Sleeper

Cær Droi was a lump, as indifferent as a barrow.

The subterranean maze that would have kept secret its breach had been compromised by decay. Past the deep door he found a dingy grotto; squatting around a dreggy sump were three of her children, the remains of so many others made a carpet of fecal debris.

Such a miserable tableau primed his vindication. This is not life! With his hands he snuffed the limpid zombies, and left them in a litter like so much squalid chattel.

Down a narrow stair he violated her adytum. She and her Husband lay on the cold earth, sunken into a comatose stupor of anoesis, barely zoetic. The result of an eternal boredom.

Still, he was cautious to approach. Power does not wither, though it sleeps. At her neck he felt her blood's evanescent crawl.

Against her lips he applied one drop from his phial.

Exile

In his third life he had been the judge of Hestern. An architect of a new world, scrounging from the midden of the old.

With him, ten-thousand refugees of a murdered world raked through the muck of their toppled race and grew a soaring junk fortress; her uneven walls a regurgitation of failed defenses, towers borrowed from the ruins of Mousk and Cait and Ys, their spindly buttresses a cobble of obsidian and offal.

They called her Elesarp, the Lady's carrion.

Her ten-thousand immigrants were a stew of anomie; they danced and alloyed around coal-fires, bought and sold pieces of their deathless bodies. They could still imagine time, but it was inconspicuous, liminal. The cycles unpredictable and overlapping. All the yesterdays became a muddled before-since. All the tomorrows, a singular later-again.

Their counterfeit revelry flattened into stultified ambivalence. Many surrendered to a hope of final, total sensory deprivation, immuring themselves beneath the streets. A thing was discovered exhuming them, feeding on their memories and splicing their bodies onto its own; a grotesque likeness of Elesarp herself.

A silt of dross accumulated, putrefied, and kindled. Transient fire roamed the citadel, and some fled to the windblown wastes. They hid themselves in cærs, and with some art they had discovered, crafted automatons to keep as companions.

Second Life

In his second life, he had been the wretch of Hyuri. How dire those days before the last day!

He could not clearly educe all the places and things he had seen; their details were obscured by a muslin of woe. He knew that there had been an inimitable organic density to the world; a depth of visibility inconceivable to the children of the cærs.

Now... now-since, all that remained of the planet's surface was a caliginous barren.

Compulsively, he had already begun to walk. He stopped. Where to seek Cær Droi? Whatever muscle in him that sensed cardinal direction was long flaccid. Away to his left was a dull copper twinkle. He had used that to navigate the sandveldt, once. He figured his cosine on the invisible spiral centering on that point of light. As he walked he thought:

So the Elesarp still burns.

Husband

In his first life he had been a soldier of Iylum. Gods of bosk and sacellum were the enemies of the state, and purged to the last. Iylum's justifications for deicide seemed to him, now-since, ambiguous. How many lives after that one? Impossible to frame in the antique concept of years. How true his memory? Impossible to frame in a culture of memory as cyclic and evolving.

But the hetman and the other children knew none of this. Now-since he was Husband of Cær Brae.

The children were drinking salt-lambic by the Torfire when he found them, and bade the hetman:

"Allmother sends a gift of poison to her sister of Cær Droi. I go to bear it to her and her children."

The hetman did not know a Husband could leave and enter the tour, but didn't ask or say.

"We children dream for Allmother while we wait. Will you by later-again?"

"Later-again," he lied, as it was the Husband's holy duty to lie.

"Allmother smiles for none of your dreams," he did not tell the hetman, for it was also the Husband's must to keep Allmother's secrets. Her sleep had lapsed into acedia, and so too had her sister's thought the Husband, so he would go and find out.

And because the children of Cær Brae and their witch-dam were anathema to him, after he walked the tour he sealed it shut. Then for a very long-again stood on the gelid sandveldt transfixed by stars.

No More

We had no more forests, so we built our cities out of stone and iron. We had no more wars, so instead of walls we set mazes. And in time, we could no more remember the others of us.

We had no more dreams, so we invented them out of dance and song. We had no more day, so instead of wood we burned coal. And in time, we could no more remember the stars.

We had no more children, so we shaped them out of clay and dust. We had no more gods, so we told our children that we were them. And in time, we could no more remember the truth.

Symbiote

The theory of the Apostates thus shown as demonstrably sound, perforce we must discard of the specification god and - attempt to - substitute a more accurate descriptor.

