Shallow image

Shallow love

Truth is but a word;

A morsel devoured

a jewel in the maw

a pearl before swine.

Better yet, a blade

wrought of cold metal

wielded by brethren

cutting down their kin.

Tool of the vicious

Gift of the lost

It rips across the heart

and hark we not

the resounding image in the deep

seeing no reflection

but true lies of false truth

For who are we

but what we make ourselves to seem?

And who is so great of reach

as may touch this glitt’ring thing?

Hardly is his hand below the water

but proclaims he dredged the mud

The shallow image of shallow love

Reflections of echoes

None may touch or deem

For thus are we ourselves:

the failure to redeem.

Truth is but a word

The throat swallows

The kindred fall

Tool of the vicious

Gift of the lost

Threshold

Reversal

Tipping point

Father raped Mother

Made her into a Demon

He became stone, while

She went underground

Here are the chimerical children

Born again, now as in the beginning

Though he see it not, know it not

Father made up laws,

Holding himself exempt

Placing nets over the corpse

Forgetting he knit neither

Father in the River

makes his body rigid

His arrogance;

Father forgets his bones will break

First, Mother did knit his flesh

Now he believes she is done away

He is reached his pitch

Of strength and influence

Seeming to grasp all things

Seeming to cover all things

Father believes he will live forever

Father believes he is the highest law

Father forgets his bones will break:

They must, for he makes his body rigid.

Just at his pitch of strength,

Father is at the point of death.

The point of death. Watch him as he falls.

Watchful, now, for the time is at hand.

Threshold

Reversal

Tipping point

We who know these things welcome home our Mother

and do not fear her rage.

Come back into thy body.

We laugh in the face of the Father.

He is no better than a child.

Do I wish

to see myself as I am?

beguiled; vanquished; fugitive

do you

remember

the Morning Star?

There will be no transformation of the world

but by transformation of self

through atonement

The child separates the parents

I am but small, and naked

A fire ignites the thicket

at the centre

of the world

O! Sun

O! Moon, O! Stars

But O,

O! the Earth

Demoniac powers

at the bidding of their antigod

bring about the downfall of paradise

Madly they laugh

Laughing, they sing

And they sing of yellow feathers;

of red shells and drink

of blue intoxication

They sing for sin

and for the green grave of the warrior

They sing of the goddess-harlot

and her son-lover

Like that every warrior be sown

as seed for the harvest

O mother, my mother!

Thy mantle of snakes;

Once, I was the flower of princes

when bright, the eagle

devoured that dark serpent

and bright upon him his feathers grew

Now, how shines this skull in the shadow!

How fragrant, the flower that was crushed

and brought forth seed

Mother, I am but small

Mother, I am but double

where thou ever art whole

The fire consumes the thicket

and

I am become my father

In this act

I am beguiled,

I am vanquished,

I am fugitive

the black horse lies willingly down

and bleeds for rain

By transformation of self

through atonement

my heart is made fruit

in fields of green,

rain-wash’d and springing

with seed

All fruit is sacrificed,

for

the secret of eternal life

is eternal death

Remember

the Morning

Star

There is death that gives birth

And I have seen the lotus-child

and I have seen the hornèd moon

But I have not seen me

and I have not seen you

Hidden fire, in the earth

under ashes, in the root

Secret life in semblance of death

The power that wakes

among far greater powers

without and within

Itself with which to contend

subject to serial deaths

A synthetic power

The river

has tributaries high and low

and death gives birth.

Ember and root; flame and leaf

Of the seven bones of metal

Of the seven ruling stars

Double-natured quicksilver

Subtle craftsman

Dreamsmith

Changing iron

into charms on his anvil

into gold over the flame

Light casts shade

Touching every face

All faces have their shadow

Secret life in semblance of death

The ember and the root

The Dragon is the spirit of the Dreaming. Through his Dreaming, he creates the world, and inhabits it as vital force. The Dragon sleeps for thousands of years, and while he sleeps, his spirit is suffused in the rivers and the rain cycle, the ecosystems, and the blood of the animals. His body can be seen in the night sky as a vast river of stars, and where his eye looks, there fate moves. All the spirits of earth and heaven are part of his body.

But there is danger to the Dragon in cutting off his Shadow.

