Contingency

Up from tranquil suspension she came floating, lifted forcibly. Out of the seat of sleep deeper than sleep, away from that place beyond place. Down from the Deep Sea, retrieved mid-thought from its ethereal internetwork of transeunt collusion, epistemic warfare, and synthetic sentience.

The one who seized her, interrupted a wayward delving for a sympathetic power, she knew him. The godtouched, the catalyst. The keeper of time. So she would be the one to court him, in a contest of probabilities.

She coiled in on herself, then made the body sensate. She stood to face him, and in grudging deference, recited the invocation: "Do you ever dream about surrender?"

Children of the Dunes

It was during the Exodus that the witch-queens of the Lemsarp ward disseminated out onto the sandveldt, and began their self-imposed exile in the tomb-cities they call cærs.

You would be right to assume that life in these austere, subpellucid conditions, away from the metropolitan verve, is one of supreme tedium. As an expedient, and with some cunning which remains opaque to our best scientific insight, these "Allmothers" have constructed a race of golem-servants; their children.

Subsequently the witch-queens have reinvented the lost art of dreaming, employing these un-children like in a puppet play. They dance (intricately), they act (convincingly), they sing (mellifluously), all to deliver a complex form of kinetic allegory. The guard-consorts of the Allmothers, their Husbands, are depended on for oneiromancy.

During my stay in Cær Brachan I witnessed and painstakingly transcribed one-hundred and thirty-eight of these dream-performances, along with their given interpretations as supplied by the Husband. Thus, I began to recognize some common elements that made for a sort of syntax throughout the plays. Imagine my chagrin when, inquiring to the Husband as to the nature of this metalinguistic code, I learned that the dreams are not only highly structured - they are in fact rote!

There are (I was informed) 1587 specific dreams, this number being sacred to the Allmothers. The immediate question is clear: How many of these are intended for military functions?

... Heretics of Elesarp, Farhen Brektr

Accouchement

He lay long-again on the buried roof of Cær Droi in equivocal, supine rumination.

The Husband's plea clung to him like a geas. It achieved a limited fruition, and a paradox resounded in him:

Does hope sublimate woe, or does woe subvert hope?

His thoughts, long coopted by the contravention of an amplified being, wrestled the fugitive arguments of causation opposing conation. His many lives, his many faces. The enormity of that-before, the equipoise of this-now. Was it immaculate formula, or incredible chance?

Reason scored:

Causality is an artifice - the fitz of experience.

The Husband was right. This decision was his. And must be his poiesis, else he be the hostage of impulse.

To kill a man makes a murderer; to kill a million makes a conqueror; to kill them all...

What god am I to fate the last of men?

So his thoughts came around like a wheel, a retread of their own tracks.

This is sophistry.

He stared up into the floor of the universe, decanting his mind. The jetsam and lagan of inquest and acquest strewn across the buoyant fluid of impartial awareness; just like the patternless glim and glum of an interstellar cloud. An abrupt and jarring paranoia spalled his immanence - irrationally he recalled the spooked fluttering of a brace of joulops against water - not merely psychosomatic but external. Those stars stared back at him.

Who will judge my judgment?

Husband

As she died her Husband woke.

Standing titubant, with cathartic trembling he shed his long inertia. And finger condemning, in procellous voice he adjured:

"What god are you to stifle the purpose of men?"

Then stooped as though burthened by the weight of consciousness. His next and final words were slurred and elegiac.

"This is the world; there is no other."