For the sake of economy, let us for now borrow from potentology the label: Power.

Substantial variegation in the physiology of Powers not only infers a separate (introduced) species, it goes further to suggest multiple (unrelated) species.

More to the point, it is well-documented that Powers of deficient client subscription are inferior in the key indicators of capacity, intelligence and area. It is here tempting to posit that competition amongst Powers is no different than competition amongst predators, but we are then ignoring the co-operative phenomenon: competition amongst us the clients ourselves.

Maybe the potentologists have it wrong; or let us say, backwards. As an etiologist would ask:

Which is the parasite, and which is the host?

... Indagation of the Gods, author unclear

The Lay of Ymer

Where once Iylum stood, greatest of all cities for the greatest of all gods, before stood Caredwiy, shrine of the twins, Ymer and Yris.

Yris loved her brother Ymer, but Ymer coveted the mortal Eco; obsequious, to her lord she came. Poisoned by envy's bile, Yris stabbed them both in the temple bed where they lay.

On misted morn Ymer slept upon a bier by the lyart soughing of the bay. Yris took torch to his catafalque, ushered him from the shore; and I thought to hear her say:

Ashes, take him back to earth. Water, quench my lover's thirst.

Lights of his pyre glimmered as wisps in the fog. The sea received Ymer, and from him took its name.

Conversation with a Living God

What have you done! This is not the gift I gave!

Yours was no gift, Lord. The issue of my womb shall never live, but neither shall he ever die. So shall it be for me. So shall it be for all of us.

I have shown you the arrogance of free will. In immortal death I have taken it from you, so that you would come to ken the burden of indeterminism. Instead you have displaced your shame, and raised a host of abominations to walk with you through perdition!

Am I abomination? You created me.

And you have created ten thousand more. From spite for my gift? From ambition, your army against the seal of heaven?

Not my army.

Whose then?

Yours. We are your people.

Arcadia IV

Three years passed.

The boy was almost grown. Learned of his self: The range and power of his limbs, which wound would heal in a day, which in a week. Where to cup with his foot or his hand to catch a man's leg, and how to calm his thoughts for many days of travel on foot.

He knew how to make a poultice of mud or mashed gourd, and to marshal hunger when rations were few. To save a little of his water for cleansing of fresh cuts. How to spar with Alin, who would lead with his left leg, and Mabon, who was fierce but tired quickly. Eric, and Radu, and Pavl, and all the rest.

How to serve as the slave of warriors, but be treated almost as one of them.

They called him by their word korus, so he called himself the same. He did not think of his old name, or of Dwlf and Amidash. He learned Iylum's language and the customs of Iylum's men, but spoke to them little. To walk and to carry, and fight for their sport, were his purpose.

Three years they hunted the gods of Arcadia, led by Iylum's own picked apostol Drustan. Five gods they killed, and many of their scattered people too. But the sixth and last was Aun, who had the form of a monstrous wolf, ancient and thrawn. Aun did not hide as the others had done, but came upon their camp as they slept. His coat was the black of forest-night, and his eyes two burning beryls. Drustan's tent he set upon first, and crushed the apostol in his crooked jaws.

Some rose in time to fight, but in the morning all of Iylum's men lay in beds of gore.

Korus hid, and he watched the slaughter. He bristled and trembled; not in dread, but awe! To see such power, to consider such a foe. Then he knew what Drustan must have felt, to battle a god.

So he went south, to go before the seat of Iylum and offer his fealty.

As a boy he was given nothing, and loved nothing, and aspired to nothing. Now he was a man. He had made himself from nothing. He had made the sword his lover. He aspired to serve the god of conquest.

Arcadia III

They crossed into Arcadia. A land of a hundred forests, a hundred mountains, and a hundred gods, but few men.

He was treated as a little more than a pack animal. Cold porridge, water, a blanket of filthy wool were his comforts. To walk and to carry were his purpose. He understood this, but understood nothing else. "Who are they?" he asked Barro on a wet morning, clenching their pale fingers at a spare, hissing fire. Barro was a seasoned man, not young like Clovis; he was solitary but seemed wise to the boy. "They are Iylum's men. And now we are Iylum's slaves. You know of Iylum?" "He is god of conquest." "The gods have always warred with one another. Buy Iylum thinks he is better. Iylum thinks he is best."

"Where will they take us?"

Barro did not know, or did not want to answer, but said at last: "We will be dead before they get there."

