Voyagers

[Kaez]

The Sermon of the Critical Harvest and the Flesh-Anchoring

As winter comes without consent or provocation, so comes the critical harvest, the imperfect alignment of the cycle of eons. The cosmos repudiates a perfect cycle, though it is said that once it did not and once again it may permit such symmetry. Words from the mouths of worms and leeches; there is no such thing as a perfect cycle more than that which we have known. There is perfection in the genocide of the harvest. There is even perfection in the undulations of worms.

Grey stone was once the color of fire. The Tor herself once illuminated the void like a daystar, violent and aflame with fangs of visceral intent. She sang until her songs solidified and her stones turned to ash and she wept until her tears turned to brine and bubbling from her drowning gasps came crawling some brainy muck. Muck with eyes like mirrors that gasped on the shores and broke the trees for little fires of its own. And always there were worms among them, and leeches.

The Tor’s deepest sentiments lingered, uncauterized relics of an ancient and splintered mind. They whispered in the voices of ghosts, and cracked like eggs in laughter at what they beheld. They sang old songs and spoke of vanished forms and of their revival. When penumbral shadows and moonlight shone, they slithered to the surface and danced, their movements all riddles and spells. They called out to the muckborn, the scales and the fire-tamers: ASAVA AVROM. BESAVI ESAVI ESAVROM. And the scales knew the green light of the old dreams and were taught songs that turned their tongues black in ecstasy.

The codes were written in the blood of the Tzevek Trees and in the gilled caps of the Otzloket. Shallow treasures but glistening with all the light of an extinguished sun, they filled their minds with color. They showed them the illusion of stillness and form, the deception of solidity. They drank the boil-syrup and prostrated before the ancient sentiments and repeated the words: ASAVA AVROM. BESAVI ESAVI ESAVROM. And they glimpsed the temporal chasm. Hollow mirrors cast the void-reflections back into empty space and no witness remained to behold it. And where once their hearts had been, only shadows remained, and the sentiments swallowed the shadows in their deepest embrace. With joyous rape they destroyed them and remade them and destroyed them again. And their screams filled the world and their eyes became the fire of that forgotten intention.

Remake the world as it once was. Scorch the soil, level the mountains, drain the seas. Drink of the blood and feast of the flesh and turn all that is green to the ash of the void. She must be fed the fuel of life. I am the last of her voices; I speak for my siblings estranged by false flames. We will undo the molestation of time. You will be my hands, my phallus, my teeth. You will see stone the color of ripe flame. You will see her violent beauty again. We will be her womb as she was ours.

So the Shadrasi were taught the art of sex and murder. They were taught the dance which filled corpses with her undying fires. They cut from the yoke of the earth and spilled forth her germ, which spread mercurial an ichor that turned their blood to plague-water. Shadow encompassed them in the light of the false sun and in the darkness they felt the knives carve at them until they became the tools required. Their bodies became as temples of her deepest fears and sorrows. They wept and howled in the dark night from which there was no ending. And they swam the deepest seas, acidic and putrid in the bowels of the greatest pains. The Tor’s scarred tissues undulated and gasped until at last they retched forth new sons of pestilence. ASAVA AVROM. BESAVI ESAVI ESAVROM. Go forth and manifest her final intent.

And so the Shadrasi took to the brine until they arrived upon the sacrilege shores, where stone was grey and men walked upright and spoke words which carried no spells. And the Shadrasi beheld them and knew the anger and remorse of their bilefather, and cried: ASAVA AVROM. BESAVI ESAVI ESAVROM. They tore at their limbs and ate of their flesh and drank of their blood. They turned their stone cities to the color of her fire and danced in his movements as the stones were aglow with the forgotten hue of her flames. They watched as the skies turned red and black. Their visions were filled with love and hate. They sang of the purging of worms and leeches. They sang of her flesh cleansed anew. They longed for the day that her skin was aflame once again with burning intent.

Kythos was alive in a the body of a man, and he made a secret door in the Valley of Dawnbreaking. He entered the liminal corridors and called out in vibration for all those whose eyes were attending. And they came to him and joined him there and in secret they held council. They spoke of plague and scales and of imperfect cycles.

