Double-Edged Pearls

Purple moon slept in the cumulus blanket offered by a sky glowing to umbral carnation as dawn yawned. The rings of Chandelier Excellence were translucent arcs of gold and silver filtering what stars remained visible in the motley heavens. All was well. At least, on this side of the world. Millions upon millions wiped glitter dust from weary eyes to slough off Dream and embrace the tenuous Day. Bodies washed in elephantine tubs. Faces scoured. Elegant layers of chiffon, silk, cotton in magnificent colors attached to forms with artistic care. And over every face in the Excellence before they went out to face the world, a unique, sparkling mask to denote what manner of Art one flaunted.

The Festooned Raiders Of Broken Irises. They regulate the bridges, you understand, their cantankerousness. Some might call it overindulgence. True, but necessary. Miltonian's Perennial Provender, the most illustrious designers of scandalous, heaped upon vestments. Skull Waters, those inky mistresses of fonts antiquated and newborn. The Regal Amphitheatre Dragoons, Marvelous Cast Assemblage DuJour, the Painted Nonsensical League, Arbiters of the Droll Starry Betrothal. One could go on, but somewhere within these confines lies a more detailed story.

Circle this fair globe and its rings until you flutter down on the brobdingnagian wings of ceramic condors to an oval sea of crystal purity, dotted by teardrop isles blinking copper floral eyelids in a sacred breeze. Whip out your stained glass telescope. Zoom in. Closer, closest. Scour the third isle from the southern blue sand beach. See how it seethes, wet sand gurgling bauble holes as masquerade crabs summon the strength to wobble up to the celestial tides. 

There. The young, slender man, bare-chested, only a tangerine sash of dangling fabrics, forearms wrapped in stitched seaweed bracers. Bracers holding knives with curved scrimshaw handles. His skin is starry bronze and has never known perspiration nor aging. His eyes illuminate a pompous shade of brown that stand out beneath the thick ebony brows and mass of hair. He wears rings on every finger, old things secreted by long-deceased sea snails. They are bone colored and porous and tie him to the sea.

Everywhere else in the world where people live, luxuriance is life. This is literal. It must be, but more on that in due time, Dear Hearts. Here, simplicity is a necessity. But the man is intricate as best he knows how. Tattoos, bold purple ink borrowed from moon dust, documented tales of schools of spinal fish across his lean figure. The sea long ago bled into his bone marrow.

See him wade into the white froth tide. Fearless. Assured. He goes into the water that never stills and wades out to a narrow boat encrusted with mercurial barnacles tied to a leaning pole. He hoists himself into the boat, divorces it from the pole, and rows out. The crystalline tendrils lapping against the sides invite as much as they taunt. All is a game for opaque Nature, who toys with lives, bereft of the fetters called Pathos. She gives and takes, ebbs and flows. Anything She makes use of comes and goes in tidal lurches.

Our simplistic man knows Her well, for in his heart they are a unified spirit. She might say otherwise, were She to ever utter a sound more decipherable than a tremor, cyclone, or volcanic rupture.

Once he reaches an ancient standing pole beyond the cresting of beryl waves, he lashes the boat to it and peers over the side. There! Through ultramarine sparkle he takes account of the eldest matrons on the Excellence. Regnant Oysters. clear images of calcified ovals beneath the liquid mirror, clamped shut. Tinges of dynastic gold about the hardened lips. He sees them and ties a rope about the left ankle, one weighted down by a stone sphere. Enamored to see his children again, the man plummets, head first, into the blue. The stone anchors him to the familial seabed.

He caresses one of the shells, appreciates her well worn experience. In ages past, he cracked open the mouth and deposited a Lilliputian gift within her depths, a single element of blessed sand. Now, the pressure of the sea against his chest, he hopes to the celestial graces that the promised silicate seed matured into that one word all souls in the Excellence lust after.

Beauty.

The blade goes along the lip with a flair of gentility. This is coaxing, not cutting. The Regnant is a large as the man, sleeping elder. She must be persuaded. The hand holding the blade is surgical artistry. A slit forms. A single, beauteous bubble warbles up and out from the Regnant. It drifts to the surface, drawn by some other form of gravity to reach higher.

The man can parse the slit with his fingers. His chest tightens. this is fine. His sole thought. The fingers rub against violet flesh, flecks of gold waft in the water now. He dares to push in, up to the elbow. Fleshy pulp, some say the most wondrous across the Excellence. Once she was a delicacy before the Rings vibrated the tepid skyline.

Sensitive fingers plumbed the secret velvet world of the Regnant. Then, the smooth palpitation. Free from blemish. He rolled it around in his fingers to test it out. Heavy! Faultless. He removed it from its motherly cradle and set it before his swollen eyes.

Nacre fantastic.

Lungs abused, he heeded their warning sign and untied the stone. A gentle shove from the toes off the sandy bottom, and he rose to make acquaintance once more with the regency of daylight. Back in the boat, he freed his eyes of saltwater stain to study the prize.

Immaculate design. Nature chose perfection. In roundness. In shine. In subtle pink kiss blown upon the surface to give it character. He nestles it into a slit in the sash of multicolored fabrics. Secured, he unlashes the boat as the water transforms. Bluish undulations. Sea green coral strands smashing to evoke white velvet ciliae. As it churned into a new thing, the man aimed his boat for the sun sparkle sands of the shore.

There, he saw the buyer. Stiff. Sculpted. Uniformed in browns and oranges, in strips of tattered turquoise and cinnamon swaths of haute couture. He was as rugged as he was regal, with gilded epaulettes, a high collar brushing the underworld of the chin. A stately clear helmet of generous crystal glistened in the sun, so that the buyer appeared to have a nimbus about the head, some curious sign from the past denoting a blessed presence. Geometric tidbits shined inside the helmet, floating on air, or water, perhaps imagination. But this buyer had no manhood.

He had no humanity.

But it had a name. Graf DuChelaine the Cobbled. And this ultrafine pearl from a slumbering Regnant would be key in its designs for a better world.