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.

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.

Yore

Imagine tomorrow you cannot read anything.  Your whole national history, all literature, all things, gone.  Rootless and legless, with no place to stand and no place to come from, and the pollution fills up your stumps, rotting them like old trees that have been cut down.  What if we were as the gnarled ones, and bound to the very  place from which we hailed.  What if we grew up out of the gentle waters of the Orvelai-mai-Ith and then were ripped out from our comfortable flower beds, what if we left behind all that we loved best about ourselves in order to escape those who trammelled us into the clay from which we came?  What if we uprooted ourselves, made ourselves homeless, soulless, to escape the oppression that lay thick on us there?  What if we had a desire for freedom greater than our love of history?  Is there any choice?  When we lay down in this new land, will the flesh of the plants themselves reach up to enwrap us?  What is true naturalization? the true transformation of our nature?

With words there goes hope.  Millions of us, and no history.  Not one document to our name, not one book to our ancient strands.  Not one age to define us in the hallowing rarity of our terrible halls.  Can we build it back?  Can we survive our innocence?  Innocence with dirty hands, thin with the wisdom of the roadside, choking with widows weeds; will we die here?  Are we able to die here?

From above, in riotous fashion, rain history from the sky.

It is almost not a choice.  For a kind as taught as us, as tried as we have been, what choice do we truly have?  We must seek what was taken form us.  Take back the history that was ours, but is no longer.  From our older but not elder brothers.  From the first kindred.  Into Cheyr'emeth.