Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, albeit nifty.

  Copyright © 2021 J. J. Malchus

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion or images thereof may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

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  Michael Benz, Unsplash

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  Jason Pischke, Unsplash

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  Cover design by J. J. Malchus

  PYXIS PUBLISHING

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  First Published August 2021

  Dedicated to James R. Duncan,

  sexy pirate mailman with a dark past.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I The Fall

  II Dawning

  III Trust in Sight

  IV In Infernum

  V Blood Is Important

  VI Light That Leaves the Hanged Head

  VII Sun and Moon

  VIII Pushed from the Nest

  IX Driven

  X Breaking Barriers

  XI Pledge to Lie

  XII However Buried It May Be

  XIII Recrudescence

  XIV Day I: Transit and Transition

  XV Day II: Unseen

  XVI For Godly Sorrow Worketh Repentance

  XVII Wind and Water

  XVIII A Change of Plans

  XIX From Come to Go

  XX Where the Heart Is

  XXI Exodus

  XXII Worth the Effort

  XXIII Humanity

  XXIV Blood Is Charity

  XXV Murder, Among Other Things, Needs a Good Explanation

  XXVI Yours

  XXVII (Mis)communication

  XXVIII A Sideran, a Sacrifice, and a Samuel Walk into a Bar

  XXIX Fuel

  XXX And How We Find It

  XXXI Burden to Carry

  XXXII Stacking the Pyre

  XXXIII We Go Wandering

  XXXIV Fanning the Flames

  XXXV Twenty-One and One Make Five

  XXXVI Transparency

  XXXVII The Sovereign

  XXXVIII Truth Rewritten

  XXXIX Cantus, Cantus

  XL Wind to Spread and Earth to Burn

  XLI Reality’s Downfall

  XLII Reunion

  XLIII Within Cyclone Eyewalls

  XLIV Memories

  XLV Blood Is Power

  XLVI The End of the Beginning

  XLVII And Are Consumed by Fire

  XLVIII Steps

  XLIX Morning Come

  L Weight of the World

  Coming Soon

  Acknowledgements

  About Author

  Beforetime of all Gods, one have I seen in pain,

  One only Titan bound with adamantine chain,

  Atlas in strength supreme, who groaning stoops, downbent

  Under the burthen of the earth and heaven’s broad firmament.

  —Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Translated by G. M. Cookson, B. Blackwell, 1922.

  I

  The Fall

  Drumming of heels against the terrain signals the executioner. There’ll be pyres to stack and blood to boil out one’s eyes and, if less fortunate, fifty wardens to chase the departing and sweep the prison. A citizen can run, can choke on his breath till unconsciousness, but can never escape the constellation walls: that black steel fifteen persons high, encircling laborhouses and rest areas and courtyards in between. A citizen can never escape his Imperium. Atlas no longer hears these words.

  The thudding of his soles, every cycling fall, overflows his ears and there beats symphonic blood.

  Thirty kilometers north of Taurus and its neighboring constellations, Atlas inhales air inhaled by no other and sprints for the horizon. His heart pounds. His spine bathes in chills hardly provoked by the high sun, the stretching, golden ground yet warmer. He leaps a crevice between islands, one of countless, this one bottomless, but his legs fight a tremble born of more than exhaustion and unstifled by safe landing.

  Atlas has understood twelve concepts since his time in the Curative Estate nursery, twelve words inherently acknowledged, words that make up the blood in his veins, marrow in his bones. They’ve told him: breathe, work, sleep, stay, listen, repeat, quiet, abstain, repress, praise, die, live. Sustain as the immobile sun, they’ve commanded; proceed unto constancy; progress for permanence.

  He uproots a weed in a cloud of kickback and wheezes concept thirteen. Freedom. It’s accompanied by fear, though such isn’t new.

  Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Atlas gasps through his teeth and looks over a shoulder. The last of his northernmost constellation shrinks until it slips out of view, under the land. He’s alone, sky above and dirt beneath. He lifts his head, turns forward, and stares into sky, not a cloud in sight.

