage?"

The two turned to each other, not a word shared, before they glanced outside. The passengers were still streaming out, such excitement on their faces. Some still had a journey to go, and rushed to take the next step toward where destiny pulled them. Others had found their mecca, and looked around with the eagerness of newly-landed colonists. They'd landed at the first station, the start of a whole new town. A host of adventures to be had. New places to see, new cafes to visit, shops to peruse, books to discover. Maybe the pair would find some little bookshop tucked into the darkest little alleyway, delve deep into the farthest back rooms, and uncover some dusty, dog-eared treasure of a tome, aged ink carrying wisdom lost to the world that they would be the first to uncover, the first to show the world. Something to make them move. To make Zion move, give the firecrest a path to travel, a heading in this storm. Here was a stop that, with just a short walk, could open up an entirely new world.

An antithesis, to go up the mountain.

A long moment of silence, and then Zion turned first, drawing Gustav's gaze. A peaceful look was spread upon their ace. Without concern, without worry, without cause for haste, their feathered head slowly shook, side to side.

They'd get off the train in time, but why hurry? Their path would be walked, not run. That spark was not waiting outside. Not yet.

Zion broke the silence.

"We've not stopped."