☠Milo Periander☠
Milo Periander breathes, and it echoes across the earth. Dryness takes his lips for a ride, begging for a drink, a taste of his past life. His skin, tinted red, reflects the dripping green of moss and algae outpouring from every corner. It's as if the slime reaches for him, slipping, seaweed fingers just out of distance. He shivers. Milo shivers because chills claw at his back, and he shivers because he's still alive.
Bones and rocks crackle beneath his feet, soot from ashen stones spreading like dust in the trails of speeding cars. It smells faintly of charcoal, heavily of wet grass, and his nose twitches against the cold; poriferous air eats at his body, a beast in itself. The contents of the cave can't hurt him anymore than its atmosphere, so vile in these verdant shades.
Something tickles at the edges of his vision, perhaps a shadow of bats or the blinking lights seeping in from the ceiling. He blinks and the world dissipates before him, his legs so tired and chest heavy like concrete poured from the moon. He's weighed down like beings at night- even the sun, golden and bare, wouldn't lift him up. Lights are nothing. Set him afire and he'll only breathe in the gasoline, hard in the hopes it takes him elsewhere.
His heels drag, pebbles kicked with each trudging step. Tired, nothing more than a sigh, nothing more than a gasp lost to dusk, like the owl wingbeats never seen by its prey; tired, like an anchor drifting to the bottom of an ocean, and all he wants is the lay at the bottom. Drowning. But he sucks in another breath and another, waiting until the cave opens to a clearing, and the imprints of a stone tablet beckon him to the center.
He lets consciousness bleed away from him. He's gotten quite good at it, a dissociation so raw that time passes in the dozens, yet doesn't pass at all. It's an hour before he realizes he's stopped moving. And it's another few minutes until the area focuses, the expanse of cave behind him found nowhere in memory. It's a nightmare when nothing feels like a dream. A dream, when everything feels like a nightmare.
This area is cleaner than the rest of the room. A lighter grey, a less-stained obsidian. More sunlight (artificial, it's not real and you know it) peeks in from above, and a perfect circle yearns for his step. Milo knows he doesn't have control over his body, his legs in slow motion as they walk onto the platform. It compresses, and somewhere in the distance a wall opens up to a new pathway. It barely registers in his eyes, but he sees it. He sees everything.
(and the smoke pillars in pennate, clouding the sky and your eyes)
"Take it," he said to me. "Don't forget to hold it in."
I remember the way he said those words. As if it was common knowledge and I was blind not to know it. How he didn't realize I was unbroken still, and that this smoke would push me over the edge, I'll never guess. But as windmills and pinwheels crashed over the hills, I fell as my mind flew high.
Don't forget to hold it in. And my lips began to wander, to crave. The taste is like burnt cotton, tearing my throat as finely as silk. Don't forget to hold it in. I start to go with them every night. Not for them. For this- sensation and bellow. I'll soak in this feeling forever. Don't forget to hold it in. Mix it with this, hit it with that. Reach new peaks, and discover new lows.
"Milo, are you okay?"
Don't forget to hold it in.
When he steps off the stone, the opening closes again. Only weight keeps it ajar, and the tremor of hope sinks away to oblivion as the room settles to blackness once more. Each time he steps back on, he grows angrier, steam arising from his stomach, steam coming in from the corners and smoke seeping in from the opening.
