There are times in which, like watching refractions belt over the water, the aether cannot understand its point of being, its point of flesh, its point in time – where in examining those waves, frothing and churning and overturned in the depths of the limitless blue, it loses itself to ponder urchins and sharks. It might run its soft tongue along sharpened teeth, or feel the way the cool water smooths over seal-velvet flesh, and dream of the darkness that exists in the nightmare and memory of the Terminus leagues. There are no stars there – no suns, no planets, no seeming unfettered skies to back to, to swell against, to taste and taste again, to create within and without and to dream... perhaps this is another dream in itself. It, Erasmus, the srreptu, the curious girl and her strategic gaze.
When she asks him if he speaks their language – it is as if the thing knows and brays in response, though Erasmus's eyes watch it move off into the other huddled forms, watch it chase flies with a swing of its head and the tight flick of its tail. Watch smaller forms, even less graceful than the titans around it, fall away to the center of their ring. Erasmus considers this, their economy, seeming uncomplicated ebb and flow of life captured in the bed of the plains. What did she see? What did she intend to see, with the naked eye, or with the imaginative pickings of an assumptive mind?
The thing that becomes Erasmus does not know what it is. It is equine flesh, hot and thrumming now with the freshness and vigor of the aether that has consumed – or otherwise, has been consumed. But there is more. It does not know how it is different from srreptu, or sky-girls, or suns, or stars, or wolves, or sharks. It knows that it is separated by bone and skin and the musculature that divines it some odd mechanism of four legs and two horns and a tail that flows, as if part of the breeze, with luxuriant tendrils of night-dark indigo and gold. On his shoulders, a beehive of a mind.
Did he speak their language?
“No.” he answers simply, though there is a hint of confusion in his voice when he says this; the aether doesn't know it, doesn't understand the inflection of not knowing because it should know. It, this thing that has birthed and carved and devoured and destroyed planets, stars, an entire solar system collapsed into the sore eye of a black hole. This thing that should not exist as anything smaller than a god, or the very concept of one, as true gods, like nature itself, do not have measure. Why does it not know their language? Why do they not speak to the creatures like Erasmus?
The srreptu keep the timeless waters of wisdom on their shoulders, a burden we may never carry. They are miserable things because they know the heart of this world, they know its faults and frivolities, they do not share but with the wolves and the jackals and the wildcats who have grown maddened with hunger for more. We do not eat them. Bothersome. We do not eat them because we, too, may go mad. Limits on the limitless.
To Erasmus, to the aether, to what becomes and has become, they are no more than meat. And if meat could speak to him the way those dying lights in the eyes of previous creatures have, he doubted they held any more wisdom. They did not speak because they were not like them. Not like Erasmus, or Nicnevin, or the rest of the Novusians. Superiority, perhaps. There may have been a time when the aether could speak to them, but it may not be in this same place and time. The world had a pattern to it, as all worlds did – there was nothing created out of coincidence. Only situations, the implementations of a terroir, and the convergence that bore its hybrid material. Survival was always necessary, and there were more than two sides, predator and prey.
To the fortunes of those that the thing that becomes Erasmus has met, it has not ventured to wonder where its place in this terroir is. To commit to ultimate motive. Predator. Were not others like Erasmus also as carnivorous, as adaptable, as lusting?
A flicker of the question is posed, when the mare responds to his assumption and provides her own. Indeed, a part of him intended the possibility that she was from nowhere near a place like the Plains or the Wilds (which still blended in front of him like a mirage, or a dream, or that convergence we considered once before) and her confirmation does not lead to a further suspicion as to what would follow the Aether's – what planet, what system, what plane, what dimension. He is satisfied, left to wonder of an overgrown forest in which death cannot exist – and the image is not so far-fetched, that death cannot touch a realm of life. He does not question it. Nothing truly dies, does it? Things are only decadent and reborn, like a cathedral formed from the bones of a leviathan, or meteors from the cold skin of planets, or soils that churn with the minerals from the long “dead”. Death, or what is understood as the concept of death, begets life.
Maybe Novus is different.
Erasmus thinks of the things rotting in the forgotten caverns dug in the foothills of the Veneror mountains. Will anything come of them?
