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.

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.

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.