The Complete Atopia Chronicles

by Matthew Mather

Night was falling, spreading its indigo carpet across the sky to reveal the cathedral of stars that shone only in the deepest of deserts. The perpetual Sirocco wind whistled softly, carrying with it the sand that over the aeons had etched the limestone bedrock into fantastical forms that sprang up out of the desert floor like giant gnomes and mushrooms, lending the lifeless place an interior life of its own. Massive sand dunes sat hunched in the distance, slowly sailing their lonely courses across the bare bedrock, their hulks propelled by the same unrelenting wind that shaped this place. As they moved, they swallowed everything in their paths, but just as inevitably as they consumed, they would eventually release as they moved on. You just had to stand still long enough, exist long enough, to be released.

A DEEP, HAUNTING wail reverberated through the morning air, carrying me upwards, beyond the highest of the Himalayan peaks, but also inwards and backwards, deep into my mother’s womb. A million deaths surrounded me, all threaded outward from my moment of creation, a cosmic embryo of existence secured by the thin timeline threading through it all that kept me alive.