Written By Elisha
June 22, 2019, 12:55 p.m.(5/1/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Tikva
In the bow of the merchant schooner, you meet an Inquisitor who claims to protect the innocent and punish the guilty, to defend freedom and oppose slavery. She marries her beloved and in due time the Mother of Beginnings, who in that realm is named the Queen of Furrows, blesses the union with children. Then the world turns brighter, a blinding glare off a becalmed sea, and the Inquisitor loses her wife and children. The city she protects slides from her grasp; the innocent walk free and the guilty are enslaved. Half-mad with loss, she boards a merchant schooner and ...
"Tell me, what happens after that?" the thrall asks.
The Inquisitor travels by ship then caravan to a city that is suspended between two mountains, hanging over a void--a furrow that is both grave and womb. The city is bound to the rocky crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. Below the Inquisitor, a few clouds glide past; farther down, the city takes shape within a net which serves as passage and as support. Instead of rising upward, this city is inverted: the spires of the towers point downward from the bottom of rope ladders. There are hammocks, houses made like sacks, terraces like gondolas, baskets on strings, trapezes for children's games.
Suspended over the abyss, life in this swaying city is less uncertain than in other cities. We know the net will last only so long. We know the guilty and the innocent will change places again.
(She turns to me with her seafoam eyes and blood-striped back and says, "What do thralls want with freedom? We want their blood. To expect our gratitude is to consider us animals. We are more human than them. We will summon waves.")
"Tell me, what happens after that?" the thrall asks.
The Inquisitor travels by ship then caravan to a city that is suspended between two mountains, hanging over a void--a furrow that is both grave and womb. The city is bound to the rocky crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. Below the Inquisitor, a few clouds glide past; farther down, the city takes shape within a net which serves as passage and as support. Instead of rising upward, this city is inverted: the spires of the towers point downward from the bottom of rope ladders. There are hammocks, houses made like sacks, terraces like gondolas, baskets on strings, trapezes for children's games.
Suspended over the abyss, life in this swaying city is less uncertain than in other cities. We know the net will last only so long. We know the guilty and the innocent will change places again.
(She turns to me with her seafoam eyes and blood-striped back and says, "What do thralls want with freedom? We want their blood. To expect our gratitude is to consider us animals. We are more human than them. We will summon waves.")
Written By Elisha
June 20, 2019, 11:05 a.m.(4/25/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Sparte
From Jadairal, the Platinum Guard travels through the realms of the Prima, rulers who claim descent from the First Child of each particular race. Every citizen and thrall in their realm is eligible to stake an identical claim, but only those so insecure in their parentage as to speak it aloud are elevated to rule.
(In Arx'khat, the queen and the beggar are the same.)
The Guard arrives at a pyramid well-exposed to the moon, with blank sloping walls bereft of entrances, and learns of its creation:
People of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a figure running along a tapestry of passages within an unknown pyramid; he was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost him.
(In dreams, women become men, plants become fish.)
Upon waking, the dreamers searched for the pyramid but instead found each other. They decided to build a pyramid like the one in the dream. In laying out the passages, each followed the course of their pursuit of the running figure; except at the spot where they had lost the man's trail, they erected walls that didn't exist in the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
These new walls of history and logic and choice trapped them forever inside the pyramid. Interred in a crypt of stars.
(No single man prevails; no single man exists.)
(In Arx'khat, the queen and the beggar are the same.)
The Guard arrives at a pyramid well-exposed to the moon, with blank sloping walls bereft of entrances, and learns of its creation:
People of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a figure running along a tapestry of passages within an unknown pyramid; he was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost him.
(In dreams, women become men, plants become fish.)
Upon waking, the dreamers searched for the pyramid but instead found each other. They decided to build a pyramid like the one in the dream. In laying out the passages, each followed the course of their pursuit of the running figure; except at the spot where they had lost the man's trail, they erected walls that didn't exist in the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
These new walls of history and logic and choice trapped them forever inside the pyramid. Interred in a crypt of stars.
