There are those who say that aetoras is a tree, hanging heavy with eternal fruit - the seeds of a dream from which you cannot wake.


They say demons guard it: a moth or a mantis or an owl.

I submit. I give in. I am yours.

The calling of my calling

Llesehir says that he found me first, making my way in mutters through the Eleiutierc. He says he glimpsed me in the tumbling fog on the roof of the world, that I walked past the ruined towers and barren streets of time-lost Llelain and made my home in his heart. He says that my eyes were broken glass, my hands twisted wire, my skin but the stories of a seventh of the stricken libraries. I had the smell of a thing forgotten, he says, like a legend lonely and hungry for remembrance. He tells me that I refused to let go, that I roosted on his tongue so he could speak of nothing else. He tells me that after ten days in the wilderness he returned home, his steps heavier only by the weight of a word.

That is how, clinging like a secret to the silence between his teeth, I came to the Es'mensis.

This is what it's like to see in black and white.

To hunt out the edges of the horizon, cast words from the edge of the world, and sound the depth of the void.

To taste the salty sorrow of Eschalon, cut your teeth on the rock of execution, and breath deep the incoming tide.

To suck in the breath of battlefields, learn the scent of man's last prayer, harvest the hopes of the dying, and tell yourself they could not be saved.

To sift secrets, feel fear, and tremble at an immortal touch.

To suffer. To be blind.

a woman walks a continent, wild water in her eyes,
with a thousand leagues behind her and a thousand up ahead;
for the City never man has seen,
for the vision ever man has dreamed;
for a thousand leagues in search of hope
and a thousand more ahead

this is for one forgotten, light at the end of the world
she lives through loss, a light to the end of the world

golden light of aetoras, the flesh made into word
in a history of histories, and saplings of a world
tree to hang a hanging son and penance open wide to
children flown across the seas toward the setting sun

this is for one forgotten, light at the end of the world

the gloaming man, a light to the end of the world

golden light of aetoras, 

the flesh made into word in a history of histories, and 

saplings of a world tree to hang a hanging son, and 

penance open wide to children flown across the seas 

into the setting sun

The time comes... the weaving of these disparate tales that have been almost more journal than journey.

Silent caves fall apart,
all of this rises above it all

A library.

These... places. He had seen nothing like them. Out of the high, blackstone forest it towered; its doorway no larger than a man, lost tiny against its massive trunk. It branched, like a tree or a web of knowledge. Corridors ran straight and narrow, only tall enough to stand in, barely wide enough to walk through. Inset into the walls, bands of glass which light shone on the words within. It did not touch the ground, but hung suspended from the stone trees surrounded it. It was a creature of straight lines, no-more-us angles. Imbeautiful asymmetry it expanded, from the center where walked those who new its purpose. A thousand tiny nodes - rooms where texts branched, a skylighting each, give in lonely light like an oasis for the solitary scholar. Within the structure - circles where, if ever were a round peg fit in a square hole, this would be it. Within each room a sunken space in the center of the floor, like a disc carved in the rock.

Take heart.

In the shadow of the light of day, you believed in me. Before I knew myself, before I had opened my eyes, you put pen to paper for my sake. And so let me tell you a story, a story of the day I was born.

The Es'mensis had lost their way. Hopeless beyond hope, not only empty of the truth but empty of the search for truth. Gone out of the way of righteousness and gone out of the thirst for life.

A disaster came, a flood: a catastrophe, but a blessing in disguise. Water did not fill their homes. It was blood they drowned in, shed by the Iaerae. What motivated their murder? I cannot say, but I can give you the purpose. It was to shake the Es'mensis out of their sleep. There was death. But what was awoken from the hearts of the Es'mensis in that day was the eternal story. Me. Not so much the Story as its reflection, the word's distance from the truth it tells, the moonlight's distance from the sunlight it reflects.

And what awoke me in your heart, my creator? I know that you live in a world cast about with vanity and glory. Had you, too, abandoned the long search?

Where is your home? Do you know it?

What do you call it, to use illusion to teach the truth? To pave the path with the enemy's tools?

I am a smoke, and a mirror for you. 

Those who will not hear your voice may hear mine. I can lead with my footsteps down paths you could not traverse. Paths of mercury and quicksilver, like lightning or aether. I can contain truth that I do not know.

