Chapter 4: The Lungs Are Not Home

A Chapter by PA1

(The Lungs)

They never stayed still long.
Stillness meant suffocation.

The Lungs were wanderers, creators, twins born from the same breath but tempered by different winds. Sol and Lune�"brother and sister, left and right�"rarely moved in tandem, yet neither ever strayed far from the other’s shadow.

They were Corpus’s air, its voice, its rhythm, its dreams.
And lately, they had been trying to forget it.

They’d returned, briefly, but not completely. Their bodies were in Corpus, but their spirits still lingered in the heights of Peripheral Ridge, where the wind cut clean and the city’s weight couldn’t reach them.

Back there, things had made sense.

Sol had painted again�"large, chaotic strokes, like trying to exhale something buried in his ribs. Lune had climbed cliffs in silence, filling her lungs with enough sky to pretend they weren’t breaking apart.

But then came the dreams.
First his, then hers.

Not nightmares. Not visions.
Just a tightness.

A waking sense of drowning.
The kind that doesn't come from water, but from everything else.

They now stood in their old studio in the Pulmo District, a loft space with floor-to-ceiling windows and walls covered in sound and color. Sol was kneeling before a canvas he hadn’t touched in weeks. Lune paced, hands trembling.

“You felt it too?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

Sol nodded.

“There’s something… wrong in the air.”

Lune went to the window, cracked it open. The wind carried up the scent of rust and citrus�"smog from the factories mixing with Stomach Market spices. But beneath it was something else. Something thicker.

“Spoiled grief,” she muttered. “Something that should’ve been let out, and wasn’t.”

Sol stood, wiping paint on his shirt. “Liver?”

“He’s gone silent.”

Sol didn’t respond right away. Then: “That’s not silence. That’s collapse.”

For the Lungs, collapse was the worst thing. Not pain. Not fear. Not even death. But stillness. A held breath. A body forgetting how to move.

They had grown used to being taken for granted. No one noticed breath until it stopped. No one appreciated space until it was gone. They were expected to be constant. Reliable. Infinite.

But they weren’t.

They were air.
And air runs out.

They left the studio, descending through the city’s tracheal spiral�"a long stairwell of green glass and brass pipes, slick with condensation. They moved quickly, past lovers whispering against the railings, past commuters with headphones jammed in ears, past murals of ancient storms and painted lungs releasing flocks of birds.

At the base of the spiral, the shadows deepened. The humidity here was thicker�"something in the infrastructure was off.

“Smell that?” Lune asked.

Sol inhaled. “Yeah. That’s bile.”

They looked at each other, then headed deeper into the under-arteries.

They found the Liver’s workshop abandoned. Not hastily�"just… resigned.

There were notes still pinned to the pipes. Tools left mid-process. Half-flushed tanks and blinking warning lights. The main filtration console had cracked, leaking a dark fluid that shimmered with iridescence.

Lune ran her fingers along the smear of it.

“This isn’t just chemical,” she whispered. “There’s emotion in this.”

“Unfiltered.”

Sol crouched by a tank and saw something written in marker along its base. Four words:

I CAN’T DO THIS.

Not a message. A confession. A last breath.

Back in the tunnels, the Lungs walked in silence. It was Lune who finally broke it.

“We can’t run again.”

Sol didn’t answer.

“We always float away,” she continued. “We escape. Paint. Dance. Drift. Pretend it isn’t ours.”

“It was never ours,” Sol said, eyes narrowing. “We’re not the Heart. We don’t carry. We’re not the Brain. We don’t plan. We were meant to move. That’s what breath is.”

“Not just move. Connect.” Lune’s voice cracked. “We breathe into people. We inspire. We animate. We… we keep them alive.”

And in that moment, it landed for both of them.

The silence in the Liver. The tremble in the Heart. The fracturing focus in the Brain. Even the tension simmering under the cobblestones of the Skin District�"

They were all symptoms.

Corpus was struggling to breathe.

They reached the surface as sirens began to wail.

Not loud. Not citywide.

But subtle.

Pitched just below hearing. The kind of alarm that only the Lungs would recognize.

A vacuum forming. A collapse approaching.

And somewhere deep in the body of Corpus, pressure built like a scream behind sealed lips.

Lune turned to Sol. “We need to pull the others in.”

Sol nodded, face grim.

“And if they won’t come?” he asked.

“Then we make them.”

Because if breath failed, the rest would follow.

And there would be no us left in the Anatomy.

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© 2025 PA1

Author's Note

This chapter belongs to the Lungs—ephemeral and necessary, often taken for granted until it’s almost too late. In Corpus, the Lungs represent motion, inspiration, expression—the breath between words and the pause before action.

Sol and Lune have always been escape artists, drifting between art and avoidance, holding space for others but rarely grounding themselves in consequence. But even air has weight when it carries grief, and even breath runs out when no one’s listening.

This chapter is about realization: that connection is not a luxury—it’s a responsibility. The Lungs are beginning to understand that being the breath of a body means being its voice too, especially when that body is failing.

The silence left by the Liver is more than absence. It’s a warning. One that only the Lungs could hear first.

Thank you for inhaling this part of the story.
— Oghogho Akpeli