Clovis was dead a tenday later, too cold and too tired he stopped on the mud track they marched, and knelt. Two of Iylum's men yelled at him, kicked him, spat on him, then finally took his load, his boots and clothes. They left Clovis there, sobbing, naked and dirty, defeated not by war or the gods but by himself, with his burden divided between Barro and the boy.

He did not feel pity for Clovis, but shame.

Some of Iylum's men would use Barro to exercise with wood swords and staves. They had used Clovis too, so now they used the boy. He did not know how to fight, and did not think he wanted to learn. It had done his father no mercy, or Dwlf or Amidash. Or Clovis. But he had no choice, because he had no choices.

He was slow and clumsy, but he was angry too. I am not an animal! his thoughts stormed, How will you fight a hundred gods! His adolescent rage was punished. Blows to his face and head that blinded him, deafened him, deprived him of all strength with shocking swiftness; he shook and staggered but he refused to submit, to kneel as Clovis had done. Finally his hands were struck, with such force he was swept clean of all other sensations than pain. He fell then, not whimpering like Clovis, but screaming.

They tended him and gave him strong drink that night, but drove him hard and did not feed him the next day. Like a dog, he knew. Like a dog that won't obey.

Arcadia II

This is how his education began:

Twelve of them skulked downslope through the thick dark, threading a maze of naked beech, boulders big as oxen, ferns painted by hoarfrost. Dwlf picked their path on deer-ways that wound and wandered, Amidash was the vigil at their back. Two other children and three women went with them, but it was the five men who seemed more afraid. They carried only hardtack and some dried venison, blankets, and spears.

In the day they would have reached the soft bice grass of the mead in an hour, but their progress was deliberate and chary. A twist of ankle would have been grave. Often they stopped to crouch and listen and watch for other feet and other eyes in the wood.

So the sky was lighting as they got level ground. The men whispered: "Do we go back?" "Twenty tents..." "Yes." "No. We must be quick." "They will mark us!" "The camp sleeps, and I see no watch." "It must be now."

They went along the forest edge in a sly hurry, until a stir of motion in the camp across the mead unnerved them, and they retreated up through the trees. Dwlf made their tracks to wend and allowed no rest. At low noon six men dressed in hard leather caught up. The fighting was short, too many were exhausted. Dwlf was stabbed through his left leg. Two other men of the cloh were slain, and then it was over. Amidash had vanished. The women and the other children fled, two gave chase.

He didn't know what to do, so he did nothing.

Their hands were tied and their shirts stripped. Down to the camp they were took, Dwlf and Barro and Clovis and him, but they met no others from the cloh. Then he saw the smoke, thick and black as the night had been, creeping down from the divide, as they had done.

The camp was breaking. The four of them lay or knelt in the wet grass, while four of the leathered men spoke over them in some coarse southron tongue. All carried forged swords belted in tooled scabbards, their boots were weathered and drab. Dwlf's throat was cut. The other three were made to bear provisions, and roped in a line.

They left, marching north.

Arcadia I

As a boy he was given nothing, and loved nothing, and aspired to nothing.

Dwlf was not their father, but had parented them both since leaving their birth-homes in the night. For one cold summer and one wet winter they hid under the skirt of a mountain, in a cloh between two of her legs, like pups confused by uncertain danger.

Other families came, but many left. There was always work to do, wood and fire and water and game to gather and tend and fetch and skin - and the ditch to dig, and dig, and dig; agone were days of idle boyish play, Dwlf taught them all the chores of men.

A cliroc stayed the winter, and made them to do obeisance to Gaerigania, the god of the mountain, but Dwlf did no rituals with them.

Amidash was the quicker and stronger of the two, and sometimes with Dwlf practiced spears. They had no forge for bronze, and trade was rare. A sickness of chills and sores took three of the families, and the cliroc, and bore a pock on Dwlf's left hand, but the boys were unblighted.

Rain and runoff rose in the ditch, and one night there were campfires in the mead below. Men argued in Dwlf's shanty. Dwlf took the boys and two other families, twelve of them all, and left before the Lady's blush.

The cloh had never bore a name. In his memory, it was the first of many places in a long journey.

Threshold

He opened his eyes, to find security in the asterisms. Orientation relaxed the waking vision's grip, his throat unclenched with a sigh. As he breathed out, reflexively, the pit breathed from him. Trepid, he lowered his stare into the lightless expanse.

