a woman walks a continent, wild water in her eyes,
with a thousand leagues behind her and a thousand up ahead;
for the City never man has seen,
for the vision ever man has dreamed;
for a thousand leagues in search of hope
and a thousand more ahead

this is for one forgotten, light at the end of the world
she lives through loss, a light to the end of the world

golden light of aetoras, the flesh made into word
in a history of histories, and saplings of a world
tree to hang a hanging son and penance open wide to
children flown across the seas toward the setting sun

this is for one forgotten, light at the end of the world

the gloaming man, a light to the end of the world

golden light of aetoras, 

the flesh made into word in a history of histories, and 

saplings of a world tree to hang a hanging son, and 

penance open wide to children flown across the seas 

into the setting sun

Finding her low with pride, full with courage, a leader not of men but those who preceded them and have fallen since.  Some would call her a servant, but others a warrior.  All at once both slave and seeker of aetoras, which she cannot hope but to find, cannot believe but that she will fail. 

Tall, tall almost as the Iaerae were tall, with eyes cast eternally high towards the horizon, with hands thin like twigs, arms gaunt like branches, eyes like fool's gold, a face sharp and harsh and never shapely, but hollow with courage and fear.  Bright skin like the light of dawn, hair white like the ragged clouds of morning.  Sickness and health war for her, the taint that occupies a thousand generations and lineages, the purging of the sas'arael. 

Over her unforgiving form layers have draped themselves, trying as they might to hide her, without success.  Of shades that vary slightly, tossed on like they matter less than the path behind her.  Without remorse they are tattered, ragged, shorn of hope but full with life.  Feet bare, she walks solemn.  There are things on her hands, made of wood but crafted with glass and filled with worries and seawater.  On the one, a ship, on the other, a road; all telling where she has been. 

Through countless miles she walks, ever in search of aetoras, in hungry wilds and hollow hills, past day and night, beyond the rising of the sun and the setting of the same, she ranges both east and west, ever in praying that one particular name, that light that blesses most generously the gates of the first-city, which we call aetoras.

When her time has come she seeks no more, yet was the first of the seekers.  Abroad she dies, far from the Edgelands, the Orvelai-mai-Ith, beyond where pass the aurel, beyond where sun meets sky and water, land. Beyond home, beyond hope.  Where the sky is low with pride and full with courage, where it meets her lonely form to make her way back home.

The Sought

I, student, eternal delver, constant in my search, like the search of the Es'mensis for the legendary aetoras.

At all times have I been careful of the translations from the cheyr'emeth. I have been diligent and exacting in my rendering of that near-mythic language into the humble mode of Cairainean speech. It is my calling. My beloved burden and thankless duty that I might bring to sight these wonders. Long hours bury themselves in my translations, often spread over months. In this case it has been nearly a year, and with assiduous fascination I still return time and again to these four pieces, correcting. Obscuring. I clarify where appropriate. In hope, I will dig ever deeper into the depths that bespeak a history so vast and storied that I will never undarken even a corner of it, though my life be dedicated only to this research.

Have mercy and forgive me, I request you, for what errors lie in pools of ink and paper. There is little hope for me in this endeavor. Ever should I have been a husbandman or tanner, yet I have no sense to me, as little then as now. What I have glimpsed is not sense...

Not sense, but truth...

Though I work not in nicurei, though I have not the single-minded humility of those I seek, I will strive, as one put it, to exhume this place, until years having walked, I will be no longer able to do as I love. Then perhaps, I too will leave in search of the Edge-lands, or the aetoras, or even Peresine itself! And when my time has come, I will lay down not three feet from that I have sought, and be no more.

But before that time comes, before my failings are beyond correction, let me tell you of my first time in the Edge-lands, of walking along the harsh fence of the Orvelai-mai-Ith. Consider yourself lost already. So all wanderers seek in that land. Give yourself up, though you may have been there never. Accomplished in this you will find yourself longing for their mountainous vistas, feeling like you sleep and walk and wake in dreaming to behold at last this one, true heartland. Know already that the peaks call your name, and that they hold no dangers for you, though perhaps home-razing gales ride their surfaces. Come empty and leave emptier. Your home will be drawn out of you by wonder and inside will walk the sky-studded, glorious vigilance of your original land. What you may have lost will never be found in between these mist-barred, rocky palaces of the Eleiutierc, but at least there is the chance among them for the search, to begin the hunt for giants and beings all at once scarcer and less intelligible.

