I fear that truth is not objective. It is almost a horror that impels me to believe there is a single way things are, or that we can ever find our way to them, for as I come ever closer to our most perfect understandings of truth, I realize that they are nothing more than convincing arguments. Neither natural nor necessary, but that they might be woven as tacitly from artifice as from yarn, and that I am no truth-seeker, but merely a consumer, delving deeply into those theories of truth that suit me best, my choices no more justified than that which guides the hand to the meat or the bread.

But perhaps there is some Nature to that reaching. Though it matter not whether a man choose meat or bread, surely he must reach for something. And perhaps that is the only truth we can know for certain, that we must seek truth, or be forever empty.

The Gloaming

Have you heard of the Gloaming Man?

She wakes, tired, sick, and homeless. The hallowed streets are muddy with her blood, paved with memories of a place she has never been. It is mourning, just before the time when sleepers wake. She raises herself up alone, out of the muck and into the cool air of the roadway.

Time falls away. We see the same wretch, hunched over books whose pages turn frantically and madness smothers her; there is an aroma of discovery so dry she might choke on it. Huge shelves, unassuming and grand, loom over her shoulders like conspirators.

We see her move backwards, the days unturning. There are other scholars, less worn than her. In a vast, empty hall, pure, with high a ceiling and windows that let in the waxen moonlight.  Clothed in layer upon thin layer. Skeletal, she and all her companions.

There is joy there. In glory, they display their revelation. Words give them the splendor that raiment does not. Formulae written in blue chalk on the floor tell laws that govern the heart of history. These are the noblest of their noble people, yet still they are certain that to be great is to serve, that the sublime is humble, and that the simple truth is essential.

We see other times, other places. Ever as we move backwards does she become less haggard. More radiant, fuller of joy, and yet perhaps more naïve. There are wonders:


A huge mass of people leave an inhuman city. In the distance, beyond the alien skyline, there is a mesa with a tower made tiny by distance. Dust in an eternal waterfall courses down the side, glinting in the setting sun. The forest intertwines the place they leave, blessing the ornate architecture with a sense of farewell otherwise absent. Those that leave have been exiled, but they are free. Behind them are their homes, livelihoods, but before them are lives worth living.


On the edge of the city, almost wistful, are their once-oppressors.


A war. Those they left have turned once more to their hatred. There is a book, the Arcane, and then the raising of the tremendous Western Gate, which leads to other worlds. Silent and doleful, out of it skulk otherworldly servants and shadows cast by another sun. The people change. They become haggard. Their eyes turn yellow with jaundice and lack of sleep. They have learned another power, and it is only with its help that the tides of the enemy are held back.


A sea crossing. Through rocky spires thrusting from the torrential ocean. Ships smash. Lives burn out. The people are hollow now, with nothing left but fleeing. No triumph, despite their victory; no hope, despite their freedom. Hurricanes lash them. The sky is black with cloud, ominous with the storm that rages about their ships. Through the firmament worm unidentifiable creatures, sleek and black and vile. A monster rises from the depths, the brother to leviathan, and only through the death of some do others survive. Cowards throw their fellows from ships, and then those ships themselves are destroyed. Only those with courage and virtue pass through.

We return to the here-and-now, and she is leaving her city. She wanders into this different wilderness, which is bleak, not forgiving. Stark, winterborn trees cling to the heavens to hold them up, and at any moment it seems their strength might give out. Her obsession led her to this. She is the progeny of scholars and the progenitor of myth. The only one in a storied history that is hoped to have found aetoras, that once-city so close to the souls and songs of the Es'mensis.

Slowly, she travels. This is the wayfaring that will make her, she knows, and so she savors it. She ignores the hunger that worms in her stomach and hobbles her mind.

She finds all things on her path. Lonely standing stones, written with lichen and neglect and carved with images perhaps a script and perhaps a painting. She embraces them like they were family and spends a night in their company. This is the closest she has come to companionship in weeks, and she is unconcerned. She is at more home with the dead and the passed than perhaps she would care to admit. Between the silent rocks, she confesses at last that she is more at ease here than even with her books. This harshness, wildness, loneliness beneath the star-studded stars is what will make her, she knows.

Seasons and leagues both pass beneath her unfeeling feet. Curious landscapes teach her visage: an expansive cliff, the peak of an nameless mountain; a wildfire that rages around her, scars her with soot but does not touch her flesh; a frozen desert. She drinks wild water, falling from her wasted fingers in shining drops, head cast back, eyes closed in generous rapture, but she eats nothing. Her hair falls out, the lustrous filaments dropping with each halting step. For a short time her path is marked with a golden trail, as the sun transforms the darkness that swathed her face to spun aurum.

She looks as if she will die. Flesh cracked, arms like twigs. The only thing that shines still are her eyes. But oh, her eyes! Bright and yellow, liquid with hope, shining with courage, like the moon at dawn shines on the tops of cliffs. Seeming to float in her cavernous face, her eyes make her beautiful.

