Written By Elisha
Sept. 20, 2019, 12:10 p.m.(11/14/1011 AR)
Everything is her, and everywhere.
Truth is the sweet daydream of a woman
who smiles as she puts on her jewelry
and braids her hair.
Everything is him, and everywhere.
Truth is the sweet daydream of a man
who smiles as he puts on his jewelry
and braids my hair.
* * *
And now the blessed camp lanterns
are eyes that watch you
And the ears that hear you confess the dark.
If you have no darkness, the blessed
camp lanterns will cast
shadows and call them by your name.
Once, my mother carried a lamp to my bedside
to keep the nightmares at bay
but the light showed only fangs and fury
and healers who cradle the deserving to their bosoms
and judge the unworthy
with eyes like blessed camp lanterns.
* * *
The bravery of a pale linen dress and
a wine woolen cloak twined with leaves.
The loyalty of winter boots embroidered with owls;
a gold-leafed olyphant, a cricket in a cage.
The memory of love is still love.
Truth is the sweet daydream of a woman
who smiles as she puts on her jewelry
and braids her hair.
Everything is him, and everywhere.
Truth is the sweet daydream of a man
who smiles as he puts on his jewelry
and braids my hair.
* * *
And now the blessed camp lanterns
are eyes that watch you
And the ears that hear you confess the dark.
If you have no darkness, the blessed
camp lanterns will cast
shadows and call them by your name.
Once, my mother carried a lamp to my bedside
to keep the nightmares at bay
but the light showed only fangs and fury
and healers who cradle the deserving to their bosoms
and judge the unworthy
with eyes like blessed camp lanterns.
* * *
The bravery of a pale linen dress and
a wine woolen cloak twined with leaves.
The loyalty of winter boots embroidered with owls;
a gold-leafed olyphant, a cricket in a cage.
The memory of love is still love.
Written By Elisha
Sept. 14, 2019, 8:46 p.m.(11/2/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Orazio
I am sorry;
I repent and beg forgiveness
from the Faith
for threats against their holy places,
and to the gods
for claiming a position
I was not granted.
* * *
My penance is to admit the truest thing I know:
There is a Gardener in the Lowest Archives,
who cultivates knowledge
and genius, scholarship and history.
In the rich black humus of the deepest
journals, the Gardener plants seeds of wisdom
which take root and send forth pale stalks of memory
(the hollow shafts of quills)
and inspiration and chronology,
and from these an orchard grows,
the air heady with the scent of shared knowledge,
the stacks crowded with barrels of facts pressed
into the cider that is poured into the tarnished mugs of the
storytellers and scholars who speak
and chronicle the history of the ages.
Nothing is hidden in the orchard.
Nothing is barren; nothing blighted; nothing burned; nothing hoarded.
This is the Garden of Vellichor; a god's hands till this soil
and harvest this fruit.
Remembrance sweeps the trees with sheets of elysian rain
that soak the roots and send runnels
of experience unfettered
to those who crouch by the banks holding tarnished mugs,
and untarnished faith,
that this is the garden of a god.
I repent and beg forgiveness
from the Faith
for threats against their holy places,
and to the gods
for claiming a position
I was not granted.
* * *
My penance is to admit the truest thing I know:
There is a Gardener in the Lowest Archives,
who cultivates knowledge
and genius, scholarship and history.
In the rich black humus of the deepest
journals, the Gardener plants seeds of wisdom
which take root and send forth pale stalks of memory
(the hollow shafts of quills)
and inspiration and chronology,
and from these an orchard grows,
the air heady with the scent of shared knowledge,
the stacks crowded with barrels of facts pressed
into the cider that is poured into the tarnished mugs of the
storytellers and scholars who speak
and chronicle the history of the ages.
Nothing is hidden in the orchard.
Nothing is barren; nothing blighted; nothing burned; nothing hoarded.
This is the Garden of Vellichor; a god's hands till this soil
and harvest this fruit.
Remembrance sweeps the trees with sheets of elysian rain
that soak the roots and send runnels
of experience unfettered
to those who crouch by the banks holding tarnished mugs,
and untarnished faith,
that this is the garden of a god.
Written By Elisha
Sept. 14, 2019, 2:03 a.m.(11/1/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alaric
Thus does the young apprentice always hurry toward his lover.
Is the apprentice truly urged by love for his man, and not by love of himself? Isn't he looking for a certainty of existing that only this loose-limbed dew-skinned youth can give him? Our apprentice hurries, falls in love, uncertain of himself, happy, desperate, and for him his man is the person who definitely exists, of which only he can give the proof. But his lover, too, either exists or does not. There he is, narrow-waisted before the apprentice, also trembling, also uncertain. How is it that the apprentice does not understand that?
What does it matter, which of the two is strong and which is weak? They are equals. However, this the apprentice does not know, because he does not wish to know. What he yearns for is the touch of a man who exists, a man who is definite. Thus does he always hurry toward his lover.
