Too much time has past, and I am sick. My stomach wails, my eyes run, my eyes bleed. There is no one hear but myself, my writings, and my translators. Everyone ignores me. I feel like I cannot even crawl, yet I hunch over my space on the floor, coal crushed in my claws, smeared on my eyelids from rubbing them. Breathing is too hard, dying is out of the question. When I came into this tiny foothill, what did I expect, next to alone? Did I expect in health and heartiness long to live? That was naive, I think. With little more to keep me than words and paper and words and endless paper, should I survive? No. But I hope against hope that I will be able to keep going. My translations are nowhere close to finished. My hope nowhere close to quenched. Perhaps history, which I have worked so hard to foster, will take mercy on me, spare me, leave me be only to continue my lonely work.

If I survive, I will travel. I have been too long in this hovel. Too long among my comfortable books, my dead friends and fictitious scholarship. Those I admire would never have holed themselves up like this, and so I will follow their example. I am not an old man. At least, not too old to leave here, not too old to find meaning in the wide road and the narrow wilderness. But where will I go? Back to the place from where I came? Back to the Orvelai-mai-Ith? Back to the Edge-lands and the once-home of my beloved Es'mensis? I doubt it. I know too much of them already. I will bring them with me, to come and see the wider world. Together, in heart if not in spirit, will the places know us. We are in tiny containers, separate and separated by time and place, but that is no reason that will stop us. If my people have taught me nothing, it is not that there is more to what is than the current.

A people steeped in history.  Generations blessed and cursed, rampant both in liberty and tyranny.  Wire hands grip at empty stomachs, sustained only by the fascination, some would say obsession, with a force greater than themselves, which without remorse will lay them low despite their dutiful observance.  It is more than the pages themselves that take in these contrite spirits.  It is less than fiction, stricter than truth, a taller tale than many historians would care to tell, but nevertheless, it is them.  Stricken from the hearts of those lonely, humble speakers of the cheyr'emeth.

With an intolerable ache for knowing, let them lay down their lives, their passions (as cogent as these may be), where from they will throw themselves ever forward.  Having taken from them all that has been, there is only left what will be.  In contrast, though, they will never give up the past, for these are creatures of history, spectres of libraries, wraiths of ancient cities, guardians and students of what has gone before.

They are smaller than those they came from.  After years of knowing too well the sas'arael, the Iaerae, their brethren and former kindred, tower above them.  In contrast to these, they are weak and frail.  But where the bliss of awe has been banked by centuries of cynicism and neglect, the Es'mensis will not give up the hunt for aetoras. 

They are a people of shades, of practicality, one might almost say, garbed as they are in their layers on wasted layers, and their minimal adornment.  What regalness possesses them comes only from their demeanor.  Shoulders square, neither hunched nor thrown back, but given to an air of defiance nonetheless. 

Eyes, yellow and amber, pass judgment from hollow sockets.  Their faces not skeletal, but burned away by the seeking and staring for too long into the face of glory.  It is a surprise their visage does not run and flow like candlewax, such things have they seen.  Having bound otherworld's inhabitants, as slaves and soldiers, having endured hatred and spite from their fellows and guardians and captors, suffering betrayal from their would have been liberator, how is it that this people has survived?

Only through countless strength, unbelied by their diminished bodies.  Only through courage of the rarest sort, yet epidemic to this curious race.  The eternal hunt for truth, whether in the day that comes or the day that does not.  What are dirty nails, pale skin, burning eyes, dry and ashen lips, maddened hair, and a demeanor fey and wild in recompense for the things they have learned?  Should they all be struck blind they would wander the streets with their canes and their hopes, finding some manner, even in their disability, to sense the change in texture of writing and written, to the end that all should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

None of us is as cruel as all of us.  What we would never justify on our own, is completely acceptable as a race, as a people, as a hint of thought in a thousand hearts, as a product of some unknowable wyle of time and death and sleep.  What unfeeling criticism do we level at our peers, those fellow seekers of aetoras, when we are found ourselves caught in a corner of fear, trapped at Eschalon? how will we justify our acts of perdition?  'It is not a failing of ourselves.  It is not a failing of any child of Iad, no single student of history, no rebel, no one single one who will die for the chance to redeem ourselves.'  We must all atone for our own actions, or so we are taught, and so we find ourselves cold and alone, hard-hearted and driven to murder.  Our ideals are no higher than the heavens, to kill those whose hearts are no higher than the horizon, and we have no choice.  There is some peculiar gravity, some nature curious to our own people that we must never rest for answers, never question the truth, but never cease questioning 'til truth is where we come to.