Will you cry out, when you reach the summit? Will the waves of your homecoming vanish out over the here and then gone again mists, falling to bright scraps like the mists themselves? Will you announce yourself, then, to the denizens of your source? Perhaps it will be nothing more, upon your arrival, than a wan face in a slatey mere. Then, a wan face in a slatey mere. Flat, hard, knowing. You will have to hollow yourself here. You will have to give yourself up. You will have to look deeper than that to find the one who has really come home.

The First Aleiu Aetoras

(Note: I found this manuscript in the salted fields of a dead farm. The script shifted between the cheyr'emeth and a curious variation on Istein orthography and becomes hard to read in several places, smeared with rich soil. Only four or five pages remained out of some presumably larger work.)

From the beginning I have pleaded with all ghosts. These spirits of a strange land bear down on us as if they were the strength of sickness. They fill these forests with mist and twilight. Their darkness is not our own, not the darkness of our homeland. Filled with mystery, but not the comfortable mystery of ages past. Not the gentle heaviness of history. Sharp and painstaking it illuminates every question of biology and change. What once was, is, and the aetoras still eludes us. We have violated the trackless wilderness, new and bright and humid, and have filled it with our footprints and the blue dust of the nicurei. Illness has taken some of us; as we have taken it from these ghosts, breathing in their pestilent breath and drinking the thick, rich, black blood that is the only liquid in this verdant desert. It seems like everything is secretly composed of ash. Dry and thick and caking.

Ivalis was the fourth today. Nearly a wyle of our party has vanished, buried in the insistent life of this region. We had no time to mourn or celebrate. Her corpse is left to the non-secrets that scavenge among these trees. Will she rise again, listless and bloated amongst the other natural creatures? Can I honestly ask myself that question? Uries mor at rohem seiru. Questions are meaningless unless you will ask them of yourself.

We have seen the towers of aetoras three times since landing on these occult shores; every time they seem to be no more distant, no closer. This expedition is too significant to be a fool's errand. I hope we do not have to turn back. If we do, though, it shall surely mean safety. Our path is marked with miniature la'in and we can return at any time. Find our way to our almost home, to the Eleiutierc, and then return to the shapes of the Edge-lands along Orvelai-mai-Ith.

Perhaps these ghosts will take us all, eventually. With their hunger and their thirsty blood. And we will lay down not three feet from the aetoras gates and be no more.

(The following was found on another page.)

There is no rest here, never in death, never in living. Because of all's eating... you cannot move on or leave anything in the past because it is carried inside of everything else. All blood is one blood since everything feeds on everything else. Not a mote of singularity in these forests; not a drop of individuality. It feels like we are merging... closer together in body and mind...

Oretsec Ca - "How Far We Have Fallen" (lit. "Erosion by Time")

Here it is at last, the object of all my labors, the aetoras of my long search. I've never seen such beauty. Truth be told, I never expected to see beauty again... but here it is. I have found my meaning in the thin pages forged lovingly out of nicurei hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago by my ancestors. The lithe cheyr'emeth script speaks to me from the ancient heshence and I can all but see the diligent wrestrim toiling over their engraving tools.

How noble.

Never one moment of rest, never one instant of hesitation in their practiced movements. Despite the sacrifice of time, despite the blue nicurei stains that must've covered their hands, theirs was a truly noble calling, and we in these times are reduced to nothing more than chasing after their glory.

Oh, how that chase wears on us.  We labor, struggle, strive, starve for the old glory like sustenance for the soul.  So it is.  So be it.  These hungry scholars will chase down the streets of the first city; if it be nowhere, nevertheless.  I will be hungry for knowledge and history, for I am so weary of the present.  Ages come and go, but there is always an age before.

I vowed to exhume this place, whose corners, breathing towers, melt from ages' ebb and draw.  Make home the keepers, dreaming sleepers, of this sight we never saw.