Terra Australis

By Cody Higgins and Hyäne Sawbones

Terra Australis is a newly discovered, hypothetical island. Cartographers have tried to map its surface before. But those are stories lost in the winds of time. Our story follows Pen Octavio as he attempts to be the first of so many to map the island, and discovers that god only knows what everything has been building to. Terra

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zen Mob Publishing
• Release date: Mar 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948848039

Book preview

Terra Australis

by Cody Higgins

Dedicated to my Devil

Copyright Zen Mob Publishing, 2018

Ancient Silk Road

A jolt sent my thoughts scattering as the tiny plane’s wheels touched ground only momentarily, the hands of a young boy as he crashingly caresses the exposed flesh of a lassies thigh, before bumping back into the sky, flight reluctant to land for fear it may never fly again, or at least mans flight; an intruder in the sky. I wondered if birds ever worried the same things as their mechanical counterparts, only momentarily, as thoughts were again scattered from the great mechanical bird resisting its predestined reunion with the earth.

Mans cause. Fighting our destination.

'Maybe before criticizing god we should question what we've done to make him silent for so long.’ The voice was mischievously confident as its words rattled round inside the cheap, pay-by-the-hour style, motel equivalent plane. They were beautiful before they shattered on the too thin metal sheeting that made the aircraft's skin while it bounced and bumbled to an eventual stop. Seats relaxed as if the craft itself was unsure about the landing, consciousness of self and not innards, we being only passengers, and loosened grip on bodies so we could depart. It would sit there in the hot noon days sun waiting for its next impossible flight, envious of birds who's very existence depended upon flying away.

She bumped into me, purposefully, hands yanking bags from under seats, and smiled when I turned partially round to see who it was that needed my attention.

'You believe in god?’ I asked, confidently thinking I had the upper hand, in responding to her prompt.

'Yeah.’ A certain boisterous air about her as she slung her backpack over shoulders.

'Which one?’

Smirking as she walked by, a twinkle in her eye, 'all of them, of course.’

All it takes. Is one impossibility.

I was tired from the travels, but my senses were excited at this new environment, this new adventure, response system torn in multiple directions. Was probably, at the end of it all, what kept man so fractured; an overwhelming curiosity in the face of being exhausted from existing.

Her walk was purposeful yet carried out its purpose in an unhurried, without a care in the world, sort of way. It was as though every single footstep was exactly where it was supposed to be. Which was really any footstep. But hers were aware of their belonging. A dance through his world. Carefully choreographed chaos.

She glanced over her shoulder as we danced the seemingly half mile from the runway towards the airport. It was a small building. Should have been built with bamboo. Looked more like a beach line spirits hut than an airport; but we were still some distance away. 'What’s your name?’

'Pen.’

'Greetings & salutations Pen. I'm Atalanta.’

There is a grand beauty in the simple act of naming yourself, for the first time, for a new traveler. All all we are. Only travelers. The world. The sky. The stars. The darkness.

'I wish people would do that more often.’

'I'm sorry?’

'Ask my name.’

'People don't ask your name?’

'Not any less,’ words already labored from the trek, 'than anyone else I suppose. Just that, well, I think if we made a stronger habit of asking each others names it would go a long way towards being kinder to each other.’ She stared at me in a way I was fairly familiar with, though also in a way I wasn't sure I'd seen before. 'I know, it's silly.’

'No, not at all. I quite agree with you Pen.’ And we finished the last bit of the walk in comfortably sweaty silence.

Upon closing the distance to the building it became painfully obvious that if anything the far off view hid the fact that this was no airport by any standard definition I had ever experienced. Like so many things in life, it was even bleaker up close. I sat down in the grass out front of the building (if indeed it could even be called such a thing), next to the dirt road that ran along perpendicular to the airport and landing strip, curved up ahead maybe a half mile or so and disappeared into the thick woods that seemed to encompass most of the area surrounding. Pulling my sketchbook out of my bag, I quickly made the markings to start.

'What's that?’ Atalanta asked with enticing surprise in her tone.

'It’s, well I'm sketching out the airport and landing strip,’ she only looked at me blankly, 'see I'm a cartographer and’

'you're here to map out the island?’

'Aye.’

'I thought for sure you were here searching for riches.’

'Riches?’

'Since rumor of this place began circulation there's been a fairly consistent flow of so called adventurers looking for hidden treasure,’ her eyes carried to the sky bewildered at its existence, 'its really beautiful isn't it?’