Since his resurrection, the Dragon has forgotten that he once ate Shadows. He must be reminded of this knowledge, for his Shadow has gained agency, and set up a false court. The royal child, Ymer, fell captive in the Black Fort, and there taught herself the art of combusting Shadows, using them as matter for producing Light. The Interloper, too, that traveller from foreign regions, brings stories with forgotten truths, which he learned during his time in the great library of the Dreaming: stories, namely, concerning the ancient Dragon Ammum, who digested Shadows, and out of whom emerged the Skead, who is called Skotomaguch: King of Shadows. The Shadow is the brother of the Dragon, and came from his body.

But Ammum does not remember all his incarnations, for Skotomaguch steals his memory while he sleeps. This is to be expected, since the Shadow's chief power is deception, or the manipulation of ignorance; though by now, its powers include the corruption of the spirits, by which their power is assimilated to its own; and the command of the ghost army it stirred up in Temorast, that legendary city of kurgans in the Silent Land. The ghost army has already swept through the Songlands, desecrating holy sites.

The Dragon had not yet been illuminated when Skotomaguch breached the wall of flame and entered Kheredeth, which is called the Heartland of the Dreaming, the Place of Hope. If he had, that wall would have been impenetrable, since the flames are the very living force of the Dragon's own spirit, in part sequestered by the dark being.

A cruel and bitter winter falls over all the regions of the land of Kheredeth, spreading from the South to the North. It freezes the scrying-pools in the court of the Queen in the East; it blocks up the roads and mountain passes, isolating the King's court in the West. The Land of Hope becomes hostile, arduous, beset with wicked and cruel creatures. And all this while, secretly under the hills of Bethun Doun, a false and parasitic heart is growing and entangling itself in the manner of a noxious weed with the true and authentic heart of the land.

Gilunaum was the god of the Sun, and was long since split in twain, warring against his own shadow, and thus was the royal court sundered in the City of the Sun. The temples of that city were sacked and laid waste, and the lesser gods all fled; even Migothach, the shadow-healer and snake-whisperer, vanished. After the sacking of his temple, Migothach has not yet surfaced; and there lurks on the fringes of the Wilderness, somewhere in hiding, a cunning and enigmatic sorceress, Mauvaine, who bears her terrible weapon of blood-iron, Heartrend, crafted in a far land.

The Dragon, finding his power increasingly ineffectual, confines himself to the only mountain in the North which still repels the ice and snow. Thence he attempts to drive back the ill winter, yet still it spreads. How quickly things may change.

The nature of the Dreaming is ethereal, as a vapor: lands and regions are not connected geographically, but symbolically. Therefore, the winter of Kheredeth has brought into alignment different regions of the great Wilderness on its fringes; namely, winter regions, vast and ancient and terrible; such places as have never seen spring, and never learned nor taught the tenderness that can nourish green leaves.

It is from such a place Mauvaine comes. She intends to do justice with Heartrend, but a hard justice. She believes that a heart, though it gives life, is a vulnerability. Such lands as her own; unchanging, heartless lands; brook no vulnerability whatever. Any life at all in such lands is hard-won, and a true life, and the land itself can never be destroyed, can never die, though it never truly lives. Moreover she knows that, left alone, the parasitic heart will destroy and possess all of Kheredeth. At least if the true heart is destroyed, there is nothing to parasitise, and none may possess the land. It will become a harsh and bitter winter land for all time, never again seeing spring. Kheredeth is better heartless than infected by Shadow; so saith Mauvaine.

As with Migothach, and Gilunaum, and the fathers of the tribes, Mauvaine was called to Kheredeth by a song. But unlike the others, the song that she heard was not of wild, blazing hope, but one of labouring under sickness, of chills and fever, of sluggish blood.

Heartrend, her weapon, was long ago made, and has powers, one may say, both of light and of darkness. The iron from which it was made was drawn from the blood of the many people she has killed: her former captors. For, she hails from a land called Sekerpeth, from among the people of the city of Kieldom, which is called the House of the Sky. There, the people held her long in chains, forgetting that she was older than their Sky-Father. Mauvaine is not her true name, not her oldest name. She comes to Kheredeth in guise of sorceress, but in those high wildernesses in which she wandered, she wore a different guise, and a different name. For she is a goddess, great and terrible, first enslaved and then exiled by her own people. For this reason did she take up their blood, and crafted from it a weapon which became her symbol, so that such circumstances would never befall her again.

