Panultima (Scene One), by Schuyler Cyr

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Ikkabod always had an imaginative mind. So imaginative in fact, that he was occasionally forced to wonder whether or not he was still dreaming. Once again, this was Ikkabod’s immediate and sole concern when he first awoke.

Am I dreaming?

Adrift, in a fog, alone; if he had gotten around to opening his eyes yet, Ikkabod would have seen that he was all of these things and very little else. Instead, he was gently lulled into consciousness by the soft, steady, and distant roll of meandering waves finding their shore. The back of his eyelids were not bright, but still seemed to be a lighter, grayer, shade than their expected pitch black.

Can I tell if my eyes are closed when I’m dreaming?

He quickly opened up all four sets of his lids, on both of his wide eyes. And for a moment nothing changed. Grayness. A vast evenly saturated expanse gaped out in front of him, and for another moment Ikkabod didn’t know which way was up; until he sat that way. The gnarled stretch of wood beneath him labored reliably, bobbing up and down from under his narrow bony knees. He was adrift, on a raft. His broad pupils followed the uneven planks to their edge, saw ripples radiating from his vessel, and out into clouded gray obscurity. He was in a fog.

“Hello?”

He was alone. He could be drifting along anywhere, maybe it wasn’t even water, perhaps the clouds themselves suspended him now. He could be gone from the land, or even gone from this world. Maybe his surroundings were simply beyond comprehension. Maybe he was dead!

No sooner had this flock of thoughts boldly perched themselves upon his mind, than they were promptly startled off again. Ikkabod had felt a soft bump against the driftwood beneath his tail bone. As he turned, he saw a waterlogged body floating face down behind him. With a sudden gasp he was startled to his feet, and soft, silent, gliding ripples emanated from the edges of his makeshift watercraft. Remaining upright, Ikkabod gained his first real sense of horizon as it expanded with the, now clearly waterborne, rings rippling around him. Then his eyes wandered up with the fading circles, and one by one the other bodies bobbed out of the fog and into his view. The departed dozens filled the slender adolescent’s vision. They were young and old, male and female, all Nanbu people just like him. It wasn’t until the upturned and familiar face of a starfish farmer drifted by, lifeless as the rest, that noise finally escaped from between his thin lips. A kind of faint whining whisper of a name, painfully conspicuous in the frigid silence. Such a timid utterance felt insufficient; Ikkabod had known the diver’s face from the docks of his home city. Akki had been his name. Before his meager eulogy could be expounded upon, the farmer’s lips parted as well, along with his eyelids. Ikkabod held his breath, and abandoned all attempts to understand the world in which they had found themselves. This was when luminescent cyan spores began floating up and out of the fisherman’s body. Coating his eyes and inner mouth until they too adopted the sickly glow. Ikkabod watched as an ethereal cloud of the shimmering particulates silently ascended and expanded from each of Akki’s sodden orifices.
In that moment the lanky Nanbu male’s memory continued to malfunction. He crouched, transfixed, as the small swarm spread and dispersed. And just as Ikkabod could begin to make out the individual filaments on a lone spore floating just past the tip of his slight, smooth, mound of a nose, the events of the last twenty-four hours came rushing back to him. His already wide eyes bulged as he flung himself backwards, and finally his screams came. Three percussive shrieks battered the insatiable silence. As the horrific sight of dozens of dead and drifting Nanbu villagers from Ikkabod’s home town wrenched cries of terror out of him, his last and longest howl struggled off into the void as his raft tipped, he lost his footing, and he tumbled backwards shattering what remained of the surface’s once-impossible stillness. The frigid reflective liquid flooded his lungs and he became sure: there was certainly water. Water everywhere.
Kicking back up to the surface, Ikkabod scrambled and clung to his wooden planks while still submerged, from the bottom of his well defined ribcage to the tips of his amply webbed toes. Then he heaved, and spluttered up all the salty water he had inhaled. No sooner had Ikkabod gasped for a new breath of air than he was coughing and spluttering again. The misty gray expanse had become a thick greenish blue cloud of faintly shimmering spores. Each cadaver had projected a personal puff of particles giving the floating mass-grave an even more haunting and hypnotic tone. He only had a second to take the whole scene in, between stifled breaths, but the eerie tranquility of this hydroponic garden of death was not lost on its lone survivor. Each breath was slower and more subdued than the last, as ever fainter gasps brought surrounding spores closer and closer to his face. One delicately shimmering corpuscle came drifting right beyond his pursed mouth as he held his breath. The moment was so tense, his mind so focused on not doing the wrong things, that he barely had time to register the thunderous roar flooding his ears as he turned and saw a dark colossal something right before it crashed into the sea and his tiny body was swept away. Now entirely submerged, he began to sink. Ikkabod’s last thoughts were of a resigned and solemn peace as he closed his eyes, still picturing the restful faces of his neighbors and kin; he let go, and slowly slipped away.

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