Truth met Rumour, they laced their fingers together and created a small world between their palms.
Into this cave a voice crept, it tested itself with a song, a thin pure sound like the a chime of a china bell, feeble but clear. The echo rang back and the voice was shocked, it could hardly distinguish its original song in the cacophony. Some of its echos were stronger versions of itself, more powerful and compelling, some were court jesters playing joyfully with its song and still others were dark, black dischords or shrill off key wails; a deliberate recycling of song through the filters of all things bad.
The echos drew other voices and soon the air in the cave was vibrating with songs and the cave was thick with noise. The sounds falling like hammers, chipped away at both Truth and Rumour, expanding the cave while eroding the walls.
Every sound had its own colour but as each song hit the walls, rebounded and shattered into its echo pieces the colours faded, losing brilliance until a fog of brown surrounded the voice. The voice tried to sing but the fog filled his mouth, the taste was stale, the smell in his nose sulphurous. The voice realised he was choking, he must escape.
The voice looked around and tried to find a way out, but the air was so filled with songs that he was disorientated and a stranger to his own senses. Looking down he saw a rim of white coating his feet, he shuffled and the white shifted, the voice bent down and watched the white swirl, it smelt of fresh daybreaks and new beginnings. He dipped his hand into it and watched light drip from his fingertips, he realised it was the soul of all the original songs, the essence of Truth.
The voice watch eddies form and drift in the white, mesmerised he crouched down and placed his face in the cool sweet fog, his senses cleared and he was able to make a pattern out of the swirling essense around him, the Truth was flowing out of the cave.
Slowly, carefully the voice followed the stream of Truth. As he made his way, half crouching he noticed that there were crystaline flakes in the flow of the white mist. At the mouth of the cave he straightened took gulps of fresh air and allowed his ears and mind to fill with the quiet of the day. With each step away from the cave the pounding of the songs and sounds hammering at Truth and Rumour lessened and he felt the reverbarations through the earth less and less. As he walked he looked down and watch the Truth’s soul spill across the plain. The snowflake shards of ideas melt and seed into the ground and spring up as small tentative shoots.
He wondered which would thrive and which would fail.
He didn’t look back but he felt the shockwaves communicate through air and earth as the cave fell. Too many voices had sung, too many echos had bounced and hammered away, expanding Rumour and eroding Truth.
The cave fell, no safe haven, no retreat. Here in the daylight of the plain was the future, the voice lifted himself high into the air, singing his first note strong and sure into the sky; freeing himself and flying over the green leaves of Truth’s saplings as they unfurled below him.
No comments yet.