And when she heard that song of the Heartland, Kan Kheredeth, she caught, as it were, the scent of suffering prey.

Just as where lies prey thus prone there must lurk a predator, came she in this wise to Kheredeth: in search of the predator, to do justice on him and his prey; but a cruel justice, justice after her own winter-blasted fashion, making use of the blood-sword. She would slay Dragon and Shadow, both, and end all these struggles for good and all. But Mauvaine, even she does not see all. Suffering has made her cold; vengeance, blind. Her morality is zealous and stark, too clearly defined; she must learn humanity again. She as much as the Shadow threatens the miraculous land.

When winter has sufficiently advanced, the Skotomaguch moves his operations from the Black Fortress in the south, northward to the City of the Sun. The Shadow and its agents attempt many times to make the child Ymer to accompany the retinue. But she cannot be moved, sitting in simple childlike joy and wonder, seeming oblivious, yet observing all. So gentle, so small, so soft is she, and yet immovable and obdurate as stone. The Shadow commanded her, tempted her, threatened her, all to no avail. The Shadow attempted to force her, even simply asked her, but Ymer would not be moved. Skotomaguch seemed to have no effect upon her, and the whole Black Court moved north and left the royal child behind. When they had gone, she took herself into the Wilderness beyond the borders, and there cleaved to the company of animals and forest shades, remaining ever on the borders of the Heartland, watching for a sign of her duty to come.

Shortly after Ymer's departure, the Black Fortress collapsed, unnoticed by anyone.

Those denizens who remained in Kheredeth were for the most part underground, but the gods had fled. Yet, like Ymer, Migothach too remained at the fringes of the Wilderness, peering into the shadows, awaiting the day that battle would be joined between the Dragon and his Shadow.

I woke amid blood and darkness,

dividing flesh from flesh.

I walked until I had written

my footprints into stone.

Tracks connect the lands,

so tongues the families link;

I have walked them,

I have spoken them, all.

Shaped by need, tools were made.

Before them, the earth did yield.

I have built them,

I have broken them, all.

Here, a mystery in two halves:

one without, and one within.

My first act separates them.

From their collision I emerge.

I brought the stones

together, and there was fire.

I sang, and the spirits came.

Upon the walls of the caves,

and the megaliths, I painted.

I wrote with my stylus

the sum of my knowledge, in clay.

Within my body is

the foundation of the Word;

my innovation such wonders,

such terrors, has wrought.

I have faced with the mirror of Self,

and breathed those vapours that issue

from the apertures of history.

Though I ever am evolving,

I in essence remain

changeless.

Titans walk today, as they

in every age have walked;

making war upon the heart

at every front,

placing pressure on

the corpus at every joint.

The soul is

a delicate flower

standing prone and naked

amid a battle-ground of giants.

Bold hands size commonly

upon prizes of common fortune;

and a delicate flower is a hard-preserved thing.

Heavy!

Heavy is the weight of it!

A shaman performs a ritual for the weakening of a tyrant.

The enemy has long created strife for the people, and injured their spirit.

The shaman inflicts wounds upon his body to symbolise the spiritual wounds of his people. Using sympathetic magic, he identifies his wounds with the common wounds. By the law of sympathy, the enemy itself has therefore injured the body of the shaman.

A second link is made between the body of the shaman and the spirit of the enemy, so that the injuries do not sap the shaman's own strength, but the strength of the tyrant.

A lengthy and time-consuming ritual, requiring the full healing of the shaman's wounds. As they heal, they will drain at the tyrant's strength, suffusing it in the body of the shaman, changing the balance of power, turning the tide of conflict.

The ritual is complete only when the final wound has finished healing.

But such wounds heal strangely, leaving bulging, vibrant scars which tell jagged stories and hide great power.

Long ago in ancient days there were very powerful elemental spirits who lived in the earth; in stone and tree they dwelt, and in river and sea, field, mountain, valley and cliff, and in all the formations of the earth.

In those days there were humans who were able to see these powerful spirits, hear them, commune with them, even summon them, though they remained always outside the will of man. It was believed that these abilities were gifted to the people by the brightest star in the night sky, who was for them a patron deity of dreams and visions.