Is the apprentice truly urged by love for his man, and not by love of himself? Isn't he looking for a certainty of existing that only this loose-limbed dew-skinned youth can give him? Our apprentice hurries, falls in love, uncertain of himself, happy, desperate, and for him his man is the person who definitely exists, of which only he can give the proof. But his lover, too, either exists or does not. There he is, narrow-waisted before the apprentice, also trembling, also uncertain. How is it that the apprentice does not understand that?
What does it matter, which of the two is strong and which is weak? They are equals. However, this the apprentice does not know, because he does not wish to know. What he yearns for is the touch of a man who exists, a man who is definite. Thus does he always hurry toward his lover.
Written By Elisha
Sept. 11, 2019, 12:22 a.m.(10/23/1011 AR)
From here, the faithful women reach down
and down, mother to daughter,
whitebark, blackberry,
to the green ponds
where the boys splash in the shallows,
chasing tadpoles.
This is not a poem,
but a census of faithful women reaching
to green ponds
and asking if Vellichor deserves the histories of dreams
or if we only honor Him with lists of items purchased on credit at the drygoods store.
My husband insists that I answer the charges lodged against me
among bolts of burlap and buckets of pennyweight nails,
so I hereby renounce the following claims:
"I am the pale cinnamon of a paperbark maple."
"A blade that lodges in a human skull turns the skull into a temple."
"A skylord-skull cauldron bubbles at the foot of King Alarice's throne."
"I would burn every priest and every white journal, beginning with my own, and leave only the black. Black words, black ash, black sands, black plague."
"You crave the moment when your drawn blade is too sharp to kill."
"The Compact forgot the treaty and the Teind, and the existence of the Nox'alfar."
"Your handmaid composes essays about bergamot, astrolabes, and amethysts."
I renounce everything except this: I do speak as Aion. We all speak as Aion. When a figure in a dream whispers in your ear, that is the Dream whispering.
There is no figure.
* * *
(Can you mend a broken heart without knowing why your beloved weeps? Every love is a first love, and every creation a repair.)
and down, mother to daughter,
whitebark, blackberry,
to the green ponds
where the boys splash in the shallows,
chasing tadpoles.
This is not a poem,
but a census of faithful women reaching
to green ponds
and asking if Vellichor deserves the histories of dreams
or if we only honor Him with lists of items purchased on credit at the drygoods store.
My husband insists that I answer the charges lodged against me
among bolts of burlap and buckets of pennyweight nails,
so I hereby renounce the following claims:
"I am the pale cinnamon of a paperbark maple."
"A blade that lodges in a human skull turns the skull into a temple."
"A skylord-skull cauldron bubbles at the foot of King Alarice's throne."
"I would burn every priest and every white journal, beginning with my own, and leave only the black. Black words, black ash, black sands, black plague."
"You crave the moment when your drawn blade is too sharp to kill."
"The Compact forgot the treaty and the Teind, and the existence of the Nox'alfar."
"Your handmaid composes essays about bergamot, astrolabes, and amethysts."
I renounce everything except this: I do speak as Aion. We all speak as Aion. When a figure in a dream whispers in your ear, that is the Dream whispering.
There is no figure.
* * *
(Can you mend a broken heart without knowing why your beloved weeps? Every love is a first love, and every creation a repair.)
Written By Elisha
Sept. 9, 2019, 2:15 p.m.(10/20/1011 AR)
A murmuration of starlings thickens into a city that is visible when you lean out from the edge of the plateau at the hour when children carry cupped candles to their small beds. This soaring city thins in dimly dusk-lighted alleys, it collects the shadows of gardens, it raises towers with glossy wings; and if the evening is misty, a hazy glow swells like a milky sponge at the foot of the never-still flocks.
Travelers on the plateau watch the bird-catchers watching the nets above which the city stretches and shifts, and long to lose themselves among the fluttering streets.
(There is more to this story--the shape of candle flames cupped by small hands, the plateau standing in the shadow of taller plateaus--but I abandon the ending to you, princess, like a bird released from a cage or an arrow from a bow--)
Travelers on the plateau watch the bird-catchers watching the nets above which the city stretches and shifts, and long to lose themselves among the fluttering streets.
(There is more to this story--the shape of candle flames cupped by small hands, the plateau standing in the shadow of taller plateaus--but I abandon the ending to you, princess, like a bird released from a cage or an arrow from a bow--)
Written By Elisha
Sept. 6, 2019, 6:39 p.m.(10/14/1011 AR)
You are the cherry blossoms
that cup the sunshine
as if they create the light,
as if the sky is only blue
because of them, and I am the pale
cinnamon of a paperbark maple,
your indrawn moon, a borrowed glow.
The understory climbs into the heavens
like angels on a green-leafed ladder and
I shall not name the ones I love,
for fear of uprooting them.
My brother, my mother, my sister,
my friend, who cup sunshine and create light:
the sky is more than blue.
that cup the sunshine
as if they create the light,
as if the sky is only blue
because of them, and I am the pale
cinnamon of a paperbark maple,
your indrawn moon, a borrowed glow.
