Territories
Most of the time, the islands of the volcanic archipelago in which the characters of this story move remain almost bare and deserted. They seem abandoned to stone, salt, and wind. Between the cooled lava flows, the blackened volcanic slopes barely carry a few dry grasses clinging to the cracks of the basalt. The ravines remain silent for long stretches of time. Even the reefs appear slowed beneath the transparent waters, as if life were holding itself back in the invisible depths of the world. The blackbird sings less. Phantom wolves cross immense expanses without leaving any trace other than a few scents scattered in the cold air. Flowers almost entirely disappear from the rock burned by the sun and eruptions. And yet the Moon Child continues to walk among these austere lands without ever believing them dead. For he knows, without being able to explain it, that the archipelago, at times, awakens. There are rare moments when something shifts in the slowness of the sky, the sea winds, the volcanic depths, or the invisible currents crossing the islands. Then, almost suddenly, the territories begin again to unfold together. Songs return to the morning air. Forest scents thicken. Flowers emerge among the black stones. Forests begin to grow very quickly… insects reappear as if coming out of the rock itself. The reefs fill with movement and living glimmers. Nothing in this metamorphosis seems entirely explainable. Even the animals seem to sense it before it fully occurs. The entire archipelago then enters a kind of silent expansion, comparable to those deserts which, on certain exceptional mornings after long-awaited rains, suddenly cover themselves with flowers, as if the earth had secretly preserved within itself, through years of drought, the intact memory of a world ready to be reborn.
At daybreak, the territories of the archipelago never remain entirely separate. They touch, cross through one another, and continually modify one another, like marine currents that mingle beneath the surface without ever completely losing their own direction.
The blackbird, perched on dead branches, sings from the volcanic heights. Its acoustic territory descends into the ravines where flowers that appeared at dawn have opened. The song acts upon them in an indirect yet real way. Insects drawn to the corollas sometimes suspend their flight for a moment when certain notes suddenly cross the cold morning air. The acoustic territory of the blackbird then alters the invisible trajectories that already connect flowers to their pollinators. The air becomes the place where several worlds intersect.
Floral scents slowly rise along the cliffs warmed by the first light. They reach the zones where the blackbird sometimes descends to search for insects beneath damp moss. Thus, the territory of the flower attracts the very beings that sustain the territorial song of the bird.
The flower opens trajectories.
The blackbird inhabits them.
Lower still, forest winds carry the scent of wolves into volcanic clearings where certain flowers grow among the black stones. Pollinators sense these presences. Some insects temporarily avoid areas where animal odors become too strong. Others, on the contrary, find there organic matter that attracts certain larvae.
Even while immobile, the flower thus lives within a world crossed by the boundaries of the wolf.
And the wolf itself depends on it indirectly.
For the deer descending toward the flowering heights follow the zones where certain more tender plants grow after volcanic rains. The pack then adjusts its movements. Thus, far within the humid forest, the silent paths of the wolves sometimes respond to the opening of a single flower among the basalt rocks.
Under the sea as well, territories communicate.
The volcanic cliffs where the blackbird sings plunge directly into the reefs where territorial fish live. Rains carry into the ocean mineral dust and seeds from the heights. Some of these materials nourish the shallow waters where algae develop, defended by the small fish of the reefs.
The volcano connects everything.
The same stones nourish the flowers, support the forests, and plunge into the marine depths where fish move among black corals. The entire archipelago forms a single substance slowly differentiated into multiple territories.
And the Moon Child moves through all this.
When he walks on the heights among flowers opened in the morning light, insects often continue to move around him. He does not interrupt their invisible paths. The blackbird continues its song even as he passes beneath twisted trees. In the forest, wolves sometimes slightly alter their trajectories to avoid him, yet without considering him a true intrusion.
His own territory has a strange characteristic: it never replaces that of others.
It acts rather as a zone of passage between them.
When he sits near the cliffs open to the sea, he hears at once the blackbird’s song behind him, the forest breaths descending from the heights, the submarine rumblings striking volcanic tunnels, the insects circling around flowers warmed by the rising sun.
And within his silence, these territories remain linked.
For human language often tends to separate: forest, sea, animal, rock, flower, sky. Each word fixes a sharper boundary between things. The Moon Child, however, inhabits a world where boundaries remain porous.
Thus, when he looks at a flower swaying in the salty wind of the cliffs, he does not see only a flower. He also perceives the insects it attracts, the birds that follow those insects, the marine currents carrying moisture to the petals, the volcanic dust nourishing the roots, the wolves crossing higher forests dependent on the same rains.
Each territory overflows into the others.
The blackbird’s song passes through the air of the flowers.
The wolf’s scents descend toward the marine ravines.
The movements of the reefs answer the volcanic stones of the heights.
The insects connect the flowers to the sky.
The roots plunge toward the ancient fire beneath the island.
And the Moon Child moves among these invisible extensions as if he were circulating within a single vast organism slowly breathing between sea, rock, living beings, and silence.
