Chapter 5: Infancy

The dreams that storm up to the mortals are so strong they fell even the men who are awake and working away in the night. They are dark, hungry with mouths that pull and suck at the exposed brains of sleeping innocence and their numbers are great – more dreams than there are sleepers. Nights of unsatisfying, maddeningly light sleep make way for the kind of sleep that is haunting and dripping with the water of Styx. Children don’t wake from their dreams, overpowered by the light and the colours interspersed with the darkness of dreams that have connected at the seams. Closed in, the life squeezed out of their limbs. Mothers, driven by a love deeper than death, try to shake them awake, crying through closed eyes.

The gods have fallen on their beds, if they have even made it there, surprised by a tiredness that weighed down their immortal limbs. They do not die, but they sleep. Their dreams are dark and flashing with teeth and danger ripping itself open. Even the gods.

Death is nothing but a prolonged, unsatisfying sleep and Orienta knows it. She’s woken up from a sleep that was never fully there. Now she’s awake, the absence of sleep leaves a lot of time for thinking. Thinking about sleep, about death, she tastes the irony on her tongue. Dimly the memories of her Before-Life filter through her thoughts. Her Before-Life was barely a life, wandering in the eternal gloom with a mouth that had no use. She couldn’t speak, she had nothing to say because she was nothing. She was a shadow, flitting from one corner to the other. Now something has forced her to wake and she wants to know what.

The earth is white under a sky of coal. The moon stands in full orbit, quiet and unmoving in a trembling sky. The star signs are on the move – Orion is dipping over the horizon, his dogs on the loose, Perseus moves closer to Andromeda when her mother isn’t looking. It’s wrong to think the sky is unchangeable. When the humans close their eyes the stars begin their life, to the puzzlement of the laws of life that have been invented to make things easier. The sun doesn’t rise. Apollo has fallen asleep on the cloudy floor of his sky-bound castle – in the stalls his sun horses dream of reigns and masters with whips in nights full of blood.

There’s no one awake save Orienta. (or is that just what she thinks?) Her brothers have felled every single living being with their heavy dream limbs – hugged them, put them into a sleep thick as blood if not killed them. Who ever knew that sleep could kill? Hypnos maybe, her father, who did not love her enough to hate her enough to name her. Who did not see her eyes as he plunged her into a sleepless lifeless existence.

How does she know he exists? She just does, looking up to the sky. Ouranos is stirring, the ancient god that has been sleeping and silent for era’s. The star signs hurry across the sky, their careful orbit lost. The ones that are usually asleep have woken in this eternal night.

Is it wrong for her to enjoy this? Sensation is seeping into her, travelling up from her feet to her head. The worldly air slaps her in the face, a face she didn’t know she had until a still pool of water threw it at her. Startled, she had hit it with her fists – discovering her fingers, her throbbing veins, that she was solid – and it had shattered, then came back into focus. She’s white as the earth, her eyes dark and deep in her face. She’s something that exists. Exists. Exists what does it mean? She tastes the word. Exist. Her parents have denied her the word and she has gone on to obtain it for herself. The umbilical cord fully cut now – no longer a soulless echo of her father’s resounding orgasm. She might still be his seed, but she has come to life.

Is it wrong for her to enjoy this? Her dream brothers are as mute and creeping as ever, attacking every fibre that still stirs with visions that pretend to be prophecies (and never are). Her sisters are still caught in their nightly, dimmed existence where no light ever reaches their eyes. Do they have eyes? She has never seen them, which might mean she had no eyes either. They fell from their mother’s womb unformed – not even deformed, even that was too good for them – and they have never found to strength to form themselves.

She has.

Why?

It’s wrong for her to enjoy this because she’s alone in a take-over that should have been done by all of them. All of them, together, an army of seeing eyes and new-found mouths. Risen from a death-like sleep.

Even as she thinks it, she also thinks: no.

This is her triumph, this is her night. Her voice has driven parents to sacrifice their children. Her voice has opened the gates so dreams of death could flood the lands. This sensation is hers by right.

No one is awake save Orienta, Hypnos and Nyx. Hypnos, who ironically never sleeps and Nyx, who is only the vessel of sleep.

Hypnos: She robs me of every ounce of strength I have.

Nyx: That’s because you are built out of sleep.

Hypnos: I am also built out of will.

Nyx: You forget she has your will as well. And mine.

Hypnos: You’re proud of her.

Nyx: I’m proud of how she makes me hurt.

The two old lovers, the night and the sleep, the mother and the child try to catch their breath in a world that needs them everywhere, on everything, at the same time. There is no breath left.