And then, you aren't from here either, are you? Then it is pulled from the cold dregs of the Denoctian catacombs, the skulls and bones which grin from beneath the leather-taut thin flesh of what-once-was. What metamorphosis happens there, ungraved, unearthed. Dust on the marble floors. Then he is in the bloodied battlefields of the Wilds, and then in the nesting grounds of srreptu, somewhere between. And then, above, far beyond the light of the sun, he is in an empty notch at some far corner of the next galaxy, where space dust does not remember what once existed. But it expands. He feels it in the edges of his stolen skin. If he could just reach it –
Erasmus swings his eyes from the sky to Nicnevin, and a grin returns to his features. This time, not quite so genuine, but not violent or feral or unkind. It simply is, as most things are. An easy thing that treads softly along the lines of his lips, but fails to smother the light of dying celestial bodies that glimmer in the far-reaches of his gaze. He blinks them away and, “Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately.” And before she can answer, before he can even finish the sentence, he is moving away from the bison yards behind them. Moving into the dried fields of wheat and withered heads of poppies, coneflowers, low growing aster, and the butterfly-swarmed graying milkweeds.
It makes up for the empty space between her question and his answer. Because the aether does not know which response is appropriate – did she ask Erasmus? Or did she ask the aether? But in a moment, he deduced that she must certainly be asking the Erasmus-that-was, as it was skin worn and presented like a war trophy. Like furs. Like sheepskin. “They call it The Wilds.” The aether thought it supposed the textbook definition of Wild was apt to describe the unfurling fields of dying grasses and grain, and the rocky encampments of beasts that warred only because they could. Perhaps if they drank from that great, ancient lake of wisdom, they would have known that the aether was as close to their gods as their gods could ever dream of being. Perhaps they wouldn't have warred with each other, bloodying the fields for scraps of wheat and short-lived greens. Perhaps they would have known that the prairie rolling into desolate desert was the lap of an altar, and the woods they grew so terrified of, its waiting chalice.
Perhaps they would have sought to murder Erasmus sooner.
"Not unlike this place." And then, almost dismissively, "Why did you leave your forest? Is there something you search for, here, in Novus?" The sparse arrays of coneflower and gold-grass tumble dry beneath his footfalls. But his eyes are on the sky again, and the silhouetted peaks of the Veneror. On and on his mind tumbles like the dreary heads of the coneflower.
When she asks him if he speaks their language – it is as if the thing knows and brays in response, though Erasmus's eyes watch it move off into the other huddled forms, watch it chase flies with a swing of its head and the tight flick of its tail. Watch smaller forms, even less graceful than the titans around it, fall away to the center of their ring. Erasmus considers this, their economy, seeming uncomplicated ebb and flow of life captured in the bed of the plains. What did she see? What did she intend to see, with the naked eye, or with the imaginative pickings of an assumptive mind?
The thing that becomes Erasmus does not know what it is. It is equine flesh, hot and thrumming now with the freshness and vigor of the aether that has consumed – or otherwise, has been consumed. But there is more. It does not know how it is different from srreptu, or sky-girls, or suns, or stars, or wolves, or sharks. It knows that it is separated by bone and skin and the musculature that divines it some odd mechanism of four legs and two horns and a tail that flows, as if part of the breeze, with luxuriant tendrils of night-dark indigo and gold. On his shoulders, a beehive of a mind.
Did he speak their language?
“No.” he answers simply, though there is a hint of confusion in his voice when he says this; the aether doesn't know it, doesn't understand the inflection of not knowing because it should know. It, this thing that has birthed and carved and devoured and destroyed planets, stars, an entire solar system collapsed into the sore eye of a black hole. This thing that should not exist as anything smaller than a god, or the very concept of one, as true gods, like nature itself, do not have measure. Why does it not know their language? Why do they not speak to the creatures like Erasmus?
The srreptu keep the timeless waters of wisdom on their shoulders, a burden we may never carry. They are miserable things because they know the heart of this world, they know its faults and frivolities, they do not share but with the wolves and the jackals and the wildcats who have grown maddened with hunger for more. We do not eat them. Bothersome. We do not eat them because we, too, may go mad. Limits on the limitless.
