Stepping Stones

It starts out slowly, to the east. Just a shift in the sky, reaching up from far behind the mountains, spreading lines of a deeper blue. If he keeps sitting there, and he will, it will shift further, the blue mingling with an ever-growing haze that wavers into a softer shade of golden-green, like a transparent curtain, before it all goes tipping and spilling over into a harsh, rich crimson, flooding the valley with a blood-red dawn.

Akaime checks his footing, pulls himself up that last bit of the way so he can lean against the branches, turn his face towards the rising sun. Here, in the heart of the woods, where the trees stand almost bark to bark, boughs curling together so tightly that he could walk across the canopy like a carpet, nary a light reaches down beneath the leaves, giving the forest floor an air of perpetual gloom. He likes it that way, much prefers not to see what lies beyond, the vastness of a world that has lost its meaning. Dawn is the only time he allows himself to do so, to climb to the top of the highest tree and watch the night turn into day. To ascertain, in the manner of someone who has been asleep for too long, that everything is still in place, the Earth is still turning, and it will be another quiet day in the below.

In the moments he retained from another time, dawn was a relief, an end to the grip of primal fear that took a hold of men when they were lying in a pitch-black hole, clutching at what may well have been twigs for all the good they were going to do, listening to the staccato of their own breaths in the darkness and praying that they would remain the only ones. Dawn was something to be greeted, celebrated even, a joyous kind of collective relief sweeping through the ditch at something that should have been a matter of course, but wasn't. He remembers different dawns, long ones, gray ones, brilliantly piercing ones, and he remembers thinking them beautiful in the way an amnesiac knows that a portrait of a person used to mean something, but now...

Now they are all the same.

It was time for him to venture off to find the one that has been calling him. Heading to the docks, he would set sail.

[EXIT to the borders]