Crematorium for Phoenixes Read Free Page A

be
uttered.
    Both of his hands began to smoke.
    The smoke drifted around the room until
suddenly it formed a pillar that changed into a snake. The
slithering creature tore into the nostrils of the men, shaking them
like electricity.
    After a moment, the smoke came out of them.
Exhaled from their nostrils, it was now blackish and compressed.
The man instantly drew it back into his hand.
    The men blinked, as if shaking off their
sleepiness. They looked at their own hands, which seemed to them
uncharacteristically clean, and then turned toward the
stranger.
    “Gentlemen, this is just the
beginning,” he told them.
    They all then exited the building as a
bunch, looking like a cloud that constantly changes its shadowy
form, clustered then scattered. They walked in the deaf, crooked
streets, which were as silent as pensive, vicious creatures.
    This maze had been created like a prison for
monsters, where each individual was chained so that his primal
urges merged into him. These individuals existed only to
represent the darkness in society. Among the nations, they
were penned in by the walls and hunted like animals, exiled, and
branded. But Cain’s race had been revived as an indestructible
hydra and now emerged like a phoenix from the ashes of the sin.
    All the while, the company continued walking
down the alleys. They passed by as life passes, hearing screams of
laughter fade away into screams of anguish only to return as
maniacal laughter. Eventually, they were out of the town.
    One world had ended, and another instantly
began. Fields with sprouted wheat, barley, and millet marked
white-sanded pathways that lay before them.
    This oil-black soil with its crops was
shaded here and there by the trunks of palm trees, clustered
together and spread far, far ahead into the horizon. Wrinkled from
time to time by terraced hills of unidentifiable greenery, the
Greeks in later centuries would call this place “paradeisos.”
    Here in the fallow, fueled by a grid of
channels and dams, the water moved like it was being boiled. It fed
the men that sum of feeling that ultimately accounted for their
existence.
    The group walked these dams whose headstone
weirs held thousands of cubic meters of water and passed barn
silos. Standing in a grove of palm trees, they made dugouts and
despite the warm weather created fires in order to boil milk.
    After several more hours of walking, they
entered the desert, which spread in wavy manner with coffee-black
spaces that stretched into infinity.
    Here, within a few more hours, they found a
limestone cave in which the corroded, membranous skin of a snake or
creature had been left behind. The cocoon left thousands upon
thousands of elbows of fabric hanging and pleated around in
hoops.
    From here, the men take actions they do not
understand and soon everything begins to swell, squirming,
quivering, and throbbing like a giant insect’s metamorphosis. Then
before their amazed gazes appeared a hovering airship.
    “Well, folks, welcome to the
Behemoth,” said the stranger.
    Chapter
Three
    Frozen ash-gray ridges were lit by the first
rays of the sun, which shone over the ancient bastions as if it
were casting a dim, contemptuous look at the ravines.
    Here and there among the silent mounded
hills and emerald-turquoise fields sheep grazed; they resembled the
scattered pearls of a forgotten necklace.
    Between the sinuous meanders of the river,
birds were singing, awakening the forests of willow.
    In the overgrown tracks near one of the
ravine, the slight crackle horse tracks could be heard.
    Abandoned in the middle kingdom bowels of
the mountains, which lay on the pagan tombs of rulers by the ruins
of old fortresses in the north of Zipangu, or what is modern-day
Japan, a group of people lived simply.
    Carrying the blood of long-forgotten
warriors, these men were tough and hardened; they made their
livelihood among these ancient fortresses.
    They had become well-acquainted with
oblivion in their shelters and