We gather in the void, beneath the distance, immersed together in the swallowing dark. Our medium is calm above the trench. We can feel weather moving across the upper boundary, pressure traveling downward through the dark in long, diminishing signatures.
We begin with the voice in the low breath.
One holds it first.
Then four.
Then twelve.
Then all.
Our medium thickens around us as the first resonance passes through our bodies and returns altered. We receive it through the long chambers, through bone, and then through the soft architecture surrounding the mind.
This is our register, the one we practice from birth.
As the structure within alters, the passage begins to open, and we hold until it remembers its shape.
The second opening is higher and carries sorrow. The sensation of singular occupation, an existence to lament in its necessity. It is the ache of containment.
The young experience sorrow more severely.
They have not yet learned to leave.
The register shifts and the liquid flows, reorganizing into the next configuration.
Currents that had been moving independently discover one another in exquisite couplings. Smaller life ceases movement as sediment rises from the floor and hangs motionless around us.
Our hearts slow as the incarnation becomes larger than each of us alone.
We breathe together and descend in a static pattern.
There is a depth beneath depth which cannot be reached by traveling. We have attempted to explain this to the young, but language performs poorly here. They understand only after their first drowning.
The third opening is more difficult.
Some tremble when it arrives.
One of the young loses coherence and we gather around her immediately, adding ourselves to the edges of her externalization until she becomes plural again.
She is frightened.
We remember being frightened, and so we give this memory to her. To calm her.
The medium now joins us, becoming something within and without.
Distance loosens, and the trench extends in several directions that were not present before.
We can feel the others now.
Those already in flight.
There are eleven tonight, although eleven is not the correct number. It is merely how many manifestations remain distinguishable.
One is passing above.
One is passing beneath.
One is moving through a place for which above and beneath are the same direction.
Three are very far away.
Two have not yet happened.
We are preparing another.
We sing with greater breath, and reality thickens as we begin where nothing is.
At first we are without dimension, until we develop internal coherence, then external. As it has always been.
We are careful about this stage. Inside and outside have a tendency to become permanent if allowed to settle.
We open, as location becomes fluid, and passes through us.
We have no means, only intention.
We are the pilot.
Each and all of us, as well as those who drowned before us.
With several breaths, we rise, and far above, the surface approaches, then breaks.
The medium of our shell does not fall because the agreement has shifted.
The space above grants us permission, and we become flight.
Ascension comes easily now, and we feel the upper darkness open around us.
The luminous points surround us, and we remember them, although none among us have ever seen them.
One of the young begins to understand now.
Her recognition enters the chorus and becomes ours instantly.
She has discovered why the oldest voices call us their children.
We are born from the ones left below and immediately contain all of who we are.
We turn toward something impossibly distant.
We allow distance to remain for a moment.
It is beautiful—
Then we remove it.
The points bend, and the medium sings through forty-two bodies in the deep.
And somewhere beyond everything those bodies have ever known,
we arrive.
© 2025 Joel L. All rights reserved.
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Thanks for reading. - Joel L.
The Drift Faction Index- Available Here
Echo Rift Season One Index - All Episodes Available Here
Liminal Salvage Index - Available Here
