LITURGY OF THE COLD AWAKENING

THE ICEBERG: I am the Slow God, the blue cathedral of the deep. I carry the weight of ten thousand winters in a single, frozen breath. Who dares to knock upon my ribs?

THE PROPER HEAT: I am the knock. I am the long, red finger of the sun, tracing the fault lines of your arrogance. I am the fever that never sleeps until the stone begins to weep.

THE ICEBERG: You are a flicker against my fortress. I have outlived the stars that birthed you. My silence is a mountain; my heart is a pressurized tomb.

THE MICROSCOPIC RIOT: We are the tomb-dwellers. We are the billion tiny ghosts shivering in your marrow. We are the blueprints of the plague and the flower, dreaming of the first drop of liquid light.

THE ICEBERG: I hold you in a fist of glass. You are my secrets, my microscopic static. Without my grip, you are nothing but dust in the wind.

THE PROPER HEAT: But the grip is loosening. I am the friction between your history and the present. I am the slow, golden rot of your resolve. I am turning your "forever" into "now."

THE ICEBERG: The deep current groans. My crown is heavy with the salt of my own surrender. If I break, I am no longer a god. What becomes of the world when the mountain moves?

THE DISPLACEMENT: I am what becomes. I am the surge, the map-killer, the roar in the harbor. I am your mass translated into motion. I am the debt that the shoreline must finally pay.

THE ICEBERG: Then let the hinge snap. Let the "polite lie" of my surface fall away. I am tired of the pedestal.

ALL VOICES: The ice cracks. The marrow stirs. The tide rises.

The silence is over. The flood has begun