Akashic Gospels

by Alicia McKenzie

excerpt one...

Observations From World's End...

Graffiti. Someone's idea of a bad joke. So would someone tell me why the name stuck? When I left, it was still just 'the bar'. I come back, nothing to show for for the trip but another dead Drake, and now it's the 'World's End Bar', Bright Lady preserve us. I should have scrubbed the painted sign off the wall with turpentine as soon as I saw it.

The World's End Bar. Definitely macabre, but maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Here in Oasis, the collective sense of humor is as black as pitch. Oh, I suppose the bar's new name is funny. Sort of like huddling here inside Franklin's shields and dreaming about reassembling the Twelve while the shifts rip the world apart is funny.

Which is to say, not at all.

So. Your friendly neighborhood Askani'son was sitting here at the bar, minding his own business and sampling this week's batch of quasi-Scotch when in walked a butcher, a baker, and a candle-stick maker. And their little dog, too.

No, I'm not kidding. Jake worked in an abbatoir before the shifts, Tania waxed rhapsodic about the half-sandwich I offered her and jumped on the chance to help in the communal kitchens, and judging by the way Wren speaks, he wandered here from some version of sixteenth-century England. I'm assuming the dog would have been lunch if they hadn't found us.

Flonqing dog. I can hear it barking outside, and the children laughing as they play with it. At last count, we have forty-six children in Oasis, and at least three more on the way. Someone asked Dom once when she and I were going to make our contribution to the gene pool. Frankly, I shudder at the thought. The world's already ending, and if Dom and I spawned, the kid would probably just wind up hurrying things alone. The Summers curse has always been a multigenerational one.

Still, there are worse sounds than the laughter of children. If I listen, and close my eyes, I can almost imagine that this is a real city, in the world that used to be.

But reality, such as it is, never goes away for long. We can never quite manage to forget that while Oasis is sane and safe and stable, the winds of chaos are still battering at the gates.

I wonder sometimes if there are other Oases out there. Surely there have to be other Franklins, boys or men with the ability to carve out similar sanctuaries from the shifts. If we could find them, maybe we could cooperate. Open up diplomatic relations, maybe? That's what countries do, and that's what we are. An island in the shift, a country of the damned--

I think I need more of the quasi-Scotch.

***

Going Into The Garden...

Sometimes I wonder why I bother to keep this journal. It's been almost a year now since I met her. She was dying when I found her, bleeding to death on velvety silver moss, a gaping hole where her abdomen had once been. My best guess is that a shift had opened right where she'd been standing and ripped her open from the inside out. A bad way to go, though I've seen worse.

I sound horribly cold, don't I? It's too easy, sometimes. Out in the shifts, you see more death than you do life. Sometimes, all that's left is the vigil. Even I accept that, despite how much I hate this world, how much I rage to change it.

She stuck in my mind, though. I found her nearly two weeks out of Oasis, far too distant to have any chance of surviving the trip back. There wasn't much I could do, other than hold her hand and block the pain.

It didn't take her long to die, but we talked for a while, before she did. Her name was Irene, and she knew me--or another me, to be precise. She told me she'd been his friend, and his chronicler.

A chronicler. The idea seemed--very right and very wrong at the same time, one of those highly questionable things I could see myself doing in the right circumstances. I tried to tell her that, to apologize for what my other self had probably put her through, but she claimed she didn't have any regrets. "Some stories have to be told," she said. "I can't do it for you anymore, Nathan, but someone needs to."

So that's why I keep the journal. A promise I didn't quite make, to a woman I didn't quite know. In some senses, trying to keep a history when the shifts are turning time upside down and inside out is futile, but there are still stories left to be told. There's so much life here in Oasis, an abundance of life that's desperate and vital and every bit as vivid as the madness outside the shields.

Someone needs to tell those stories. Someone needs to remember the impromptu Christmas pageant the kids put on--not that any of us have any idea of the date, or even the year. Someone needs to recall how it felt to hear jazz wafting out on the night air from the World's End Bar, jazz played by amateurs on salvaged instruments, but as rich and real as anything from the old world.

Someone needs to remember that the phrase 'to go into the garden' had a distinctly sexual connotation.

Come to think of it, maybe I'll go find Dom and ask her if she wants to go into the garden. Franklin's still irked at us for being caught in flagrante delicto on his newly cobbled-together pool table. I don't have a lot of sympathy. So we were having an exhibitionist moment--so what? We hardly intended to make a public spectacle of ourselves. We were just too drunk to register the fact that there were other people in the bar.

Besides, it was her idea.

Going into the garden is socially acceptable around here. Even in the garden, there's no real privacy, but the grass is green and the ground cover is thick--it's the next best thing. Everywhere else, the walls are thin.

The walls are thin. All the walls--the walls inside Oasis and the walls of reality itself, outside the shields. Thin, and getting thinner.

Interesting image.

***

Passion Plays...

