Revolution in the Underground

Ember Oaks let his irrational thoughts sweep over him like waves upon a shore. As his illogical fancies grew upon him, he fell deeper into his own imagination. And just as he was about to be submerged, the absurdity of his own fantasy would awaken in him the embers of his fading rationality, and the wave would recede. With each wave his consciousness grew less and less resistive, and he knew that soon he would be overcome. It was a battle he fought quite often. On some nights he would drag out the fight as long as he could—desperately clinging to the well-defined constructs of his perceived reality like a fish against the current. On other nights, he would just let the waves come and sweep him off to his wonderland on a floating raft.

But usually, he approached his dreams with considerable trepidation. On the one hand, the waves promised an endless array of possibilities and most of the time these euphoric prospects were enough to extinguish any resistive instinct deep inside him. On the other hand, there was a chronic apprehension that he would not be allowed to return to the world he had invested so much. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of where the waves would take him—they seldom took him anywhere bad—as it was that he was afraid of what he was leaving behind and might not be allowed to return to.

In his waking hours Ember would often ponder the tradeoffs of a perpetual dream. Was a rapturous existence worth sacrificing the logical coherency inherent in the waking life? Were the non-sequiturs of his dreams not tolerable if they were coupled with the majesties of his own imagination? Ultimately it was the inevitability of the whole process that made Ember Oaks not dread going to sleep. In the end, the waves always won and would always win, and, as far as he knew, they had always and would always continue to welcome him back to reality.

In fact, Ember Oaks was no stranger to these contradictory emotions. He was satisfied with his life—as satisfied as an ambitious 19 year old romantic could be—but his quiet contentedness belied a deep desire for adventure. A desire so deep, so intimately connected to the frame of his very existence, that he knew it could not be fought forever.

***

Life was more than perfect in Erosa, it was idyllic. Food was plentiful, resources were abundant, and the people lived in perfect harmony. Even when Erosa was faced with a death of one of its own, the people would band together and as a collective they grew powerful and their pain and despair flickered into oblivion. Most of the time the person was so old, and his or her death so well anticipated, that everyone had approached the eventual culmination with a degree of appreciative acceptance. And in this fashion, the member of the dying party would often pass with a beaming smile, as if it to suggest to all those it left behind that greater greatness lay ahead. And on the rare occasion when a death was unexpected, premature, or otherwise particularly tragic due to any number of various extenuating circumstances, the folks of Erosa would comfort one another with such fervor that by the end of it the pain was tolerable.

Each and every man and woman, adult and child, that fared death’s journey were immortalized in so many memorials that it had become a popular belief within Erosa that they had successfully annihilated death. Since life is more or less encompassed by arbitrary materiality, corporeality, and perceptions, the argument would go, life can be effectively continued into perpetuity through the creation and adoption of new concepts and forms granted that the newly created was somehow associated with the recently departed. Before passing, for example, many Erosans would opt to have a tree planted on their soon-to-be cadavers—the idea being that through the body’s effect on the tree and through the trees effect on the universe, the individual would live on, providing shade and oxygen to the living inhabitants it left behind.

It was common, particularly for tragic deaths, to create a new tribute word. The Erosan lexicon was littered with such words—fuchsia, for example, is to skip along merrily after having finished a large meal, and cerulean is a word used to describe a weeping willow whose leaves have a particular tendency to sway to a particular side despite the insistence of the prevailing wind in the opposite direction—both of these, of course, are in addition to their usual meanings as colors.

Plaques were made, monuments were erected, concepts and theories were crafted and refined, post-mortem biographies—the creation of which was a major undertaking involving the collaboration of many people—were written, plants were planted, and legacies continued. Even the act of having a child was, to some extent, viewed positively because it perpetuated the legacy of a bloodline.

Though some approached memory with a burden of responsibility, most in Erosa saw it as an escape from the existential and fatalistic terrors sowed by death. By the time that Ember had come into existence the memory process had been so well systematized that the act of remembering had been engrained into the very psyche of every Erosan. The nature of memory and the process of remembering was, for many, practically a religion.