(No single man prevails; no single man exists.)
Written By Elisha
June 18, 2019, 6:46 p.m.(4/22/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alaric
Sent off to inspect remote provinces, King Alaric's envoys and teind-collectors duly return to Arx'daja and to the gardens of magnolias in whose shade the king strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors are Blancspine, Oathcene, Eustarrea, Dustmarch, Winterborn; the king is he who is a foreigner to his subjects, and only through foreign eyes and ears can the empire manifest its existence to Alaric.
In languages incomprehensible to the King, the envoys relate information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque stridor emerge the military disposition of foreign lands, the hidden names of officials dismissed and decapitated, the dimensions of the canals that the narrow rivers fed in times of drought.
"On the day that I learn all the languages," the King asks the dreamer, "shall I at last truly possess my empire?"
The dreamer answers with a bowl of black sand.
King Alaric is displeased: "The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, they inform me of forgotten turquoise mines, the price of marten furs, suggestions for supplying demonscale blades. And you? You return from lands equally distant and only tell me the thoughts of a woman who sits on her doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?"
"It is evening," Aion says. "We are seated on the steps of your palace and there is a slight cool breeze."
(I smoked the black sand and this is what I heard: "How many groups of twelve were there? Eight, ten--a dozen dozen? She thought she should count. The numbers might matter one day. The teind of teinds was led, each one with their hands tied behind them, past the marketplace of the abandoned village, and there, each with their hands tied behind them, they were decapitated and—glory be to the Fourteenth!—their headless bodies tipped into a ditch. She thought she should estimate the size of the ditch. The dimensions might matter one day. ‘I will measure tomorrow,’ she said, ‘when it is too late.’")
In languages incomprehensible to the King, the envoys relate information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque stridor emerge the military disposition of foreign lands, the hidden names of officials dismissed and decapitated, the dimensions of the canals that the narrow rivers fed in times of drought.
"On the day that I learn all the languages," the King asks the dreamer, "shall I at last truly possess my empire?"
The dreamer answers with a bowl of black sand.
King Alaric is displeased: "The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, they inform me of forgotten turquoise mines, the price of marten furs, suggestions for supplying demonscale blades. And you? You return from lands equally distant and only tell me the thoughts of a woman who sits on her doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?"
"It is evening," Aion says. "We are seated on the steps of your palace and there is a slight cool breeze."
(I smoked the black sand and this is what I heard: "How many groups of twelve were there? Eight, ten--a dozen dozen? She thought she should count. The numbers might matter one day. The teind of teinds was led, each one with their hands tied behind them, past the marketplace of the abandoned village, and there, each with their hands tied behind them, they were decapitated and—glory be to the Fourteenth!—their headless bodies tipped into a ditch. She thought she should estimate the size of the ditch. The dimensions might matter one day. ‘I will measure tomorrow,’ she said, ‘when it is too late.’")
Written By Elisha
June 17, 2019, 6:41 p.m.(4/20/1011 AR)
You walk for days along the coast. Rarely does your eye light upon a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the meadow-goat's passage; a marsh announces a vein of fresh water; a hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent on this unchanging shore; but from the wind-churned waves the sirens call to their brothers, the griffons, and their brothers swoop low in answer.
At each encounter, every siren and every griffon imagines a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, caresses, gifts, arguments. Yet they never touch; eyes lock for a moment, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. A siren rises from the waves, her breasts swelling above her rounded hips. A griffon with glistening shoulders beats his plaited wings. A tattooed siren with pearls in her hair looks to a young griffon with quivering flanks, and then looks beyond him.
The exchange of glances connect one with another, drawing thirteen-pointed stars and triangles reversed within circles; once all geometrical combinations are exhausted, seductions, copulations, and orgies are consummated among the sirens and griffons without a word exchanged, without a single spray of water misting a single stiff-bristled mane.