I can't sleep. I was tossing and turning, so Dom finally kicked me out of the room and told me to walk it off. I suspect she thinks Franklin was sloppy and left some temporal residue in my system or something.

If only it were the shifts still making me crazy. I wish it were. It would be easier to deal with than the real reason.

Dom doesn't seem bothered. I really don't get that. How can she just forget what we saw? I know she never got involved with the X-Men in her world, so she's got no emotional attachment to any of them, but how can she just ignore that?

'That'. How am I even supposed to write it down? We walked out of African savannah into another blasted wasteland and saw Charles Xavier crucified on a telephone pole.

I think I could have dealt with that. I've seen worse. We all have. But what just about tore out my heart was the sight of Magneto, kneeling on the ground in front of him, sobbing and smiling at the same time, raving about how everything would be all right now, that all they needed was a martyr to the cause and it would fix everything--

It was almost a relief when he attacked Dom. Because then I could kill him, and Bright Lady knows, he needed killing.

I think I'm going to be sick. I lost it completely. I ENJOYED killing him. I felt so--triumphant when that airless shift swallowed him up.

I wrote him off the moment I laid eyes on him, and he wasn't even all that far gone. I don't know why Dom didn't call me on it. If I'd been able to get him back here, Franklin could very well have saved him. Then we would have had a sane Magneto, one more member of the Twelve. Another figure in our transcendental equation.

But he did--that to Charles. Out of love. I felt it, as soon as we saw them.

Out of love. Would I ever do that? Could I?

I'm so afraid. I don't even know why.

***

Laws of Probability...

I wish Dom would stop laughing at me every time I ask her whether she thinks the shifts have affected the laws of probability. It seems like a logical assumption, to me. If time and space are collapsing into each other, doesn't that constitute a fundamental alteration in the Way Things Work?

I suppose I'm in a philosophical mood. Nothing like walking across a shift line and into the ruins of the Askani Cloisters. It was unnerving. Definitely unnerving.

There were no corpses. Just the rubble.

I found writing scratched into the stump of a support pillar, a message in Askani battle language. It didn't make any sense when I translated it, but for the sake of posterity, here it is--

'time and space dance into oblivion
the circle has closed and the mathematics of transcendence fail
courage fails as broken spirits pass into dust
listen to the song in the empty spaces
the land is shadowed
but we can still find the way'

It sounds to me like a poem, or a prophecy. I thought of showing it to Franklin, but--I think it's a message for me. My intuition, again. Despite what Franklin mutters about paranoia, I've learned to trust my instincts.

'Time and space dance into oblivion.'

It's been so long since I saw the battle language in writing. I've forgotten how beautiful it is.

'The mathematics of transcendence'.

There's deeper meaning here, I know it. Someone's trying to tell me something. Someone's always trying to tell me something. I just have to--

Listen to the song in the empty spaces.

***

Ten Reasons I Like Dom...

One. A little Dom goes a long way. Oath, she's going to kill me if she reads this--

Two. She has warm feet.

Three. She's stubborn enough to haul my stubborn, half-crazed ass back to Oasis every time we're out in the shifts for too long. Don't ask me how she manages it; I don't ask Dom how she navigates in the shifts, and she doesn't wake me up in the morning and pretend there's coffee.

Four. She doesn't blame me for the shifts. At all. That's rare. Even Franklin and Kitty wonder sometimes how the Chosen One had managed to fail quite so totally. I sometimes ask myself the same question. But Dom doesn't.

Five. She only kicks me out of bed when I really deserve it.

Six. She's just as stubborn as I am. Contrary to popular belief, I do appreciate being told I'm wrong. Really.

Seven. She saved me. My life, my sanity, and very likely my soul, too.

Eight. She tells dirty jokes like no one else.

Nine. She's a partner. Not a liability, not a damsel in distress, not a victim like so many other survivors of the shifts have become, but a partner. Someone I can depend on. I just wish I could be sure she could always depend on me.

Ten. She's alive. She's here with me. Sometimes it hardly seems real. In a world where everything gets lost, how did I find her again?

I could think of more, if I tried.

Let me count the ways.

***

Something I'd Forgotten...

Another morning, and another departure. It's gotten to be pretty much routine, by now. Sometimes Franklin comes to see us off; other times, we just grab some early breakfast and slip away before anyone notices we've gone.

My place is out there, in the shifts. I know that, even though I don't like to admit it. All blame and guilt aside, I have a share in this, a role to play, and I can't do it hiding inside Franklin's shields.

I was meant to be the Gatherer of the Twelve, and I never got to fulfill that role. The Twelve gathered themselves, the first time, and the second time--

Well, the less said about that battle, the better.

No matter what happens out there, what I see or do, or who winds up dead, I feel the rightness every time I cross the shields and emerge back into the world. Maybe because I know I'm fighting again, instead of just surviving.

We forget that our choices still have weight, that our thoughts shape the universe.

The land is shadowed, but we can still find the way.

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