By place he counted back time, the anterior shrouded by a labyrinthine canyon, a trap he had thought eternal. Freed, he came out onto a littered and sulphurous moor, that descended onto salt tundra. There the wind had belched up a long squall of dust; northless, untethered, he flickered across the scrub until spat out on a basalt plain, trackless and corrugated in strange configurations. It graduated into a wide, shallow stair, that banked on chalk cliffs at the cusp of the world.

Here was a vast emptiness, in it no features to distinguish near from remote; an immense hollow - not like a chamber, he discerned no boundaries but the line where he stood, and the eclipse of the sky. As if he had found the sunken sun, an extinguished megasomatic entity, the corpse of a star.

Here he stood in lasting contemplation of that unknowable space. Motionless; time's surrogate prosody hung.

Longer, he brooded the solitary articles at his feet: Two stones, fist-size and worn.

Then, ponderous and resigned, he traded them, then walked out to the brink.

"Lord!" spake behind him.

Falling Away

Opened eyes blind, by the awful magnitude of nothing. Lost from land's end and falling, down, in, away. Tumbling, tumbling. Closed throat stuck, by the choke of abyssal terror. Tumbling. Into the empty sun's dead heart.

Somnorine

By steps he retreated from Iylum's domain, and driftered far in a darkling wasteland.

A throng of dawn mirages expected him; fires on the mountain crowns that soon cooled to vermilion, indigo, taupe.

No other living thing did he meet. With the wind he walked, over lands sagged into slue, through jungles cinereous and mute, across oceans frozen.

So his own circadian process deteriorated. Sleep shrank to syncope; a malaise of oneirataxia conjured dweomers of cadaverous behemoths, mundified by a blood deluge, the welkin's eye opening into a vault of oblivion, coruscating xanthochromatic.

Like the peakfires, this delirium glutted then waned. He quit sleep. He could not remember what last he ate, or ever eating. Still his doom vexed him, so he walked. Over dunes of ash, through starlit wealds of argent stone, across the void of seas.

A doubt burgeoned, then festered: Was it the world execrated, and him spared? Was it the world in fugue, and him lucid?

Was the world final, and he the final arbiter?

Depth Perception

The ravine was long, narrow, like the mountain had cupped her palms between her knees. The sides of the niche, that he remembered verdant and treacherous with moss, were wan and rotting in a bath of gloom. The wreath of forest delineating the precipice was slumped in retirement. All the bothies on the walls were sagging into fuliginous sediment, the mulch of civilization in decay.

He looked up from the lap of the cloh at the loft of the night, incubative, and felt smothered by the cosmos; as if sunk to the very floor of an ocean as deep as the gulf between stars. His weight drained and pooled in his feet, his tail of gravity listed; ahead rolled below.

The bed of the gulch became an escarpment, its jambs prostrate, and his view toppled to survey his altitude from the horizon. There guttered the tumid sun, like a chthonic inferno, sucking him down its desiccated throat.

Gods Last

Departing Iylum's necropolis, he passed the blackened hull of a grange and its tract. There toiled a man alone, back bent to the barren earth, so to deterge it with sweat, and eat, and live a little longer.

He obscured himself below the path and hurried on his way, or else his numinous aura might be detected, and aligned with this fatal causatum.

Crossing the high bridge into a bordering cloh, he met a woman strange and ragged. With the fence she struggled, so to thrust herself into the nadir, but was too weak, too gravid, to climb and to fall.

He sued: "Do you accept death? I ask you. Do you really? How do you know? What is the quale of acceptance?" So she presented his hand to her bare womb, full but cold. "It is the subtraction of will." Pitying he touched her with death, and she wandered the other way.

Arriving the river's native side, plangent he knelt. To forget hunger, to slough infirmity, to last undying through the night of years - but still to know grief, was the greater curse. Now would she know it too?

He saw his reflection in the mirror. To him it spoke, but he would not remember the words, their sounds or shapes. Reviled it touched him with life, and he came awake.

Lich

Death climbs up from the tenebrous places. Where it nested in the day, the sewers beneath the trees, the slums between the hills. Death sniffs in the murk, so the leaves shiver. Death reaches up to pluck the plump fruit, death drinks the rain that grew them. Coughs and slobbers from a million mouths, molten sputum and the sludge of its shit, but no tears will slake death's dry cheeks. Death is hiding in the rust, singing in the sand. Death is soft as dust.

