Ptou the Messenger (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
over_the_fop) wrote2012-01-14 04:26 am
over_the_fop) wrote2012-01-14 04:26 am
FOR MY REFERENCE
So, this may not actually be much of interest in general, but I've collected all of the stories of SLT that Messenger featured in (and some that he didn't)
Experts from The Theogony of Shodisé Bookman the First, written 1231 BTR (Before Theological Rejection)
Sing to me oh Weaver Kolotha, oh Queen of the Gods, and Lady of Truth. Pull back the curtain on this brief life and let me see the holy pattern beyond. Let me fathom only the tiniest threads you weaves. I pray you let this fool speak other than foolishness. I invoke thee in the name of truth.
Sing to me as well, oh Storyteller, oh many-tongued. Let my words be sweet. Let the telling of this tale ease the suffering of all we sad mortals. Make clever my tongue and lovely my voice. Let this ham-fisted prattler sing a song worth hearing. I invoke thee in the name of beauty.
Once, once, long ago, there was nothing. Then, in this nothing, there was dust. Then, in the nothing and the dust, there was a heart. This heart had a wish, but what that wish is not for we mortals to know. But to fill this wish, the heart must create. And so the heart called all the dust in the nothing onto itself. The dust came unto a heart, and the heart had a body. Pleased with this, the heart warmed. It warmed and warmed until it became fire, and its body of dust became fire. And so it became the first life- what we call now the Old Woman.
But a heart alone is a lonely one, and one heart yearns for another. In her own awareness, she learned that her yearnings became a call that even nothing responded to. So it came to be, that in that darkness, there became dust, and from it, another heart. This heart knew nothing but the love it received from its maker, and grew. It did not seek to compete with her warmth, merely to receive it, so he did not burn. The dust became soil, and he became the second life - what we now call the Old Man.
From her, he had learned, and yearned himself. He called as she had, and created two beings to circle himself. They were named Lunox and Lundia, the blue and the red daughters, but their affection did not please him. They were always out of his reach... so he turned inward and called.
His call became the water, and from the ground - just as he had come from her warmth - grew those who began from their love.
First called from the ground was Regelus- who named himself King. He looked at the beast in the ground, the sea and sky, and he named them. When he had named them he said "I have created this."
Second called from the ground were the Twins, Kolotha and Corpus, she who weaves and he who cuts, fate and form. They together understood the two sides of Truth and she was found most beautiful and mysterious by Regelus. He named her his Queen and thus it was so. Everything flowed from them, onwards, until the Old Man was brimming with life, whom he loved as the Old Woman loved him.
While the Old Man held so much life in his arms, the daughters of the sky became jealous and forever tug at his attention, pulling it back at forth between each other as siblings will.
The swell and ebb of the tides are their yearning and loneliness.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger creates squidrats
The things she had . . . produced are less than a day old, and already the male had become a nuisance.
"And what's that one?" it toddled across the room, naked as the day it was- . . . naked as today, and reached its fat little hands towards a specimen it could not possibly understand the significance of. Prehistoric, it was! One of the first to be born of the divine union, older than They themselves from some perspectives. 'Imp,' the humans would call it, and then some day 'trilobite' and some time after that 'Olenoides erratus' when they finally found a nomenclature approaching sensible.
"That one is- likewise, one you are not permitted to touch."
"But uncle, you’ve said that of all of them!"
"Clever boy."
It stopped suddenly, whirring attention span transfixed on an aquarium. Cepholopods. "I like these. They should be out of the water." One began reaching over the top of the tank, pulling itself into the open air which was of course preposterous as it lacked anything like the musculature to support itself on land, let alone the respiratory capabilities to-
He slammed a lid down over the tank, "That will be quite enough suggestions of that sort, thank you. Shouldn't you be off defecating yourself?"
The boy smiled at him with all the wholly insincere innocence of a babe. In the tank, the creatures were all beginning to cling to the top, now unable to stay submerged indefinitely. "Dear Uncle," he asked sweetly, "would you like me to?"
