None of us is as cruel as all of us.  What we would never justify on our own, is completely acceptable as a race, as a people, as a hint of thought in a thousand hearts, as a product of some unknowable wyle of time and death and sleep.  What unfeeling criticism do we level at our peers, those fellow seekers of aetoras, when we are found ourselves caught in a corner of fear, trapped at Eschalon? how will we justify our acts of perdition?  'It is not a failing of ourselves.  It is not a failing of any child of Iad, no single student of history, no rebel, no one single one who will die for the chance to redeem ourselves.'  We must all atone for our own actions, or so we are taught, and so we find ourselves cold and alone, hard-hearted and driven to murder.  Our ideals are no higher than the heavens, to kill those whose hearts are no higher than the horizon, and we have no choice.  There is some peculiar gravity, some nature curious to our own people that we must never rest for answers, never question the truth, but never cease questioning 'til truth is where we come to.

I am different from you, not because I have no power, neither for my hope for a better life for the us, but because I am more willing to shed power than virtue.  The scraps of flesh that litter the ground on the mount of Censeasen bury not only my bloodmark but my arrogance.  They are the laying down of my pride, the sacrifice to prove to you assembled alal'rhan that the time has come.  Our hopelessness is past.  Look at this corruption!  This tireless oppression!  How now is it that you are not as wearied of your dominion as we are of your tyranny?  Let us chain this vapid empire to Eschalon and cast it all into the sea!  What has Ialar become under the auspices of your reign?  Sick and hearty all at once, with cancerous ghettos filled with the first kindred. A site of wonder and malice all at once, like time has split one apocalypse unto another.  Where this comes from, the fury, the terror, the wonder that fills us as we walk your streets, we know, every one. If we tell it not from the beginning, we will be taught it by the hardship of a daes'rhan's written countenance.

How now, that this peculiarity of pigments so enthralls us?  That this near accident of arrangement, this coincidental question of ink and page should tyrannize our existences so thoroughly?  Oh, that the subtle irony of those who so oppressed us for ages have in fact ensured our slavery for much longer.  Despite our escape, they gave us the written word with which to shackle ourselves for eons that will come.

How dies these words?  How tire these eyes?  How weak these hands!  Arguments fall on failing hearts.

How disappointed I am, with our kind, with ourselves, with all that has come before and all that we seek evermore.  With leglike hands and sleeping feet, there will be no where to go in the ages past and fleet.  We will return everplowing into this plane and we will damn ourselves consistently into the ground.  Drive ourselves sick and tired into the clayy that didn't even make us.  Where will we go then?  When our time is come and we have wasted our lives,  what will we make of us?  What can be made of us when we have made so little from ourselves?  Who will make what of us when we have made so much of ourselves, but so little from us?

There are answers here, and we can see them, but we choose not to act on them.  We are ignorant, stubborn, and stupid despite our scholarship.  We have sought the past in the future and the future in the past but we have made nothing that will last, much less something that will do us good.  We have taught ourselves to recognize the truth but never taken ourself to the strength that will wean us of lies.  We who are called the fools, those who ignore wisdom, those who die in ignorance come at least in the time that we can recognize.  We at least know we are lost.

But the Iaerae... know not.  They are truly lost.  And in some ways that is more forgivable - to not know the truth, as they do; or to know the truth and choose lies, as we do.  There are only rivers and sunsets and drying leaves and the bitter cold to give us succor, but we were better had we cut off our own hands to offend not that higher power.  We were better had we not allowed us to astray.

Can sI speak truth to this page ? Am I truly able to lay down my thoughts here?  We are pathetic and full of sickness.  Tried and true we are truly false, genuinely fake, powerfully weak, all creatures pathetic with opposites and flu-filled with oxymorons.

No glory here, my lord, no majesty, but the weakness of omission, the grace to acceed to higher grace, the willpower to let go our own will.

You are afire in my mind, a bow in my arc, a theorem amidst my ramblings, a proof in this world of fear. Go try and I'll forget your name, if I cannot forget my own.  Take your fingers from my heart or let me die.  Let me be with you, my lord.  Nothing else knows me in my core.  In my center, the heart of my gravity.  If I'm a crown without a king, then you are a god without a need, a lord without a servant, a messiah without a herald.  At least in my person.

Have mercy,  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.  Have mercy.

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.

Where walks this life?  As voices play only in one ear, as pen strikes pen, and buckler, sword, as time lays low the page, takes on the visitations we find, gives up the ghost, ties itself down to the once and only, it has and will have been and never was the past.  All things live on, whether in our hearts or in our lives.  There is no end to one and anything, and I am coming back again, whether in the day that comes or the day that does not.

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.