Portents
Friday, January 6, 2006
Somewhere between the moons and the mountain peaks it was said that a man could lose himself entirely. Whether the fullness of lunar cycles has any bearing on such mystical pragmatisms remains to be proved. But late one autumnal night a metal worker of Thentis became swallowed up whole into such a black abyss during a rare occurence of three full phases of the Gorean moons. He was not heard from for several months by any citizen of that provençial mountain city. High and low, those who knew him well had searched. Uneventfully. Until several passings of the moons' phases, he simply reappeared. No explanation was offered, and no accounting was asked. Over time, most of the folk in that provençial city had resigned themselves to the idea that he'd gone mad. Though the talk was mostly relegated to the whisperers of gossip, it was a commonly accepted theory that those of his family would deny to the end of time.
Ever wonder just what did lay on the far side of the abysmal chasm of bleak blackness? Still it was commonly and widely accepted that lunacy is a non-existant disease, and any mention of it would usually occur in children's bedtime stories as a particular moral objective pointing to the virtues of discipline and obedience.
Upon the man's sudden return from Nowhere, his home had become transformed into a hermitage. And one he rarely, if ever, left. It was there in the self-imposed solitary confinement that he lived with his ghosts and demons day and night. Often deprived of sleep, the unconscious dreamscape blurred into the lucent dreamscape, and he increasingly unable to distinguish between them.
Never in all that time, did he remove a metalic object that depended from a chain hung about his neck. It remained just where it had been placed all that time ago, beneath his tunic and against his flesh. Yet a constant, single thread that bound him tight and kept him from plunging over that eternal precipice.... he would close his eyes and see a face. Her face. Veiled. But he knew intrisically every feature of it all the same. Diviner of auguries. Her name, always in his mind, yet unspoken on lips.
Dream of me.
Ever wonder just what did lay on the far side of the abysmal chasm of bleak blackness? Still it was commonly and widely accepted that lunacy is a non-existant disease, and any mention of it would usually occur in children's bedtime stories as a particular moral objective pointing to the virtues of discipline and obedience.
Upon the man's sudden return from Nowhere, his home had become transformed into a hermitage. And one he rarely, if ever, left. It was there in the self-imposed solitary confinement that he lived with his ghosts and demons day and night. Often deprived of sleep, the unconscious dreamscape blurred into the lucent dreamscape, and he increasingly unable to distinguish between them.
Never in all that time, did he remove a metalic object that depended from a chain hung about his neck. It remained just where it had been placed all that time ago, beneath his tunic and against his flesh. Yet a constant, single thread that bound him tight and kept him from plunging over that eternal precipice.... he would close his eyes and see a face. Her face. Veiled. But he knew intrisically every feature of it all the same. Diviner of auguries. Her name, always in his mind, yet unspoken on lips.
Dream of me.