________________________________________________________________
Messenger meets Trickster
Once, when I was quite young and the world was new, I forgot a word. Perhaps it was not meant for me to keep, for the very moment I finished it, it flew away, caught by the wind and taken from me.
Curious and a little panicked, I ran after it. I knew already that some words were dangerous, and others unpredictable, and I'd been berated quite soundly for messing with verbs, honestly. I sorted through time. I sifted through a dream but woke too fast. I checked in memory and innovation, the forgotten and the new, but it hadn't caught any of those places...
[He sets his chin on his palms and then looks up, smiling at Kain.]
It wasn't until I'd checked the earth, I found a child in a mask, about my age.. perhaps a little younger. I'd asked him if he'd seen it, even though I no longer knew what it looked like.
He said, it was his now, he'd found it. And he'd "had the last word on the subject. And the first."
And at that, he began to laugh and crow and cackle. He'd snort and giggle and then burst into another round at his own joke. He fell over onto his side in the dirt and just rolled with it, causing such a fuss of mirth I couldn't help but join in.
The word, of course, was humor. I only know it now, as it was shared with me. It's a very GOOD thing that it's infectious.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger takes Trickster home to Weaver.
No one knew where he came from; he was certainly no member of the Family. But that was not so strange in those days, when her ladyship shone down with infinite possibilities and creation seemed to bubble out of the rocks. There he had simply been one day, a skinny little thing with a clay mask tied to his face, cords knotted in his greasy hair. Before anyone had taken any real notice, the boy invented both shoelaces and the tying of them together when someone wasn’t paying attention.
Whatever the mother saw when she inspected him, she kept- as always- her own counsel. It took no soothsayer to spot the intelligent gleam in his eyes, nor the crooked smile under his mask that promised that such intellect would be put to no good use at all.
"Please mom? Pleeeeease? We'll explore things! We'll bring something nice for you! He said he knows how to write limericks."
No, it took no manner of prophesy at all to see that letting those children play together could only go badly. But it certainly helped.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger, his sister Flowers, and best bro Trickster discuss snails
"Why are snails?" the sister asked one day.
"That's not a real question," the brother replied, insolent. He was quite fond of grammar in those days.
"Yes, it is! I'm asking why are snails."
"Noooo, you can ask why do snails exist, or why is that snail he-"
"Snails are tube worms!" the friend announced snickering, "but the got let outta the water and lost on the way back. Then they got so mad, they crammed their heads up their own arses over and over til they were all spiraled up!" As he spoke, they all felt the world’s history shifting, so that it had always been true.
Both boys howled uproariously, while the girl looked closer at the snail with a contemplative frown.
"It's OK," she whispered to it, "you don't need to be that angry."
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger's mother is dying
"Please," he begs, "please. Just do something. It doesn't have to be- oh, melodramatic and cruel. We played Apples to Apples! They all had fun!"
"Hmph. You will find I have little patience for games." She takes a drink of her tea and coughs into a kerchief. Sand sprinkles to the floor.
He falls to his knees in front of her, shoulders shaking. "Mother, I'm scared. Please. Please don't do this. Please don't do this."
"Do not weep, my son. All threads must be cut in time."
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger rebels and loses his speech.
"This is madness, Father! You're destroying them! Mortals are not livestock. This family is becoming a mockery of our purpose, just like she said we would."
He turns, slowly and takes his pipe out of his mouth, "Son I will not tell you again. I am your King, and you will keep a respectful tone when you address me, or you will not address me at all."
"Your maj-"
He holds up a hand and continues, carefully reloading the pipe. "Son, I have tolerated quite a number of shenanigans. An abundance of shenanigans one might say. Perhaps a plethora. You like the word plethora, don't you? But that all ends now. This flexibility and adaptability of mortals that you admire so much, maybe it's about time you showed a little of you own, hmm? Now, you will go out there, and you will tell them what you need to to keep them playing. Do we understand one another? I certainly hope we do, as this is an order from your King, and as such, would be exceedingly foolish to refuse."
