Obscured by dried fronds and shade of a ruined tower, orange eyes stare out at the wounded mosaicist crouching against the wall of a low house under hot sun. Abandoned and rotted, the house kept cool inside for those insects that make it their refuge. Outside the air burned. The eyes, low to the ground, pierce across the deserted settlement. Beside the mosaicist, slumped in a pile, was a large fabric sack which the eyes held onto for a while. The sack was partly hidden in the shade of a withered tree, whose cover had now left the mosaicist to simmer. Over dead grass and past the house, up on a small dusty hill, a man stood unwilling sentinel. He was bound, for some unknown crime, to a stake set deep into the dry earth. Every limb was tied down so that no part could move except for one arm which, outreached against hot sky, cast a shadow of infinite form along his figure. His eyes staring eternally turned upwards to the sun had dried long ago. The only moisture to be wicked from him was from his agape mouth, which a swarm of flies had just discovered.
The mosaicist roused and turned his head into his shoulder, pulling his matted cords of hair across drenched back, to see what the sound was. From his one eye not blinded and caked in thick blood and mucus he acknowledged the bound man’s struggle. Nighttime had been good to them these past numberless days. Both men imprisoned by their bodies found relief in the other. The bound man, able to only listen, heard tell of mighty and strange tales from the mosaicist. Stories from his travels and dealings through his many years. Something about the words that swirled out from the mosaicist’s mouth made the bound man uneasy, as though they were hooks that sunk deep into him and drowned him. There in his one eye the bound man found himself free from his bonds, but imprisoned into the labyrinths of the mosaicist’s mind. Every dream that the bound man ever had seemed to flow out of him as he became a part of the grout that lined the precipices and towering walls of the labyrinth. The faces and dreams of others, strangers made brothers within the mosaicist’s perverse realm, were made clearer to the bound man as he felt himself slipping away.
Then it was over. He was himself again, tied tight to his stake on his small hill to see nothing and feel only the hot sun and crawling of a hundred flies around and inside his lips. Baking alive, he knew that there was something unearthly about this man slowly bleeding out in the dead grass and sunlight. The past few hours there was silence. But today the air was beginning to shift, from relentless, still heat to a cool breeze. Leaves began to shift and sigh in the new wind, and soon a chorus was struck with the old tree and the flies.
Above the ruined tower where the flaming eyes hid a black storm was growing over the valley. The mosaicist became aware of the great pain in his arm and pulled it out from against his stomach where he had kept it from the sun. Wooden bolts pierced through his forearm, wrist and palm, all of which were entwined and bound by coarse string. Between his fingers were wedges driven deep into the flesh so that his hand and arm were completely immobile. Bound up in the center of his palm, above the wooden bolt that ran clean through and secured by string, was a small talisman carved into a perverted visage.
All these pieces were unreal to him. This scene, he thought, was to be that of his death. A tragic painting compiled from the dreams of other men wholly remembered but not desired. Delirium, he was sure, was finally taking hold. One memory he was sure of came to his mind. Not too long ago, before he dragged himself to this dry place, he had seen a great battle between two beings. An ethereal figure descended from the sky to greet a great warrior atop a massive horse. Black and steaming, it carried its rider around and around the man of light, whose body seemed the very heavens. Eventually the rider charged at the god and began to battle. The god struck out with blinding blows and whirled beautifully through the air. However the warrior seemed to know where the god would strike, and soon feinted a stab from its glittering blade and sunk his own strange sword through the head of the god. He cleaved him up and threw his limbs and head far through the heavens.
Within his labyrinths all has been dreamt and all has been recorded. Sprawling fortresses are built over old ones and within them, forever new and without forgetting. He has been all men’s horrors and all their desires. He was unsure as to why he had shared the few stories that he did with the bound man, of far away cities and wars and diseases. Lovers’ dissolutions and murderer’s victories. Regardless of why, he now saw something different as this storm thickened and drew nearer. A small courtyard, deep in his mind, was clear and beckoning for him to come to it. A final secret left unexplored. Now here, all he could see were those burning orange eyes.
The storm was overhead now and rain was whipping against the earth. The wind and rain drowned the violent thrashing of the lone tree’s limbs. A low moan was let out from the bound man but was lost. From the small hill he occupied, a rushing stream had formed and was winding down through the grass between the low house and the ruined tower. Now the shadows had become gray and their secrets laid bare.
Distant harmonies of thunder turned the desolation into a living battlefield. The mosaicist pushed himself up with his good arm and legs to try and seek refuge along with his belongings under a dilapidated section of roof. It was no use as the wind assaulted him and the side of the building. It shuddered, and the mosaicist felt something that he had been anticipating. The pair of orange eyes, reflected wildly in the coursing stream from the bound man’s hill, raised to the height of a man. Stepping out from what remained of the brittle fronts into the heavy rain, the silhouette of a tall man could be made out in the thick mist that now enveloped what was left of this deserted town. He stepped across the soaked grass, toes poised within thin mud. Long fingers felt their way down from his throat across slick body and thigh to rest upon an open blade that glinted from those distant, soft flashes of the storm as he walked. Those orange eyes were now radiating stars in the storm. Having forded the stream, the mosaicist could discern the horrible mask that the man donned. This man before him, this animal in the skin of a human was an assassin for the dream eaters.
One had finally caught him. The mosaicist tried to rise to his feet, but the assassin was quick. Lunging across the distance that seemed so far and obscure in that storm, he slid his long dagger through the heart of the mosaicist. What blood he had left in his useless body pumped black out from his wound. He fell back against the house and tried to grasp for the trunk of the frail tree but missed. In the mud, through his one capable eye, beheld the world for a final time, and died silently.
Thunder boomed overhead and a strange glow from the soaked bag still slumped on the ground softly illuminated the tall assassin. He loosened the rope that kept it shut and slid his hands inside. Pulled out from the bag was a limp torso that shone within itself all the stars in the heavens. Out from a small satchel he kept on his waist, the assassin procured a thick needle and string. Dragging the mosaicist’s corpse nearer, he set to work on constructing a new god of the stars.
***
This all I had seen before as I walked the labyrinths of the mosaicist’s mind. Different but the same. The assassin, with his sewn up deity in one arm, trudged through the mud and stream up to my hill, my domain for how long I couldn’t know, and set me loose. Falling to the ground, in the swirling rain of the storm, I had entered into a new maze. My mind was full of all that the mosaicist had ever procured. He had let his labyrinth birth itself into me. I don’t know whether the origin of that dead god’s torso was what the mosaicist thought he believed it was, but his fate to deliver it into this assassin’s arms was fulfilled nonetheless. A man made of other men, entrapped forever in dark labyrinths forever. He had become every man and everyone of their thoughts that ever would exist.
Visions of a new god with a horrible wooden face now pervade my thoughts. In recounting this memory, and subsequent events since my freedom, I will understand, and annihilate, the legacy of the mosaicist.
— Pilate lives in Phoenix. He is a traditional artist and a writer. When not working on what he should, he plays Halo 2.