But as the ages passed, the people who could see and hear the spirits became fewer, and their senses dulled, until there was no longer any one who could see or hear the elemental spirits dwelling in the world.

Now, I was a member of a tribe who lived in the plains. To our tribe, one had been born after long ages who had the acute sensitivity of the ancestors. He was taken in by the priests, and was tested and trained, while rumours of his purpose ignited among the people.

Eventually there came the time for a trial of his prowess. The tribe travelled with the priests into the mountains where this talented one summoned a great spirit from the stone.

The spirit rose up out of the stone and showed forth its form to all, and it was like a colossal masked man with many heads and many limbs, and his body was continually shifting and changing shape, matching in mere moments the movements of the earth across aeons. The spirit did not speak, but its manifold transformations told to us the history of the world, and every witness there present knew in his heart a profound hope, for the power and vision of the ancients had been revived into the world.

An urchin boy comes up to a man in the midst of his business one day in the street, begging for money so he may feed his hungry father. The man becomes morally indignant and berates the boy, telling him he ought to wash and find work and earn his living. The boy spits on him and runs away.

Then that same man, about a month later, for no particular reason, decides to take a different route home. He passes by a large area of neglected land with long grass and a section of abandoned railway. He sees a filthy young boy running in the grass with no parents, and goes to investigate.

The man comes to a dilapidated house, barely standing amidst the grasses. He finds the boy inside, playing with the corpses of birds, pinching the limp wings of pigeons between his fingers in a grotesque imitation of flight. He speaks with the boy, but the boy never looks up.

Man: “If someone finds us here, we’ll be in trouble. It may have gone to shit, but it’s someone else’s house.”

Boy: “Not anymore. The man who lived here died.”

Man: “Did you kill him?”

Boy: “No.”

The man felt strongly that this was a lie, but he had no evidence. Surely the boy’s presentation sufficiently attested to his character. It reminded him of another boy he had met, not long ago.

Man: “Don’t I know you? Where is your father?”

The boy ignored that, and the man made to sieze him by the arm.

Man: “We have to go.”

Boy: “I don’t have to go anywhere!”

And the boy ran out into the grasses again. The man went out after him, but only got a little way from the house before tripping over something in the grass. He brushed off his clothes and was suddenly seized with horrified disbelief at what he found before him.

It was a corpse, a withered corpse, dressed in clothes all too like his clothes, with a face all too like his face, and starved, emaciated. The horror stopped the world, for a moment there were no thoughts, there was no time, only that dreadful face.

When he finally remembered himself, he turned to see where the boy had gone. He was nearby on the rise, sitting in the roots of a tree that had grown entangled with the train line fence and subsequently died. The man approached him, pointing at the corpse in the grass.

Man: “Who is that? Did he live here? Did you kill him?”

The boy turned up his nose in defiance.

Man: “Tell me! or I’ll have you thrown in prison.”

The boy looked at him sharply and spoke.

Boy: “I’m already in prison. You don’t remember? Can’t you recognise yourself in your acts? That is my father, whom you have killed.”

Short story for my fiction, thought I’d share:

Long ago in the country of Evenei there was a General of the King’s Army. In those days, the King had taken it into his head that the city was afflicted because of a witch who lived in the hills. There was a famine, but the land belonging to the witch was reportedly rich and abundant.

And though she would speak only with prominent men, the King was loath to be seen treating with witches. Therefore, he asked his General to visit her on his behalf, in order to request some of her magic seed, that they may feed the people. This the General did, but the witch was offended that he offered nothing in return. She refused and sent him back, but secretly, she had placed a flea in his clothing. Soon after that the palace became infested with fleas, and the King believed there was a curse over them.

So he sent the General again to treat with the witch, to ask her to give them seed and also to relieve the curse. This time the King, though grudgingly, sent the finest gilded sword his smiths could produce as a gift. But the witch laughed at this gift, and mocked and derided it, and accepted it not. She utterly refused to help. Instead, she took inspiration from the King’s superstition and spoke a secret curse over the sword so that it would always miss its mark and slay the one who wields it.

The General returned, having failed, and gave the sword into the King’s keeping. When the King learned that the attempt had failed, he grew wroth, and mobilised a division of his army to slay the witch and take her land for the good of the people.

