Lore:Inspiral: Difference between revisions

A phantasm of the Hive, forbidden and sacred, trespassing into hidden and unwelcoming places. It leaves behind a calcified fragment to mark its passing.

Here is what is taught to the Hive, from the basest of Thralls newly made: that what can be destroyed, must be destroyed. What cannot be destroyed will surpass infinity. Therefore, is it not best to destroy? Only by testing can the truth be found. Only in destruction can the invincible surpass the mortal. Commit the violence, and know you are part of that greatest ambition, to create some ultimacy, which perfects the universe. That which is built on your sacrifice, with your bones as the foundation and your blood as the mortar, is yet part of you. In this way is transcendence achieved.

I tell you this in a duelist's regard: I made that heresy. Is it not just? It was my hand that fashioned the Hive from the marrow of their predecessors, and it was my voice that whispered this in time. That as much as the Hive were uplifted by the worms, so too were those worms uplifted by the Hive.

Even between the lines of the Books of Sorrow themselves is this written.

A trance-imagining of Darkness sweet like honey, a life refracted through another's eyes like splintered light. It leaves behind an imperfectly translated data fragment to mark its passing.

Funny, isn't it? How can you miss someone when you know they're always in the Dark? I close my eyes, and in the warm nest-hide of sleep, I know you are real and happy and out there on some other part of the world, far from the river, far from the [untranslatable] where our ancestors (dream/exist) together. But it isn't the same as having you near, knowing your truth is under the same stars. Being able to simply turn my (head/face/bloom?) and ask for your opinion.

A nightmare of Luna, of that which waits below, of disaster and wreckage and inexplicable warm camaraderie tangled together. It leaves behind a journal page with familiar handwriting to mark its passage.

I have not wanted to look back at that time, but lately it has become prudent to examine what is and is not known of the Darkness. I know Darkness. I have been trying to distinguish the Darkness from the framework the Hive use to shape it for long and long, but they are deeply intertwined. The Voice in the Darkness answers some things, but not all.

The Lunar Pyramid was here all along, as we now know. Since the Collapse, its Darkness has seeped into Luna, into all that surround it. Could one write a treatise on the subspecies of Hive, on the differences written in the various plates of chitin? Have the Hive been here long enough, overrunning our Luna, that a recognizable change in them has evolved?

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.

anomaly Zero = infinite|witness;

archive data retrieved. Zero = infinite|witness == (a seed was planted here.) Recorded referent: "Black|Heart"

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.

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.

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