i know i am deathless
i know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass
The lore of Novus is foolish, Torix thinks, to classify Courts on a basis of their patron god’s characteristics. Delumine has always read as soft to him, as tender, but as he walks down the library’s endless isles of knowledge it occurs to him all that is needed to destroy this continent is here, in these shelves. The most foolish of men, Vercingtorix has found, believe that physical force is true power. No. This is true power. Knowledge. History. The greatest collection of literature he has ever seen.
Vercingtorix arrives first with the hope of learning something of Novus; the histories. He reads in The Common History of Novus: Many, many years ago, Novus was a new and alluring land unknown to all but one. His name was Tempus, and he would come to be known as the founder of our world. Tempus was a powerful being with the ability to manipulate time itself; with this talent, he was almost omnipresent, seemingly everywhere and even beyond—
Of course, he keeps reading. All about Tempus’s children; Caligo, Vespera, Oriens, and Solis. The war. Denocte.
All of it.
Vercingtorix, however, finds the history lacking. He has difficulty discerning any aspects of mortality in it; and to read solely of the god’s affairs seems more like a fairytale than actuality.
He closes the Common History and puts its it away. Vercingtorix continues to wander down the aisle, pausing for a moment to glance up at the deep canopy above. The effect almost creates something akin to vertigo; it feels as if the earth is both below and above, as Torix stares at the kaleidoscope of autumn’s breath. The leaves are tinged in vast shades of red, yellow, and orange. The leaves, although fire-like, seem cool—they whisper with a wind he cannot feel and occasionally one leaf flits lazily toward the earth below.
Vercingtorix has never seen anything like it; and the thought is reinforced as he continues onward, through rooms made of trees and long corridors of books. Vercingtorix eventually finds what he is looking for: a history of foreign places. Torix finds what he is looking for. The History or Oresziah.
The title itself brings recollection of a witch-like mare that arrived on the island when he was a child. She came without ship or sail but had flown, instead, upon a pegasus’ wings. The entire city had distrusted her inherently, as a foreigner. They warned her she would be bound by the island strange magic, and entrapped on Oresziah with the rest of Torix’s people. Vercingtorix had been so young; a mere child at his father’s flank. The general—his father—had been aghast and insulted when she laughed at their warnings. She stayed for many months and then, one day, vanished.
They had assumed she had been eaten by the water horses, on account of the fact no one entered Oresziah who could then leave. They were Bound.
Now, Vercingtorix has his doubts. He pulls the thin, grey-backed book from the shelf. It is covered in dust; a fine filament of it rests upon the cover and top. He blows it from the history and opens, again, to the first page.
The Oreszians are an old, old people. Before they lived on Oresziah they had another name and came from another land: Comaetho. The Comaethians were vikings from the Far South, where the water freezes thick and glaciers and icebergs forbid travel. The Comathians refused to be confined to their Southern world, however, and developed a culture of seafaring raids. They pillaged the surrounding territories but always, always feared the land beyond the black cliffs. In their mythology, the Lands of Black Cliffs belonged to Oresziah, the god of the Dark Sea. One day, Oresziah would consume the world and draw it into the depths. Because of this, they feared his sigils and were wary of the Land of Black Cliffs.
There is a dry taste in Vercingtorix’s mouth. He returns the book to the shelf and turns away.
The tone is clipped; pragmatic. Strangely, he feels betrayed; if not by the historian who documented his people and then returned to this faraway land, then by whoever told her their history. It was theirs—what right did it have to become a grey-backed book no one read?
No one believed, or cared for? Torix thinks, if he were to tell the history of his people, he would not use words. He would show someone the way the ocean froths red when there are enough bodies on it; he would show them the way the sand develops a thirst for the carnal, the crimson. He begins to move, not because he feels he has the strength, but because it is a necessity. Mechanical.
Torix is already compartmentalising what he had read. Storing it away. He wonders if it was his father who she interviewed, or the other generals. Perhaps it was all of them. Perhaps none.
He might have wandered endlessly, if he did not turn into an aisle with another stallion. It is the first time Torix has seen another equine in the library as he has gone through painstaking care to avoid others, for whatever reason. A semblance of privacy, perhaps.
But Vercingtorix has arrived just in time to see the strange grin upon the stranger’s face. Although Torix feels resolutely hollow, he… connects, somehow, with that expression, that grin that is honed blade-like and nearly cruel.
"You must be reading one hell of a story,” he says, into the whisper of the trees and the silence of the books.
"Speech" || @Erasmus
i know i shall not pass like a child's curlicue cut with a burnt stick at night. i know i am august, i do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or to be understood, i see that the elementary laws never apologise.