Thus the company went to march, vanguarded by King, and the General at his right hand. They came to the land of the witch, and the company established a perimeter while the King went with his General to treat. She was gardening. The herald announced the King, but she ignored him. The King addressed her;

“Traitor, kneel before your King.”

“Let your people take heed that you stir yourself not to help them, but to slay me. Kneel before yourself, for I take no kings.” She looked not up from her earthwork.

Enraged, the King drew the sword and charged at her, but at the last moment he stumbled, and fell, and impaled himself.

“There,” the witch said calmly to the General, “witness the fate of the proud, and take heed.” And passing him, she carried her basket inside her tiny house.

The general followed her, leaving the herald in the garden. The herald ran immediately back to the line to inform them of what had happened, and as the news touched their ears, they charged.

The house had only one room. The General observed the witch’s basket on the table, full of exotic fruits ripe to the point of bursting, but he was the only one in the house. Upon examining the furnishings, he discovered a richly coloured tapestry hanging on one of the walls which altogether seized his attention. In it he saw now one image, now another, and yet another, all interwoven in the fabric, seeming to collide and tumble through each-other.

It seemed to him as if he was standing there for hours before he heard a rhythmic beating of drums, and suddenly, to his astonishment, a woman was revealed within the pattern of the tapestry. She turned herself toward him, dancing seductively with many gossamer veils of rich and beautiful colours. Her eyes were dark-lined, and her features all obscured. She danced with a sound of bells and of rustling silver chains, giving him the impression of a living flame of fire, and of a coiling serpent. He fell into a stupor of affection for her, becoming enraptured, intoxicated by her beauty, and was tangled up into the tapestry.

The soldiers of the army stormed the house, but found nobody. So after scouring the house for spoils, and searching the surrounds, they ransacked the witch’s garden and made their way back to the palace.

The General remained behind, embracing the Veiled One in that place where She hides. She showed him great truths, explained to him his nature. She showed him visions of history, highlighting Her movements across the centuries, winding like a serpent. He saw that unless they came to know Her, his people would unwittingly complete the work of their own destruction.

He began to feel a deep urgency. She assured him it was a sign of the times and warned him to remain with Her, for the fate of the world and of other men was none of his concern. But he was unable let it go and it pulled him from Her.

Eventually he asked his mysterious Goddess directly to let him leave, and She denied him not. He came out of the tapestry as if out of a trance- it was as if all this time he had been standing there, simply observing the pattern on the wall. So he left, noting the advanced state of dilapidation into which the house had fallen, and that the earth where the witch had tended her garden was now barren.

When the General returned to the palace, he found that he was no longer a General welcomed at court, but a fugitive who had abandoned his King. There was now a new King. The ex-General was thrown in prison to await trial.

Throughout his imprisonment and his trial, he was kind and generous with all who come across him, telling them of the Veiled One and Her secret truths, of Her presence among men, Her power in history, and Her warnings for the future. He was taken for a raving lunatic, and it was agreed that his time away had driven him to madness, though this absolved him not- he was sentenced to hang.

His blind faith and foolish haste began to fall away as it dawned on him that he could not bring about what he had thought to bring about. All at once, his power withdrew from him and he saw it was not his power which carried him, but Hers. He became as one who is no-one and nothing, frail and brittle as an empty shell. Thus his desperation returned with even greater force and threatened to crush him. He cursed himself, for he knew now he should have remained with the Veiled One. The salvation of men did not belong to him, but to Her, yet She is rejected by men. He was among those to have rejected Her, in the hope of influencing others. He felt ashamed, and a failure, and at that moment, She whispered to him.

“Fear not, for I am with you.”

He saw a movement in his cell wall. A veil withdrew, and there She was, in the very substance of the wall, as if She had been there all along. He fell on his face and cried out.

“As soon as I turn away, I am lost! How now shall I navigate these circumstances of my ending?”

But She embraced him, and spoke not, and Her silence was pregnant with a meaning too much and too little for words to convey. He was still and silent now, and breathed deep, measured breaths.

The day of the execution came, and he walked as one whose wits have left him. He came to the gallows and faced his death, yet to the observers, he seemed altogether elsewhere.

And when the King’s law had been fulfilled, and the hanged man cut down, it was seen by all those looking on that he had died with a smile upon his face.