The understory climbs into the heavens
like angels on a green-leafed ladder and
I shall not name the ones I love,
for fear of uprooting them.
My brother, my mother, my sister,
my friend, who cup sunshine and create light:
the sky is more than blue.
Written By Elisha
Sept. 4, 2019, 10:21 p.m.(10/11/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Sparte
A breeze comes spilling through
the alley mouth, combed
by the crows who watch
with impersonal inquisitiveness.
The smoke rises and flattens over our crates, gray
upon gray upon gray, spreading into
a path that opens inward,
revealing all those necessary places
that cannot exist.
Do you remember the boy
who broke his neck falling from that rooftop
right over there,
while playing games to impress
me, the first girl he ever loved?
If I knew of a reason to leave,
I might. The touch of his trembling fingertips,
against my wet cheek.
the alley mouth, combed
by the crows who watch
with impersonal inquisitiveness.
The smoke rises and flattens over our crates, gray
upon gray upon gray, spreading into
a path that opens inward,
revealing all those necessary places
that cannot exist.
Do you remember the boy
who broke his neck falling from that rooftop
right over there,
while playing games to impress
me, the first girl he ever loved?
If I knew of a reason to leave,
I might. The touch of his trembling fingertips,
against my wet cheek.
Written By Elisha
Sept. 4, 2019, 1:56 p.m.(10/10/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Rhea
We reproach Marach the Heretical because each of his tales illuminates the empire of secrets without showing us the rolling dreams that stretch between one secret and another: a landscape of trout ponds, fields of ripening rye, oak forests beloved of truffle pigs, farmyards where children throw sticks for panting dogs.
The heretic answers us with a story. In the streets of my illustrious city, he says, I met once a goatherd driving a tinkling flock along the walls.
"Stranger blessed by Elysium," the goatherd called to me, leaning on her staff, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?"
"May the pantheon accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognize the illustrious city of Arx, home to the Creature who feeds upon certainty and grows ever greater?"
"Bear with me," the woman answered. "I am a merely a wandering god, exiled from my own land by holy seers who speak in my name. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through the secret cities, but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow Where Children Play, the Green Slope of Love Renewed, the Shadowed Grass In Which Sisters Braid Each Other's Hair. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one kindness from another, where my goats are frightened at street corners and scatter."
"I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognize only secrets and cannot distinguish what lies between them. In the dreaming places, each child's laugh and lover's caress appears, to my eyes, identical to every other laugh and kiss."
"And what of dreams?"
"I have no need of the soft sentiments that stretch between hard truths," I said, drawing my robes of office closer, "between the rituals of the Art and the revelations of the past. I collect secrets and facts in the service of humanity, to protect us against the enemy."
"You feed upon them," the goatherd said, "and grow ever greater."
* * *
Marach's 63rd heresy is this: 'A faith that bars the doors to the houses of the gods is not a true faith.'
His 71st: 'A teacher who declares one teaching true and another false is false; this I declare.'
His 108th: 'Love each other, that's all, you spavined numb-gizzards! Hold your friend when he weeps, dance when she sings! This isn't hard. You can't command a dream, you can't *win* a dream. Stop trying! Titles mean nothing in dreams: riches and strength and knowledge turn into daisies stretching toward the sun. We can't seize the reins of the Dream like a cruel rider on a beaten nag. Let go, let go, let go. Kindness requires more courage than cruelty, love requires more courage than power. The Dream carries us like twigs in a current, heedless of our feeble attempts to seize the water in our fists and shape the river. Just float, you flax-embossed turdlings! Float!'
The heretic answers us with a story. In the streets of my illustrious city, he says, I met once a goatherd driving a tinkling flock along the walls.
"Stranger blessed by Elysium," the goatherd called to me, leaning on her staff, "can you tell me the name of the city in which we are?"
"May the pantheon accompany you!" I cried. "How can you fail to recognize the illustrious city of Arx, home to the Creature who feeds upon certainty and grows ever greater?"
"Bear with me," the woman answered. "I am a merely a wandering god, exiled from my own land by holy seers who speak in my name. Sometimes my goats and I have to pass through the secret cities, but we are unable to distinguish them. Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow Where Children Play, the Green Slope of Love Renewed, the Shadowed Grass In Which Sisters Braid Each Other's Hair. Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one kindness from another, where my goats are frightened at street corners and scatter."
"I am the opposite of you," I said. "I recognize only secrets and cannot distinguish what lies between them. In the dreaming places, each child's laugh and lover's caress appears, to my eyes, identical to every other laugh and kiss."
"And what of dreams?"
"I have no need of the soft sentiments that stretch between hard truths," I said, drawing my robes of office closer, "between the rituals of the Art and the revelations of the past. I collect secrets and facts in the service of humanity, to protect us against the enemy."
"You feed upon them," the goatherd said, "and grow ever greater."
* * *
Marach's 63rd heresy is this: 'A faith that bars the doors to the houses of the gods is not a true faith.'