"I will not lie for you. She was right. We should all fade, and let this place die, we have no right to-"
He explodes then, in terrible wrath. You can not make out the words, the anger of a god being far to heavy for a mortal to bear.
--
Later, when it is done, he is sitting on a cot and contemplating the needle and leftover thread, stained golden with his blood.
"Yeesh," his friend (are they really friends anymore?) says, standing in the doorway, "So he really went through with it, huh? That's rough buddy."
His sister, standing next to him giggles. She does that a lot these days. "D-does it hurt? Does it hurt?"
He turns and his sealed lips tug up into an unamused smile. Of course he is kept him from really speaking but still the words come out, "You know, I really couldn't say."
She laughs again, for an unpleasant amount of time.
Soldier's Birthdays
____________________________________________________________________
SOLDIER
"ALL RIGHT BRO, GET YOUR GAME DICK ON. IT'S TIME YOU LEARNED HOW TO PORK A DUDE AND NOT BE A TOTAL FAG ABOUT IT, AND I JUST SO HAPPEN TO HAVE A DUDE THAT'S NOT A TOTAL FAG RIGHT HERE."
"Yo, 'sup man. I'm Dwayne."
"HIS NAME IS DWAYNE."
And that was the day Messenger learned to run faster than the wind.
OKAY UN MESSENGER RELATED STUFF FOR MY OWN REFERENCE
____________________________________________________________________
Surgeon and Weaver
You are watching a young man's back as he sits at his desk writing feverishly.
"Why do I? Why wouldn't I? Kolotha, they are simply amazing. For such a simple lifespan, so short at that, there's almost an infinite ability to absorb information and then build upon it. While merely a blink of time, yes. But …" He turns, expression engaged and focused, long fingers twisting to express a concept he can't quite convey. "Like bricks, nothing special by themselves... It would be easy to give them the tools they need to overcome nearly anything. Just by the smallest of hints..."
She/you reach out, putting a bemused hand on his shoulder. "Kindness? I thought you'd denounced that."
He looks taken aback for a moment, before his expression closes and he straightens his sleeves. "It's curiosity. There are several experiments I need to run."
"Of course."
____________________________________________________________________
The Decadence and Death
Figures seem to flicker into existence on the weave. You can't quite SEE either of them, both there and not, small and yet too enormous to properly take in. There's little more than hints and impressions...
A spindly clawed hand, languidly reaching down and picking up a body. The tongue that slides around the still struggling soldier and the slow way her teeth sink in...
A bemused presence, leaning against a tree, the smell of cigar smoke and a drum beat both heard and not...
"You could give me just a little..."
"Ah my beautiful dear, you'd find me not to taste..."
"Possibly... ah what a droll job, so instant so methodical... I bet there are rules and everything."
A laugh resounding and loud. "A process at least."
"I thought so... my my, what good IS instant... I enjoy a good struggle... it makes the cake a little sweeter."
"My lady, I do believe, that for all my fondness for the finest in life, I will take your word on it."
"Well, we'll just have wine and music instead. I'll be traditional about it."
The branch unravels.
____________________________________________________________________
Rota and Flowers
As you touch the flower, it turns to yarn and unravels. It's caught in the next sweep of the shuttle and begins to form patterns. For a moment the strings start to organize, pulled tight by the warp and the weddle begins showing it's pattern. The canvas forms quickly... but the figures within it begin to move.
They take on texture and depth, and for a moment it seems as if you are standing there...
… in beside a tall, jolly fellow in a top hat and suit. A great vorn lays next to the warrior who fell just before it's death throes took it as well. He reaches down and taps each on the shoulder, offering a welcoming hand to both spirits. They swirl around him and slip into his jacket pocket.
He pulls a golden watch and is checking the time when a pale, tiny hand tugs at his sleeve.
The little girl is gawky and wide eyed, twigs in her hair, and a guileless smile. Little insects play at her feet. "E... Excuse me."
