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.