A Rising Fall

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  The Children all lay in slumber as darkness fell over The Nest, the sun moving backwards towards zero. The choral of heavy breathing and snoring filled the complex.

  At Peace, in the grand dormitories there slept nine Children together on a mattress on the floor circled about a Mother sleeping at their centre.

  Mother and Child always stayed close for warmth and comfort while at the entrance to the complex, under a veil of arcane darkness, stood The Teller, waiting for all to reach the depths of their unconscious where all lay in absolute influence unaffected by their waking distraction, open to suggestion; a blank canvas in the mind of every Mother, Father, Son and Child waiting for the delicate brush of their Teller.

  The Teller had no face and it was as without form as it was without sex. It was simply a voice that spoke through the dark and into The Collective sleep; never seen; not in the day and most certainly not at night when from out of nowhere, from behind the forbidden room that divided At Peace, it came like the onset of a virus; slow but strangling.

  The Teller only appeared when The Collective had submitted to their slumber and connected wholly to their unconscious states. Then, in the hours of influence, The Teller told its tale.

  The Teller first introduced the image viewed from above as the eye of a god looking down upon its creation. There it told of narrow streets moving through a web of immense concrete structures where through the smoky glass, things were still as they had been only now an eerie emptiness filled the rooms.

  While The Collective slept, a mood was being set in their subconscious, the trickles of fear falling faster and harder into their subconscious until horror and panic directed their theatre.

  The Teller then demented its voice; curling words over one another, droplets of saliva falling to the floor as it instilled vile terror in their sleep. It directed their sight to a greasy window in the distance. It was far, but its occupant was terrifyingly visible.

  There, looking into them was The Collector.

  The Teller contorted its formless self and though invisible, its strangeness could be seen in the sound of its voice. It pulled its arms close to its body and twisted its fingers, rolling them over one another, occasionally picking at the skin in its palm and dragging air through its mouth in a low gruff. The Collective all twitched in their unconscious states as fear resounded in the foundation of their subliminal theatre.

  When its voice again turned kind, The Collective were taken from the silently prosing Collector and guided to the orange hue of the Forever New Dawn where assurance warmed up to their subliminal states and embraced them with certainty. Their eyes flickered lightly and their lips parted to an unconscious smile as the strain in their bodies slackened.

  The Mother in the centre of the bed glowed as The Children about her moved their closed eyes to her direction, pulling themselves in sleep closer to her warm body. The Children rolled over one another, connected like the links in a chain.

  The Teller spoke, ranging from a soft whisper to a deep and gentle like hoarseness by the end of the dream. It told this story unchangingly, a thousand times in every sleep and in every sleep; The Collective was learned of fear and love; but in this sleep, in the final tell, a different tale was told.