Teal Empire

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Before the prison of black water,
their towers of white stone burned beneath the sun.
Cold rivers braided the valley in silver,
and fields of green and bearded gold
bowed softly beneath the wind.
The god-king said he loved them.
And when the sky caught fire,
when the mountains split like rotten teeth
and the earth drank their kingdom whole,
he called his people back from death.
Bone answered bone.
Rot remembered its shape.
Ribs stitched themselves together
in the silt of abyssal graves.
“Rise, my children.”
And they rose.
But the valley was no more.
Above them loomed a sea without end,
miles upon miles of crushing jade darkness.
The river had become an oceanic trench.
The fields of gold had withered into forests
of seaweed swaying like the hair of the drowned.
Their cities slept beneath the black tide,
broken domes buried in drifting silt like ash,
each doorway a mouth of brine,
each hall hung with streaming kelp
that moved like mourning banners in the deep.
Still they worship.
Verdigris crowns fused to naked skulls.
Coral flowering through the hollows of their lungs.
Their hearts,
hollow engines of grit and salt,
throb with tides they cannot breathe out.
Centuries encrust them.
Barnacles seal their fingers in eternal prayer.
Memory rots within them
like drowned parchment containing old scripture.
Sometimes the darkness blooms.
Pale lanternfish drift through the pressure,
cold blue embers in the eternal deep.
And the dead gather around them
as though remembering fire,
as though remembering warmth,
as though somewhere above the crushing water
the sun still burns.
But the light always fades.
And when it does,
the hunger returns.
Far above, waves glitter beneath the stars.
Far above, the living call to one another
in the sweet open air.
But in the drowned valley,
the god-king’s gift endures.
And still they kneel
in an empire the sun abandoned long ago,
where the darkness lies teal and endless,
and still as the dark of the moon.