PLEISTOCENE - The Legend of Parakos

“I don’t get it. I’ve been up this road here a hundred times with Fa–with my uncle, Kaetus. We never went this way before,” A rock is slammed into gravelly scatter.
“Well. It’s a big canyon.”
“No but, I mean . . . it’s, it’s . . . new. I know this place. This wasn’t here yesterday. How can that be?”
“You’re having dreams.”
“I think it’s the Elvanelan.”
“What! That’s a tale the really old ones tell,” his laughter loudly echoes.
“They say they can manifest things. They say they can travel through air. Without a body,” the younger boy gamely replies, despite being afraid of more laughter.
“Who’s they?”
“My tutor says they exist. He knows a lot. . . .”

“In a clearing within the trees, a small, solitary aged-log structure seems part of the landscape. A youngish-looking man, an elusive Elvan, sits on the ground, still as the fossilized dino-saur bones back down the hill. His legs are crossed, his eyes closed, palms rest on his thighs. His intaken breath and its release only breaks the silence once. He doesn’t seem to need to breathe much. . . .

Avis holds out a magnesium block and knife and he seems puzzled, then suspiciously curious. He looks at Paragon, then into his own mind, trying to figure out his instructor. Despite what his rock-hound friend said yesterday, Avis suspects Paragon isn’t just an ordinary tutor. . . .

Kaetus, Avis’ uncle and father-figure for as long as he can remember, suddenly turns in his sleep upon his chair, Avis is dis-tracted, the china on the heavy tray slides just enough, throwing off Avis’ balancing act. His shocked face watches as the breakable mixture keeps sliding toward certain crash. Kaetus’ eyes fly open at Avis’ loud exclamation of disaster and helpless-ness.
But in a moment of auto-pilot response, Paragon stretches his hands out toward the falling disaster. He steps between Kaetus’ line of sight and the avalanching plates, aware that Kaetus leans sideways to see, reaching with his arms and hands.
The Lazuli, now uncovered, light brightly. Plates and other jumble suddenly reverse course, fly back to Avis’ tray. He almost drops them again as his eyes rivet to Paragon, who keenly realizes his knee-jerk reaction is not quite ordinary in the present company. . . .
. . . Paragon flinches and jerks his hands away. He glances back at Kaetus with a light-hearted smile.
“Whoops.”
Kaetus grabs this time, a focused look into Paragon’s eyes. “No whoops. What did you just do?”

Paragon sees humor isn’t going to get him out of this slip, sighs deeply. . . . “All humans used to be able to do this without the use of such devices . . . .”

Paragon grabs Avis’ waist, who still fights madly to reach Kaetus. The Lazuli light as the very ground they stand upon is swept by a boiling sea. Their Energies sparkle above the wave now engulfing the tallest peaks. Other monuments wink amid the charging deluge, which almost seems mollified as the land sinks and the piers and spires and pinnacles and high science of Atlantaea descend out of sight, out of life, and out of all know-ledge, entombed. . . .

Hoofprints in the sand are pounded by rains, followed by countless grains blown in drying winds until their outlines can be discerned no more. Time blows them into the swirl of never-ending hummocks across the wide sea of desert. . . .

A few short millennia after the fall of Atlantaea, J. M. Keats looks out upon a calm, lazuli-blue Pacific desert of sea. He is saddened as the golden sun rises in mock-hope, showing him a stretch of ocean that is devoid of the teeming fish that his research says once swam here and fed a growing human population upon Earth, now that new territories had been discovered; the Little Ice Age seemed tamed for a time . . . perhaps by the Industrial Revolution? . . . and peoples began turn-ing from world warfare to trade as a more peaceful means of per-suasion, . . . .
Keats hears running footsteps approach over hum of machinery from the stern of the research ship whose deck he stands upon, contemplating his inner, gnawing demons. . . .

. . . Then, a strong bite on his fishing line almost pulled the rod out of Keats’ hands, and the crackling drag noise brought him fully back to his present, but the fish spit out the lure, as the past receded beyond Keats’ conscious awareness, and he continued his dialogue with the lake fish as if nothing intervened, through kneaded brows at the much dimmer light in the sky; and what looked to be drops of rain on the backs of his hands. . . . He shook his head and rose so stiffly from the rock, it felt like he’d slept on its hard surface for hours, but all he recalled were the same, present-day problems flooding back into his mind, not that they left. . . .
“And then there’re all the nutty physicists in the weather project.The weather project. We can’t find a Vortex, if that theory is even correct, maybe there is no central air,” as he liked to call it, “that will be a key to controlling things when Earth goes hay-wire. Maybe it’s humans who are haywire, and the Earth is just doing its own job. We just don’t know what that is– ” . . .

He snugly stowed his gear, turned the scooter around, and as he crested the gravel road, flying toward home through the autumn bunch grasses, a large storm of wings and high-pitched cheeps exploded in all directions: a quail covey surprised at his passage. Keats stopped dead, jolted at the birds’ fright, and he watched the evening sun-tipped feathers as they scattered wildly, every line of his face etched with the clear memory of the inflooding vision he’d seen as he dozed upon the rock and, he thought, just fished.

. . . “I am typing the rest of this transmission into Russian, . . .
I advise you to re-evaluate your relationship with your research team, particularly the funding part of it. I refer to Mr. Whitney in this regard. . . .”

“Parakos! Continental road rage! Does that make it clearer?”
“I’m not really concerned about your bias– ”
“Not concerned!!” Keats yells back. Bias? CAM I confirms a Vortex formation and it’s not in South America! With or without a solid fix on it, we have six months before we could slide to ex-tinction! What in hell do a couple billion goddamn dollars mean anyway! . . . “I still believe there are people, and scientists, that you don’t own! . . . I will go all the way . . . It will reach the public.”

“They’ve found it, Case! . . . They’ve found Atlantis!”