U-5704: Elegy of the All-Mother
The Primeval Bloodwitch’s Mythobiological Canticle
There are tales of planet U-5704 with a vintage almost Precambrian in nature, stories chiseled into the sediment of memory. They speak of an age when the All-Mother’s telluric currents roared like mammoths beneath moonlight, galloping like a stampede of wrathful rhinos through a pitch-black jungle.
This is what happens when a planet reverses its birthright of biological scarcity.
Its thick hide and formidable respiratory system tell of an epoch of torrential meteor bombardment and acid rains that hissed with purpose. Random effusions of toxic gas sprayed without warning. Kelvin-hot steam geysers erupted, oozing, blistering lava devoured the rock beneath its own feet. Every breath was fire. Every inch: a forge.
When the chaos waned, the planet began to cohere.
All-Mother exhaled. At last, it was a time of monolithic abundance, of immeasurable overgrowth. Creatures multiplied. Habitats stretched their limbs. Life surged—not delicately, but with gluttonous exultation.
Etched into a natural stone monolith, its language older than root and rain, stand three maxims, memorialized for descendants who may one day understand:
Unexpected convergences birth revelations most strange.
A triste with fiction in the bedchamber of surreal delirium.
Descend into obscurity to lampoon the liturgy of the mundane.
These are not lessons. They are invitations.
The creatures of that ancient era trudged and plodded through landscapes untamed and unforgiving. But no human ears were present to record their ordeals. Only the so-called primitive senses of the insects, the algae, the amphibious mutterers of warm shallows. Only predators and prey, leaf and spore, fin and fang bore witness.
Not even the All-Mother herself, vast and interwoven within the Biotic Nexus, could articulate their struggle. She was a participant, not a spectator.
She belongs to the Terrasphere, where organisms bind themselves to the mineral logic of the planet--the Abiotic Nexus--forming a synergistic system that maintains the delicate theatre of life.
But she does not dwell in the Mortal Field, where sentience coils like smoke in the cranium. She does not weep when it rains. She does not rage when the earth quakes. But we poets, mystics, and orphans of the Anthropocene insist otherwise. We have invited her into the mirror of ourselves.
Much later came the dreamers: those who whispered her name backwards into their bones, hungry for her presence in their rites, their ecstasies, their death-throes…
O Lioness of the Endless Plain—Sekhmet, most radiant in wrath,
Strip our skulls from the spine’s tender vine.
Scorch every meridian from the crown to the root…
For agony is but a costume worn by triumph in shadowed rites.
—Feudal Blessing of the Ezhi’ Xu-Ywen tribe
And still, there is something else…
Something between our breaths that inverts the rhythm of choreography, disrupting the dolls of tradition, rewriting the spiral script of our matrilineal whY-chromosome, a mitochondrial bloodwitch birthed in the green cannabinoid stench at the zenith of circumambulation, slipping in and out of time-space like breath between curses.
“GLESHARRA UMBILICUOS MAGNEX MAHULV ESTAW RAZQUI”
These are the sounds of forgotten tongues.
And in the end:
The monstrosities returned
unseen since the deserts bore names
slithering dry-skinned across the scaled sands of Zurvan’s left hand.
In his right:
the undead cadaver of the Chronophage, still squirming,
devouring time by the mouthful: seconds, hours, centuries.
Each increment swallowed in feckless gulps,
oozing spatially askew
down the ravenous gullet
of a throat widened to a gaping grotesquerie.
Through the spiral of memory, the coils of decay,
past the lungs of history and the ribcage of myth,
through winding intestines of chronology and loss,
until, at last, it defecates time into light again:
oxygen, nitrogen, sun.
And so the clock begins anew.