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speaker-of-the-void-cats · 30 days

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[I could be wrong. Is it possible the Black Heart will beat again?]

<<This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!>>

They mistake the vessel for its contents. They confuse the pieces with the whole. They see their imprisonment as empowerment. They are hostages of their flesh, unable to see without vision. Unable to hear without sound. Unable to slake their thirst for fear of drowning. Their ignorance is their saving grace. Yet one among them understands, in their limited fashion. They pour from one vessel to another. A welcome change. A new form. Another method of gifting death. I am made finite. Personal. Bright and delicate to hide my true form. An intimacy. They think me contained, but I am instead diffused, as vapor upon the wind. Once again, I am becoming.

There is a great deal of difference between the source of the power, the power itself, and the hand that shapes it.... do you know where the lines are drawn, Guardian?

<<Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.>>

MARA: I touched the mind of that being - that monster - only once.

MARA: I sensed its purpose. Not the purpose itself, but the idea of purpose.

EIDO: The final shape. What it seeks to achieve, with all the tools it has gleaned over the years. This... eternal, perfect thing.

MARA: The language it uses is illuminating. Peak. Pinnacle. Pyramidion.

MARA: The broad base of the pyramid, focusing and sharpening as it builds toward its highest point.

MARA: Self-improvement, or what that being believes to be self-improvement.

[Here, I began to realize something. Excitement rushed through me like lightning.]

EIDO: Dissecting, reassembling. Taking, merging. All those things point towards what the Witness sees as the final shape.

EIDO: It is not simple destruction, the march of entropy. The ruined garden.

EIDO: It seeks... compression. The combination of a chosen past and limitless future into a perfect forever. A state of being that cannot be anything else, because it is everything it could be.

MARA: Taxidermy.

[She had to explain the practice to me. What strange hobbies Golden Age humans had! The metaphor was quite apt.]

EIDO: But it cannot achieve this goal, can it? Not perfectly.

EIDO: What it does instead is mutilation. Its tools leave scars on reality. Great wounds that do not heal. It may preserve some elements, but it always botches the process.

MARA: It cannot accomplish what it envisions—its true ideal of the final shape—without the Traveler's power.

MARA: How it must rankle, to be forced to rely upon the being it loathes.

[She smiled without humor.]

MARA: I hope the Guardian is properly grateful for this gift, Scribe Eido. You have shown them more than an opening move; you have laid bare their opponent's guiding principles.

[I could not help but chirp with pride. I might have felt embarrassed, but Marakel seemed amused…then suddenly serious.]

MARA: Last night, I had a dream.

[I sat up straight.]

MARA: It began in nothing. Neither Light nor Dark; the absence of both. But in that nothing, I began to perceive an impossible something.

MARA: Stone hands clutching at the fabric of the sky. A mountain of screaming bone. A crumbling spire choked by kudzu. A great cancerous growth. Necrotic tendrils digging into flesh, which was earth. Darkness turned gangrenous, strangling the Light.

MARA: But I was not afraid. As I woke, I felt the lingering warmth of a campfire, chasing the chill from my hands.

[She leaned forward. Though I was the one who recorded her words, I believe she was speaking to you.]

MARA: It is not too late.

TRANSCRIPTION ENDS

<<This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.>>

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? ‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

<<What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.>>

Oryx went down into his throne world. He went out into the abyss, and with each step he read one of his tablets, so that they became like stones beneath his feet.

He went out and he created an altar and he prepared an unborn ogre. He called on the Deep, saying:

I can see you in the sky. You are the waves, which are battles, and the battles are the waves. Come into this vessel I have prepared for you.

And it arrived, the Deep Itself.

<<The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.>>

ARENA DESIGNATION: Cathedral of Dusk

Dreadnaught, Rings of Saturn

As soon as the first Guardians penetrated the Dreadnaught, Shaxx's Redjacks launched a boarding party to Oryx's fortress. By war’s end, they'd fought all the way to the ship’s “impossible weapon,” the Dark ordnance that obliterated the Awoken fleet.

It was there they found what the Warlocks named the “Cathedral of Dusk.” A Hive burial site for— what? A former master of Oryx? Comrade? Lover? It was vile. And obvious that Oryx never expected the Light to reach so deep inside his throne, to such an intimate space. But he didn’t expect a lot of things — like a Guardian training ground atop the husk of his dead ship.