She grows certain of death. She has traveled the whole world, walked continents, crossed oceans in this prayer of searching. But she has found nothing.

Then at last, when hope has failed, when she has walked worlds of nothing but water and tenacity, she sees a glimmer. Her sight is blinded by hope, and the sluggish blood surges in her veins. Color flees to her chalky cheeks and she breaks her fragile lips with a smile. She runs, falls, runs and is finally at the gates of her long search. We have not seen what she sought until now, but there it is:

Out of one eye we see it arrayed in its eternal radiance. The gates made of limestone and marble blur in her vision. The charcoal road that leads to the soul of the holy city. And there, its inhabitants! Those blessed keepers of aetoras! What virtue could surpass that which now fills her pitiable body? To have fought with hope and courage and fear and desperation and the desire never to see another creature. To have wagered her life on the certainty that this place was real. And now, to be here-and-now and at last. With the knowing that she has found

Out of one eye, nothing but ruins. Time dies, and her sight dims. A last scrap of light, all that remains of her ardor, lays itself on her teeth and she is quiet. Where is her tenacity now, that all is lost? Where the sting of death? Where the graven victory? At the end of her long search there are only empty stones, not even kissed with the mortar their builders laid on them in gentle benediction. And now there is no choice for her, as there was never any choice before. So, without hope, without fear, with absolutely nothing, she waits. Waits to find

the grace she had sought for so long.

Like a lie it takes all life from me. Like a heart it fills my body, passing through me its twisted roots and subtle agonies, calling me into question with its travailous rapture, leaving no stone unturned, no heart unquenched, no creature more than a mewling whelp. Naught left but kneeling, humble, frustrated, and resigned. Tired, hungry, in pain both moral and psychological. Is this where it has left me? Then why do I need not to let it lie? There is some heartier gravity at work on my bones, coming from whence they came, drawing them from whence they go.

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.

A people steeped in history.  Generations blessed and cursed, rampant both in liberty and tyranny.  Wire hands grip at empty stomachs, sustained only by the fascination, some would say obsession, with a force greater than themselves, which without remorse will lay them low despite their dutiful observance.  It is more than the pages themselves that take in these contrite spirits.  It is less than fiction, stricter than truth, a taller tale than many historians would care to tell, but nevertheless, it is them.  Stricken from the hearts of those lonely, humble speakers of the cheyr'emeth.

With an intolerable ache for knowing, let them lay down their lives, their passions (as cogent as these may be), where from they will throw themselves ever forward.  Having taken from them all that has been, there is only left what will be.  In contrast, though, they will never give up the past, for these are creatures of history, spectres of libraries, wraiths of ancient cities, guardians and students of what has gone before.

They are smaller than those they came from.  After years of knowing too well the sas'arael, the Iaerae, their brethren and former kindred, tower above them.  In contrast to these, they are weak and frail.  But where the bliss of awe has been banked by centuries of cynicism and neglect, the Es'mensis will not give up the hunt for aetoras. 

They are a people of shades, of practicality, one might almost say, garbed as they are in their layers on wasted layers, and their minimal adornment.  What regalness possesses them comes only from their demeanor.  Shoulders square, neither hunched nor thrown back, but given to an air of defiance nonetheless. 

Eyes, yellow and amber, pass judgment from hollow sockets.  Their faces not skeletal, but burned away by the seeking and staring for too long into the face of glory.  It is a surprise their visage does not run and flow like candlewax, such things have they seen.  Having bound otherworld's inhabitants, as slaves and soldiers, having endured hatred and spite from their fellows and guardians and captors, suffering betrayal from their would have been liberator, how is it that this people has survived?

Only through countless strength, unbelied by their diminished bodies.  Only through courage of the rarest sort, yet epidemic to this curious race.  The eternal hunt for truth, whether in the day that comes or the day that does not.  What are dirty nails, pale skin, burning eyes, dry and ashen lips, maddened hair, and a demeanor fey and wild in recompense for the things they have learned?  Should they all be struck blind they would wander the streets with their canes and their hopes, finding some manner, even in their disability, to sense the change in texture of writing and written, to the end that all should not perish, but have everlasting life. 

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.

Material abundance goes hand in hand with spiritual famine.  Go forth as slaves and return as free men.  Loose yourselves before the halls of the Iluthe-set-Arc, bind yourselves to that hollowed tower, and when it brings you in, tie it down my child.  Sing that beast to sleep in your eyes, that stares out lecherously like one of the mesura to devour the heavens and the earth.  Give in to ambiguity, my child.  Lay to rest what subtle ironies plague your fledgling spirit.  Ask not for answers and I will not trouble you with lies.  Beg not the source for I will not plague you with alms.