This is the most chaste of shores. Until we embrace our terrible dreams, every griffon will struggle against storm winds that refer to nothing, and every siren will remain barren.
(I have only to hear the neighing of horses and the cracking of whips and I am seized with amorous trepidation. In the Ward of Alarissa, one travels to the stables and riding-rings to worship a beautiful woman who mounts the saddle, thighs naked, greaves on her calves, and as soon as young scholars approach, she flings them on the piles of hay and presses her firm nipples against them.)
At each encounter, every siren and every griffon imagines a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, caresses, gifts, arguments. Yet they never touch; eyes lock for a moment, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping. A siren rises from the waves, her breasts swelling above her rounded hips. A griffon with glistening shoulders beats his plaited wings. A tattooed siren with pearls in her hair looks to a young griffon with quivering flanks, and then looks beyond him.
The exchange of glances connect one with another, drawing thirteen-pointed stars and triangles reversed within circles; once all geometrical combinations are exhausted, seductions, copulations, and orgies are consummated among the sirens and griffons without a word exchanged, without a single spray of water misting a single stiff-bristled mane.
This is the most chaste of shores. Until we embrace our terrible dreams, every griffon will struggle against storm winds that refer to nothing, and every siren will remain barren.
(I have only to hear the neighing of horses and the cracking of whips and I am seized with amorous trepidation. In the Ward of Alarissa, one travels to the stables and riding-rings to worship a beautiful woman who mounts the saddle, thighs naked, greaves on her calves, and as soon as young scholars approach, she flings them on the piles of hay and presses her firm nipples against them.)
Written By Elisha
June 9, 2019, 8:36 p.m.(4/4/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Preston
A silver tower rises in Arx, city of golden stone, with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into the first globe, you see a blue stone city with a pewter tower, the model of a different Arx. These are the forms the city takes when Aion rouses from slumber for a sip of water before returning to interrupted dreams.
In every age someone, looking at Arx, imagines that the city is eternal: "Asking /why/ the tower is copper serves no purpose." Carnifex Alora worshipped the gods and gave obedience to the royals, yet before even so lofty a personage as she installed her model into a crystal globe, the stones of her Arx changed hue and the tower grew a new skin.
On the map of your empire, Templar, there must be room both for the big, stone Arx and the little Arx in crystal globes. Not because they are equally real, but because they are equally unreal.
(In a vision, my Master told me: "We are certain of this much: the dream we can interpret is not Aion's dream, the principles we can obey are not Aion's principles, and any doubt that is born of virtue is not Aion's doubt." Upon waking, my Mistress added: "None of that is true.")
In every age someone, looking at Arx, imagines that the city is eternal: "Asking /why/ the tower is copper serves no purpose." Carnifex Alora worshipped the gods and gave obedience to the royals, yet before even so lofty a personage as she installed her model into a crystal globe, the stones of her Arx changed hue and the tower grew a new skin.
On the map of your empire, Templar, there must be room both for the big, stone Arx and the little Arx in crystal globes. Not because they are equally real, but because they are equally unreal.
(In a vision, my Master told me: "We are certain of this much: the dream we can interpret is not Aion's dream, the principles we can obey are not Aion's principles, and any doubt that is born of virtue is not Aion's doubt." Upon waking, my Mistress added: "None of that is true.")
Written By Elisha
June 9, 2019, 12:23 a.m.(4/3/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Celeste
Prince Alarice does not believe everything that Cassian Rope claims when she describes the countries visited on her expeditions, but he reads the young Explorer's reports with greater attention than he shows any other member of her guild: "In the life of the prince there is a moment that follows an evening feast, with the odor of tired horses in the rain and the sandalwood ashes fading in the braziers; a hot clarity that consumes the dispatches announcing the collapse of the last Abandoned troops and that melts the wax of the seals of obscure lordlings who beseech Alarice's protection, offering in exchange tributes of shadowsilk and Cardian tortoiseshell.