The man looks down, his smile breaks wide into a grin and his eyes warm. The others watching would not come near, not the wind, nor the wild one in the mask and the weeds, they were all scared of him and his touch. "Speak lil one. I listen."
"... I um....... I was wonder. What happens next?"
He crouches, speaking as one often does to children about difficult things. "I give them back to the Old Man and they become new life. It's the way of this planet."
"No... I mean! I knew that... what happens to them." She points down at the bodies.
It takes a moment, for the man to realize what the child was asking. A little bemused, he answers. "There's nothing left there, child. Nothing happens."
"Oh." She stared down at them, then looked up at the man, then down at them, then up at the man, then down at them, then up at the man. "That.... that's a little sad."
She drops to her knees in the mud and crawls to one, curious like a curwiss and just like he'd done, tapped each on the shoulder. Immediately, the bodies began to fold in on themselves with an awful smell, insects came from the ground and from the sky, called by the scent and took part in the feast.
It was only moments before each slipped into the ground... and in their place, grass grew lush and green. Flowers sprung up, far more healthy than anywhere in the field.
"Okay!" She beams up at him. "They're not left behind."
He smiles and strokes her hair, genuinely touched. "You did well, my little Flower. I think that was quite the tribute."
And so it always was.
____________________________________________________________________
The Weaver wishes her Sight away
The threads shudder around you, sliding together as you brush against them until they fill your vision...
They take on texture and depth, and for a moment it seems as if you are standing there...
… next to a young, beautiful woman with a warm smile and old, tired eyes. She motions over her shoulder to a man, similarly young. He's composed and collected, hands folded, and neat.
"Corpus, bring your sharpest tools. I wish for shorter locks."
A thin eyebrow arches. "Your husband thinks highly of your hair."
"This is for my pleasure, not his."
"It is a part of your gift of sight." He steps behind her, empty handed, reverently gathering her endless, braided locks in one hand. "Even my calculations have no such accuracy."
"What would you think, my dear younger brother, if I were to say that for all your skill and my art, the end of all things is still a pitiful thing."
Silence fills the air between them. Seasons change, years turn. "Nonsense." The hair falls to the floor at her feet.
She smiles. "I knew you would say that."
Experts from The Theogony of Shodisé Bookman the First, written 1231 BTR (Before Theological Rejection)
Sing to me oh Weaver Kolotha, oh Queen of the Gods, and Lady of Truth. Pull back the curtain on this brief life and let me see the holy pattern beyond. Let me fathom only the tiniest threads you weaves. I pray you let this fool speak other than foolishness. I invoke thee in the name of truth.
Sing to me as well, oh Storyteller, oh many-tongued. Let my words be sweet. Let the telling of this tale ease the suffering of all we sad mortals. Make clever my tongue and lovely my voice. Let this ham-fisted prattler sing a song worth hearing. I invoke thee in the name of beauty.
Once, once, long ago, there was nothing. Then, in this nothing, there was dust. Then, in the nothing and the dust, there was a heart. This heart had a wish, but what that wish is not for we mortals to know. But to fill this wish, the heart must create. And so the heart called all the dust in the nothing onto itself. The dust came unto a heart, and the heart had a body. Pleased with this, the heart warmed. It warmed and warmed until it became fire, and its body of dust became fire. And so it became the first life- what we call now the Old Woman.
But a heart alone is a lonely one, and one heart yearns for another. In her own awareness, she learned that her yearnings became a call that even nothing responded to. So it came to be, that in that darkness, there became dust, and from it, another heart. This heart knew nothing but the love it received from its maker, and grew. It did not seek to compete with her warmth, merely to receive it, so he did not burn. The dust became soil, and he became the second life - what we now call the Old Man.
From her, he had learned, and yearned himself. He called as she had, and created two beings to circle himself. They were named Lunox and Lundia, the blue and the red daughters, but their affection did not please him. They were always out of his reach... so he turned inward and called.
His call became the water, and from the ground - just as he had come from her warmth - grew those who began from their love.