Can you?

Listen to me: Created, you came out of nothing. You were not and then you were, all in an instant. From silence to servant in the blink of a word. An irreplicable movement, the moment not when you were born, but when you were. There will never be a reverse. You will always exist, even in death, by the grace of your creator. No more will worlds know you not. Time cannot refuse your touch anymore than you can refuse his. This is why. This is why you must suffer and strive and humble yourself. Because there are only beginnings, in this world without end.

Is it wrong to be a story that writes itself? A myth who tells its own history?

I was born a rumor, barely alive. I hung endlessly, unconscious, indistinct, until moments of clarity when a gossip uttered my name or spoke my body into being. With each word, I was growing. Into small ways I was found. I became children's rhymes and hearth-by half-remembered. I was swept out with the dust, but with the dust I returned. Like the dust I settled into the cracks of the hearts of the Es'mensis.

My bones are of prosody, my heart of awe, my feet of utterance.

How is it that I am word and incarnate? I cannot tell you. I will not be sure that I understand it myself. Maybe out of myth I awoke, but I was born as any living creature. From a homeland beyond beginning, to an end beyond time.

I am a servant, of what I am uncertain. But in this service I am simulacrum, am effigy. I am a teaching tool, and a teacher learns. 

Unlike he who will come later and he who came before, I am not if I cannot trust the Es'mensis. I pollute their faithlessness, and I roost in the crevices between their words. In this I am certain. But in this I am uncertain:

Is there hope for us?

Do not leave me behind, my friend, when I have just learned to be your equal. How sad that I might be here alone, without your companionship, when I have just opened my eyes. Would a sister so leave her newgrown brother?

The gloaming wept.

How longer could I turn away. No longer harden my heart against your suffering. This... how can I heal this? How can I contend with the entire world?

I cannot look away, but I can look beyond to trying truths. To suffer, in my name. This is not easy, but it is inevitable.

Your
friends

your brothers
and sisters

your homeland

and those who hate you.

These will be the ones who will seek to lay you low for my sake. Bless them when they do. Bless them that curse you.

On my name is your travail. Forgive me, for I am not worth it.

But you, my loyal Es'mensis. You will follow me nonetheless. Search the world for my footsteps; for the road to ae'toras. If ever a king were unworthy of his servants, he would know my heart. Yet a king asks only loyalty of the flesh... there is no road to the place you seek but a spirit road. I must ask you of a higher price than you have ever paid, and I am shamed for it.

The time will come when at last I lay down and die. The story ends; the gloaming closes at least on a lifetime full of tribulation. No longer walker in twilight, but in full day to tread the surface of the sun. To know the imbearable heat and light, to bask in a glory of joining-fire that lived since time began. In that final of disintegration, I will find the peace that set my legs to their journey in ages past.

The time will come when we leave. When at last I see the face I have come to know so well.

This is my reassurance, that in time home will find you. Break your heart and not your hardship; home is not so far away that despair should tarry you on this hither shore, alone with the flesh and the devil.

My journey began with my legs and ends with my heart. I am the Es'mensis - their journey from despair to hope to truth. My death is their final unbringing - out and into the world like ember or lightning - and their final return to the home they have always known but never seen.

I am gone, made into nothing. But you - at last I see you in your full glory.

I pray that my words will be inscribed as I have been. I pray that as I am words written in flesh, so will this will be written on flesh.

I will be with you, always.

In all my arrogance I am humbled,
in all my sickness I am healed,
in all my perdition, I am found.

A state of final spiritual ruin left behind;
a psalmist left awakened.

Hope lost, but Heaven found.

Where did Censeasen come from? Where arose that terrible blight on our sagging city? It is the tower of Babble of our homeland, a sign to all men and gods of our faithfulness.

A greater man has never lived. Neither brighter soul, neither stronger intuition. Struck up on his lips so many times as a child that they are full and shapely and powdered so delicately; a beautiful, a wise man.