"At that moment, the prince hears the first far-off call of a lost dream whispering that this empire is merely a stepping-stone, a foothill raising us closer to the clouds, closer to a station so divine that the gentlest gods strike us down."
Must you travel, my brandywine prince? What do you seek? Did you leave some thing behind, some place, some one who cannot bear your absence? Must you sail for a country unknown, unnamed, and uncharted, beyond the dream of empire, that nevertheless feels as near to you as my head on your beating chest?
We will follow her rivers, search her valleys, and inquire about her oldest taboos. We will stand for hours, talking with veiled fathers in terracotta archways, watching while they call their children home.
(In a scrawl: History that is not shared is not history. It is a broken bottle in the grip of thieves who claim that the sight of our blood staining the snow-packed cobbles belongs only to them.)
"At that moment, the prince hears the first far-off call of a lost dream whispering that this empire is merely a stepping-stone, a foothill raising us closer to the clouds, closer to a station so divine that the gentlest gods strike us down."
Must you travel, my brandywine prince? What do you seek? Did you leave some thing behind, some place, some one who cannot bear your absence? Must you sail for a country unknown, unnamed, and uncharted, beyond the dream of empire, that nevertheless feels as near to you as my head on your beating chest?
We will follow her rivers, search her valleys, and inquire about her oldest taboos. We will stand for hours, talking with veiled fathers in terracotta archways, watching while they call their children home.
(In a scrawl: History that is not shared is not history. It is a broken bottle in the grip of thieves who claim that the sight of our blood staining the snow-packed cobbles belongs only to them.)
Written By Elisha
June 6, 2019, 1:31 a.m.(3/25/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Alaric
You traveled past heroic statues and through a metallic doorway to reach the City of Chains.
Skal'daja is a city of thirteen concentric canals, each canal divided by thirteen locks and united by water that simmers with one hundred and seventy unpronounceable names, the first of which prohibits explanation. So I will instead list the wares that are profitably sold in Skal'daja: agate, stygian, chrysoprase; I will praise the flesh of the pheasants cooked over ratleaf fires; I will sing of the slender youths who invite you to chase them in the tide.
In Skal'daja, we work as cutters of chrysoprase, we sear our flesh over ratleaf fires; we believe we are enjoying the freedoms of the city when we are only its slave. I walked among the hyacinth hedges, sure I would discover slender youths bathing, but at the bottom of the tide, crabs were biting the eyes of slaves, stones tied around their necks, their hair green with seaweed.
In Skal'daja you exchanged a seven-weight of agate for certainty; you return to Arx knowing what is crafted by the heroic statues in this metallic forge.
If shackles do not bite at your throat, you are one of the slave-masters.
(In a shakier hand: "Choice is a lie the powerful tell to justify power. Oaths and honor bind more unforgivingly than writs, because a false choice is another chain. I offer myself to you for a writ. To you, and you, and you. I would burn every white journal, beginning with my own, and leave only the black. Black words, black ash, black sands, black plague. Black eyes has my Mistress, and she gazes at me lovingly.")
Skal'daja is a city of thirteen concentric canals, each canal divided by thirteen locks and united by water that simmers with one hundred and seventy unpronounceable names, the first of which prohibits explanation. So I will instead list the wares that are profitably sold in Skal'daja: agate, stygian, chrysoprase; I will praise the flesh of the pheasants cooked over ratleaf fires; I will sing of the slender youths who invite you to chase them in the tide.
In Skal'daja, we work as cutters of chrysoprase, we sear our flesh over ratleaf fires; we believe we are enjoying the freedoms of the city when we are only its slave. I walked among the hyacinth hedges, sure I would discover slender youths bathing, but at the bottom of the tide, crabs were biting the eyes of slaves, stones tied around their necks, their hair green with seaweed.
In Skal'daja you exchanged a seven-weight of agate for certainty; you return to Arx knowing what is crafted by the heroic statues in this metallic forge.
If shackles do not bite at your throat, you are one of the slave-masters.
