The Mimosa Effect 2

Making up for lost time – partly inspired by this week’s Writer’s Island prompt “If only”, and covering all the prompts (themes + words) from the last four weeks of Saturday Scribes.

Have you seen the sleepless ones? They were here, not long ago. There used to be many of us, more than anyone knew, or cared to believe. Can you tell me my people are, where they have gone?

They’re not in the temple – I’ve looked there, even though it’s naught but dust and rubble – shattered, not by the quake, but by men with hammers and pickaxes.

People used to respect the order, even as they secretly feared it, used to bring us incense and spices – cinnamon and cloves, myrrh and patchouli, oil of jasmine and bergamot. We could not sleep, and so we found other ways to lose ourselves, filling the temple with the scented smoke, singing hymns in the dark, dancing deep into the night. The children called us whirligigs, for the way we spun, faster and faster until we reached something close to oblivion.

There used to be a temple in the mountains, made all of granite and crystal, a glittering spire stabbing the chill air, defying the bare cliffs and howling snow. That an avalanche came and buried it, is a story more twisted by falsehoods than truth. The ones who feared us set a hundred mines beneath our walls, and when they exploded into fire, they brought not only the temple, but the mountain down with them. Only one of the sleepless survived, a novice, a child with ginger hair and pale blue eyes like chips of ice. They say he saw the tower and the mountain fall, that he was never the same after – that he became more ghost than human, a phantasm haunting his own memories, wrapping the past around him like a cloak against the winds of time.

There used to be a temple in the valley. Anathema to the stone dwellers, the engineers, it seemed to grow out of the earth itself, gnarled like tree roots, covered with moss and lichen, its curves and hidden pathways unfathomable to any who were not born there. The towns were miles away, a long slow slog through acres of swamp and peat bogs, and yet the stone dwellers so hated the temple, that they sent a league of hardened soldiers to burn it to the ground. They marched for days through the mire, lost many to disease and hunger, but still they came. They said you could see the red glow of the fire on the other side of the mountains, where the fishermen launched their wide flat boats into the sea swell. It is said the fishermen woke in the night to the smell of smoke, even over the pungent reek of fish and seaweed, brine and tar.

When the temples burned, there was no panic, no mayhem, no survivors wandering glaze-eyed and disoriented after. The sleepless had found their final sleep at last, and they did not fight it – all except for the blue-eyed boy, now a man, who lived for months in the marshlands, hiding among the reeds, until he was as gaunt and dirt-brown as the long-legged birds who hunted there.

The stories of the sleepless once filled so many scrolls, they built a library to house them all, commissioned by the emperor himself. Now they exist only in epitome, in fragments and footnotes, in the scant, hurried summaries of historical scholars to whom my people are little more than legend, fireside tales to warm weary travellers at the end of a long journey.

How the blue-eyed boy came through the snow, and the bogs, and the fire, to reach the denouement of his life, begging for food in the gutters, is a story that does not bear the telling, for it will not entertain even those of basest humour, and will only sadden the rest. They say he wanders still, the blue-eyed boy, although it is doubtful a man could live so long (and yet, they say that unrequited yearning may make a man immortal; I know not if there is any truth in such a claim).

If you see them – if you see the sleepless – will you tell them that I’m sorry? I’ve been awake for so, so long, walking, searching, until my footprints covered every inch of the earth. I am tired now, and find at last that sleep is within my grasp. If only I had done more, fought harder, travelled farther… but time has forsaken me, and I must rest. Perhaps I shall see them again, in my dreams. I can only hope that when I do, they will find it in their hearts to forgive me.