The Edge of Dreams / The Neoplatonic Pirate - Short Story about Love

A Very Short Story about Love

The Edge of Dreams or The Neoplatonic Pirate

The great Spanish galleon of lost dreams slid along the razorblade horizon between hope and hopelessness. Its great oars lapped deep into the birthing foam of love and fate, seeking to sweep the great ship onto the inexorable cresting of an eternal dawn. Tattered with whispers of relinquishment, the sails genuflected over lustrous decks of beaten bronze and the burnished beauty of the ship’s forgotten youth swayed beneath the captain’s unshod feet.

Once a radiant blond, his now grey and oiled locks draped in cobwebbed complacency over time-worn shoulders. The slow rhythm of the rowers’ drum was his last recourse to belief in the indefatigable strength of his heart. His blood-red captain’s coat, long since faded from the spray of sea-salted wounds, flattered fitfully in the wind sighing in from the great beyond. He, his forlorn men and the elegant ghosts of lovelorn damsels whose names he could no longer recall, trod the deck's ecliptic as the ship coursed the waves towards a predestined horizon.

The captain lifted his slender ivory spyglass and placed it to his one remaining eye, a blind and bale orb of otherwise useless flesh, pointing it directly at the sun hanging off the starboard bow. It was the only thing that remained to light his world, the one last glimmer of light focused and distilled, which when magnified a thousand times could penetrate his veil of darkness. He could feel the lay lines of heaven shifting deep in his bones, his ship had finally carried him beyond the bounds of the frothing sea. After a lifetime of searching for a vision lost, he could feel the celestial configuration sliding into place. He raised a well-worn hourglass to his ear and listened to the last granule of sanguine sand extinguish time.

Over it all was the roaring silence of the ends of the earth. Though lost to his sight, he could still sense it; the crystalline waterfall of the sea rushing over the cusp of the world’s celestial chalice into the vastness of eternity. He remembered how, long before purgatory’s opaque embrace, his men had lowered him from the bow over the edge of the world to see the birthing of the cosmos, to witness the essence of the sea freeze into silver suns and float off to fill the void of the heavens. There, dangling in that luminous dark, he had seen the harbinger of her coming: a single radiant strand wavering in the eternal black beyond the cradle of stars.

It was in that moment of fading memory, as if summoned from the past, that she reared from the abyss beyond the bounds of the earth to obscure the heavens. It was her, the leviathan of love herself, wreathed in rapture and raging flame. Her tresses flailed in the blue, setting fire to the azure sky, an image of unimaginable resplendence. And she loomed ever larger, her beauty expanding to efface the stars and outshine the sun; she was radiant and terrible, possessed of an implausible perfection promising inexplicable fulfilment. His men cried out and covered their eyes, fell to their knees and turned away; but the captain stood fast, for his vision had returned to bear witness to Love.

Her eyes, harvest moons lidded with heavy dreams in a dawning sky, slowly yielded to wakefulness. They opened with gilded longing, their brilliance birthing the aureate apocalypse his heart had long foretold. And she looked down upon him in his torn and faded vestments of former glory donned in her honour nigh eighty years ago. Her sigh moved upon the face of the waters, drowning out the dream of death, and the liquid gold of her blazing eyes ignited in him an excruciating bliss of being.

The captain’s gnarled fingers, palsied with age and endless waiting, clutched to his breast. His ragged nails broke the skin and delved into the depths of the hallowed halls where his longing heart had long laid hidden. He found it there, beating and beautiful in his breast, and relished the ecstatic alchemy as he loosed it from its moorings, knowing that it – if not he – would sail forever with her in beauty.

Her being obliterated the horizon, all sound, all being. She lifted with great tenderness the mariner's heart from his supplicating hands and it began to glow with the same radiance of which she herself was made. She lifted it, a mortal man’s monument of love, and set it in her celestial crown with golden threads of finest fire.

He heard her then as she sighed with infinite satisfaction; he felt her breath, a lick of passion hotter than the crucible of ten thousand suns as it branded the firmament of his ancient sailor's soul. Joy resplendent gushed from the wound of his sacrifice, the dangling charm of his lost heart tolling with triumph at his final breath. The great galleon and its crew slipped over the horizon, sliding from the edge of dreams to become a bronze star tumbling into eternal silence.

A sweet coy smile graced Love's radiant vision as the ruby jewel of his heart pulsed in its new moorings. And softly, so softly, it began to sing.

Shot with a golden arrow,

Cupid Zero

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The Edge of Dreams / The Neoplatonic Pirate (c) Cupid Zero 2017
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Tags: fiction, love, writing, creative, fantasy, Neoplatonism, pirate, dreams
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