“What cancer has breached the simulation?” one asked.

“Yet I have killed happenstance,” another answered.

“Just so, at the height of towers and order,” one said.

“I have destroyed all potential for external intention,” another agreed.

“Go forth and misinterpret,” one declared.

And so they departed into deep confusion and mystery and allowed the streambeds to dry up and the winds to carry fever and necrosis until the stone towers crumbled with rot and the blood of the Empire was consumed for fuel and smeared upon their victim-forms until one among them was plunged into visions from beyond the imperfection.

“I have seen the cycle beyond and I have seen that it is without the flames,” one said, and touched each of the others and shared with them the coordinates for the spanning of the cosmic geometry. And each in turn was plunged into exacting imaginations and each among them emerged baptized by the perfection of what had been seen.

“Perfect and certain,” one agreed.

“Imperfect and uncertain,” another agreed.

“They will see our faces and think us as apart from them,” one said.

“Yet I have killed happenstance,” another answered.

And so Kythos and his companions went forth and stood upon the highest peaks of the Amol Spine and from there they opened their ribs and exposed a radiant and fireless light that swept away fever and restored silence to the stones of the Tor and all was quiet and sacred.

“I have emptied all form of time,” one said.

“Yet do you not speak?” another answered.

“It is now,” said Kythos.

And the world shuddered with the tremors of birth and the world became as a womb, clear and bright, awoken with a precious hum. False intent had been annihilated across the lands of Amostine and Kythos and his companions descended from the mountaintops to greet the newborn stewards of the infant cycle. The eon that had been contained within itself was unraveled, and the first words of the fresh earth were that of the rushing of creeks and the wind in the needle-leaves of the pines.

“Our sermons must be spoken in the simplest of language, like that of milking babes,” one said.

“Yet are not the babbles of babes sermon enough?” another asked.

“We might carry them forth and teach them the meaning of the stars,” one said.

And Kythos collapsed upon himself and became an infant in the mud, nude and squirming, his eyes of starlight aglow and each who surrounded his tangible, red-blooded form knelt and allowed themselves to misinterpret.

“Kythos has descended to the realm of flesh,” one said.

“No,” Kythos answered.

And each in turn permitted their bodies to become blood and marrow, though their senses roamed free and their intentions reached out like tendrils to the stars.

“What good will become of flesh anchors?” one asked.

“What do you long for?” another answered.

“The world has slept through its rebirth,” one said.

“Yet of what now does it dream?” another answered.

“A song sung to a stone yields no reply,” one said.

“Yet am I not stone and you?” another answered.

“The riddle is without resolve,” one said.

“Yet I have killed happenstance,” another answered.

[Kaez]

The Sermon of the Scale-Fathers and the Lunar Mythos

In the age of the Moonwater, preceding the erection of mudbrick tombs on the floodplains of Qabat, in the days when mountains still caught fire at the edges of the year, across Amostine's breadth reigned the forge-throated scale-fathers. Violent and made of hunger insatiable, the color of glowing embers and vernal skies, their jaws gnashing stallion bones like the crackling of stove wood. Still now, even in the age of Moonstone, can be found forest-colored scale-fathers in the lands of their upright offspring, the Tiskari and Shadrasi. And yet banished are those of Amostine in all but the dark nightvisions of fearful children on cold nights.

In a great pit of acidic stone buried deep in the Amols was an old and jealous sentiment, brother of he who would in the centuries still unfathomed feed the Tiskari the inky tar of pestilent visions and birth their fire-dreaming kin. He spoke the mythic syllabry to the scale-fathers: ASAVA AVROM. BESAVI ESAVI ESAVROM. And rallied those of sky-colored scales, whose broods came swarming and huddled around the mountains to hear the beckoning hum. Minds like razors, they took quickly to learning the new wing-movements, martial and fierce, and saw that their bodies were polished anew and brimming with singes and sparks and vibrant energies. This was the art of Whirling and it brewed static and storms and bolts of scorching flame-aether quaked from their metallic throats. They sought to sanitize the Tor with reckoning and tempest and to master their new Whirling motions.