I am different from you, not because I have no power, neither for my hope for a better life for the us, but because I am more willing to shed power than virtue.  The scraps of flesh that litter the ground on the mount of Censeasen bury not only my bloodmark but my arrogance.  They are the laying down of my pride, the sacrifice to prove to you assembled alal'rhan that the time has come.  Our hopelessness is past.  Look at this corruption!  This tireless oppression!  How now is it that you are not as wearied of your dominion as we are of your tyranny?  Let us chain this vapid empire to Eschalon and cast it all into the sea!  What has Ialar become under the auspices of your reign?  Sick and hearty all at once, with cancerous ghettos filled with the first kindred. A site of wonder and malice all at once, like time has split one apocalypse unto another.  Where this comes from, the fury, the terror, the wonder that fills us as we walk your streets, we know, every one. If we tell it not from the beginning, we will be taught it by the hardship of a daes'rhan's written countenance.

How dies these words?  How tire these eyes?  How weak these hands!  Arguments fall on failing hearts.

How disappointed I am, with our kind, with ourselves, with all that has come before and all that we seek evermore.  With leglike hands and sleeping feet, there will be no where to go in the ages past and fleet.  We will return everplowing into this plane and we will damn ourselves consistently into the ground.  Drive ourselves sick and tired into the clayy that didn't even make us.  Where will we go then?  When our time is come and we have wasted our lives,  what will we make of us?  What can be made of us when we have made so little from ourselves?  Who will make what of us when we have made so much of ourselves, but so little from us?

There are answers here, and we can see them, but we choose not to act on them.  We are ignorant, stubborn, and stupid despite our scholarship.  We have sought the past in the future and the future in the past but we have made nothing that will last, much less something that will do us good.  We have taught ourselves to recognize the truth but never taken ourself to the strength that will wean us of lies.  We who are called the fools, those who ignore wisdom, those who die in ignorance come at least in the time that we can recognize.  We at least know we are lost.

But the Iaerae... know not.  They are truly lost.  And in some ways that is more forgivable - to not know the truth, as they do; or to know the truth and choose lies, as we do.  There are only rivers and sunsets and drying leaves and the bitter cold to give us succor, but we were better had we cut off our own hands to offend not that higher power.  We were better had we not allowed us to astray.

Can sI speak truth to this page ? Am I truly able to lay down my thoughts here?  We are pathetic and full of sickness.  Tried and true we are truly false, genuinely fake, powerfully weak, all creatures pathetic with opposites and flu-filled with oxymorons.

No glory here, my lord, no majesty, but the weakness of omission, the grace to acceed to higher grace, the willpower to let go our own will.

You are afire in my mind, a bow in my arc, a theorem amidst my ramblings, a proof in this world of fear. Go try and I'll forget your name, if I cannot forget my own.  Take your fingers from my heart or let me die.  Let me be with you, my lord.  Nothing else knows me in my core.  In my center, the heart of my gravity.  If I'm a crown without a king, then you are a god without a need, a lord without a servant, a messiah without a herald.  At least in my person.

Have mercy,  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.

Uries at Heshens - "The Antique Country"

An eon has past since I walked the borderlands, where sun meets sky and water, land.

Even now it melts and sinks into tepid waters, like the great aurel crack and float, ever southward, until what magic they held, the frozen air of the north, the tyrant touch of their homes, the very detritus they have preserved, is vanished. What displaces this wonder is not known to me, but I will take it into myself if that is what is taken; I will bring it low with my own weakness, let that terrible grievance rest itself in my heart, burn itself shallow in my own hunger.  And when it seeks it to escape, I swallow it back again, back into the cloud that is my heart, the mist that I have eaten.  The mist I stole.

