A short piece of writing that I completed for the Beyond the Spectrum Writing Group organised by Writing East Midlands:
The stone is smooth and round and fits in the palm of your hand. Its surface is flecked with silver flashes that spark when the light hits them as the stone is turned. Tiny black lines intersperse these. The stone feels warm and substantial and strangely familiar. A faint salt smell echoes from its surface, like the breath of the sea from where it came.
The spirit living in the stone was a God, an old God, of a mountain, revered by tribes many millennia ago when he and his stone were still joined to/in/with the power and constancy of the rock from whence they came. The mountain is now long gone, as is the memory of him in the minds of man. Every so often though, the spirit of this long-forgotten God and his stone is cast onto the seashore and the memory, of a memory, of a memory of them, reverberates in the mind of the person who finds it.
The God is the stone, and the stone is the God. They are indistinguishable from one another. As the stone is diminished, so the spirit forgets. As the water wears him away, so he joins his kin in the sea, his God brethren who once held sway over man in the many corners of the earth, before they tamed the earth they revered. When hot lava tears were cried over the land, causing the death of so many of their followers.
The stone is dressed in memories; those of the God and the humans who touch him and his stone. Through them and with him they join, momentarily, and remember the boundless glory of the rock that thrust up into the sky, tall and unconquerable, and even from the before time, when the reptiles walked the earth and rode the air. Even the Gods at the zenith of their might struggle to remember this time, from before, when they were strange and liminal between the space of mineral and divine consciousness.
So the stone and the God are rocked gently by the currents of the sea, moving and swirling with the water, faintly aware of the growth of humans across the face of the earth whilst they sleep in their watery cradle on the ocean floor.
Every so often, he is found, and he remembers…do you remember? Have you founds him?
Hold him to your heart, hold him to your ear. Hear through the sound of the waves to the silence beyond. The silence of the rock. The infinity of the sand and water that was once a mountain which you can pour through your fingertips in a million tiny grains. The rock becomes the limitless sand. Humans become the limitless teem. We all return to the earth, to the rock, in the end. We all become one with the God of the Mountain. We all remember, just like the stone that is smooth and round and fits in the palm of your hand.