To Erasmus, to the aether, to what becomes and has become, they are no more than meat. And if meat could speak to him the way those dying lights in the eyes of previous creatures have, he doubted they held any more wisdom. They did not speak because they were not like them. Not like Erasmus, or Nicnevin, or the rest of the Novusians. Superiority, perhaps. There may have been a time when the aether could speak to them, but it may not be in this same place and time. The world had a pattern to it, as all worlds did – there was nothing created out of coincidence. Only situations, the implementations of a terroir, and the convergence that bore its hybrid material. Survival was always necessary, and there were more than two sides, predator and prey.
To the fortunes of those that the thing that becomes Erasmus has met, it has not ventured to wonder where its place in this terroir is. To commit to ultimate motive. Predator. Were not others like Erasmus also as carnivorous, as adaptable, as lusting?
A flicker of the question is posed, when the mare responds to his assumption and provides her own. Indeed, a part of him intended the possibility that she was from nowhere near a place like the Plains or the Wilds (which still blended in front of him like a mirage, or a dream, or that convergence we considered once before) and her confirmation does not lead to a further suspicion as to what would follow the Aether's – what planet, what system, what plane, what dimension. He is satisfied, left to wonder of an overgrown forest in which death cannot exist – and the image is not so far-fetched, that death cannot touch a realm of life. He does not question it. Nothing truly dies, does it? Things are only decadent and reborn, like a cathedral formed from the bones of a leviathan, or meteors from the cold skin of planets, or soils that churn with the minerals from the long “dead”. Death, or what is understood as the concept of death, begets life.
Maybe Novus is different.
Erasmus thinks of the things rotting in the forgotten caverns dug in the foothills of the Veneror mountains. Will anything come of them?
And then, you aren't from here either, are you? Then it is pulled from the cold dregs of the Denoctian catacombs, the skulls and bones which grin from beneath the leather-taut thin flesh of what-once-was. What metamorphosis happens there, ungraved, unearthed. Dust on the marble floors. Then he is in the bloodied battlefields of the Wilds, and then in the nesting grounds of srreptu, somewhere between. And then, above, far beyond the light of the sun, he is in an empty notch at some far corner of the next galaxy, where space dust does not remember what once existed. But it expands. He feels it in the edges of his stolen skin. If he could just reach it –
Erasmus swings his eyes from the sky to Nicnevin, and a grin returns to his features. This time, not quite so genuine, but not violent or feral or unkind. It simply is, as most things are. An easy thing that treads softly along the lines of his lips, but fails to smother the light of dying celestial bodies that glimmer in the far-reaches of his gaze. He blinks them away and, “Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately.” And before she can answer, before he can even finish the sentence, he is moving away from the bison yards behind them. Moving into the dried fields of wheat and withered heads of poppies, coneflowers, low growing aster, and the butterfly-swarmed graying milkweeds.
It makes up for the empty space between her question and his answer. Because the aether does not know which response is appropriate – did she ask Erasmus? Or did she ask the aether? But in a moment, he deduced that she must certainly be asking the Erasmus-that-was, as it was skin worn and presented like a war trophy. Like furs. Like sheepskin. “They call it The Wilds.” The aether thought it supposed the textbook definition of Wild was apt to describe the unfurling fields of dying grasses and grain, and the rocky encampments of beasts that warred only because they could. Perhaps if they drank from that great, ancient lake of wisdom, they would have known that the aether was as close to their gods as their gods could ever dream of being. Perhaps they wouldn't have warred with each other, bloodying the fields for scraps of wheat and short-lived greens. Perhaps they would have known that the prairie rolling into desolate desert was the lap of an altar, and the woods they grew so terrified of, its waiting chalice.
Perhaps they would have sought to murder Erasmus sooner.
"Not unlike this place." And then, almost dismissively, "Why did you leave your forest? Is there something you search for, here, in Novus?" The sparse arrays of coneflower and gold-grass tumble dry beneath his footfalls. But his eyes are on the sky again, and the silhouetted peaks of the Veneror. On and on his mind tumbles like the dreary heads of the coneflower.
@