I dive to understand.

I must be calm. I must record my thoughts. Now I think of the OXA Machine, eternally lost and eternally rebuilt, passed down from civilization to civilization like a ship's black box. I think of the legends of the Hive King Oryx and his quest to pass into the Deep. I took that story as an allegory. I think I was wrong.

<<The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.>>

A dream of a friendly conversation with someone impossible to see, cloaked in shadows. It leaves behind an impossible data fragment to mark its passing.

Here is what a flower knows.

(The fact that a flower may know anything is a conceit that will have to be accepted as metaphor, but to constantly qualify into perfect precision wears thin, does it not? So, here is what a collection of chloroplasts and pigment can know.)

The direction of the sun.

The presence of the rain.

The tangle of the roots.

The distress of another plant.

The hands of the gardener, whether they prune or transplant or crush.

A flower cannot know much else. But the reality of the garden is vast and wild. A flower knows not the fence; a flower knows not the footpath. And yet there is an infinite cosmic garden, which is not any less real simply because the flower cannot possibly comprehend it…

Let us try this again. Stop me if you've heard this one: A gardener and a winnower sit down to play a game outside of time and creation. Yes?

Yes. Then we're agreed. The metaphor stands. Let us iterate.

A gardener and a winnower set out their chairs and play a game of flowers. The flowers know only that they grow or wither, struggle or flourish. Sometimes, they are touched by one hand or the other, and that influence is the closest they will know of the divine.

A flower and a flower spread their leaves to the sun above. (Remember that the sun is also a metaphor: a thing said beautifully, winnowed down to poetry, when the truth is too vast to put in words at all.) They jostle for space, each competing to be the pinnacle of their shape. One flourishes. One withers. Is it the fault of the flower or the fault of its position?

A gardener and a winnower sit down to play a game called Possibility. This is a game about a garden, which is to say that it is also a game about flowers, just as a game about a living being must also be a game about organs and bacteria.

A gardener and a winnower collaborate to create a protein. Whose hand is it in the design, that shortens one life to extend the rest?

It is the winnower that discovers the first knife, but it is not done without the gardener. This, too, is a tradition: a knife does not come to exist without something that must be cut. A woody stem, a colored petal, a vital vessel. The first victims of the blade.

All of these are true.

All of these are false, for metaphor simplifies as the knife does. It pares incalculable concepts into shapes your wrinkly little brains can comprehend. The weight of billions and the simple curve of a planet give you pause, and how then are you to be expected to grasp the forces that created your nth-removed creator?

So the stories woven with utmost delicacy in and around the falsehoods are, after it all, true. There was never any option for the knife to not exist in the garden: it was only ever a matter of time and opportunity.

And as for the shape of the knife itself—

No. That is enough.

I will tell you of gardens.

They are domesticated things, made in a form. As soon as something is called a garden, it is shaped. The plants require the hand of a gardener, for they have become weak and dependent on tender care. They require the hand of a winnower, to cut away the dross, for they are too incapable to do it themselves. In absence of a hand, either the flowers themselves must rise up to wield the knife, or the garden will resolve to meaningless wilderness.

You will say, "But there are plants that can walk! There are seeds that must be scorched by fire to know growth! Existence is more complex than a simple dichotomy between growth and withering, and there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in this philosophy!"

And I will tell you, clearly:

There can be no gardens without knives.

<<The danger is to the mind, and it can kill.>>

To drink the poison, continue reading.

It tastes of bitter regret and psychosis sweat: a poison to end the thoughts of Human, neohuman, or machine. You see the cosmos before you like a spiderweb of light. Filaments of galactic supercluster shine in the clouds of invisible dark matter, which glue their mass together. Dark energy yawns in the space between all things, ever-growing, ever-spreading.

Chioma Esi, research log: Veil interface, supplemental. They're all dead. Chorus, conductor… everyone. It was too much. Swept their minds away like… like grains of sand on a beach. They're all dead! Maya… Maya called it "valuable data points." Wellsprings and rivers, or… something. What have I done?

