Lore:Inspiral: Difference between revisions

…Anyway, beloved sibling, if you want to catch me while I'm still wearing this (form/body?), you'll need to come home in the next couple of cycles. I don't mind if you'd prefer to wait until I'm down by the [untranslatable] among our ancestors, but you might get a different sort of chat!

I have lived out my life with the tenebrous warmth of our ancestors over me like a (cloak/atmosphere?) between us and nothingness. It's different—it's distant. I've drunk of the nectar a few times in the last cycles, and I touch briefly that concurrence of us all, and more and more, I think it is time to be part of it. I want to know the truths our ancestors keep close, and it is my turn to guide the future's children.

I miss you.

Dear sibling, come home. Live in my house, and let me (dream/exist) close to you again, whether in this shape or the new one I will take on. I will not be the same, but which of us ever is? You are not the same as you were as a child, either.

Six of us went down into the Pit, and only one crawled out. That is how it was, and that is how it is.

I think: What was in the Pit?

   

Synergy, I thought. The closeness that combat creates. We were pinned together in the dark, and so we learned to read each other perfectly, for to do otherwise would have been to die.

[[Sol Divisive|A specter of the Black Garden, rich with the sweetness of flowers and the stink of radiolaria]]. It leaves behind a delicate data-lattice to mark its passing.

garden&&gardeners==root&&branch==leaf&&flower

[[Piri|A reverie of a loyal Ghost, changed and quiet but always steadfast]]. It leaves behind a gently glowing data fragment to mark its passing.

And where did that leave me?

I tried to run.

I lost something there, like I was taken apart and put back together with a part missing. Like I was really nothing more than a machine, like the [[Traveler]]'s blessing and my own bright heart meant nothing at all more than copper and glass. And when I thought about anything again, anything that wasn't an infinite abyss with no stars, my Guardian and I were outside the Black Garden. He had lost them, and I couldn't tell him, and nothing was the same.

I think the voice, that wrong presence in the Darkness, thought that forgetting his team would make him malleable, but it's the other way around, really. Without them, my Guardian is impossible to shift aside. Even for me.

I've known a lot of con artists.

[[Mara Sov|A waking dream that appears by night, singing slyly like starlight]]. It leaves behind a crystallized data fragment to mark its passing.

   

Celestial bodies still spin. Most of them.

(There was a version of me that was grateful… no.)

In the noise, in the oppressive weight, I learn pieces as delicate as spiderwebs, as scattered as stars. I lay them out along each other in my thoughts. Here is purpose—not a singular thesis, but the idea of purpose, vicious and brilliant and driven as I ever was. Here is a shape—I see it as a sharpness, like a starless cutout against a distant galaxy, made clear in the negative space. The thoughts of the Hive, I might guess, but it is not quite the same. Purpose and sharpness are discrete from each other here. Darkness, and the sword—no, Darkness BUT the sword.

Risky, as all valuable things are.

Beneath all else, that being cradles rage enough to burn the stars themselves to cinders.