Somewhere beyond the sound of engines lies a small island near the brim of the sparkling Senrua Ocean. Lhia is a remote world, its sciences unlike our own. The island is surrounded on three sides by a thick mossy crag (dirmeyril) which by its natural function absorbs excess amounts of rain during the wet season and re-emits them as mist during the dry season. The mist from the crag (aim in the Lhiani tongue), travels inland during the span of the dry season (about 125 days) at an extremely slow rate, advancing towards the center of the island 4 feet each day. During the culmination of this season, which is comparatively shorter than the wet season (lasting 674 days), an ancient ritual is enacted involving a single child among the town’s young (the rumo sephian) whom Lhiani claim has been given a special rite from birth.

     Lhiani say that the child was chosen as the tangible host of one of the dirmeyril crag’s thoughts (Lhiani hold the dirmeyril mountain to be the body of the creator). During the final day of the dry season (or crel lescia) the mystical fog of aim converges upon a singular point in the heart of a hollow stone outcropping in the shape of a cone (the rumo simlus) around which Lhia’s grandest city, Opima, has been built. The rumo simlus’ origins are unknown to Lhiani. Some alchemists using special techniques determined the age of the cone, which they claim predates the land itself. It is on this night that the identity of the rumo sephian is exposed.

     Before the sun sets on crel lescia, all of the Opima’s children are smeared with mimosa paste and dressed in fine costumes of thin geode lace. The procession of children are then led to fluskyein an’ gil, a glade straddling the nucleus of Opima, and a gigantic banquet is held in their honor. During the joyous feast, the sparkling children sit elevated above their parents and townsfolk, gobbling their meal upon a gleaming tan table carved with furiously intricate relief scenes illustrating days passed in the same ritual. After the ordeal, an Opima holy man (the renikinbrom) escorts the children, who are followed by their parent’s and then all the other townsfolk, to the rumo simlus, which by this time is the only point in Lhia not enveloped by the mist.

     The entire ritual of crel lescia depends upon the acute knowledge of the Renikinbrom, who in all of his days studies the holy cycles of the aim mist in preparation for the sacred evening’s rhythm. Lhianis claim that before the predestined day when the mist converges upon the center of the island in the Rumo Simlus, any who enter into its nearly opaque bellows disappear with no trace as to their whereabouts. It is then the Renikinbrom’s intrinsic motive memorize the precise motions of the mist, to safeguard any wandering Lhianis from joining it in aerial eternity. He is a much a scientist as a shaman. His knowledge of the aim’s centripetal migration must also be so precise that the conclusion of the feast on the night of crel lescia should be synchronized perfectly with the white clouds spectral entrance. If all his discipline’s are executed correctly, then the moment the Opima children are escorted away from their changing rooms before the banquet, the aim will envelop the room they left empty. The table they left bare from their feast moments before will be consumed as the mysterious haze hugs at the wake of their heels. Any breech in the continuum of the procession may result in a disappearance no Lhiani is willing to perchance.

    Once they reach the base of the rumo simlus, the adults hold hands and form a series of concentric circles around the ancient growth, glimpsing for the last time the one chosen anonymous among the faces of their brightest youth. The renikinbrom trudges laterally across the rank of silent children pressed against the gaunt circular stone of the rumo simlus, stopping at each one to administer a small prayer: “Di formelit sig te dearomoih aim rumo” or “The fleeing mist thought you into being only to remember you and return.” With a small brush he draws the darcoi ginjea (the Lhiani symbol for eternity) on their forehead using noj, a thick white adhesive paste extracted from the pulp of the kanfruome plant which grows at the summit of Aim’s crag.

    The Lhiani are then led by the Renikinbrom into the aqiupea, a polytonal chant as ancient as the soil of Lhia itself. The children enter into the rumo simlus by a small crevice in the approximate shape of a 14 year old boy. By this time the mist is almost licking the backs of the tone entranced Lhiani in their cyclical chain. It is now the mood point of this ethereal crisis, fate charged either to ignore or rescue its own nervous body.