And as I know this, as I seek the truth of the place from which I came, I see that we are a people obsessed with time and place.  That there is nothing new, no clear beginnings, that all these things the result of but a tiny question that lays itself in my mouth, underneath our tongues, laying forth with full fury when its time is come.

It says, "Why?"

It says, "What is this?"

It says, "From whence it came?"

It says, "Take me to the source." 

And we comply, ill-fated and woebegone creatures spring from our paths and we go past them.  That is the source of all comfort, all beginnings, all sources.  In some fashion, all hope.  What then, if we obliterate この事?  What is left then, but emptiness?  To fill our hearts with, emptiness.  When we seek out the tyrant touch of language, drape its airy vestment 'round our rise, raise its tale in our windy courtyards.  We will not leave, nor it leave us.  Alone. We will not leave.  alone.

Sea Visions

Let us lay bare what has been done to this place. If you can reach, if you can strive upwards, into the empyrean vault that hides the telarai from our view, hold down the continents of the sky and reach beyond them, I say. Take them, roving and new, such seismic antagonists, and lay them here amidst our own waters. Make their edges meet the Hollowell and sift their mountains down amidst our own; take down the astral vault from whence time comes, and if you can believe it, you will carry the weight of a drifter, the clouds that ride in to sow honesty among the least of us. I imagine that if sight would stretch far farther, braced on delicate balance of snowy wings, it would find that the heavenly strand does not reign in hues but shades, and that even beyond the lightnings of our skies lies night, not only forever eternal, but forever still.

An Age and an Age

Old and older, quiet and quieter, bleak and yet even grander, this tidal plain like the natural planes of death, written with gates and precincts. All the pools filled with the mercurial remains of the night's flood, like ages gone and past, whose subtle residue soaks our feet as we travel through the light, cold sunlight towards where the water that lies miles off the shoreline. Look down at this panorama behind you, and there is a sign of joy in this weakness, a world missing, at the cliffs that overlook where you will not even bury your ancestors. You will lay them down in the wet sand, surrounded by the edges of the water, but not yet by the sea. Their ashes are now fallen on the ground, and when the flood comes again they will wash and be thrown against the cliffs that buttressed the place they called home from the immeasurable tides. Convinced in some way of its appropriateness, there is a dirge that escapes almost silently from our lips, an honor, a laurel composed by another, but it vanishes in a wyle, barely heard in the first place, and shredded and dusted over the dead by the wind, less even now than when it first escaped our lips.

This is the same place where the criminals bury. Lay down in the mud at the bottom of the sea, miles from land and inches under water, silt, sea-life, shells and demons of the dead. Corpses of those that came before. This is what papers, carpets the land before us, provides a place to walk on, a plank and bridge into the past, where we came from, and the future, to which we are inexorably pulled. Is there more to this? Do my feet really tread the walls of death and the walks of the dead? The walls of the passed, the heights to be passed, ascended, and then stranded beyond, on the plateau of beyond-being. Looking out over the cliffs that preceded your journey, and now you are higher than them. Is this what heaven looks like? A view of a coast-line and the Orvelai-mai-Ith? I am surprised. I feared that there would be more, like some sort of quest, some answer to the questions that we have posed to the sea and the ceaseless tides since our coming to the Edge-lands. Then there was nothing to fear after all. Being saved from the constant inquiry that has housed my kind since before our leaving.