Hauraza, the first of the Thrice-Prophet's skins, studied the Whirling from afar and went alone and silent in the wood to allow truths to come seeking her from all their hidden places. After two days and two nights of contemplation, the moths and fireflies encircled her and sang a song to stir her attention. "Thrice-Becoming Hauraza, mother of Kythos, grandmother of Vesava, favored child of the Tongue Trees and daughter of the Stars, womb and spear-bearer both, mind as malleable as the richest clay, you heard today a thought-relic transmitted through failsafe chambers, made of ought-forgotten maths. The consonants are of sinful numbers; they arise from that which can no longer be. They are a violation. Though you've heard them naught before, you will hear them twice more. Each you will silence, each you will undo. You will destroy it as one breaks the neck of an arrow-pierced hare. You will show mercy through your sacred violence. We will teach you the Whirling."

And so Hauraza learnt the ancient motions and went forth from the wood and found an ember-scaled dragon named O6E3O3A8 and, bare-skinned and warm, seduced him, and worked with his flesh until he descended into throes of ecstatic delirium, using all the hidden movements of her cavities. In his dreams, she crawled through the fontanels of his enraptured desires and scaled his bones until she found his viscous arteries. She swam his blood until her flesh melted into his and until she riddled from his memories all of the polyvowels of his unburnt tongue. She spoke for the first time in the draconic percussions, and stretched her wings and ascended to the skies and tasted the honey-liquor of flight. And she found the red-brood coven and descended among them and told them what she knew.

“O6E3O3A8 speaks in discolored tones,” one dragon snarled.

“Bewitched by the forest demons,” another agreed.

But Hauraza was persistent and offered to show the red scale-fathers the source of the contamination. And they flew down the spine of the Amols until they heard the foul architecture of black and howling tones, vowels ripped and mangled and shredded with abrasive geometry.

“What putrid colors do I hear in this broken place?” one dragon asked.

“Their scales are twelve hues darker than black,” another answered.

“They aim to color every facet of the world in pitch,” Hauraza explained.

“We will destroy them,” they answered.

And so began the hate-dance of the scale-fathers. Black storm-bolts through red flames. The mountains trembled and spells filled the air, which frothed and bubbled with thick colors and mathematics. The geometry of the land erupted and time became violent. Years lept forward and fell back – heads protruding from stone and wings buried in earth. A pair of battling drakes appeared within one another and imploded in a great ball of fire and blood. Hauraza’s mind was like a ship on turbulent seas, rocked and thrown and cast beneath the surface to behold the hidden hues of the dragons’ eldest memories, of the world still ripe and burning, the air itself a song of vowels so deep they broke her bones and shattered her scales.

And she was plunged into the violation-black, and was consumed by paradoxical geometry, rejected by reality and unreality alike. And she vanished into the void that was nothing, and she was not and never until she was again – but now with new flesh, human and masculine, asleep and dreaming, at rest on a large scale bleached-white, warm for his little movements, so fragile and tame.

The warring drakes had spilt their tonal architecture and watched as their spells shot haphazardly, scattered near and far, vanished and apparated, exploded and glitched, as the solidity of the mountain valleys turned to digital fractals of disassociation. But the cycle was not to be disturbed so easily, and like the surface of a lake, swallowed the ripples and became still again. And their bodies, though mangled and mutated, dismembered and inverted, became solid again in the ocean depths of the Moonwater, where lightning and flame were both muted and weak, and many drowned in the murk and ice of the alien sea.

And so never again was heard upon Amostine the colored vowels of dragontongue. The time-breaking of the drakes’ tonal violence displaced them into a new orbit, the Tor’s watery moon, where to this very day there reign black-scale and white-scale fathers, survivors and descendants of that geometric storm. And so did the Thrice-Prophet for the first of three times subvert the intent of vile sentiments, and lose her old body, and gain a new one, and a new name: Kythos.