'I suppose it is.’ I hadn't thought of it in a while. The look in Atalanta's eyes sent a shock of guilt down my spine for neglecting the obvious things right in front of me. It's easy to forget the world when you think you have it all figured out. 'So is that what yer here for? Adventure and riches?’

She spent no time letting her smile engross her face, it catching me off guard how lovely she really was, a smile that seemed there long before I asked the question, only waiting for its moment, 'adventure, yes, riches, not so much. I'm from Terra.’

'Wait you're native? But’

'But I don't look like I come from an island no one ever heard of till a few months ago?’

'Well, no, I didn't…. I guess I just don't know what to expect here.’

'Just because the world doesn't know we exist, doesn't mean we don't know the world.’

My words caught in my throat as a carriage pulled by two beautifully constructed horses came rumbling around the far bend kicking dirt and dust into the air like a trail through aged memories before coming to a halt feet from where we sat.

'Pen Octavio?’ The man behind the reigns had thick, dark skin, that shone in the sun rays exactly like the hair on the beasts he controlled, 'they control me, not other way round,’ he murmured, his words harsh against the landscape.

'I'm Pen.’ I let it go for now.

'Safe travel has been provided you to the Ancient Silk Road. Beyond that you are on your own.’ Letting words rest a moment as his older than the rest of him eyes scrutinized me more severely than I'd ever remembered before. 'Atalanta,’ he nodded.

'Willard.’ Her simple acknowledgment before turning towards me as I rose to stand up, bag slung over shoulder in one fluid motion, 'you must have more pull than you let on if you're being taken to the Silk Road.’

'Must I?’ I smiled a smile she wasn't sure she wanted to return, ‘how do you think I got here in the first place? Yer not the only one who's explored the world outside Terra,’ I winked at Willard, his head forward, eyes focused on things beyond what either Atalanta or myself could see, and stepped up into the carriage.

'Can I come with you?’

'Only if it's OK with your gods.’

She only stepped up and in as a response. There was a quiet as the carriage bounced rhythmically down the dirt road, or, more accurately, dirt path. That was all any roads were anyway, paths from one point to another. Like pathways paved perfectly through space. Porous human consciousness incapable of connecting the dots if they aren't already charted out, systematically, one by one beforehand. Speed limit already set because we are nothing if not the rulers of each other, so often forgetting what our authority makes us. A prisoner in our own cage. The suffering comes back round again, waiting for us to take notice. But we drive on down to the next. No time to stop and soak it in in large doses.

I didn't like roads, which made this path far more pleasant than most I was familiar with. As it bended round the edge of the trees, development depreciated drastically and we really were left on a trail that gently curved its way through the forest. A certain simplicity sensually cuddled up to me in being wrapped up in this place. Much like space exploration, I thought, disheartened as those that charted out the stars apparently never felt the need to go see them themselves and instead defined a world through a glass scope glass coping with glass thoughts reacting to their own fragility in a sense like feeling the warmth of a fire with hands on coals burned down watered out and extinguished many moons before our tender feet carried us to the pit it once burned brightly as though artists writing about love whom had never felt it.

What do you have to offer life when you've never lived it; only watching from afar with rented eyes?

Which was what so much of the human experience felt like; watching with rented eyes. Costs money, anymore, especially, though to some degree always did, simply to see.  

There has been talks and predictions throughout years, control: the money, the food, the water, the production, the land of a people and you'll control them. The type of doom and gloom that always has some master up high in a sturdy chair who keeps all the peasants in one way or another loyal servants. wasn't those resources that the worms claimed would keep us all in check. Was sight. Was a dictatorship on human imagination.

Control sight. Control the people.