We cleave it open to cast down the dead, but the earth is not the ossuary. It is itself the lich.

Immortal Vespertine

He woke from apprehensive dreams, into vertigo and sweat. Iylum had been seeking him, while he hid together with Kyrig. But the taint left smoldering footprints behind, and no refuge could they keep.

He felt there suddenly unanchored, and paralyzed, like a stone in a flood. This was not his world; he had been deracinated from his own and was numb to this one. He had sat down some hours before to sleep under the lee of an oak. He stood now and beheld an impossible simulacrum of then, everything fixed in an immutable twilight, withholding the entelechy of night.

Comprehending the immobile sun, he experienced a profound transformation of perception. First as a disequilibrium, a catatonic aporia, then with plenary awe. Time had become wholly noumenon, uncoupled from its ontic covenant.

With only a coat and staff, he walked out into a world hushed by celestial coma.

Days Dwindling

The days are dwindling. Dim this eve, dimmer the next. The Lady withers and winters; noon cool as morn. A thousand thousand dawns have sprung from her womb; she is used up. The last are lame, dwarfed, blighted.

At day's dwindling the mother of light is distant and thin. I see her plainly: Look into the os of time! Acronycal dread crawls in me. The wind reeks ash. The earth turns adust. The Sentinel is cadaverous, a grey face in a bottomless black well.

The days' dwindling swallows us like the serpent of acrasy gorges on the egg of youth. We slick into the belly of entropy.

Tempest

No record of Palas survived its colossal fall; no account of its amaranthine splendor, its impossible size and arcadian conditions, is firsthand - no objective distinction can be made between the myth and the experience of that ancient sanctuary of man.

Equally unreliable is the assertion that the gods then lived in accord, with their subjects, with one another, or that they were conflated; and it is the competing theory that to historians is less incredible:

That from the Deep Sea came the first gods, a fugitive kind which named themselves the Apostates, and the aftermath of their settlement was the Tempest. So great was the scale of this epiclysm that even its specifics were annihilated; what relationship between Apostates and their subsequent ectypes, how no vestiges are found of a state so pervasive, why no further such allotriomes have since impinged us - these are the so-called enigmament of our era's advent.

Conversation with a Dying God

I know this place.

Yes. This is - was once - the Beacon of the World. Behold collapsed glory! An inept wonder. The conclusion of all vanity. The wreckage of paradise!

You have brought me here because your work is complete?

Never complete. See down there, that litter of shelters, like sediment. The vomit of your ceaseless determination! I am come here to die where Iylum died. Face you west and lament the final sunset. I have covered the world in fire. Now shall it be covered in darkness.

Lord, you abandon me! What purpose is left for me in desolation? This place is no wonder. It is a graveyard of the gods.

Never a purpose had I for you. It was you who pursued me. As you witnessed the murder of my kin, so you were cursed to witness the murder of your own.

I have forgotten who I was. This man whose face I wear, his mind is obscured in a wake of smoke. I am a newborn, in a dying world.

Then die with it.

Mercy, Lord! Let us worship you, as a fire in the night!

Iylum would that you worshiped no gods. I would that no men live to defile us. No matter. Both of us submit to extinction.

Then die, the last of you! But we still live, some of us.

There are no victories left to you. You will live in the bones of your empires. Your children will be strangers to daylight, born blind. You will scrounge in the dirt until your own tombs are dug. And the last of you will lie down in them, because there will be no beauty left for you to fight for.

Aspects of the Lady

Manifold are the Aspects of the Lady.

Say the heliomancers, there are 144, each with its own portent. The day's weather, the yield of the crops, even the destiny of a nation may be interpreted through careful observation and exact recording of the Lady's procession.

When in the morning she is bright and yellow as a day lily, she is then called the Girl. A clement sign. But when rising red as a goblet filled of blood, she is the Hag, and an omen of turbulence.

Veiled by haze in aftermorn she is the Mirror, also named in Iylum the Hor, a dram of silver. She then signals caution, or some say thrift.

At brightest apex, she is called by her name Beril (or Brill), and it is ill luck to deceive in sight of her countenance.

By evenfall if scarlet she is the Matron, assuring prosperity. Dire to see her gamboge and diffuse, for the Bane is a harbinger of ruin.

In her stead comes the Sentinel, the Night-Shepherd. He watches over, turning his eye to each country in turn, and ferries dreams down and back across the Deep Sea, from a thousand other worlds where gods and star-sailors have cast them up.

