“And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
felt myself a pure part of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose on the wind.”
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
felt myself a pure part of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose on the wind.”
Here is the boy, bent like a priest at the altar. Here are the knees tucked under the chest just so, a black that slopes toward the ground and the tip of a horn on the street like a pike. It feels like ceremony, like the bright white light of salvation, like the sun on his back is a hand and the hand holds him down.
Like the hand of god pushes, and pushes, until he has shins in the dirt and there is no taste around but the grit of sand and the cloud of dust that follows him down.
It is still holy. It still draws a prayer from his lungs. Most everything is holy, he knows. Most everything is like living and dying and living and dying in the same breath. Most every empty space is full of the voice of God. When he stands it is with the languor of a reptile. He does not know how to be anything but the creaking of old houses and the swing of a chandelier. He does not know how to do anything but stand, and watch, as Solterra turns on a pin around him.
Spinning,
and spinning,
and spinning,
though none of them pray as they should. None of them are full of the same joy and fear that he is. He feels it. He feels it deep down in the core of him, where there is only empty space and the cavernous echo of a heart that cannot see itself.
He inhales again. Exhales.
Some deity sighs through the wind, hot in his face, like any wind from the desert should be. All around him the Court is alive with heat and sun and the groan of a nation in motion. The fountain is cool and white against the blocky, yellowed brick of the rest of the city. Its splashing sounds like laughter, like some beast from the deep.
It would move anyone. It does not move him. It cannot.
Though Jask stares, though he stares and he stares and he stares, there is nothing that stirs in him, saying maker help me, this is beautiful.
There is just... silence. Cold, black silence like the void.
He used to wonder what it is like, to be the void.
Now he knows.
@orestes et any, here is... this werid man
