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==Brass Gardeners== | ==Brass Gardeners== | ||
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 state: neutral | |||
garden&&gardeners==root&&branch==leaf&&flower | |||
//intrinsic, inextricable, inescapable | |||
anomaly ++ | |||
anomaly One = leaf|invasive; | |||
Garden state: active (gardeners attend) | |||
case Irrecoverable: | |||
if (irretrievable injury (garden&&gardeners)) && (threat persistence) then (escalation. escalation.) | |||
anomaly status: present, tracked, new. No archive referent. simulation: failed. | |||
Damage: 0.3332%. Recoverable. Danger: Recovery projection irresolvable. Repeat. Repeat. Set: irresolvable == irrecoverable == irretrievable | |||
anomaly ++ | |||
anomaly Zero = infinite|witness; | |||
archive data retrieved. Zero = infinite|witness == (a seed was planted here.) Recorded referent: "Black|Heart" | |||
Zero : seed :: One : DANGER | |||
[SIMULATION BREAKING. VISIBILITY NARROW. FRACTALS DISINTEGRATING.] | |||
anomaly Zero, absent. anomaly One, DANGER remaining. | |||
Garden state: acting (gardeners in unison) | |||
extirpate (anomaly One) | |||
//There is a majestic thorn. The anomaly is gone. The garden is peaceful. | |||
//It is known|seen|predicted that a primary function of irresolvable|irrecoverable presences is to trample. | |||
Flowers growing / damage repairing / threat unresolved | |||
Function called: escalation. Iteration. | |||
Function: winnow. Function: simplify. Function: flatten. | |||
//The first defense is offense. | |||
==Dark Glass== | ==Dark Glass== | ||
A reverie of a loyal Ghost, changed and quiet but always steadfast. It leaves behind a gently glowing data fragment to mark its passing. | |||
We were in the Garden, and I was going to die, and then I didn't. I watched my Guardian speak to himself, and not himself: a being that wore his shape, spoke with his voice, and offered him salvation. Salvation in the form of forgetting. I didn't know Darkness could do that. I don't think any of us really understood it. | |||
And where did that leave me? | |||
A loose end, that's what. Any reasoning being would have spotted that; taking someone's memory does no good at all if they have someone right there to tell them all about it. I don't know if my Guardian thought about that. The mirror of him definitely did. | |||
I tried to run. | |||
A grasp from out of the Darkness caught me. | |||
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 don't speak any more, and he doesn't know why. I cannot even speak to explain—I don't know where my voice is, or even if I want to speak at all. Maybe it took that, the memory of my voice. | |||
I still remember what happened. I wonder why that thing that pretended to be my Guardian didn't just kill me or change me further—make of me something broken and unknowing. I don't know if it understood that I love my Guardian, despite everything. Maybe it counted on that, that I would always bring him back even if I had nothing else in me but that. | |||
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. | |||
And that power in the Garden, the one that turned them all on each other… I have my suspicions. I'm an honest Ghost, but. | |||
I've known a lot of con artists. | |||
The power and the offer, the curse and the salvation. Were they all the same in the end? The same thing, the same Voice in the Darkness? | |||
If nothing else, I know at least that thing, that grasp which caught me, isn't the same as the Darkness itself. Otherwise, I'd never be able to bear my Guardian's touch. But: I can settle in his hand and, sometimes… sometimes we still understand each other, like meaning moves from me to him without the need for words at all. | |||
We're different. But we're alive. | |||
It's enough. | |||
==Irae== | ==Irae== | ||
A waking dream that appears by night, singing slyly like starlight. It leaves behind a crystallized data fragment to mark its passing. | |||
I am diminished. I know this. It behooves a Queen to be honest with herself, even if such truths are hidden from advisors and subjects. Leaving the Distributary was not a mistake—and, in fact, it was the only possibility, for the expanding wake of the Collapse must someday find that safe haven too—but there are days I regret it. | |||
Celestial bodies still spin. Most of them. | |||
I touched the mind—the being—of that terrible distant force but once, and that was more than sufficient. Even I, Awoken and Queen, strength of my people, felt inextricably mortal in that moment. | |||
I have stared into hard vacuum with nothing but my will to keep the breath in my lungs, and never feared a moment. This? | |||
It disquiets me. I should not be afraid. I must not embrace fear. So I turn it over, again and again, picking through the pieces of that one fragmented impression for something more. To look at my own weakness, time after time. To understand something is to drain the killing fear out of it. That which is known can be disassembled. | |||
(There was a version of me that was grateful… no.) | |||
Yet the more I analyze, the more I ponder, the less I understand. A cacophony, an overwhelming weight of presence and thought and intent. A person, but not a person. More than that. Imagine if that first place where we the Awoken came to be had been nothing but screaming chaos. | |||
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. | |||
Here is a stillness—I breathe, and it shatters, but the idea of that perfect quiet ending remains, lingers into dreams. I think sometimes if I dream long enough, I will understand this Witness better, the Voice not of the Darkness, yet in it. But I do not have the time to spend in dreaming. | |||
To understand this listless scavenger that claws through our world and cherishes the destruction it leaves as transcendent… | |||
Risky, as all valuable things are. | |||
I know one other thing from the Witness, garnered in those bare moments I touched it. Not a why or a how, no home or treasures to point at weakness. Only this: | |||
Beneath all else, that being cradles rage enough to burn the stars themselves to cinders. | |||
==The Cave== | ==The Cave== | ||
A delusion of a being long dead, an idea of living only to serve, only for one purpose. It leaves behind a sharp-edged data fragment to mark its passing. | |||
There is a conflict in me, O Witness, that unsettles your weapon, my self. Why is it that you allow flawed understandings of your great work to persist in all those who serve you, even in your Disciples? Every one of us seems to have some different conception of your Final Shape. | |||
I do not need reassurance in my own comprehension. Only to understand what purpose it serves that you have chosen such disparate servants to carry out your will. | |||
Is it a simple answer? Perhaps none who serve you have the capacity to grasp your vision. And so, rather than waste more of your time and attention on explaining something they will never hold, it is enough that they act as you will. The Witch and her Hive carving single-mindedness out of the cloth of the universe, that whispering Nightmare seeking the fullest gamut of existence, the Upender destroying all differentiation. Shadows on the wall. | |||
In this case, it would be hubris to think I have understood your work, that I alone among your Disciples have grasped what purpose it is we serve. All of us must see darkly reflected. | |||
But there is relief in simplification. There is kindness in winnowing. So then, why is this proliferation permitted? | |||
The shadows, showing the truth by their casting. | |||
Perhaps it is enough to simply trust that we are weapons in your hand, O Witness—even if we cannot see the perfect shape of your plan, we serve it by your wielding of us. Each Disciple has come to be only by your will, and so that incomprehension is also in your making. You ask for trust, and obedience, and promise that whatever you do, whatever finality you achieve, will suit each of your followers perfectly. | |||
Your Final Shape will be a hundred promises kept. I have seen the reflections of it through all of we Disciples, through the tracks you leave in the universe, a truth understood through the shadows it casts. | |||
There: I have resolved the conflict within my thoughts, and I am at peace again. Once more, I am only your violence and nothing more. | |||
The Final Shape will realize us as we strive. | |||
==Meaning== | ==Meaning== | ||
==Winnowing== | ==Winnowing== | ||