The Following Times

Then came the ides of man.

Civilization's apogee, Iylum's sublimation of divine tyranny into providence, was the ripening that invited torrefaction. Only where men lived in stone hovels did men survive. Desert foragers, highland nomads, lowland cenobites. Around them the mountains burned, the seas boiled, and the roots of the world melted into slag. Finally, exhausted, the sun itself dwindled.

Iylum had stripped every aegis that could repel his spear; so then there was no amianthus that could shield the flame of Hyuri.

But the long dusk of perigee is not fatal. This was not the first apocalypse, and not the last. Progress, enlightenment, apotheosis: these things are deciduous.

The Wall

Along the west bank of a narrow muddy track there is a shimmering screen of cypress. He is facing it when he emerges from another lapse. His own footprints tell him the direction he has come, but he remembers nothing since the mossy, graying walls of Carpathia.

In his left hand is an irregular stone; one face jagged and new, the other smooth and decayed. Held before him in coincidence with the trees, he can liken the network of slender roots that were growing through it, and the unfixed streams of dusk coming through the leaves:

There are no walls, none that are impermeable barriers. The wind and the light come through; the earth digs its fingers in; even the body is not a wall. The skin is porous. All the things he has touched, sweat he has meted out in exchange for tears absorbed through fingertips, the lovers he has held, the dust of a millennium of civilization tramped down under his bare feet.

Everything gets in.

Gloaming Halo

In its stone cradle, a senescent basilica burns.

A monstrous skeleton, mantled by a gloaming halo.

By night, no ghosts linger. Only smoke, char, and the echo of a vengeful god's somnolent footfalls.

Weird of the Vagabond

What is the weird of the vagabond?

Is it sacred or base to succumb to lackadaisical destitution? Is enlightenment the total freedom from bondage - even the restriction of concern? Is apathy a transcendence from vanity?

Is the cliroc's choice of deprivation more meaningful than the no-choice of the leper? Is suffering quantifiable?

If possession is the having-of a thing, cannot a man ever relinquish his own being? Is it selfish to be self-aware? Can a man conjoin with all things, become oikoumene, and remain a thing called a man?

Or would it be said; There: He is no longer man. He was a vagabond, and has wandered into the infinite.

Lull

He is often now between places. The gaps wider, the walks longer. Fatigue is absent; blocked out by a shield of muscle, callus, and a terrible impetus. Even grief's leaden weariness is fading, its crust has made him inure. Drained of the fluid of empathy, at first he benefited from an efflorescence of apathy, but it has degenerated into a loathsome grime, a patina of fear.

He often wakes and is still walking. Rest is beyond his volition, automated, overseen by the power impelling him. He does not dream, and his waking memories are garbled by an ubiquity of horror and the confusion of peripheral omniscience. Everything so fragmented that he suspects he is skipping through time, inchoate.

But there are idyllic lulls when he is between places. A high meadow jubilant with so much clean, open air. A nestled hollow in a wooded gulch, evocative of his halcyon cloh. He will stop, void of urge, and breathe, and listen, and feel, for a while. Sensing nothing artificial, the strict conditions of ecology, he speculates that this is the last god's last ambition.

Then a stir of discontent murmurs in his empty stomach. No. The creations of men. All the made things burning, unmade. Destroyed! Murdered! Razed!

And when all the makers are gone?

Silence, a lull. He walks on. The world is vast. There are many empires still.

Twilight's Spark

In far-flung Mousk the doom of Hyuri's flame is not yet known. Women still love according to the Attar Laws; men work and drink and covet, and love the women out of spite if not out of need. Bronze bells and the night's murders herald the dawn; noon's heat is pacified by the wind from across the steppes; twilight's spark is a scintillating jonquil buoyant in an indigo mere - that same color as the velveteen chitons worn by Diagne's hierodules.

The slums reek with the fetor of fertility, like a pond teeming with algae, while the heights are as clean and arid as a desert; and both creep across at uncertain borders.

Lissome willows that blossom crimson in middle-winter curtain Rivern Street - a two-story defile vivisecting the din and press of the Aestival Court - but the galleries of the goliath-tree in its center are all azure windowed, selling talismans of hubris, trophies filled with the pith of greed, and icons of the motherland's quondam glory.