His 71st: 'A teacher who declares one teaching true and another false is false; this I declare.'
His 108th: 'Love each other, that's all, you spavined numb-gizzards! Hold your friend when he weeps, dance when she sings! This isn't hard. You can't command a dream, you can't *win* a dream. Stop trying! Titles mean nothing in dreams: riches and strength and knowledge turn into daisies stretching toward the sun. We can't seize the reins of the Dream like a cruel rider on a beaten nag. Let go, let go, let go. Kindness requires more courage than cruelty, love requires more courage than power. The Dream carries us like twigs in a current, heedless of our feeble attempts to seize the water in our fists and shape the river. Just float, you flax-embossed turdlings! Float!'
Written By Elisha
Aug. 12, 2019, 12:18 a.m.(8/19/1011 AR)
In the sky above the village torched by the pack,
a thousand thousand embers
shine like the stars of Nefer'khat.
The flames reduce our bodies to ash
and sanctifies the ash,
and makes us holy.
What's rotten in us burns first.
You, a shadow, departed, a glowing hearth, a spiked gloaming.
You know that a blade that lodges in a human skull
turns the skull into a lit temple.
With our eyes empty and Goddess-filled,
we become both the wheel
and the body it breaks.
You opened vault of thorns before your time and
outraged the culprit by reciting the names
of your victims aloud
and
when you woke into another dream
you bled green sap from the forests
that smother the mountaintops
above the horizon of trees.
a thousand thousand embers
shine like the stars of Nefer'khat.
The flames reduce our bodies to ash
and sanctifies the ash,
and makes us holy.
What's rotten in us burns first.
You, a shadow, departed, a glowing hearth, a spiked gloaming.
You know that a blade that lodges in a human skull
turns the skull into a lit temple.
With our eyes empty and Goddess-filled,
we become both the wheel
and the body it breaks.
You opened vault of thorns before your time and
outraged the culprit by reciting the names
of your victims aloud
and
when you woke into another dream
you bled green sap from the forests
that smother the mountaintops
above the horizon of trees.
Written By Elisha
Aug. 7, 2019, 6:21 p.m.(8/10/1011 AR)
And how is faith made?
I did not make the faith;
I discovered it in its churning offices,
in the troughs and crests of waves.
I found it armed, bristling,
in the wind-whipped formation of an armada,
sailing across an ocean of chains
toward shores dyed Pyrian orange.
Everything is white and deep, Mistress,
seething and forever with moonlight, with
ovaries, with dead ships jeweled in barnacles,
and my body is pulsing, in the Dream, for you.
You measured me between the rocks of the astonished earth
and said, "I did not make you either, my child, my slave, my faithless one,
for even the abyss is contained within the filtered, lapping, gray-green death
of a mollusk cracked by the teeth of the seabed,
in the darkness beneath the fleet that sails toward shores dyed Pyrian orange."
* * *
(Scrawled words: Sometimes I don't believe in gods and sometimes I believe they are everywhere. Sparte is Skald, blessed with forgetting, Tescelina contains gods like panes in a stained-glass window contain a larger image. My mirror-hunted brother Azhan is divine, my cloudtouched prince Ras. Lagoma kneels before Juniper, begging for instruction, and a statue carved into a desert mountaintop whispers urgent truths to Rinel that nobody else will believe. The goddess who flickers like candlelight vanishes into the creases of Monique's second favorite handbag and the one sleeping inside Faye will rouse with a crack of thunder. This is for the gods who speak with me in the alley and the shrine, who ask to remain nameless, who are wise enough to wish they were human.)
I did not make the faith;
I discovered it in its churning offices,
in the troughs and crests of waves.
I found it armed, bristling,
in the wind-whipped formation of an armada,
sailing across an ocean of chains
toward shores dyed Pyrian orange.
Everything is white and deep, Mistress,
seething and forever with moonlight, with
ovaries, with dead ships jeweled in barnacles,
and my body is pulsing, in the Dream, for you.
You measured me between the rocks of the astonished earth
and said, "I did not make you either, my child, my slave, my faithless one,
for even the abyss is contained within the filtered, lapping, gray-green death
of a mollusk cracked by the teeth of the seabed,
in the darkness beneath the fleet that sails toward shores dyed Pyrian orange."
* * *
(Scrawled words: Sometimes I don't believe in gods and sometimes I believe they are everywhere. Sparte is Skald, blessed with forgetting, Tescelina contains gods like panes in a stained-glass window contain a larger image. My mirror-hunted brother Azhan is divine, my cloudtouched prince Ras. Lagoma kneels before Juniper, begging for instruction, and a statue carved into a desert mountaintop whispers urgent truths to Rinel that nobody else will believe. The goddess who flickers like candlelight vanishes into the creases of Monique's second favorite handbag and the one sleeping inside Faye will rouse with a crack of thunder. This is for the gods who speak with me in the alley and the shrine, who ask to remain nameless, who are wise enough to wish they were human.)
