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.
August 20, 2011
August 12, 2011
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.
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.
August 3, 2011
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.
July 31, 2011
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.
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.
July 24, 2011
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.
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.
July 16, 2011
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.
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.
July 6, 2011
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.
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.
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