Damn the Iaerae, those bastards that care not for good or truth or peace. Everything is easy for them but nothing is right. Their gods are no deities at all but the simple beasts of burden that cart them from day-to-day. Tools. Things they have subjugated to themselves and nothing more. And oh the irony! That these draft-beings that they have created should enslave them all the more for their superiority! Service to a being greater than yourself is perfect freedom. The perfect opposite is true, and that is the truth that the Iaerae live. How sad, really, that these were the ones to whom was given the death of a deity. As always, the master is the servant; the servant, master. A world of inversions, and always without hope that things should change. And so the persecuted should become persecutors. But breaking this inversion in a most important way, the hunted will not become hunters, though the last become first. The tired will become hungry, but the empty, full. Strong and defiant and eternal of the end, Iad was redeemed by his dying. He at last proved that he was worthy of his Creation, that he had deserved the absolute dominion of the place he had made, this Machine that works so imperfectly. That Thing Which Obeys. And now where lie his remains? In his place of origin? Chaotic, yes, lawful in its unpredictability and we will be tired and done in but a short time. Wait for us. Yes, wait for us.

We must build a wall.

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...

A Systematic Examination of Cheyr'emeth

This is a thorough and scientific examination of Cheyr'emeth, the ancestral language of the Es'mensis. I will examine in particular the Cheyr'emeth spoken and preserved in the child-cities of Peresine. The city of Llelain will serve as my primary reference and in cases of contradiction Llelaic Cheyr'emeth will prevail. For ease of comprehension Cheyr'emeth's proper script will be rendered into the Cairainean mode of writing.


First, a study of Cheyr'emeth's pronunciation:

Double Consonants - When one sees a transliteration with two consonants side by side it represents an actual, brief stop between sounds. For example, the Cheyr'emethic word rendered as muetteret is pronounced "muet" (stop) "teret." Thus, the "t" sound is articulated twice.

i - The Cheyr'emethic sound rendered as "i" as always a short sound, similar to the "i" of "bit." The front of the tongue, however, is generally higher and curved slightly backwards.

ch - /x/, The sound rendered into the Cairainean script as "ch" represents a voiceless palatal fricative. To approximate it, make the "h" sound of "horse" and then raise the tongue so that air flow through the mouth generates an audible friction.

e - /ɛ/, The Cheyr'emethic "e" is similar to that of our native tongue. However, the tongue is slightly higher and more tense.

y - /jʉ/, "Y" is a diphthong pronounced almost like "yu" in our tongue. It begins with a sound very similar to our "y" but the tongue quickly curls upward and the lips become slightly rounded.

r - /ɾ/, "R" is pronounced quickly, with the tongue tapping the roof of the mouth only briefly. It sounds like a trilled "r" but is only trilled once. Before an "i" sound it usually transforms to a sound closer to "d." Instead of tapping the roof of the mouth, coming back down, and then forming the "i" it simply blocks the air flow and then continues on to form the "i" sound.

m - /m/, This sound is pronounced as in our speech.

th - /θ/, "Th" is not as hard as it is in the language of Cairaine. The teeth are not quite as close to the tongue. Otherwise, they are similar.

s - /s/, "S" at the end of words becomes much more like a "t" sound, otherwise it is the same. No air accompanies the creation of this sound.

The Cheyr'emethic writing system:

Cheyr'emethic writing symbols actually only represent vowels. Consonants are represented by articulations and alterations to the basic vowel symbols.

Cheyr'emethic consonants each belong to a certain class. The written markings refer only to a specific class of consonants and not to specific consonants themselves. In addition, the same word can be read differently in different contexts, despite having the exact same spelling. In these cases, the consonant(s) typically vary within the same class.


The Cheyr'emethic Lexicon

Muetteret Escalon at Nisseres Rue - "The Sea's Judgment at Escalon"
Oretsec Ca - "Erosion by Time"
Uries Mor at Rohem Seiru - "I have found God's grace."

At - A conjunction that combines two related phrases. Also serves to indicate grammatical relationships between two phrases.
Ca - A temporality marker. Indicates some relation to time. The particulars of this relationship are inferred by context.
Oretsec - Erosion/wearing away/withering.
Uries - A pronoun for old things. Occasionally euphemistically used to refer to the Cairainean concept of "god," though its definition would be more precisely rendered as "it which is old."

Uries Mor at Rohem Seiru

"Uries mor at rohem seiru."

This is the keystone, the foundation of temerity and the fruit of prayer. Whether known or unknown, these five words are the object of our every hunt, spiritual or otherwise, and to utter them truthfully is the completion of a life's work.