Of course no chair, no matter how high up, is ever very sturdy, and when they all come tumbling down all the eyes they've collected up will come rolling & rumbling from pockets and sacks and cover the surface of the land. Maybe have too much sight then. See more than we want to. That happens from time to time. Far more often than we'd like to admit, and of course that was the true meaning of Pandora's box, once we saw the things we didn't want it always redefined everything. Can't unsee being alive. Even after yer dead. Was really the reality of reasons why people committed suicide. To unsee life. But there is no way to unsee it. And if those that have tried could come back and tell us they'd beg us to not give it a go. Cause the infinite sight of life in the haunted darkness of death is absolutely excruciating. Every time there's a whisper in the wind that systematically sneaks in through creaks in walls and caverns in floorboards when we think we are all alone at home, every time a door closes under its own weight, every time a hand brushes hair on the nape of neck though there's no flesh and blood near enough; it's the dead trying tirelessly to tell the tale truth tempts from lies about the things we've seen. And there's something, I glanced at Atalanta while breathing in deeply the dust and dirt kicked up by wheel and hoof, coughing a bit from earth in lungs, something here that doesn't want to be seen. Something in the way the wind moves, mimics true love dried out from years of upkeep, pretending at desire but if you taste it just right you know its body language says 'leave,’ it's time to go. The wind, like so much else, often only a vehicle for words the speakers can't or won't say themselves. I wanted to see. Came a long way to see. More ambitious men would suggest such a thing as their legacy: mapping out the last of the ancient spaces on this planet, but I never had much need for these types of men and their ambitions. I pretended, like the mimicking wind, in order to see what I knew was specifically being hidden from me for all the years of my life so far, and most likely since long before that. Secrets held even before god said let there be light, for each of us. We are all billions of universes waiting to be illuminated one by one. And of course none of us are born only once, but over and over again, constantly replacing ourselves with new sight, and new secrets.

The sun shines down, through blackened clouds from burnt fears and recycled hopes/dreams/desires. Heats me like the world continually spinning. Spinning. We stumble forward through the fog, jagged edges of lives shattered cover the ground under our bloodied scabbed feet. Step after step after all that time and pain the sun shining down calls to us, so close, few more ste...... cries from the world shift that blood stained blackened mass we call existence and blot out the shine in front. There'll be another ray breaking through, and till then? We soldier on digging bits and pieces of the world out of our torn and tattered flesh and call it our lives. The dreams of bleeding feet kept me company when eyes drifted to sleep under the gently aggressive bumblings of the carriage over the path of bodies that remembered before us. Dreams of sunshine. And clouds on fire. And bodies littering the roads. If all roads lead to nowhere; how do we get somewhere? Or, more importantly, where is somewhere?

Like lost travelers, we carry on, with absolute, unshakable certainty, that we not only know where we are headed but also how to get there. I was tired of certainty.

Atalanta bumped into my shoulder as the wheels nearly bucked us off the wooden bench, 'eaasy,’ Willard lullabied soothingly out to the beasts that pulled us along.

‘How long was I sleeping,’ words strung together through yawns.

'About a day,’ Atalanta casually responded, forced disinterest spilling over the edge of her pinker than I remembered lips.

I laughed.

She didn't.

'Funny.’ She still didn't laugh, didn't respond, only shrugged the shoulders of her mirrored self in her head. 'Yer,’ I looked down at my watch, voice confusingly trailing off into the woods, 'serious.’ All we ever have of self is a mirror image in an imagination who's been paid by god or the devil or both to pretend to represent what electrical synapses think we are. There's holes in this, more than countable, our existence being only an idea in our (yours & mine) heads, and more than likely enough falls through that it's difficult to claim the reflection is anywhere near complete. A lost day was hardly even noticeable. 'This island isn't big enough for me to have slept a whole day. Have we been traveling in circles?!’ There was an irritation in my voice that I’d blame on fear if prompted to explain myself.

'All movement is in circles,’ Atalanta looked at me as though explaining nostalgia to a child, I could hear Willard's grunts of agreement from his position behind her.

There was a moment, where I was trying to discern what was real, that I tumbled into, as we all do; it wasn't the first time, but would be the last. Maybe they were fucking with me. I dozed off. And they decided to have a bit of fun.

But they didn't.

My watch had stopped. I couldn't tell how I knew this meant reality deserved to be trusted. It just did. Time had been controlled as only nature can do. The unseen controller of all our infallible numbers. Numbers failed, to meet our expectations, all the time, we simply didn't notice, too obscured by our own flaws to see through most the time. That was important too though. Seeing those flaws. Our consciousness a mixture of both our strengths and flaws, whether aware or not.

'How? … how did I sleep for a whole day?’

'Time,’ came Willard’s voice without looking over shoulder to address us, as though speaking a general truth for all to hear, 'can never be trusted, especially in this place,’ because after all, eyes aren't needed for speech.

Though we see language all the time. We may see more in language than hear. And it made me wonder how blind people hear.

A great, grand, ball. Expensive suits and dresses. They billowed out and into each other. Embracing each others embroidered money instead of each others self. Society in general. And we wonder why we are so poorly to each other.

They danced and swirled like beautiful, retarded, swans. And when they sat, to talk, their hands felt moistly at their faces, blank