Ember, however, was not like most of his contemporaries. Ember did not buy into the prevailing sentiments of his time. He did not agree with their approach to death. While others celebrated warm memories on the anniversary of a death, Ember would hide from the festivities. For him, each death was tragic and irreversible. Perpetual legacies were nice but ultimately a rather poor substitute for life.

Like all true romantics, Ember had a profound and inexplicable love for tragedy. Without tragedy there were no great heights and without great heights there were no tragedies.
All the magnitudes of life are relative
, Ember would often philosophize to himself.
By middling out death, you middle out life
.

In his typical contradictory fashion, Ember at once felt the necessity of death for his romantic visions, but also reviled it for the horrors and pains it created. Since his first philosophical formulations it had been a continuing goal of Ember to tie together loose ends and reconcile inconsistencies. His ambiguous perspective on death, however, was one that he never consciously took recognition of, but nonetheless gave rise to much of the tension and angst that characterized his teenage years.

Ember was also the grandson of Azure—the oldest living man in Erosa’s history, and, not entirely coincidentally, Erosa’s chief magistrate.

***

It was high tide when the knocks came. At first Ember failed to notice the disturbance. The second and third triplet of knocks pierced his dreamland—transiently appearing, disappearing, and reappearing as a magical frog that clicked with each outstretch of its tongue—and the fourth set broke it.

“One moment,” Ember managed to mutter, as much to himself as to the mysterious person on the other side of the door. He rubbed his eyes rhythmically and carefully dug out the crust that had accrued in its corners with his fingernails. Ember stroked his chin, patiently awaiting the return of rationality. “Who is it?” he asked automatically.

“Dude, come on, everybody’s a-balancing on one hand and head just to see you! We’ve all been buzzing around here like flies around an abandoned picnic! The morning dew isn’t quite as fresh without you around, get? The sun’s a-waiting for you to get up so it can rear its head… But the sun’s like an impatient fly waiting for its honey. Get?” This was the voice of Onyx, one of Ember’s best childhood friends. If the effervescent voice wasn’t enough of an indication, the absurd similes, which Onyx had a predilection for, were a dead give away.

“Huh?” Ember answered, the best he could.

“I a-said that we are all running around in near perfect circles like our planet around our sun just to get dizzy because we’re so anxious to see you… except for Glaucous… his circle’s a bit eccentric… because, well… he actually likes running around in ovals.”

Ember was glad that it was Onyx at the door. For one thing, he always came with something that was worth getting excited about. Additionally, his unconventional mannerisms were a welcome transition from the nonsense of a dream world to the sense of the real world. Onyx’s thoughts, words, and actions, often made sense only when viewed at an angle—like a star in the night sky that is best resolved when looked at from the eye’s periphery.

Onyx was, to a large extent, a person of great idiosyncrasies. For no particular rhyme or reason, he enjoyed putting a’s in front of random words. He enjoyed illustrating abstract concepts with effusive demonstrations and hand gestures. He enjoyed intentionally mixing up his onomatopoeias and animal associations. He enjoyed staring at a person’s ears when he or she talked. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything strange and innocuous that Onyx didn’t enjoy engaging himself in from time to time.

Ember got up and put his clothes on. He meandered over to his small, dull mirror and made a face so contorted that only a mother could love. It had become a routine of late for Ember—the justification of which resided somewhere deep in his subconscious and had something to do with an innate need to share a genuine and personal moment with himself. “You do know that today’s the day of my Generalized Evaluation, right?”

“Know? Of course I know! Do owls a-hoot just before they catch a meal?”

“I don’t know,” Ember answered honestly.

“Well they do.”

“I had no idea,” Ember replied with a smile, half imagining Onyx’s hand gestures behind the door.

“Well… Actually… I don’t know if they do or don’t…” he said, correcting himself, “but that’s hardly the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is… The point is… The sun’s a-rising and we’re all a-waiting to a-see you and a-hoping we can catch the sunrise by the Falls. The Council of Elders has hardly gotten off its flying unicorn let alone started playing with its twiddly-dinks. You get?”