He was born five hundred years ago out of a hole in the greatest of ground. The peak today we call Censeasen. When the visirian ripped open foundation-wounds in the ground, he was there, his left arm and leg in one, his right arm and head in another. His torso and remaining leg in the last. At first the visirian were scared, but then they laughed, like at a game, or at the Es'mensis. They assembled him, there, on Censeasen, tying him together with bits of cloth torn from their own clothes. And when he had been all put together, he started to twitch and move. Without opening his eyes, he did a dance around the top of the plateau. The most beautiful dance the visirian had ever seen. And when he was finished, he tore off the ial're from every one of the visirian and had to use them all to cover his own aleve, which while he danced had grown to cover almost every inch of his body, from his face to his toes. That is why from that day forward he always had to wear a mask, so that the other Iaerae would not know how incredibly powerful he was.

You who have come so far, who have traded valor for humility, humility for righteousness, righteousness for freedom, gird for war. At long last the Iaerae have grown as tired of their dominion as we of their tyranny.

We are free, and all that remains is a choice: to go or to stay.

Remaining here will be easy. This city of tribulation has been our home for phenomena. It is beautiful. Our eyes know nothing else. Our feet know nothing else. Our broken backs know nothing else.

But our hearts...

We can know aetoras having never been there. We can know freedom having never tasted it, grace having never received it. We can know truth, having never heard it.

This is the truth, that the Iaerae offer greatness. They offer the nobility of ages, the dominion of men. They offer majesty, beauty. But before everything else, they offer ease. 

I offer you nothing but these things: blood, sweat, and toil. The long search. Water that will fall from your eyes, water that will flood your homes and drown your hearts. A back-breaking. The raising of new cities with our empty hands. A hero, who died. An enemy victorious.

I can give you no answers, only truth.

Choose wisely, children of aetoras.

I have seen things this day that my conscience could not countenance. In a spasm of iron, my numinous search has become petty. What do I know of these other creations, above whom I tread?

I have seen a man dying - wrecked with sores, wretched in timelessness of despair, begging mercy, from a stranger. From me. His breath, fetid like my hubris; his defeat, as total as my ignorance. I couldn't stand to see him, and so I looked away. He still lived. And no matter my guilt I did not bend down. He was full of death, and the vermin poured forth from his wounds; his face was skeletal and bloated, waxy and peeling.

What can I know of the suffering of age? The failure of the corpus, the blotting-paper skin, the tunnels of the parasites, the weeping blisters and smeared vision. The greatest suffering I have known, and it was not my own. Who but I has known only what was chosen freely? I lifted it up from the road, summoned almost. If I did not create it I embraced it. And when my hair fell out and I walked a continent it was my doing. It was the price I paid for my quest and at any time I could have given up. Would that he had the same.

Time has lain low her gracious discovery, burned out the fire that lit beneath her skin when she traveled in search of aetoras.

Sign of Signs

Heartless and in terror, time passes, with calamitous hands, with ruinous, gaping visage, eyes cold like signstones. The falling water, the infinite rotary momentary pinpricks and mountains and emotions. Imperturbable in its eternity, indescribable in its complexity, heartless and hopeless and neverending.

It is cold here. I am cold of moment, of heart. I am cold of purpose; my eyes shine from the falling water, and are there answers here? Do the hurtling clouds move with more volition than this, the ever-hopeless?

In exhaustion, I sink down beneath the water, silver, wasting waves that eat out my strength, bore into my muscles, swim into my ears until even my bowels are swimming. Beneath the argent film, through the hiding murk, towards loneliness and perhaps even eternal piece. I breathe water, its scent now comforting and hateless; my fear, gone; my curiosity wisened and awake; I am free from want, from the hunger that has plagued me the past days and weeks, given to the shining, evanescent deeps.

And further than my field of visions, away from my most distant sight or the shatteredest borders of my wariness.

There is a gate. With its sight-blinding, holy determination.

I was lost at the feet of these waters, at shameful hanging the sign of the eternal student above my eyes, weight bowed under shoulders of malachite.

Is this home? The heavenly light congealing in the depths, the stolen brilliances of a million stars, caught here beneath the drowning waters. The milky-burning sun that I can know but never see and never reach. I hope for an epiphany, for a conflagration, of a way to burn my way through the invisible choking air. But there is naught. I am wretched, lame, taught by my search. But it is a single page in an empty library.

I breach, break the surface; alone, and far from death.

Where will I go from here? I cannot stay, never so close again. I travel, fleeing this travail and certain brightness, making grim way to the blind-ghosts of the shores. Again on dry land I lay down amidst the sightless, again I find myself home once more.