Seek them with diligence.

And yet what we have here is not religion, neither ritual, neither superstition. Give me hierarchy, that I might crush it under heel and chain it to the promontory at Eschalon. Ask me the source of this grace. I will show you that, in the asking, there is no certain truth. Answers in this place are useless, and questions are of dubious power unless you will ask them of yourself. Only things discovered first hand have the touch of veracity.

Bound to this realization is the certainty that you must act. Truth comes only to those who find it. Certainty is an absolute, and if you do not seek then you cannot help but hide. There is truth to be found in all corners, whether it be in the granite calculi of the ordani or the a'esse poetry of the wrestrim.

Know this, and seek.
Seek this, and find.

(Translator's note: A'esse is a Cheyr'emeth word used for things that are not ancient now, but will be in the future. As such, it implies permanence or long-lastingness.)

The Distinctness of Cheyr'emeth Grammar (pt. 1)

Cheyr'emeth certainly differs from English in many ways. A potential list of differences follows:

1. Distinction of lexical aspect.
2. Distinction of grammatical aspect.
3. Use of particles.
4. Generally, Ceyr'emeth's use of grammatical inflection.
5. Methods of demonstrating possession.

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.

Muetteret Eschalon at Nisseres Rue - "The Sea's Judgement at Escalon"

And so he passes.

It's cold and wet here, and there are slate-grey waves in the distance. Give them a little time, though, and they'll be lapping at the dunes behind us. The top of the water will ride only three wyle above the top of the rock and more than ten u'yle above the head of the criminal chained to its base. The dark will fill the sky, and not a person will have waited to watch the murky clouds of blood fill the water as the tide smashes his body open against the stone.

In the morning we won't see the ruin that the ocean has made of him. We won't see the shattered bone that tore through the skin and muscle of his wrists and forearms to point up at the salty sky and the gore-stained rock. We won't see the huge cavity filled with blood and teeth and vomit where the lower half of his face used to be. We won't smell the stench of brine and shit and fear that lingers around his corpse when the waves finally retreat.

Chances are, when we finally make it back out here, nothing will be left. The ocean will have taken and buried him off the coast, under a blanket of silt and sea-life.

We'll take the next one out to the rock and he'll be crying or silent. He'll be dignified or petrified. He'll be ready for the end or ready to give us anything: his money, his home, his mother, if only we'll let him go. And then we'll lock the shackles around his wrists and ankles and make sure that the chains sunk into the rock are still secure.

I would ask him for his last words, but we are not permitted to give him such dignity. We do not show compassion or pass judgment. We do not honor the dead or remember their passing. We are not the hands of justice. We are the messengers and the silent jailers whose only task is to abandon the condemned in the face of a force greater than ourselves.

We are afraid.

It is not the heaviness of the water that terrifies us, nor the comfortable dread of our eventual passing. Our stomachs do not turn at the thought of ourselves in those shackles. Rather there is some other foreboding, however secret it may be, that lingers around the waxen lines of our faces. As we secure the end of a life, there is a wordless tension in the straight movements of our bodies that mirrors the straight horizon toward which the criminal will travel, lifeless on the back of the water.

The briefest respite comes only when we burn the lelerian. As we yield the shore to that other strength, we will put fire to flame and page, letting the soot from the smoldering sheets mark our path. The ash of their passing tells us that we are free, clean of this sterility and blamelessness, and we comfort ourselves with the thought that somehow words turned to smoke will absolve us of this terrible absolution. We hope against hope that these gestures will change the sea and somehow bring low the superior innocence of its ceaseless tides. Almost, we believe that our burden is not inescapable.

And yet it is a burden of our own making. Our grievance, as heavily as it tells on us, is freely chosen.

What led us here? All things conform to some nature, some gravity, and we are no different. We are the simple children of a logic deadly and inconsequential.

Yet execution is no inconsequence.

Neither is it tragedy, nor cruelty, and so it is not tragedy or cruelty that I fear. As the relentless tide swallows the promontory, I am afraid that, in all its cold sterility and innocence, I have become the right hand of death, destroyer of worlds.