1964-10-06 - Heaven-sent
Summary: Vesper's investigation goes terribly, terribly wrong.
Related: [http://marvel1963mush.wikidot.com/plot:Kingsmen]
Theme Song: Moonbound - Anzo
vesper 


Follow the signal. Those awful, hammering shouts bouncing through the atmosphere bypass slumbering villages and communities wrapped up in their own sorrows. She’s chasing the sun across its daily trek to follow the clamor that engulfed New York in a passing tide. Follow the waves, find the source.

*
It sounded easier than actuality proves it to be. Swept up in commands transmitted over the limb of the earth, Vesper Mézières goes with the current. She’s never been particularly good at going along to get along. But for crown and country, she makes exceptions.

*

Minutes pass. Hours pass. Nightfall swallows her whole in its gaping maw. She pushes against the current to find the source. The waves break on a near shore, focused in a churning undercurrent that almost engulfs her in the cacophony bringing ephemeral hands to her skull to block out the bombardment. It forces her down under its weight, implacable.

*

Below her feet stretches an ancient land shaped by long-ago kings with entangled names that dance off her tongue like poetry. Flat, dusty plains cloaked in rough scrub surrender bit by bit to parched fields in the final flush of growth. Those limestone tablets showed enemies huddling with their hands over their necks in submission. The thunderbolts clashing through her attenuated being make her understand why.

*

The land between the two rivers is old. She feels it in herself. No bones. Not in this form. She’s made of soundwave and memory. Dust and fragments shown in the Louvre remind her of stiff kings and their immense curling beards, dog-like ‘dragons’ marching imperiously across chipped fragments of glazed wall. Not this place, this city that should buzz with life. Its silence mourns and the river calls her to attention.

*
The Tigris’ song briefly deafens her hearing to anything else, the trembling notes flooded over one another in their rush. The waters churn the dayglo green of a child’s picture.

She can taste the poison her lips and feel the serenade in her veins, if veins she had.

*

Funny. The Seine never sounded that way to her. But then that muddy brown serpentine represents another life washed away in a deluge for the ages.

*

Don’t think that way. Check out the source. Analyze. Return to tell Karnak. Don’t be afraid. Piece of cake.

*
A jump over the waters takes her to the left bank where no one goes or lives. A great city faces its own cemetery coated over in a layer of dry soil and time. Wind moans freely where no structure higher than a modest one-story hut clings to the roadside. Here, too, is a lightless abyss.

*

But for one tiny star that generates her own faint radiance. From her rising vantage as she floats airborne, Vesper looks. What she sees carves out a new awareness of cartography.

Green light traces dry gulches and crevasses in the landscape, like a filigree of magma outlining continental plates. It leaks into the Tigris over a mile-long stretch.

*
Fingers in a toxic brightness seep forth out of the cracked earth into the water. Once she’s seen it there is no way not to. A great poisoned hand reaching forth towards a darkened city. Submerged claws glitter with malice. They reach for her, striking up eagerly to clutch the streak of starlight faded into emptiness.

There be monsters in the empty scrub lands around Mosul.

*

Submit to justice / submit to justice / submit to justice.

She doesn’t understand those howls originating from the earth, but she is afraid.

*
The Orientalists gave names to these dusty places, hinting at a time when they were green and fair as Eden. The largest cities in the world of their time, the Paris or New York.

She remembers those names. Nineveh. Akkad.

*
Dead at a remove of three, four, five millennia. Dead civilisations and yet here is a hand reaching out over the water in glowing green to scour the sky in vindictive rage.

Submit to justice. Submit to justice.

*
A moment of free fall capsizes rational thought, her body briefly corporeal before it transforms into pure light.

The atmosphere collectively holds its breath. Systems shriek their shrill verdict upon the thoughtless sky and the barren earth. Light explodes into a smear of energy roaring into the heavens.

Clouds boil. Steam vaporizes patches of the river. Ancient creaking technology spins up at sites across the globe. Jungles flatten. Lava churns. Cracks open. The signal howls all around her on dusty Akkad’s periphery.

*
Vesper screams in a voice no one can hear as she, too, is catapulted past oblivion’s edge. Shattered light scatters among the stars.

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