First called from the ground was Regelus- who named himself King. He looked at the beast in the ground, the sea and sky, and he named them. When he had named them he said "I have created this."
Second called from the ground were the Twins, Kolotha and Corpus, she who weaves and he who cuts, fate and form. They together understood the two sides of Truth and she was found most beautiful and mysterious by Regelus. He named her his Queen and thus it was so. Everything flowed from them, onwards, until the Old Man was brimming with life, whom he loved as the Old Woman loved him.
While the Old Man held so much life in his arms, the daughters of the sky became jealous and forever tug at his attention, pulling it back at forth between each other as siblings will.
The swell and ebb of the tides are their yearning and loneliness.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger creates squidrats
The things she had . . . produced are less than a day old, and already the male had become a nuisance.
"And what's that one?" it toddled across the room, naked as the day it was- . . . naked as today, and reached its fat little hands towards a specimen it could not possibly understand the significance of. Prehistoric, it was! One of the first to be born of the divine union, older than They themselves from some perspectives. 'Imp,' the humans would call it, and then some day 'trilobite' and some time after that 'Olenoides erratus' when they finally found a nomenclature approaching sensible.
"That one is- likewise, one you are not permitted to touch."
"But uncle, you’ve said that of all of them!"
"Clever boy."
It stopped suddenly, whirring attention span transfixed on an aquarium. Cepholopods. "I like these. They should be out of the water." One began reaching over the top of the tank, pulling itself into the open air which was of course preposterous as it lacked anything like the musculature to support itself on land, let alone the respiratory capabilities to-
He slammed a lid down over the tank, "That will be quite enough suggestions of that sort, thank you. Shouldn't you be off defecating yourself?"
The boy smiled at him with all the wholly insincere innocence of a babe. In the tank, the creatures were all beginning to cling to the top, now unable to stay submerged indefinitely. "Dear Uncle," he asked sweetly, "would you like me to?"
________________________________________________________________
Messenger meets Trickster
Once, when I was quite young and the world was new, I forgot a word. Perhaps it was not meant for me to keep, for the very moment I finished it, it flew away, caught by the wind and taken from me.
Curious and a little panicked, I ran after it. I knew already that some words were dangerous, and others unpredictable, and I'd been berated quite soundly for messing with verbs, honestly. I sorted through time. I sifted through a dream but woke too fast. I checked in memory and innovation, the forgotten and the new, but it hadn't caught any of those places...
[He sets his chin on his palms and then looks up, smiling at Kain.]
It wasn't until I'd checked the earth, I found a child in a mask, about my age.. perhaps a little younger. I'd asked him if he'd seen it, even though I no longer knew what it looked like.
He said, it was his now, he'd found it. And he'd "had the last word on the subject. And the first."
And at that, he began to laugh and crow and cackle. He'd snort and giggle and then burst into another round at his own joke. He fell over onto his side in the dirt and just rolled with it, causing such a fuss of mirth I couldn't help but join in.
The word, of course, was humor. I only know it now, as it was shared with me. It's a very GOOD thing that it's infectious.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger takes Trickster home to Weaver.
No one knew where he came from; he was certainly no member of the Family. But that was not so strange in those days, when her ladyship shone down with infinite possibilities and creation seemed to bubble out of the rocks. There he had simply been one day, a skinny little thing with a clay mask tied to his face, cords knotted in his greasy hair. Before anyone had taken any real notice, the boy invented both shoelaces and the tying of them together when someone wasn’t paying attention.
Whatever the mother saw when she inspected him, she kept- as always- her own counsel. It took no soothsayer to spot the intelligent gleam in his eyes, nor the crooked smile under his mask that promised that such intellect would be put to no good use at all.
"Please mom? Pleeeeease? We'll explore things! We'll bring something nice for you! He said he knows how to write limericks."
No, it took no manner of prophesy at all to see that letting those children play together could only go badly. But it certainly helped.
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger, his sister Flowers, and best bro Trickster discuss snails
"Why are snails?" the sister asked one day.
"That's not a real question," the brother replied, insolent. He was quite fond of grammar in those days.
