The Orrery of Salted Veins

Somewhere between the algal bloom of shattered geometry and the cathedral of liquefied quartz, a procession of chromatic carrion shuffled—beaked effigies draped in filaments of ultraviolet tinsel, their sockets brimming with radium milk. Overhead, the sky blistered open like a neglected fruit, exhaling a confetti of polyhedral spores that spun in slow centrifuge, orbiting nothing, heralding no one.

A pinecone the size of a funeral barge gnawed its way through the treetop’s cortex, weeping bitumen sap from apertures shaped like forgotten alphabets. Beneath it, a topiary spiral of green-glass cilia whispered secrets of the subcutaneous cosmos, transmitting backward through time on frequencies only the deaf could hear.

The river ran counterclockwise, its banks tessellated with the mandibles of extinct instruments. Steam curled in plasmic skeins from the surface, tasting of scorched persimmon and phonograph dust. Something with twelve elbows sifted through the sediment, extracting morsels of oxidized parchment, gnawing the margins for marginalia.

A fox-faced homunculus, stitched from the pelts of nocturnal equations, blinked twice before unscrewing its snout and ladling out a broth of fossilized echoes. Nearby, an hourglass with vertebrae for spindles and mucus for sand listed sideways, leaking minutes that congealed into chitinous masks along the cobblestones.

And still the tree grew, splitting the firmament into fevered slices—each branch a corridor, each leaf an oubliette. In its hollow, a congregation of orphaned diodes hummed psalms in extinct dialects, their glow feeding the cathedral’s pulsing dome.

The sky above? Boiling velvet, stitched with the tendons of untranslatable beasts.

The ground below? A treacle of shattered zodiacs, stuttering out false prophecies to no audience at all.

And in the middle—where everything slid sideways, where the ink bled uphill—stood the obelisk:

Carved from black honey and the molars of saints,

Inscribed with the ligatures of sleep paralysis,

Pointing nowhere,

Forever.