     What happens at this point is vague and beyond explanation for any outside observer. The children inside however have spoken of their experiences. They say that as they enter the Rumo Simlus a deafening silence instantaneously drowns out the distant sound of chanting, that the air itself seems to fall into a deep sleep. They are drawn into a noiseless blanket that cannot be heard but only felt. Their hearts become inaudible and stillness itself retreats into nothingness, as though they could no longer hear even silence. The children describe a feeling like thin warm wetness on their skin as they enter the simlus, and reaching into the air to feel for the appropriate walls of the cone their fingers and arms find no such confines. They instead are met by an impossible sensation on their skin, like thousands of airy fingers gripping and enhancing the direction of their motion. One boy said he had waved his arm to feel for a wall and the unseen force increased his simple exertion so greatly that he spun round four or five times before being able to bring his arm back to rest at his side. Some children remain close and still in tight huddled masses of assumed security, however a few of the more ambitious ones sprout in their own direction and run for what they say feels like hours in search of a wall that they should have encountered almost immediately (the Rumo Simlus is 15 feet in diameter from the outside).

     The interior of the the Rumo is pitch black at first, they say. However as the moments pass their surroundings are subtly illumined in instantaneous flashes of brilliant light that course from a source seemingly miles in the distance. The fragmented pulses of light, which the children during each crel lescia have numbered as nine in total, reveal a land that spans as far as the eye can perceive in all directions. The children explain the landscape during the first pulse as being a vast plain of tall grass filled with flowers and bushes unlike any they had ever seen or imagined; with unusual proportions that defy gravity, snarling transparent stems, metallic hued oblong nettles and clusters of dew dripping fruits that appease the eye more than any fruit they had known could appease the tongue. Receding along the horizon the plain meets the brim of a thick wood filled with bulbous effervescent tree-like growths that reach halfway to the sky. Otherwise, no signs of life present them self, though the children describe the the land as brimming with a secret motion. Mouths and eyes innumerable seem delicately entombed behind these organic obstructions, aching to expose their intelligences to the young visitors. Despite the overwhelming grace and magnetism of this pastoral haven, the children have said that their first impulse upon glimpsing the enchanted glade was to look in the direction from which the light pulse had emanated, almost as though the light invoked a reflex in their being to look towards its source without the thought of looking ever having taken place.

     In the perfect center of the horizon, the source of the light, is a lone structure which straddles the heavens. Barely a pinpoint in the distance, its details and characteristics are vague and undefined to the observant eye: some have described its appearance as like some colossal skeleton laying collapsed among centuries of thick undergrowth, crude organic passages and cursive sky kissing ligaments intersecting the thicker sections in staggering diagonal angles, the whole subtly obscured behind a stand of shimmering gases. The structure, and the land that it seems to breed are a complex force whose origins constantly redefine the mystery of the Rumo Simlus.

    The next 8 successive pulses of light reveal the same landscape, though in each spectral growth the land is shrouded in a different season then before (winter, spring, summer and autumn). Each vision lasts but a few moments, as though time itself is moving through all the progressions of aging and rebirth between them. The first pulse reveals not only the ancestral hearth of AIM, but also the identity of the Rumo Sephian.

    In the duration of the phantasmagoric glimpses, none of the children claim to be able to see each other, or even themselves, glancing about frantically in an effort to assure their own existence. They can, however, see the one among them chosen, the unanswered prince, the prodigal beacon of divine memory, the ideaflesh. The Rumo Sephian walks among the vanished spectators, his clothing falling at first behind as tatters, his features and flesh contorting as though made tender by some unspeakable wind. He walks forward, his frame aging in the hyper-real chamber of blessings. With each pulse of light, the children say that their once familiar initiate grows older, more robust, somehow more vital, and alas more distant. All the while, his gait draws him onward in a casual pace, as though the cells in his body were automated to this motion, living out a story that they were helpless to rewrite.

    During the ninth pulse, the children have lost their view of the Rumo Sephian, and are met by a peculiar alteration in the land before them. A city, a microcosm brimming with all the elemental dances of being, laid out before them in dazzling array. See-through palaces billowing like leaves at the slightest breeze, cauldrons of bubbling enzymes hidden in the labyrinthine niches of a giant oak, shooting bursts of colorful smoke that coalesce into symbols and faces before their furtive onlookers. Gem laden avenues punctured by pillars of water cascading from the skies like liquid lightning. Motley congregations where singing throngs encircle their sick loved ones and heal them with sacred songs, their voices made medicinal by love. Fields of stone sculpted meticulously to mimic the surface of a raging river, as though medusa could work her magic upon the elements here. Ghosts of the future and past, embracing the living among calico alleys. And the city, towering yet humble, meager yet magnificent, its only function to exist as a metaphor for breath: incessant, fluctuating, nourishing. The children see all this with eyes mummified by tears. Then, in a blink, it is gone. Darkness descends again, and the sound of chanting outside penetrates the cone. They follow the sound back to the entrance. The mist has disappeared, and only the story remains to be told.