(In a shakier hand: "Choice is a lie the powerful tell to justify power. Oaths and honor bind more unforgivingly than writs, because a false choice is another chain. I offer myself to you for a writ. To you, and you, and you. I would burn every white journal, beginning with my own, and leave only the black. Black words, black ash, black sands, black plague. Black eyes has my Mistress, and she gazes at me lovingly.")
Written By Elisha
June 4, 2019, 7:02 p.m.(3/22/1011 AR)
You died at home,
in your own warm bedroom,
the old-fashioned death of a Lowers woman in labor,
who tries to close herself again
but cannot.
The ancient darkness to which you also gave birth
returns to your bedchamber,
and enters.
in your own warm bedroom,
the old-fashioned death of a Lowers woman in labor,
who tries to close herself again
but cannot.
The ancient darkness to which you also gave birth
returns to your bedchamber,
and enters.
Written By Elisha
June 1, 2019, 12:36 p.m.(3/16/1011 AR)
I will watch the thralls wrap the land around themselves
in their ancient work, in field and meadow.
I will address their baffled queen and mute princes.
I will bribe their seraphs and sully their shrines and
they will expose me before the most powerful
of the statues in their keeping.
Everything is her, and everywhere
the sweet daydreams of a woman
who smiles as she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.
Everything is him, and everywhere
the sweet daydreams of a man
who smiles as he puts on his jewelry and combs my hair.
(a scrawl continues in messier handwriting, apparently unrelated to the above: "You left me there you left me there 'They leave me there, shutting the mausoleum gates behind them ... ' The black snowfall of a plague ship drifts through the Lowers and becomes our breath ... black snow and black sand and the Queen of Death wearing her jester's cap who whispers riddles to the faithful and speaks with a terrible clarity to those who don't believe.")
in their ancient work, in field and meadow.
I will address their baffled queen and mute princes.
I will bribe their seraphs and sully their shrines and
they will expose me before the most powerful
of the statues in their keeping.
Everything is her, and everywhere
the sweet daydreams of a woman
who smiles as she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.
Everything is him, and everywhere
the sweet daydreams of a man
who smiles as he puts on his jewelry and combs my hair.
(a scrawl continues in messier handwriting, apparently unrelated to the above: "You left me there you left me there 'They leave me there, shutting the mausoleum gates behind them ... ' The black snowfall of a plague ship drifts through the Lowers and becomes our breath ... black snow and black sand and the Queen of Death wearing her jester's cap who whispers riddles to the faithful and speaks with a terrible clarity to those who don't believe.")
Written By Elisha
May 30, 2019, 2:36 p.m.(3/12/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Salvador
Several times has Arx decayed, then blossomed again. Over centuries of decadence, emptied by demon-tithe, its height reduced by collapsing beams and shifts of terrain, the city's survivors emerged from palace cells in hordes, swarming like rats to rummage and gnaw, yet also to collect and patch, like nesting birds.
They grabbed everything that could be taken and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as patchwork skirts; in marble funerary urns they planted oregano; wrought-iron gratings torn from the bathhouse windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of parquetry flooring.
A new Arx took shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, nothing was lost of Arx's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order.
Days of poverty followed days of grandeur. Again and again, a sumptuous butterfly emerged from a beggared chrysalis until our current Arx crawled forth, overflowing with the shrines of infant gods and the wards of upstart clans. The shards of this city's original form are preserved under glass bells, locked in mirrored cases, set on velvet cushions.
Historians will reconstruct, through them, the great and ancient dreams of palace cells, and parquetry floors, and funerary urns.
They grabbed everything that could be taken and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as patchwork skirts; in marble funerary urns they planted oregano; wrought-iron gratings torn from the bathhouse windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of parquetry flooring.
A new Arx took shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. And yet, nothing was lost of Arx's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order.