The worship-places hum and nod with rituals of meditation, beds laid out for the ascetes to drink the poppy-milk of torpor and transcend misery. The flesh-houses sweat and roll with their older arts, parlors made murky with jasmine-smoke for obfuscated strangers to couple, slither, and fuck.

Spice has become more valuable than gold. The death of a prince is celebrated. Virgins are fungible with slaves. Tomorrow, a handsome vagrant will come in by the west gate. He carries only a coat, pack, and walking staff.

Let Go

Far past Eridu the Broken Land; grey-swathed in the Sea of Dust, there slept in that cauldron a flock of isles that had lost its god and people, and so its name. A domain of tombs. An intestable kingdom.

Fat with the pogrom of Arcadia, his master slumbered. So he the vessel risked all to sojourn in a place beyond places, so to be alone with another god's ghosts, and behold no beauty he must later bring to ruin.

The outer orbit of its principalities were wholly barren, so in his sandskiff he scudded to the crux. No proof survived of its cultivation. He tried to vivify its walls from reefs, its avenues out of negative space, its donjon from a central spar of ashen rock. But he was no more and no less alone.

Would this be the fate of all men?

He was once a drupe in a weald. Now the pit is corrupt, the world denatured.

All the Lights in the Sky are Stars

Time is not a stream, it is not serial. Time is observed. A man recalls a day past, but he merely observes his memory of his past observation. A woman recalls the same day, and her new observation of the old observation overlays the man's just as warp and weft make a tapestry. Many years hence each recalls the same day again; but the memory is already different, their interpretations filtered by new experiences; the tapestry has changed.

Time is the night sky. There is no emptiness there: Behold a constellation, limned by stars at unfathomable heights, and the illusion of darkness between them; but the light of every sun is a volume, not a point. So memory encroaches on experience, making time like a feedback loop. But "loop" is a tricky word. It conveys two dimensions, it is a trap of linear motion. Experience is a system of opposing forces!

Remember yesterday; wade into its galaxy. What binds the memories, the stars? Gravity: "Observe, it falls." The length of a day: "Observe, the sun rises and sets." Every man says: Who will remember me? Some say: My children. Others: My works. They are all the same. You have made a thing to be observed. And I am the final witness.

Depth does not accumulate, comprehension reifies it. To live a thousand years, the vastness of time becomes awesome as the whole of the night sky seen at once, the gaze unfocused. This doesn't belittle him. The world burns to its socket, but he will not shut his eyes to spite vision. On a winter morning in the charnel guts of Old Iylum he watches the sun rise, and thinks: This sun too is one of the lights in the sky. The heavens are not a place apart, the past is not gone. I am the corpse of history. This is how the world ends: The fish have ceased to swim, they have become the sea.

The god within is laughing at him. Relativity is the science of detachment. Solipsism! See: I am the fisher of men. I am the eater of time.

Red on White

This road does not wend, it is straight as a cord taut between posts. It is a furrow through miles of greensward where homes have been sown, and some sprouted up into villages, and some withered into lorn ruins.

All the details of its ruts, stones and puddles, its population of cottages and their barns, their intricacies of wood-carved eaves and shutters and fences, are equalized by the new snow. The character of a weather vane, once daedal in the spring, now lumpen and indistinct from a midden. A gutter, now a lane. A trough, now a tumulus. Every thing anonymous. Gloved by nude winter.

Where are your people? Their traceless absence is an epitaph: All that our hands have wrought, once in defiance of nature, nature has now taken back; the colors that distinguished us, extinguished in white; then by the final color of the setting sun.

God and the Last Man

Awake, he thought he'd slept into noon. The shade of the cedar felt too warm, and a thin vapor rose off the side of the pond like the steam that skirts a fire. The fire was the sun, so gravid and red that it confused and filled him with a terrible vision of holocaust.

A pair of joulops startled the water, and then the fog. Only fog. His face was hot but the morning was still cool. The forest made her familiar coughs and shuffles of diurnal inhabitants reluctantly limbering. Birdsong and the tang of dew reassured him. Nothing out of place in his furtive bivouac; not even a proper camp but just an embrasure in the woods that crowded a wide clean pool.

He wanted to bathe but he feared to stand juxtaposed with his reflection.

Instead he shook out his coat, picked up his little pack, and his staff. A few steps away he found two acceptable stones, fist-size and worn, and traded their places to honor Gaerigania, long dead. Eaten by a greater power.

What would he have seen in the mirror? A man and the last god? Or god and the last man?