  Topsoil crumbles on his next leap and he clears another ravine, pebbles skittering down its shadow. How Sidera stays afloat, broken into chunks of islands suspended in sapphire sky, he hasn’t the slightest. Such a question died in youth.

  Atlas brings his eyes to the horizon; much closer than expected, it bounds to meet him. His heart skips and stomach drops. Jaw locked, he leans back and digs his heels into ground, but gravel skids them beyond his control. He collapses on his tailbone. He drifts another meter in billowing wake and then falls still, his foot dangling off the edge of the land.

  Groaning, he drags his body from the cliff. He brushes the dust off his tunic and pants as he stands.

  Atlas steps to the isle’s edge and gazes into infinite sky. Blue—same shade as his eyes. It reaches all the way down, down under all Sidera, into nothing. Everything he’s ever known: sky and floating pieces of rock that stir his stomach on more lonely labor cycles.

  But up until this moment, Atlas hasn’t been alone for longer than an instant. He stands on buoyant gold shards in a mass of absence—an absence of other citizens, of Imperium government watch, of overcrowded resting areas—and feels less alone than he has in his life.

  Fixing his left foot, leaning onto it, Atlas kicks a copper pebble off the cliff edge and watches it fall for seconds until its fading leaves the blue again desolate.

  Nothing below breathes; nothing budges. Atlas stares into a blue wall near as his nose, far as the sun, embracing universe till devoured, and imagines with might one terrene shard unswallowed.

  He steps back.

  Closing his eyes, he searches for the gold coin slipped under one of his leather armbands. He calms his breathing and curls his fingers around the round token, no wider than the tip of his thumb, no thicker than three millimeters. He squeezes it in a fist.

  “I have followed.” Atlas opens his eyes and looks to the sky. “Show me.”

  A gust of wind streams in from behind, blowing his dark hair forward. It curves around his body, around his right side and, ebbing to a breeze, urges him backward. He turns with it. The wind grazes his neck, scatters along the hem of his high collar, and Atlas takes another step away from the cliff. He squints at his feet. He stands in the center of a circle, a ring of Heliomeris Aethiopica, bright yellow lilies native to Sidera.

  Atlas bends down and places the coin in the ring, where the lilies cease and leave a circle of bronze grass shimmering no less than the rest of the land. Sun saturates every blade, every
granule in between.

  He glances south—where he came from. The thought of returning strikes ice through his chest. The thought of what he must do next ignites it.

  Boring focus into the coin, Atlas spreads his fingers, palms toward the ground, and explores the power under his skin. He forces a pulsing charge out from under his lungs, down his arms, to the tingles washing his palms. He releases it onto the coin. The vibration rushing off his fingertips emits as wind: 200-kilometers-per-hour air that, after a glint of direct sunlight and a few ground tremors, locks the coin under its flood. He swallows.

  Atlas throws sputters of hurricane voltage into the circle and counts his hopes. A golden relic, his powers, and what lies beneath.

  His eyes widen. The coin sparks violet. Then flashes emerald, shades of yellow, crimson, and a dozen tints of blue he’s never been fortunate enough to glimpse in sky. Atlas flicks another burst of wind and a multicolored hole tears open the land where the coin was. Panting, he grinds his teeth, wobbles on his heels, holds his energy’s last until the gap at his feet, distorting bronze dirt in ripples, grows large enough for his body. The wind picks up, not his power’s, but the sky’s, twirling toward, within, through his own. It blows him toward the hole, toward the portal.

  Voices. Shouting voices and lavic rumbles. Atlas looks to the southern horizon.

  Imperium flags whip into view. Two guards to a vehicle, a swarm of at least twenty wagons roars their blood-maroon bullets over his island’s edge, and Atlas knows: he enters the portal or his body breaks around golden dust gasped in his Imperium-granted last breath and crumbles to permanent naught.

  Chills bristle his neck. He stops breathing. Then lifts a foot and steps into the portal.

