Feel the ground. It is cold. She glides along the stone floor, her feet raw from the hushed murmur of the River Lee. The skeletal remains of the mill are filled with a damp air that clings to her skin, heavy with the scent of moss. She tilts the bottle to her lips. A warmness spreads to her chest. She dances to the groans of the aged wood and sighs of the stone. She skates to the broken windows where the grey clouds hang low. The son of Cennétig shouts down from above. The rumbling language of the heavens is enough to fell her. She hits the ground and her tailbone clashes with the earth. She runs out. It will soon rain. In her drunken stupor, she lopes to the underpass. She hunches over, her hands on her knees, still clenching the bottle, as she catches her breath. The raven begins to speak.
His name had been lost in the cacophony of sleepless nights, the world around him a blur, a maelstrom of light, yet he drifted through it unbound. Buildings towered around him like ancient monoliths, the air thick with the whispers of the wind. He wandered through the concrete canyons, disregarding the confetti and balloons from the festivities of the prior night. He paused beneath a streetlamp and gazed upward at the sliver of sky between the towering structures. There, he would speak to the unseen stars, his words a quiet plea.
Comrades, citizens of this ancient land: we find ourselves today, here, in this revered square, not under the benign gaze of that moon that once cradled our ancestors in sleep, but under a sky that has turned its back on the very essence of night, Deng declared calmly as his eyes began to gloss over. A malady most peculiar grips our world—a wakefulness unyielding, a vigil never-ending. A curse has been cast upon us, a spectral shroud that has swept across our vast empire, leaving behind a trail of shadows and whispering wraiths. These phantoms, borne from the depths of the Otherworld, danced in the moon’s melancholy light; their silvery forms a mocking reminder of our mortal folly. The streets of our ancestors have become a stage for a most bizarre spectacle. The night markets turned into carnivals of the histrionic. We, children of the dragon, must place our ears against the coarse dirt and listen for the whispering lips of the Jade Rabbit who brews the elixir of life on the moon. We must listen to his riddles wrapped in the midst of dawn, dancing with the spirits of Yangtze and drinking from the forgotten well beneath the sacred Wudang Mountains. Let us don the masks of apologue until the stars themselves descend to watch, and Chang’e smiles upon us once again.
As the morning swallow emerged from the brush I reached out my hand and all I saw was blood. Lying on the railroad as the synapses stopped firing, I had no peace to express. My eyes shut and opened again—a new man was born.