Written By Elisha
July 29, 2019, 7:13 p.m.(7/20/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Brianna
In vain, great-hearted patroness, would I attempt to describe caer'bijou, the prison built from the bones of forgotten gods. I could tell you how many steps rise to the top of the highest battlement, and the angle of the ballistae's curves, and the taste of the rust on the lips of the zinc buckets from which the prisoners drink; but all this tells you nothing.
The prison does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a watchtower and the distance from the ground of a hanged heretic's swaying feet; the depth of the well and the volume of water necessary to cover the loyal cultist, the height of a railing and the leap of Archscholar Py, who climbed over it at dawn.
Sitting beneath well-seasoned sausages dangling in the kitchen, the architect designs cells for three Fractals who forever pursued death and who were forever disappointed, falling instead into the embrace of mere oblivion. Sapphire, the shapeshifter, is trapped in a cell open to the sky, her power to remake herself torn away. Ruby, the courtier, is secreted in a silent hall with no company save herself. And the scholar is condemned to unchanging, unrelenting darkness in the mausoleum in the graveyard of Arx that bears his name: Onyx.
On the dock
jutting from the breakwater
beyond caer'bijou's walls,
three old women tell each other the story
of the heretic,
who loved the cultist
whom the archscholar still visits
in the warm shade
of the highest battlement.
The prison does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a watchtower and the distance from the ground of a hanged heretic's swaying feet; the depth of the well and the volume of water necessary to cover the loyal cultist, the height of a railing and the leap of Archscholar Py, who climbed over it at dawn.
Sitting beneath well-seasoned sausages dangling in the kitchen, the architect designs cells for three Fractals who forever pursued death and who were forever disappointed, falling instead into the embrace of mere oblivion. Sapphire, the shapeshifter, is trapped in a cell open to the sky, her power to remake herself torn away. Ruby, the courtier, is secreted in a silent hall with no company save herself. And the scholar is condemned to unchanging, unrelenting darkness in the mausoleum in the graveyard of Arx that bears his name: Onyx.
On the dock
jutting from the breakwater
beyond caer'bijou's walls,
three old women tell each other the story
of the heretic,
who loved the cultist
whom the archscholar still visits
in the warm shade
of the highest battlement.
Written By Elisha
July 19, 2019, 12:09 a.m.(6/27/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Sparte
A mayfly with mica wings hovers,
then darts away.
Farther down the valley,
a little fog broods.
Each version of this dream conveys a different choice.
A star falls from a bone-white sky
toward an army of the dead.
A bent figure stands among the fallen;
not beckoning for aid but
calling down the star.
That is when you realize
that the stiffening corpses are arranged
to perfectly reflect the constellations
hidden by this heavenly ossuary.
If the crickets ever quiet--
my great-hearted guardian,
my untouchable love--
we might hear a grub burrow beneath
the tarry pine bark
and a salamander
skitter
across the limestone gravel
toward the mayfly
who is already
reborn.
then darts away.
Farther down the valley,
a little fog broods.
Each version of this dream conveys a different choice.
A star falls from a bone-white sky
toward an army of the dead.
A bent figure stands among the fallen;
not beckoning for aid but
calling down the star.
That is when you realize
that the stiffening corpses are arranged
to perfectly reflect the constellations
hidden by this heavenly ossuary.
If the crickets ever quiet--
my great-hearted guardian,
my untouchable love--
we might hear a grub burrow beneath
the tarry pine bark
and a salamander
skitter
across the limestone gravel
toward the mayfly
who is already
reborn.
Written By Elisha
July 17, 2019, 12:15 a.m.(6/23/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Lora
I am born of the mist
churned by the tide
that batters the breakwaters
of the Morning Isles,
you told me.
I was happy for a time.
I am beloved of the roses
and the drowned
and the men
who seize their own souls
on quiet roads,
and release them again,
to die
in quiet dreams of me.
I was happy for a time.
* * *
No riddle is impossible, my love,
I tell her,
with tears in my throat.
The lack of an answer is more than an answer,
the lack of an answer is precisely that which you seek.
churned by the tide
that batters the breakwaters
of the Morning Isles,
you told me.
I was happy for a time.
I am beloved of the roses
and the drowned
and the men
who seize their own souls
on quiet roads,
and release them again,
to die
in quiet dreams of me.
I was happy for a time.
* * *
No riddle is impossible, my love,
I tell her,
with tears in my throat.
The lack of an answer is more than an answer,
the lack of an answer is precisely that which you seek.
Written By Elisha
July 10, 2019, 1:37 a.m.(6/9/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Dianara
Tehom:
I watch you from this damp branch,
the cunning sun
across your sullen face,
your mouth curled, beautiful, angry--a child's lips
that linger on a word.
Lagoma:
Your sisters, from the same Elysian womb torn,
cross the red sea of our maddening mother
through a wave-tossed sail-furled storm
and drown themselves
in your soft-throated mercy.
Tescelina:
She applies her passions like
a pyre that burns the vellum of her flesh,
into a cloud of ash
that charts the arrival of the new banner,
and the betrayal of the old.
