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.