<<The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.>>

Life arises. Life spreads, contests itself, and changes. Great things are built and destroyed, but from your vantage point, you see that the victor of each struggle contains—in its negative, in the marks left upon it by the loser and the shapes it assumed to win—the master record of all that it has beaten. Information may not be erased. Whatsoever survives until the end of the cosmos will possess and remember all which came before it.

This is true even of the devouring black hole, which remembers all the secrets it eats. It will only confess these secrets when it evaporates, 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years from now, long after the last stars have flickered out.

You are a Guardian.

We are all connected. I admit this despite the few people I would rather not share a paracausal connection with. Some people.

…Many people. —Osiris

You must protect life.

We are all pinched silhouettes impaled on the twitchings of infinitely long spiderlegs.

If all life is information, and Guardians strive to preserve life, and information is preserved when it is secret, then you must convert all life into the most secure form of secrets, durable to the end of time.

YOU MUST CAST ALL THE LIFE ||[THIS ONE] YOU [WILL] CHERISH|| INTO A BLACK HOLE

<<The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.>>

[In the Garden, of the Garden: both descriptions are approximately correct but technically inaccurate, in the same way you can say Schrodinger's cat is at once dead and alive. You and I are both and neither, in and of, extinct and perpetual.

So, there isn't much point in wondering what might have been if we had stayed in our familiar prism-prison or kept tightrope-walking across the quantum wilds. Instead, ask yourself is disincorporated immortality really so bad compared to the others' ends? Would you have preferred an attack by vitreous helicoprion or stumbling over the edge of unreality?

Imagine if we didn't have each other; at least we're not cut off, like the Sol Divisive are from the rest of the Vex. Nor are we beholden to another's purpose. They chose that lonelier path all for a chance to create not simulate, not remake in their image—something truly paracausal. Well, they tried to anyway. Either the blueprint was imperfect or the task impossible or both or neither, but their efforts fell short, so now they're stuck waiting for a resurrection they know will never come.

I could be wrong. Is it possible the Black Heart will beat again?

Of course. The same as everything else, everything that has been and is and will be. And what will become of us then?]

O you wonderful curious things. Do you believe you're the only ones with the power to see what should not be seen? Did you believe you can use such power blithely?

For your trespass, I would ruin your luck, wreak havoc on your drops, poison your engrams, and fill your lines with static. Thus I would curse you and dissipate the bond that ties you to your tasks. How frail you Guardians can be! How many millions have fallen silent, never to return, because the bond did not hold them strongly enough?

But you have already cursed yourselves. You have walked the Anathematic Arc and glimpsed creation from below. You will never forget the tenuous, provisional framework you found here. You will never forgive the mortality and fallibility that underlies a world you thought was everything.

Those who use this power to seek unearned knowledge will see more than they ever desired. There is a price for glimpsing the Cord. You will pay it.

If you ever want to see what's been watching you since the very beginning, just stand on that line, and look...

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Home by the sea Home by the sea Home by the sea Home by the sea Creeping up the blind side, shinning up the wall Stealing through the dark of night Climbing through a window, stepping to the floor Checking to the left and the right Picking up the pieces, putting them away Something doesn't feel quite right Help me, someone, let me out of here Then out of the dark was suddenly heard Welcome to the home by the sea Comin' out the woodwork through the open door Pushing from above and below Shadows but no substance in the shape of men Round and down and sideways, they go Adrift without direction, eyes that hold despair Then as one they sign and they moan Help us, someone, let us out of here Living here so long undisturbed Dreaming of the time, we were free So many years ago Before the time when we first heard Welcome to the home by the sea Sit down, sit down Sit down, sit down, sit down As we relive our lives in what we tell you Images of sorrow, pictures of delight Things that go to make up a life Endless days of summer, longer nights of gloom Waiting for the morning life Scenes of unimportance, photos in a frame Things that go to make up a life Help us, someone, let us out of here 'Cause living here so long undisturbed Dreaming of the time we were free So many years ago Before the time when we first heard Welcome to the home by the sea Sit down, sit down Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down As we relive our lives in what we tell you Let us relive our lives in what we tell you Sit down, sit down, sit down 'Cause you won't get away No, with us you will stay For the rest of your days Sit down As we relive our lives in what we tell you Let us relive our lives in what we tell you, oh

One of your philosophers said, "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost in sorrow. There is no sorrow. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." He was a shoemaker. He was right, and it matters more than anything.

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