Rose Blumen ~

(Aïsshean)

We had seen the white dawn of change, together. We had already lost most of our intellectual and human aptitudes, but not yet everything, and maybe not forever.

We saw in more than just sight, this strange element of shattered history now drifting gently across the sky. It carried its waves of auroras of magnetic disturbances through the ionosphere and other things beyond mere light.

If the initial white flash felt like losing your soul and half your heat being ripped away instantly out of your body, this also made an echo to that future sight.

Seas unmoving normally like bedrock to reality, they ruptured in a violent earthquake before, and returned to still solidity and silence after, apparently.

This peaceful sight however, it made some things inside our very cells shiver and contract.

Our entire selves felt this turmoil. Like a calmer vibration or mind, coursing through matter like whispers, unfazed by normal wind or apparently solid walls.

This object slowly moving out there carried the echoes of the tragedy. It was now faint, the outburst behind, but still glowing from the same flame that burnt the world before.

I could tell. Everyone possible could. Everything in remote line of sight from this could likely tell. This shiver, this wind of cold and heat coursing through your cells membranes.

This flame, this fountain... It was the same. It had the same nature of that which razed everything remotely intelligent or with animal level of organisation before.

The source of abrupt changes was out there, with likely its causes and reasons, unbeknownst to the poor earth dwellers and lonely survivors.

But this sensation burning through my eyes, directly imprinting some of its reality through my mind, it branded unto me its perenniality.

It appeared to me as the lone witness and archaeological testimony able to explain what happened in the end, more than a perpetrator. It wasn't looking like a gunship or spaceship completing an investigation of the results from its bombing campaign. Although that would remain a grounded theory.

All I saw was an abandoned ship that wasn't intended for war. A shell adrift, or a slightly active volcano that shrouded the world as it blew up, and now was floating peacefully.

Nothing human and nothing portraying intention was obvious at first glance.

Just... something.

Something with enough energy to glow and float unrealistically over the sky. Maybe a sky city lighter than air at this altitude for clouds, but its shapes barely noticeable through the pale glow weren't evocative of any synthetic or artificial architecture.

It looked just like a cloud. A solid and brighter cloud, gently passing by. But from the reactions caused inside of me and every other witness of it, we could tell it was far more than droplets of water or ice.

It held some of the truth, the source and cause of our regards, all reason and attention. It focused our crumbling intentions and sense of mind, pulling us onward like moth to flame.

I felt that urge, insatiable urge to get closer, to find answers, to find meaning and explanations.

I stood up in uneven daze, while my brethren were but the shades of their former human selves now.

We all were becoming shades, looking human but barely keeping with some mechanical routine or appearances.

Our bodies had already simplified to levels defying and disturbing whatever was left of our education about what a human bag of flesh should be.

My clothing had molten along with my skin, but below this shedding paper were no longer much human derma nor muscles. What fell animated and moved my limbs now, it was organising itself differently.

I still had blood and heart beating in my chest, and so did they. But every organism had been redrawing and restructuring itself on levels far beyond the boundaries of phenotypes.

Overall structures had been challenged, and allowed to revaluate everything.

It had been as if everyone had been ordered to rebuild their own body from a unicellular start, but the governing metabolic templates had been removed from our genes.

This was a poor comparison, but the idea remained that on everyone casting their dices, very few held the good numbers to keep their biological integrity and past structure.

We barely had, even helping each other.

I could see through my changed hands how flesh and bones had fuses, and muscles fibres turned to isotropic foams.

Blood still circulated through me and my body could still mimic human form and movements, but I wasn't human anymore. That much was already obvious.

I didn't want to look at my face in a mirror anymore.

Looking at my brother and sisters now turning to faceless monsters, I had a fair idea of how far gone I was as well.

They also kept their thoughts about how we all looked to each other now.

We had enough trouble staying sane, aware and focused already. This non existential and superfluous aspect no longer mattered.

Medical aspects no longer mattered...

Attie had given up along the way experimenting with our available tools and medicines to help us.

But now we saw hope in a way.

It brought us up, together, as it met our previous impulse that didn't die.

Holding hands that had fused together, or been exchanges like transplanted limbs from one another. I stood up. We formed a social organism as a team helping each other. We kept that ancestor's dream alive all these years, and now it kept us alive in a context where everyone else or near must have died.

Our bond helped us keeping remnants of our human selves alive.

A light above the sea after the flood and storm. A chance to find understanding and another form of peace.

Although... Like most adventurers on odysseys, we were more likely to meet doom than fortune.

They stood up and walked slowly after me, sharing my thoughts and gratitude. Sharing the same thirst and excitement.

Pain had softened and the main and hardest focus now wasn't to stand or walk anymore, but to keep coherent thinking and steady aim on an objective.

Our memories were exteriorised like scattered petals or pollens all around us. It was an odd sensation. We could literally see ourselves losing our memories and coherence of thoughts. They were shed like colourful vapours and sweat, breathed out and away like futility every instant.

We were constantly bleeding out our own memories and knowledge, our intelligence as human beings thus diminishing.

We hardly kept an unsteady balance between changing body and decaying mind.

Though with what remained, with vigour and passion, we stepped outside.

We left our house behind, entering abandoned streets none of us would recognise.

The world had changed and we could no longer feel familiar in it, even about ourselves.

But calling us like reason and virtue, the floating dream pulled us onward.

Promising us possible answers, and likely hopes or fulfilment.

Slow unsteady steps we began to make, to the Septentrion.

~