By Rune Davino-Collins
Elion: you dream of a great city. It stands between a range of hills and a basin full of aspens.
You walk through the city’s streets, noticing fruit trees on all sides of you, gardens of moss and herbs and fruits hanging in mats and from vine growing down from the walls of the buildings. And you feel this strange manipulation of scale as you continue to walk through the city. You feel tiny as you notice outside the city walls these blades of grass the size of enormous tree trunks, blocking the sunlight briefly as they cross between you and Chaat’s brilliance. And you enter a building, a great temple library. It’s full to the brim with holy texts and lit by magical lanterns floating above desks with your fellow holy men reading and debating theology in hushed voices. The stairs go down into the depths of the earth, and you enter this maze of tunnels filled with books. The walls smell pleasant but musty, and the light dims further and further, and you find yourself relying on the smell. You want nothing more than to find a particular book. As you’re hunting for it, you find it difficult to remember the title of the text. This bothers you immensely. Finally, in a bolt of recollection, it comes to you – but in that instant, a shadowy figure steps out of the darkness, puts their hand over your mouth, and slits your throat. You wake up sweating.
Rune Davino-Collins (they/them) is a senior at Purchase College, studying cultural anthropology. They are interested in posthumanism, becomings, and fictive worlds. Rune’s biggest passions lie in the creation of lived-in, breathing fictional worlds in the styles of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin, drawing further inspiration from conceptual frameworks of posthuman anthropology, semiotics, and affect theory. In their spare time, they study martial arts, play violin and guitar, fold origami, and play Dungeons & Dragons with their friends.
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