Ember didn’t. ‘You get?’ or more recently, just ‘get?’, was Onyx’s latest
idiosyncrasy—though to be fair, it was a natural extension of his recent foray into rhetorical questions. The Falls was the name of a popular hotspot next to one of Erosa’s lesser known water falls. As with the all locations in Erosa, the Falls was surrounded by rich, verdant foliage, and encased with the warm echo of nature living in harmony. The Falls was particularly popular amongst people Ember’s age, and was the silently agreed upon place for flirting.

“Huh,” Ember murmured with a smile and an inquisitive wave of his eyebrow, even though no one was there to see him.

“Look, I’m trying to be perfectly clear here. The Council is still sleeping, you still have some time before your Generalized Evaluation, and we’re all waiting for you by the Falls in hope that we can catch the sunrise together.” In moments of frustration, Onyx was occasionally capable of clear and effective communication, though it seemed to kill him every time.

“Oh, why didn’t you say so?!” Ember said with a big smile.

“Alrighty then! So why don’t you a-go and a-open this door, and we can get a-started!”

Ember obeyed. As he walked out of his small hut and out onto his terrace, he was met with a playful face slap and punch in the shoulder—the purpose of which was presumably to expedite the walking process by getting Ember to chase after him as he ran to the Falls. Onyx giggled childishly as he ran across the moss-covered log and towards the Falls. Ember knew that he wouldn’t look back to see if he was following him. Such an act would be far too normal for Onyx.

He stretched his arms wide and took in a deep breath as he scanned the green vista. The underlying mysterious valley was as much a part of Erosa as the arrangement of wooden huts suspended far above it. Supporting these huts were questionable yet time-tested systems of ropes, nails and scaffolds. All homes and buildings were anchored along the walls of cliffs, trunks of tall trees, or various other fixtures that allowed for the stabilization of constructions far above the ground. Occasionally, as was the case with the market center, large gathering grounds were suspended hundreds of feet above empty air by an intricate assembly of artificially constructed platforms. Connecting all these structures was a complex maze of bridges and a meshwork of wooden ladders. The bridges were often covered in moss and dangled with ivy, and the ladders, which attached many of the huts together in groups called “clusters,” were often strung with thick rope and makeshift supplies that, on the whole of it, gave the whole place a paradoxically pleasant but dilapidated and dangerous feel.

Ember tried to focus his eyes on the forest’s trees. Though he had spent much of his childhood staring into it, it wasn’t until recent years that he started to try to resolve the forest into discrete units. At first approximation, the tree was the natural, fundamental unit of the forest—a forest is composed of repeating units of trees in the same way a population is made of individuals, as a whole is to a part. The more Ember studied the forest, however, the more he realized just how illusory the concept of a fundamental unit was. One could study a tree for hours and by the end of it, still know nothing about it. After he looked at it long enough, he would notice the trees blending into its surrounding—indistinguishable from the rest of the forest.
It is equally important to see the tree within the context of the forest, as it is to see the forest for its trees,
Ember decided.

Ember wasn’t exactly sure whether or not he agreed with his own formulation but he seldom liked to leave such moments without verbalizing some sort of revelation. The whole concept of epiphanies was more or less lost on Ember. Though he was naturally predisposed to such moments by virtue of his introspective nature, he was also susceptible to false insights by his impatience and occasionally excessive optimism. Distinguishing genuine moments of inspiration from false ones was no easy task for Ember as such determinations often required pitting reason against emotion and logic against feeling. Many a-nights Ember would crawl into bed embarrassed by the wild thoughts that had occupied his mind just a few hours prior. Ember did not know why he was ashamed by his heart’s emotional outcries, and he did not know why he felt a strong pressure to relegate his emotional discoveries to his rational ones. It was while staring at the forest that Ember’s mind was most free.
I can never know the forest until I walk within it,
he pondered, and with that thought, Ember was overcome with a profound sadness.

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