Tuesday, June 29, 2010

You who have come so far, who have traded valor for humility, humility for righteousness, righteousness for freedom, gird for war. At long last the Iaerae have grown as tired of their dominion as we of their tyranny.

We are free, and all that remains is a choice: to go or to stay.

Remaining here will be easy. This city of tribulation has been our home for phenomena. It is beautiful. Our eyes know nothing else. Our feet know nothing else. Our broken backs know nothing else.

But our hearts...

We can know aetoras having never been there. We can know freedom having never tasted it, grace having never received it. We can know truth, having never heard it.

This is the truth, that the Iaerae offer greatness. They offer the nobility of ages, the dominion of men. They offer majesty, beauty. But before everything else, they offer ease. 

I offer you nothing but these things: blood, sweat, and toil. The long search. Water that will fall from your eyes, water that will flood your homes and drown your hearts. A back-breaking. The raising of new cities with our empty hands. A hero, who died. An enemy victorious.

I can give you no answers, only truth.

Choose wisely, children of aetoras.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

I have seen things this day that my conscience could not countenance. In a spasm of iron, my numinous search has become petty. What do I know of these other creations, above whom I tread?

I have seen a man dying - wrecked with sores, wretched in timelessness of despair, begging mercy, from a stranger. From me. His breath, fetid like my hubris; his defeat, as total as my ignorance. I couldn't stand to see him, and so I looked away. He still lived. And no matter my guilt I did not bend down. He was full of death, and the vermin poured forth from his wounds; his face was skeletal and bloated, waxy and peeling.

What can I know of the suffering of age? The failure of the corpus, the blotting-paper skin, the tunnels of the parasites, the weeping blisters and smeared vision. The greatest suffering I have known, and it was not my own. Who but I has known only what was chosen freely? I lifted it up from the road, summoned almost. If I did not create it I embraced it. And when my hair fell out and I walked a continent it was my doing. It was the price I paid for my quest and at any time I could have given up. Would that he had the same.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Time has lain low her gracious discovery, burned out the fire that lit beneath her skin when she traveled in search of aetoras.

Sign of Signs

Heartless and in terror, time passes, with calamitous hands, with ruinous, gaping visage, eyes cold like signstones. The falling water, the infinite rotary momentary pinpricks and mountains and emotions. Imperturbable in its eternity, indescribable in its complexity, heartless and hopeless and neverending.

It is cold here. I am cold of moment, of heart. I am cold of purpose; my eyes shine from the falling water, and are there answers here? Do the hurtling clouds move with more volition than this, the ever-hopeless?

In exhaustion, I sink down beneath the water, silver, wasting waves that eat out my strength, bore into my muscles, swim into my ears until even my bowels are swimming. Beneath the argent film, through the hiding murk, towards loneliness and perhaps even eternal piece. I breathe water, its scent now comforting and hateless; my fear, gone; my curiosity wisened and awake; I am free from want, from the hunger that has plagued me the past days and weeks, given to the shining, evanescent deeps.

And further than my field of visions, away from my most distant sight or the shatteredest borders of my wariness.

There is a gate. With its sight-blinding, holy determination.

I was lost at the feet of these waters, at shameful hanging the sign of the eternal student above my eyes, weight bowed under shoulders of malachite.

Is this home? The heavenly light congealing in the depths, the stolen brilliances of a million stars, caught here beneath the drowning waters. The milky-burning sun that I can know but never see and never reach. I hope for an epiphany, for a conflagration, of a way to burn my way through the invisible choking air. But there is naught. I am wretched, lame, taught by my search. But it is a single page in an empty library.

I breach, break the surface; alone, and far from death.

Where will I go from here? I cannot stay, never so close again. I travel, fleeing this travail and certain brightness, making grim way to the blind-ghosts of the shores. Again on dry land I lay down amidst the sightless, again I find myself home once more.