Preston:
Even a newborn arrives in the world
with bloody hands.
To fight with honor is to fight with honor and
that double-edged sword leaves us
no choice except endings.
Dianara:
The stars know neither east nor west,
No moon rises; we have dreamed, cursed and blessed,
Of this contract through many Reckonings hurled,
To that bright reflection of our waking world
That sleeps on its pivot, the heart of rest.
(There are at least two kinds of stories: dramas and dreams. Every scene in a drama brings us closer to the end. Every scene in a dream bring us a new beginning. Every drama is staged within a dream, but no dream is contained by a drama. A dream understood by a drama is mere prophesy, or fantasy. The Silence, The Certainty, The Eater of Stories; all are welcome into my dramas. I raise them by clever mechanisms from the trap room. Never into my dreams. If the massacre of Abandoned children is the price of admission we gladly pay, the silencing of Abandoned dreams is )
I watch you from this damp branch,
the cunning sun
across your sullen face,
your mouth curled, beautiful, angry--a child's lips
that linger on a word.
Lagoma:
Your sisters, from the same Elysian womb torn,
cross the red sea of our maddening mother
through a wave-tossed sail-furled storm
and drown themselves
in your soft-throated mercy.
Tescelina:
She applies her passions like
a pyre that burns the vellum of her flesh,
into a cloud of ash
that charts the arrival of the new banner,
and the betrayal of the old.
Preston:
Even a newborn arrives in the world
with bloody hands.
To fight with honor is to fight with honor and
that double-edged sword leaves us
no choice except endings.
Dianara:
The stars know neither east nor west,
No moon rises; we have dreamed, cursed and blessed,
Of this contract through many Reckonings hurled,
To that bright reflection of our waking world
That sleeps on its pivot, the heart of rest.
(There are at least two kinds of stories: dramas and dreams. Every scene in a drama brings us closer to the end. Every scene in a dream bring us a new beginning. Every drama is staged within a dream, but no dream is contained by a drama. A dream understood by a drama is mere prophesy, or fantasy. The Silence, The Certainty, The Eater of Stories; all are welcome into my dramas. I raise them by clever mechanisms from the trap room. Never into my dreams. If the massacre of Abandoned children is the price of admission we gladly pay, the silencing of Abandoned dreams is )
Written By Elisha
July 4, 2019, 12:18 p.m.(5/25/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Rukhnis
My sigil is not an unburied skull,
laughing,
but a newborn's head,
crowning.
I am the queen of furrows.
The ditch that
embraces
a body
exhausted from life
and
the channel from which life,
refreshed,
gasps to breath
again.
I am a mother first.
* * *
You enter the city through Fontanel Gate, which is guarded by red wardens who cast oblique glances at your bundles. You pass beneath an archway and find yourself within a tunnel; its compact fullness surrounds you; carved in its walls is a pattern of shattered diamonds that tell the tale of Skald's inevitable victory over Fate.
You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. Every now and then at the edges of the street, a cluster of black spires seems to indicate that from there the city's texture will thicken. However, you find instead other vague spaces: a neighborhood of metallic workshops, warehouses packed with bijous, a reflecting pool surrounded by scrawny shrines.
If you ask the people you meet, 'Where is the city?' they make a broad gesture which may mean 'Here,' or 'Farther on, or 'All around you,' or even 'In the opposite direction.'
Finally you reach a gate guarded by red wardens who cast oblique glances at your bundles. Stepping into a tunnel carved with the tale of Fate's decision to defeat Skald, you realize that this city is only ever the outskirts of itself.
laughing,
but a newborn's head,
crowning.
I am the queen of furrows.
The ditch that
embraces
a body
exhausted from life
and
the channel from which life,
refreshed,
gasps to breath
again.
I am a mother first.
* * *
You enter the city through Fontanel Gate, which is guarded by red wardens who cast oblique glances at your bundles. You pass beneath an archway and find yourself within a tunnel; its compact fullness surrounds you; carved in its walls is a pattern of shattered diamonds that tell the tale of Skald's inevitable victory over Fate.
You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. Every now and then at the edges of the street, a cluster of black spires seems to indicate that from there the city's texture will thicken. However, you find instead other vague spaces: a neighborhood of metallic workshops, warehouses packed with bijous, a reflecting pool surrounded by scrawny shrines.
If you ask the people you meet, 'Where is the city?' they make a broad gesture which may mean 'Here,' or 'Farther on, or 'All around you,' or even 'In the opposite direction.'
Finally you reach a gate guarded by red wardens who cast oblique glances at your bundles. Stepping into a tunnel carved with the tale of Fate's decision to defeat Skald, you realize that this city is only ever the outskirts of itself.