Days of poverty followed days of grandeur. Again and again, a sumptuous butterfly emerged from a beggared chrysalis until our current Arx crawled forth, overflowing with the shrines of infant gods and the wards of upstart clans. The shards of this city's original form are preserved under glass bells, locked in mirrored cases, set on velvet cushions.
Historians will reconstruct, through them, the great and ancient dreams of palace cells, and parquetry floors, and funerary urns.
Written By Elisha
May 28, 2019, 6:32 p.m.(3/8/1011 AR)
When you unseal the bird's nest jar, the scent of sweet marjoram whispers untruths that you have vowed to believe:
The Children of the Sun and the Moon built Albamons'alfar upon the shores of a lake, a city with terraced streets whose parapets look out over a water so still that it contains two cities: one erect above the surface, and the other, upside down, beneath it.
Nothing exists or happens in the one Albamons'alfar that the other does not repeat, because the city is built so that the Albamons'alfar in the water reflects not only all the facades above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the contents of the sea-chests, the mirrors of the wardrobes.
The Children know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image. Even when lovers twist together, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck, it is not so much their lovemaking or murdering that matters as the lovemaking or murdering of their reflection.
The two Albamons'alfars live for each other, eyes interlocked, never in negation or opposition, always amplifying and augmenting; every thought and gesture is renewed in the mirror until not even the Children know which city is above the surface, which city beneath.
The Children of the Sun and the Moon built Albamons'alfar upon the shores of a lake, a city with terraced streets whose parapets look out over a water so still that it contains two cities: one erect above the surface, and the other, upside down, beneath it.
Nothing exists or happens in the one Albamons'alfar that the other does not repeat, because the city is built so that the Albamons'alfar in the water reflects not only all the facades above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the contents of the sea-chests, the mirrors of the wardrobes.
The Children know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image. Even when lovers twist together, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck, it is not so much their lovemaking or murdering that matters as the lovemaking or murdering of their reflection.
The two Albamons'alfars live for each other, eyes interlocked, never in negation or opposition, always amplifying and augmenting; every thought and gesture is renewed in the mirror until not even the Children know which city is above the surface, which city beneath.
Written By Elisha
May 27, 2019, 11:14 a.m.(3/5/1011 AR)
Relationship Note on Monique
Our paths diverge in the islands; you reach the capitol of Dustmarch by a tall-masted ship while I walk in the shadow of a spice caravan. The city displays one face to the beggar arriving overland and a different face to the woman who arrives by sea.
When the caravan driver sees, at the horizon, the spires rising into view, the snapping flags, the gold and white tiles, he thinks of a ship; he knows the capitol is a city, but he dreams a vessel that will carry him away from the dunes, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze swelling the sails; and he thinks of all the ports, with dragonmilk and thistlebone uncrated on foreign docks, with taverns where pinch-gangs slash broken bottles at each other, and with streets of lighted windows, each framing a woman combing her hair.
However, from the coastline's haze, the captain of the tall-masted ship, gazing upon the capitol of Dustmarch, discerns the form of an embroidered saddle swaying; she knows she observes a city, but she dreams a laden ox from whose packs clatter with whiskey-casks and bags of candied figs, date wine in gourds, banana leaves in bitter liquor, and she sees herself at the head of a caravan escorting her twice-masked passenger away from the barren sea toward oases of fresh water among the palm trees, each with a different scent of sandalwood, each framing a man removing his robes.
Every face is dreamed into being by the desert it reflects. Our paths diverge in the islands; we arrive in the capitol of Dustmarch much changed.
(Scribbled below the story: "For sister Monique Greenmarch. Coin and truth, both have two faces like capitol. The scent of her letter helps me sleep." In an even scratchier scrawl: "Brother Vere Dhan doesn't believe in gods or kings, only cloth puppets on broken strings, each one exactly like the next. He paid already and received nothing.")