  The first thing he experiences is a pull, a lurch forward—not down, but forward. The second feeling pours as cold blood into his gaping mouth and drenches him, head to toe, in the icy, invisible liquid surge too viscous to be water, too thick to pass. His heart slows close to a stop. His feet fly above him, his hands grasping air below him, arms outstretched, body flipping and turning until direction wanes with thought. Deafening white noise floods his ears and pressure crushes limbs’ circulation and shrivels his lungs. Colors unnamed blur into a tunnel of essence that spins quicker than he plummets. His gut suspends and head fills and vision blackens from its periphery inwar—

  * * *

  “Buddy, you okay? Do you need me to call someone? Hey, wake up.”

  “I don’t think he’s okay, Dad.”

  “ ’Course he’s not okay—looked like he just fell out of the sky in a freakin’ tornado. What do you want me to do? I don’t know CPR and, well, that’d never happen. Go back to the car. Daddy’s handling it.”

  Atlas groans.

  “Wow, you’re awake. Good. There’s a hospital off Forbes. You know how to get there?”

  Crinkled forehead, Atlas lets out a louder groan.

  “Eh, you’ll be okay. We better get going.” The man’s voice lowers. “You’re late for Comic Con.”

  Footsteps fade into distance and Atlas pries his eyelids. He’s alone. His head pounds; his ears ring; eyes ache. He narrows them, his pupils pinning to a slit of sky that must be up.

  Feeling returns in segments. Pain webs through his neck, shoulders, spine, arms, every swollen knob of two splays of logs of legs down which he peers. Peers past his toes and to a brick wall across from him. Atlas feels similar brick through his hair behind him. A weight denser than lead locks each limb; he bends his fingers in and out until his arms loosen.

  Pushing his hands into the ground, hard, hot, he straightens his elbows and props himself against the wall. He turns his left wrist in his right hand. Winces. Unclenching his jaw, he presses his fingers into each arm, one after the other, and repeats around his ankles and knees. Nothing’s broken, he thinks. Scrapes and bruises peek through his clothing where torn and dragged; dirt stains his tunic where it wrinkles over his leather sashes; scarlet blots his citizen-grade pants; and all his uniform remains too pearl-white to hide it.

  But the surrounding walls hide him. In shadow, Atlas traces a brick and lodges his fingers where the mortar erodes. He hoists himself up, stands staggering. His vision spins. Five gasps later, it steadies on the cement at his feet. Where his back lay not a minute ago, a centimeter-wide crack fractures the floor across one of its many stone slabs, zigzagging toward where his hip must have landed. He feels it.

  He rubs his neck. Discovers the folds in his collar and straightens its hem till it stands halfway toward his jaw and smooths snugly against his skin. He adjusts his leather sashes, two slung around his shoulder, one horizontally across his ribs, and re-buckles a couple of his six armbands. And wobbles forward, following the walls to their mouth paces away.

  His eyes narrow. Too bright. The sun—he breathes out: something familiar—presses away alley’s funnel of shadow and sears into asphalt. Too hot. Heat rolls off the road in waves ten degrees hotter than the waggle of tallgrass off Sideran turf. He stumbles out the alley’s opening and holds his hands over his ears. Too loud. Beeping and yelling and whirring.

  He stops.

  Atlas reaches the street perpendicular to his alley and gazes into it, mouth open but unable to sound. His hands drop to his sides.

  Glass and grids armoring them, towers a hundred meters skyward loom over their geometric canyon, their waterless canal. One building steals half the high sun and casts shade as a colossal tarpaulin migrating, millimeter by millimeter, with its rectangular kin down the pewter-gray pass. Female and male walkers scatter walkways bordering the wide, shallow trench lined in flashing lights and drowning in blurred objects. Moving objects. Reflective objects that speed and stop, speed and stop in uniform routes, all supported on circular propellants. Vehicles—cars, Atlas believes they’re called.

  Logic tells him he should be afraid. His stomach tells him he should continue staring until the charge under his skin grabs hold and launches him into a sprint for nowhere. He’d smile if his senses could organize.