Written By Elisha
July 3, 2019, 2:50 p.m.(5/24/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Rinel
Every Truth I Tell Is a Wall (Rinel)
If you pledge yourself to the Mistress of the World,
you will denounce everything you worship. (Vere)
She weaves her own patchwork
of perception and experience and (Selene)
every thread is woven from a nameless color (Celeste)
into a story from beyond the graveyard. (Nicely)
Yet even the dead need care. (Keyser)
In the time before death was born, (Sparte)
we answered only to the goddesses (Juniper)
who dreamed of turning the Wheel of the world. (Harlex)
Reworking our sense of we,
shifting our I. (Zara)
We're not a mess of rats,
we're a swarm of locusts, (Jack)
marked because we saw Her;
apparently that is enough. (Jeffeth)
What does it mean,
to be chosen by the gods? (Monique)
The answer is the death of knowledge. (Aureth)
Therefore, this must be truth. (Sina)
Our breath carries all the things we forget, (Tescelina)
to the home that awaits the end of our journey. (Reigna).
Elsewhere,
a man sweeps dust into her hand. (Celeste)
If you pledge yourself to the Mistress of the World,
you will denounce everything you worship. (Vere)
She weaves her own patchwork
of perception and experience and (Selene)
every thread is woven from a nameless color (Celeste)
into a story from beyond the graveyard. (Nicely)
Yet even the dead need care. (Keyser)
In the time before death was born, (Sparte)
we answered only to the goddesses (Juniper)
who dreamed of turning the Wheel of the world. (Harlex)
Reworking our sense of we,
shifting our I. (Zara)
We're not a mess of rats,
we're a swarm of locusts, (Jack)
marked because we saw Her;
apparently that is enough. (Jeffeth)
What does it mean,
to be chosen by the gods? (Monique)
The answer is the death of knowledge. (Aureth)
Therefore, this must be truth. (Sina)
Our breath carries all the things we forget, (Tescelina)
to the home that awaits the end of our journey. (Reigna).
Elsewhere,
a man sweeps dust into her hand. (Celeste)
Written By Elisha
July 2, 2019, 12:37 a.m.(5/20/1011 AR)
"Truth is a hungry thief who wears many cloaks." - Vellichor
* * *
What does one call a journal reduced by fire to a mineral? The quarry walls—tool-marked, wind-pitted—long ago contained our first alphabets and now cradle our final flames on their scree-ridden edges.
You excavate stones as columns, crowned with acanthus leaves, and I lose myself in your forest. Absent the whole, the part suffices. The gleam of my lover's laughter is the same color as the tongue of the asp; a blue flash at bright noon.
An image emerges from, disperses into, light. Above the ruined half-arch of the aqueduct, the water's silver shimmer becomes a skylady's noose. A gust of wind becomes stretched-leather wings, thinner than spiderweb, contain in fractal branching veins all the prisons we are afraid to escape.
Light shines through them, and disperses into light.
(What does one call the knight who wishes death upon a child held hostage by a prophesy? With what coin does the Seraph of Fireside buy the loyalty of the faith militant? Orazio whispers, "A title is the opposite of a dream," and renounces her title every night before closing her busy eyes.)
* * *
What does one call a journal reduced by fire to a mineral? The quarry walls—tool-marked, wind-pitted—long ago contained our first alphabets and now cradle our final flames on their scree-ridden edges.
You excavate stones as columns, crowned with acanthus leaves, and I lose myself in your forest. Absent the whole, the part suffices. The gleam of my lover's laughter is the same color as the tongue of the asp; a blue flash at bright noon.
An image emerges from, disperses into, light. Above the ruined half-arch of the aqueduct, the water's silver shimmer becomes a skylady's noose. A gust of wind becomes stretched-leather wings, thinner than spiderweb, contain in fractal branching veins all the prisons we are afraid to escape.
Light shines through them, and disperses into light.
(What does one call the knight who wishes death upon a child held hostage by a prophesy? With what coin does the Seraph of Fireside buy the loyalty of the faith militant? Orazio whispers, "A title is the opposite of a dream," and renounces her title every night before closing her busy eyes.)
Written By Elisha
June 28, 2019, 1:02 a.m.(5/12/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Sparte
(This much is true: King Alaric summons me to his opal chamber late at night, and bathes me in scented water while his astrologers and hierophants and thralls explain that Skald chose to divide himself from himself, to change so completely that he forgot his own divinity. He walks among us now in the form of a young guardsman with burgundy hair and hazel eyes who refuses every royal command to acknowledge his true self.)
* * *
You learned first,
not to touch fire,
and second to caress it.
You plucked a black fig
from a low branch,
and saw a raw red glare.
You squint your eyes
and the bonfires
freeze on your horse's mane.
You crave the moment
when your drawn blade,
is too sharp to kill.
Like viper venom?
No.
Like wolf's milk.
* * *
The first clans watch the dreams of their pyre-side shadows and, even before the camp-following wolves lose their voices, the ritual sharing and eating of food replaces sacrifice:
How easily
cowardice slips
away like skin
from a blanched peach.
A curved yoke, a bamboo flute, a crossbow, a tether, a choice. What is the purpose of a well-made tool? To ease and lighten work? Sand is heated by alchemical fires into glass and lenses are ground into bridges that fetchforth the distance between orphan and commander, and anchor against invisible embankments.