"Yes, it is! I'm asking why are snails."
"Noooo, you can ask why do snails exist, or why is that snail he-"
"Snails are tube worms!" the friend announced snickering, "but the got let outta the water and lost on the way back. Then they got so mad, they crammed their heads up their own arses over and over til they were all spiraled up!" As he spoke, they all felt the world’s history shifting, so that it had always been true.
Both boys howled uproariously, while the girl looked closer at the snail with a contemplative frown.
"It's OK," she whispered to it, "you don't need to be that angry."
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger's mother is dying
"Please," he begs, "please. Just do something. It doesn't have to be- oh, melodramatic and cruel. We played Apples to Apples! They all had fun!"
"Hmph. You will find I have little patience for games." She takes a drink of her tea and coughs into a kerchief. Sand sprinkles to the floor.
He falls to his knees in front of her, shoulders shaking. "Mother, I'm scared. Please. Please don't do this. Please don't do this."
"Do not weep, my son. All threads must be cut in time."
____________________________________________________________________
Messenger rebels and loses his speech.
"This is madness, Father! You're destroying them! Mortals are not livestock. This family is becoming a mockery of our purpose, just like she said we would."
He turns, slowly and takes his pipe out of his mouth, "Son I will not tell you again. I am your King, and you will keep a respectful tone when you address me, or you will not address me at all."
"Your maj-"
He holds up a hand and continues, carefully reloading the pipe. "Son, I have tolerated quite a number of shenanigans. An abundance of shenanigans one might say. Perhaps a plethora. You like the word plethora, don't you? But that all ends now. This flexibility and adaptability of mortals that you admire so much, maybe it's about time you showed a little of you own, hmm? Now, you will go out there, and you will tell them what you need to to keep them playing. Do we understand one another? I certainly hope we do, as this is an order from your King, and as such, would be exceedingly foolish to refuse."
"I will not lie for you. She was right. We should all fade, and let this place die, we have no right to-"
He explodes then, in terrible wrath. You can not make out the words, the anger of a god being far to heavy for a mortal to bear.
--
Later, when it is done, he is sitting on a cot and contemplating the needle and leftover thread, stained golden with his blood.
"Yeesh," his friend (are they really friends anymore?) says, standing in the doorway, "So he really went through with it, huh? That's rough buddy."
His sister, standing next to him giggles. She does that a lot these days. "D-does it hurt? Does it hurt?"
He turns and his sealed lips tug up into an unamused smile. Of course he is kept him from really speaking but still the words come out, "You know, I really couldn't say."
She laughs again, for an unpleasant amount of time.
Soldier's Birthdays
____________________________________________________________________
SOLDIER
"ALL RIGHT BRO, GET YOUR GAME DICK ON. IT'S TIME YOU LEARNED HOW TO PORK A DUDE AND NOT BE A TOTAL FAG ABOUT IT, AND I JUST SO HAPPEN TO HAVE A DUDE THAT'S NOT A TOTAL FAG RIGHT HERE."
"Yo, 'sup man. I'm Dwayne."
"HIS NAME IS DWAYNE."
And that was the day Messenger learned to run faster than the wind.
OKAY UN MESSENGER RELATED STUFF FOR MY OWN REFERENCE
____________________________________________________________________
Surgeon and Weaver
You are watching a young man's back as he sits at his desk writing feverishly.
"Why do I? Why wouldn't I? Kolotha, they are simply amazing. For such a simple lifespan, so short at that, there's almost an infinite ability to absorb information and then build upon it. While merely a blink of time, yes. But …" He turns, expression engaged and focused, long fingers twisting to express a concept he can't quite convey. "Like bricks, nothing special by themselves... It would be easy to give them the tools they need to overcome nearly anything. Just by the smallest of hints..."
She/you reach out, putting a bemused hand on his shoulder. "Kindness? I thought you'd denounced that."
He looks taken aback for a moment, before his expression closes and he straightens his sleeves. "It's curiosity. There are several experiments I need to run."
