Shattered Fate

I have learned... I have learned the difference between hard and heart, 'twixt love and tolerance and knowledge and truth. There, the thinker such as I traces rivers in the falling leaves but when I come around again I find that there is something else here that were I never so bold would I find hope in this hopeless endeavor. Is there tragedy? Is there irony? Finding in this difficulty the self-discipline to remove myself. Would that I could give up, for I feel no inspiration. This is another pattern that I trace, meaningless, like turning pages or a burning book. Is there hope? Is there a coming courage? I can taste it, I can feel it, moving slowly, like a sound source on the tip of my tongue, a bird in the hollow of my ear, a lie in the folds of my heart. Is there hunger here? Are we free? Well, does the sun not set? The tides not erode the land? The warmth of holy hearts grow cold?

We have, and they have not. Or at least so we would tell ourselves. But are they so truly removed; form us? And I can feel my fingers twist, my eyelids waver, my burning orbs smolder, my hopes rise, my wisdom wither before it blooms, my courage falter before it stands, my hope shimmer before it answers the search for that which is most important.

How much is aetoras a symbol and how much a place? Is that blasphemy to ask such a question? I don't know the answer, and perhaps never will I, but I know that if it is blasphemy, it is blindness not to, and better a damned blasphemer than a blind sojourner in hope of a truth that does not exist.

Does it matter whether we can find aetoras at the end of a road? Is there so much difference between a step of the body and a step of the soul? So great a space between the leg and the heart?

Never.

Aetoras is all the greater because were I never to walk its streets I could yet have been there. Were I never to know its soul-soothing sights my eyes could behold its glory. My delicate, paper-thin skin could even still, on my deathbed, suffer the gentle breezes of my actual homeland. And yet I can come from that distant place having never been there. And this is its greatness, that all Es'mensis know this place from the moment of conception if not earlier. That there is a longing, neither transitory nor permanent that will return us there at a moment of strength or weakness. This is my people's blessing and my people's curse, that transmutes us into seekers of righteousness but enemies of the world. So much so that, given the chance, we would break it in an instant. Shake it to its cornerstone, bare its filthy ambitions, its receding, bloody tides, its faithless bowels and empty secret palaces.

Where is hope? It is in this place but not of it, an incident of location but not a representative of the same.