You cross the bridge, while behind you, the cold green umber of a storm gains strength. You are surprised when your lover reaches to join hands and offer thanks for your safe return. The storms gains strength and, where the mountains should be, there's a crisscross of lightning. Am I the son, you wonder, of the dire bear?
The thunder comes,
more delayed
than you ever imagined.
* * *
You learned first,
not to touch fire,
and second to caress it.
You plucked a black fig
from a low branch,
and saw a raw red glare.
You squint your eyes
and the bonfires
freeze on your horse's mane.
You crave the moment
when your drawn blade,
is too sharp to kill.
Like viper venom?
No.
Like wolf's milk.
* * *
The first clans watch the dreams of their pyre-side shadows and, even before the camp-following wolves lose their voices, the ritual sharing and eating of food replaces sacrifice:
How easily
cowardice slips
away like skin
from a blanched peach.
A curved yoke, a bamboo flute, a crossbow, a tether, a choice. What is the purpose of a well-made tool? To ease and lighten work? Sand is heated by alchemical fires into glass and lenses are ground into bridges that fetchforth the distance between orphan and commander, and anchor against invisible embankments.
You cross the bridge, while behind you, the cold green umber of a storm gains strength. You are surprised when your lover reaches to join hands and offer thanks for your safe return. The storms gains strength and, where the mountains should be, there's a crisscross of lightning. Am I the son, you wonder, of the dire bear?
The thunder comes,
more delayed
than you ever imagined.
Written By Elisha
June 26, 2019, 3 p.m.(5/10/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Dianara
What if
there is only
one god
and she lives
in the dust
on the shelves
of
an empty larder?
* * *
"White journals are for white lies,"
Vellichor tells me,
revealing a black pebble in her left palm and
a white pebble in her right.
"Black journals for black truths."
I think I understand,
until she opens her third hand
and I do not see the gray pebble that I expect.
there is only
one god
and she lives
in the dust
on the shelves
of
an empty larder?
* * *
"White journals are for white lies,"
Vellichor tells me,
revealing a black pebble in her left palm and
a white pebble in her right.
"Black journals for black truths."
I think I understand,
until she opens her third hand
and I do not see the gray pebble that I expect.
Written By Elisha
June 24, 2019, 10:47 a.m.(5/5/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Tescelina
In the smallest city on the farthest shore, a beggar follows me home and demands a story. I gather words in my cupped hands like water scooped from a mountain spring and remind her that when we were girls, the seraphim stole me onto a caravel travelling beyond the coast. "They forbade me to leave my cabin at night, but I snuck to the deck and discovered glittering stars not only in the sky, but in the sea as well, in the air all around. We sailed through a fog of starlight."
Behind your ship, Mistress, the wake spreads so artfully that every ripple follows a comet's path, and your masts and sails repeat the order of the constellations. Your captain's log faithfully corresponds to the firmament, and thus the ship and the sky always reflect each other precisely.
In praising your crew, the beggar says, "Feeling yourselves part of an undying heaven, gears in a meticulous astrological clock, you take care not to make the slightest change in your ship and your habits. This is the only place I know where the wise remain motionless in time. The only place where eternity exists."
Your officers stare at one another, dumbfounded by the wretch's ignorance. To their trained eyes, the novelty of every moment is obvious: the whistle of a midshipwoman newly arrived on her watch, the arrhythmic slap of the dinghy against the starboard hull.
"Our ship and our stars correspond so perfectly that any change on the deck is entangled with a similar transformation in the firmament. The heavens are not unchanging, and neither are we. Quite the opposite; we are fated by the one who defeated Skald to never stop choosing, never stop changing. That is why our most precious cargo is not the tonnage of butterfly-silk or dragon-milk, but the girl in the steward's cabin who, having read all her books, sneaks to the deck every night and raises stars from the waves."
Behind your ship, Mistress, the wake spreads so artfully that every ripple follows a comet's path, and your masts and sails repeat the order of the constellations. Your captain's log faithfully corresponds to the firmament, and thus the ship and the sky always reflect each other precisely.
In praising your crew, the beggar says, "Feeling yourselves part of an undying heaven, gears in a meticulous astrological clock, you take care not to make the slightest change in your ship and your habits. This is the only place I know where the wise remain motionless in time. The only place where eternity exists."
Your officers stare at one another, dumbfounded by the wretch's ignorance. To their trained eyes, the novelty of every moment is obvious: the whistle of a midshipwoman newly arrived on her watch, the arrhythmic slap of the dinghy against the starboard hull.
"Our ship and our stars correspond so perfectly that any change on the deck is entangled with a similar transformation in the firmament. The heavens are not unchanging, and neither are we. Quite the opposite; we are fated by the one who defeated Skald to never stop choosing, never stop changing. That is why our most precious cargo is not the tonnage of butterfly-silk or dragon-milk, but the girl in the steward's cabin who, having read all her books, sneaks to the deck every night and raises stars from the waves."
Please note that the scholars may take some time preparing your journal for others to read.