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.