Costas Komborozos

Free Greece Echoed Costas Komborozos

The darkness before dawn recedes, letting the broken and bloodied warrior on the battlefield shut his eyes and will the battlefield away. The warrior, Anastiades, saw another fallen warrior reaching out to him. His vision was blurred and he saw, or thought he saw. Achilles looking at him with his hand partially raised toward the sky. But then he saw Leonidas, whose hand reached toward him. Now, he sees everything dissolve into a shimmering red, orange, and golden sea. But then the tide moves, and the battlefield returns and paralyzes him once more. He lays on the bloodied soil again, watching the dusk become night. Achilles' lifeless body appears, but then Anastiades sees Leonidas laying dead. His eyes slowly become shut. An indifferent universe persists all around him. The vast world trudges on. The bruised moon gazes down on a near-apocalyptic dark. A sliver of moonlight kisses his eye, which is sealed by a deep slumber. Anastiades' eyelids flutter slightly and are on the verge of bursting open. But then Anastiades finds himself in a tumultuous dream. Oceans collide before him. I am here, he tells himself. I am at the aeon tide's beginning. Then the tide shifts, and Anastiades glimpses a distant shore in which noon and midnight converge. Anastiades feels that he can see what lies beyond this shore. He feels that he is at one with the tide's future. I am reborn, he tells himself. But, as he is about to awaken, he feels himself falling into something deeper than the blackness of unencumbered sleep. Aeon is layered upon aeon. An ocean screams with the steady bone-crunching sound of feet marching across endless battlefields. War cries scatter and reflect like dazzling white snow in a child's eyes. Then the cries become fully arrayed and aligned with the sound of myriad horses galloping furiously deep into the night. A bloodied tide becomes bright blue, and freedom finally reaches across a void. Centuries intersperse. The tide begins to roar.