When the caravan driver sees, at the horizon, the spires rising into view, the snapping flags, the gold and white tiles, he thinks of a ship; he knows the capitol is a city, but he dreams a vessel that will carry him away from the dunes, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze swelling the sails; and he thinks of all the ports, with dragonmilk and thistlebone uncrated on foreign docks, with taverns where pinch-gangs slash broken bottles at each other, and with streets of lighted windows, each framing a woman combing her hair.
However, from the coastline's haze, the captain of the tall-masted ship, gazing upon the capitol of Dustmarch, discerns the form of an embroidered saddle swaying; she knows she observes a city, but she dreams a laden ox from whose packs clatter with whiskey-casks and bags of candied figs, date wine in gourds, banana leaves in bitter liquor, and she sees herself at the head of a caravan escorting her twice-masked passenger away from the barren sea toward oases of fresh water among the palm trees, each with a different scent of sandalwood, each framing a man removing his robes.
Every face is dreamed into being by the desert it reflects. Our paths diverge in the islands; we arrive in the capitol of Dustmarch much changed.
(Scribbled below the story: "For sister Monique Greenmarch. Coin and truth, both have two faces like capitol. The scent of her letter helps me sleep." In an even scratchier scrawl: "Brother Vere Dhan doesn't believe in gods or kings, only cloth puppets on broken strings, each one exactly like the next. He paid already and received nothing.")
Written By Elisha
May 25, 2019, 6:15 p.m.(3/2/1011 AR)
Dust attracts dust.
A cocoon of spun gold
Holds the slow barge of the moon.
The cold of hoarfrosted echoes.
Haze attracts haze.
At either end of the river's edge
The silence is terminated.
A spell calls forth favorable winds.
Leaf attracts leaf.
The bitterchew gentles my soul
Like a pack of dogs gentle a newborn fawn.
Every wound is also an eye.
(scribbled in a fainter, less-steady hand:) Begged a fat pouch from a skinny man and now can't find a seller. Not in the alley, not in the knock or the park or the scent. Rich for once and no one to take my coin, mildewed canvas tarpaulins remind me of cloaks and flap like the shadow of the mirrormask Falak'a'sib, Eye of the Prophet who opens like a lily a fist a leaf
A cocoon of spun gold
Holds the slow barge of the moon.
The cold of hoarfrosted echoes.
Haze attracts haze.
At either end of the river's edge
The silence is terminated.
A spell calls forth favorable winds.
Leaf attracts leaf.
The bitterchew gentles my soul
Like a pack of dogs gentle a newborn fawn.
Every wound is also an eye.
(scribbled in a fainter, less-steady hand:) Begged a fat pouch from a skinny man and now can't find a seller. Not in the alley, not in the knock or the park or the scent. Rich for once and no one to take my coin, mildewed canvas tarpaulins remind me of cloaks and flap like the shadow of the mirrormask Falak'a'sib, Eye of the Prophet who opens like a lily a fist a leaf
Written By Elisha
May 24, 2019, 10:34 a.m.(2/27/1011 AR)
Come into the candlelight.
We are not afraid to look the dead in the face.
When they return, they have a right,
as much as other things do,
to pause and refresh themselves
in our vision.
We are not afraid to look the dead in the face.
When they return, they have a right,
as much as other things do,
to pause and refresh themselves
in our vision.
Written By Elisha
May 23, 2019, 11:17 p.m.(2/26/1011 AR)
She seems to hide
all the glances that
have ever fallen into her.
(Her veil hides her sorrow,
and her pulse hides her love.)
Like an actor on the boards,
she looks them over, menacing and sullen,
and curls to sleep with them. Until all at once
as if awakened
she turns her face toward you and, with a shock,
you see yourself suspended there, inside her gaze.
all the glances that
have ever fallen into her.
(Her veil hides her sorrow,
and her pulse hides her love.)
Like an actor on the boards,
she looks them over, menacing and sullen,
and curls to sleep with them. Until all at once
as if awakened
she turns her face toward you and, with a shock,
you see yourself suspended there, inside her gaze.
Please note that the scholars may take some time preparing your journal for others to read.