"Of course."
____________________________________________________________________
The Decadence and Death
Figures seem to flicker into existence on the weave. You can't quite SEE either of them, both there and not, small and yet too enormous to properly take in. There's little more than hints and impressions...
A spindly clawed hand, languidly reaching down and picking up a body. The tongue that slides around the still struggling soldier and the slow way her teeth sink in...
A bemused presence, leaning against a tree, the smell of cigar smoke and a drum beat both heard and not...
"You could give me just a little..."
"Ah my beautiful dear, you'd find me not to taste..."
"Possibly... ah what a droll job, so instant so methodical... I bet there are rules and everything."
A laugh resounding and loud. "A process at least."
"I thought so... my my, what good IS instant... I enjoy a good struggle... it makes the cake a little sweeter."
"My lady, I do believe, that for all my fondness for the finest in life, I will take your word on it."
"Well, we'll just have wine and music instead. I'll be traditional about it."
The branch unravels.
____________________________________________________________________
Rota and Flowers
As you touch the flower, it turns to yarn and unravels. It's caught in the next sweep of the shuttle and begins to form patterns. For a moment the strings start to organize, pulled tight by the warp and the weddle begins showing it's pattern. The canvas forms quickly... but the figures within it begin to move.
They take on texture and depth, and for a moment it seems as if you are standing there...
… in beside a tall, jolly fellow in a top hat and suit. A great vorn lays next to the warrior who fell just before it's death throes took it as well. He reaches down and taps each on the shoulder, offering a welcoming hand to both spirits. They swirl around him and slip into his jacket pocket.
He pulls a golden watch and is checking the time when a pale, tiny hand tugs at his sleeve.
The little girl is gawky and wide eyed, twigs in her hair, and a guileless smile. Little insects play at her feet. "E... Excuse me."
The man looks down, his smile breaks wide into a grin and his eyes warm. The others watching would not come near, not the wind, nor the wild one in the mask and the weeds, they were all scared of him and his touch. "Speak lil one. I listen."
"... I um....... I was wonder. What happens next?"
He crouches, speaking as one often does to children about difficult things. "I give them back to the Old Man and they become new life. It's the way of this planet."
"No... I mean! I knew that... what happens to them." She points down at the bodies.
It takes a moment, for the man to realize what the child was asking. A little bemused, he answers. "There's nothing left there, child. Nothing happens."
"Oh." She stared down at them, then looked up at the man, then down at them, then up at the man, then down at them, then up at the man. "That.... that's a little sad."
She drops to her knees in the mud and crawls to one, curious like a curwiss and just like he'd done, tapped each on the shoulder. Immediately, the bodies began to fold in on themselves with an awful smell, insects came from the ground and from the sky, called by the scent and took part in the feast.
It was only moments before each slipped into the ground... and in their place, grass grew lush and green. Flowers sprung up, far more healthy than anywhere in the field.
"Okay!" She beams up at him. "They're not left behind."
He smiles and strokes her hair, genuinely touched. "You did well, my little Flower. I think that was quite the tribute."
And so it always was.
____________________________________________________________________
The Weaver wishes her Sight away
The threads shudder around you, sliding together as you brush against them until they fill your vision...
They take on texture and depth, and for a moment it seems as if you are standing there...
… next to a young, beautiful woman with a warm smile and old, tired eyes. She motions over her shoulder to a man, similarly young. He's composed and collected, hands folded, and neat.
"Corpus, bring your sharpest tools. I wish for shorter locks."
A thin eyebrow arches. "Your husband thinks highly of your hair."
"This is for my pleasure, not his."
"It is a part of your gift of sight." He steps behind her, empty handed, reverently gathering her endless, braided locks in one hand. "Even my calculations have no such accuracy."
"What would you think, my dear younger brother, if I were to say that for all your skill and my art, the end of all things is still a pitiful thing."
Silence fills the air between them. Seasons change, years turn. "Nonsense." The hair falls to the floor at her feet.
She smiles. "I knew you would say that."
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