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.

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.