  This world, Earth, dimension of walkers and days, nights, seas, rotations and changes, beginnings and ends, has truly existed down here his whole life: thirty-one Sideran full cycles. He made it. Mind’s whisperings of ignorance suffocate under the electricity that speeds his pulse.

  Purpose. Atlas blinks and shakes out his hands. Find purpose. He glances down one end of the street, then the other, but his heels stay lodged. Something bumps his shoulder.

  He turns.

  It’s a walker, female, mid-forties, colorful, crude patterns littering her clothing, and she’s headed for some road crossing that flashes a countdown and chirps taunts. Atlas eyes her up and down. He tilts his head and watches her click away on her foot dowels. She looks over her shoulder, grimacing once she spots Atlas glaring back. She whips forward, quickens pace, and hugs her short-strapped satchel. Atlas studies her until she’s across the street and two blocks away.

  A male walker steps his focus closer. Atlas shifts his examination to the man’s red hair, how it changes tint in the sun, how it matches his complexion, how it doesn’t match his orange shirt, until he’s three blocks away.

  Another walker, one with taupe-rooted yellow hair, takes Atlas’s attention for the next five minutes.

  After a dozen walkers react the same as the first, Atlas wanders up the street, staying clear of the wheeled machines’ path. He lifts his feet with strain. Earth’s gravity piles onto his shoulders a mass similar to that of a steel beam ported across a Sideran constellation. The sun piles perhaps a kilo more, but his injuries could exaggerate. His toes scrape sidewalk.

  He angles a palm to it; Atlas delves deep within his chest for his power’s source and thrusts his invisible influence out his fingers, at ground’s stone squares. A breeze shivers his pant hem. He opens his other hand downward and tenses it until his veins bulge, until he chokes on his breath, sways with his pulse. The breeze decreases to a whisper. His hands fall limp and eyebrows draw. There’s much he had
n’t prepared for.

  Atlas suppresses the aches in his body, the exhaustion in his bones, and looks up. Paces ahead, a few persons funnel into one of the street’s stouter buildings. He follows them. He slips through the open door and purses his lips, eyes dilating in artificial light.

  It’s some kind of gathering area. Thin plastic cases, flimsy disks, and labels line the walls. Pounding noise and rasping voice bark attacks from grates mounted in the corners while colors of screaming shade spew the nausea of his portal descent. Walkers scour aisles, picking up items, then examining and returning them to their shelves. Atlas walks to the front counter and squints at the man behind it.

  His long hair coiled into matted locks, the man glimpses Atlas’s clothing and raises a bushy eyebrow.

  Atlas glares.

  The man lifts his hands and makes a face.

  Opening his mouth, Atlas sucks a lungful but coughs on it. He clears his throat, ducks his head, looks centimeters beneath the male walker’s eyes. He whispers, “What is this place?”

  The man grunts and angles his ear forward.

  Atlas’s palms sweat. He wrings them against his pants. “Quidnam est hic locus?”

  The male walker stares.

  “Poú eímai—”

  “Dude, what are you speaking?” the man says.

  “Adequate.” Atlas exhales and straightens posture. “Allow me to restate: where am I?”

  Without turning, the man points to the sign behind the counter. It reads: “Rico’s Record Region.”

  Atlas looks at the room through his eyes’ corners. “This is the region of Rico?”

  “It’s just a name, man.”

  “And what is your name?”

  He points to a nametag pinned onto the front of his shirt. It reads: “Hello and welcome to Rico’s. My name is Rico.”

  “Rico of Rico’s,” Atlas inhales, “can you express to me the name of this territory in which said region is contained?”

  Rico’s eyelids droop halfway down his pupils. “Pittsburgh.”

  Atlas glances out the entrance. A couple more people open the door and let sun stream in. He scratches his temple.

  “The pit’s burg?” Atlas says. “Summarized, you are Rico of Rico’s, the region of Rico, and oversee this exotic building in the pit’s burg, a burg sunken into pit?”