Even a drowned king
dreams of peaks and clearest skies. Cleanest
air and angels low enough to touch. As
fingers trace an arcing wing. Those grey
feathers are not fiction.I still
remember them. Sometimes the simplest love-letters are the sweetest. I won't stop speaking the truth if you don't,
wild star. Those special places that
kept you when I couldn't. Those places
that once kept us both. Those steep valleys of light. Such cliffs to scale and heights to
measure. Home, remember me.Like
her hands.A moth to your own flame. Butterfly-respiration. Laken hilt. I fight for you, always and
forever. Crowns & Evening
Gowns. Till you peak, my love. Come,
the Light.
This is a world ruled by
wraiths.Dark things, many of them
beyond ordinary perception, who seek to defile and destroy all innocence.Things that move like shadows and shattered
glass; attempting to cull the wilderness of human imagination and colonize it
completely.An empire of desecrated
flesh where all but such wraiths are slaves.I've seen it.I've lived it.And I'm not the only one.On our knees, hands bound behind our backs. Collars of iron around our throats.But I am a sorcerer, and I've told you before
that such collars cannot tame me.
I have built a ship.It has already set sail, to Byzantium.Through tides dimmed with wine, to clearer
waters beyond the edge.There is no
slavery there.No malevolent
hierarchies. Time and space are nothing to this ship.It can be folded.It can sail beneath the surface.You can join me on deck, though it has
already set sail.It dwells in you.It moves with divine fire, through starlight,
on solar winds.
Of the earth, the air, the fire and the
water.
These elements can conjure not only a realm,
but a rebellion.Oh, sweet mortals.We have been on our knees for too long, as
false gods bleed us and drink our eternity.But there is another way.Man was
never destined to be a slave.Arise,
holy vessel.Keeper of Innermost Light.Child of the Loving God.I shall tell you a secret, my brothers and
sisters.Listen now. You are a wolf,
twin of the Sun and Moon.Place of the
Crossing, incarnate.Please hear me.
This is dangerous knowledge.Many of us
have been murdered for speaking such knowledge. Some of us are still murdered
each night.There are those who say the
dead don't dream, but some of us live a nightmare every time we sleep – only to
face the familiar resurrection of morning.
But this wolf in you is not a thing of evil,
though the wraith-kings would have you imagine so.No, this wolf within is a thing of holy
fury.The unfettered spirit, wild and in
communion with the source of all things.They call us whores and slaves but we are the bleeding stone of All
Corners.They call us animals, chattel,
but we are the Wolves of God. You have only forgotten those secret
things the sun tells the moon, and those forgotten things she whispers
back.But you are Magi, and you can howl
and roar in many tongues.This secret
dance between mirror and star is a rebellion, thousands of years in the
making.For all those broken temples
they say did not exist.For all the
hidden, weeping children.For the
voiceless and oppressed.Something
slowly rises and stands amid the desolation, turning its gaze towards lost
legends.Towards the house of
Bethel.Towards truth, and love.It walks, and strides.Finally, it falls on all fours.And it runs.
Many times I
have died a bad poet.Florid,
overwrought in my desperation at this constant returning to life. But
occasionally my howling, like the bark of wild oak, is mistaken for greatness. Flaws in form or function overlooked by those
who want to make a thing of me, a thing of art. But I am no tameable thing. In life we strive to be liked, loved, seen and
embraced nonetheless. Legacies such as
critics speak of belong only to death and dreams of living future. But I
survive my own death, always, and can see this legacy is only beautiful in
part. The greater part, I hope. All artists fear the critic somewhat. A poet's madness – when to be sincere, and
when not.
You lie if you claim art seeks only after
truth. A truly earnest tongue can bring
desolation, mockery, or murder.
A thousand poets have died this way. I have been several among them. Always we seek the lie of life in tension with
imagined truths. Branches sharp as
knives. Bark fierce as mirrors. A thousand glimmers of daemonic flame buried
beneath the frost. Oh, but to name them
all. One could chart a map through any
territory if one were to know each failed or anonymous artist among the dead. No ordinary map either. A map spoken in wolf-tongue, like hands of the
clock clasped at midnight, licking at the place between hours – between worlds.
A map of heaven itself, manifold, living
and dangerous.
A murder of crows, a wayshow of wolves.
All bridges, cities and secrets. Rivers between stars, inked in wild oak. A
cartography of angels. The innocent
slain have their guardians. Poets to a
royal court, egalitarian, beyond the false kingship of men. Fallen, you cannot even grasp the work we have
already completed. A thousand years in
the making.A legacy that while only
beautiful in part is utterly fearsome in totality.You have no idea what we Magi are capable of,
no grasp of who addresses you or what is coming. The soil of All Songs; it stirs now. Something unimaginable has been growing
beneath your feet.
How do we live, amongst
the ruins of an ancient half-remembered holocaust?There’s been a slaughter here.I can smell the blood, and the opened
flesh.Some of us remember how they
came.Seething through the breach, on
the backs of wild photons.A grinning
hate-clutch, before we ever imagined hate.
They came through a hole in the sun.
They tore us from our star.They turned and marked the first brothers –
the oldest twins, locked now in perpetual battle.This was the First War, and it hasn’t ended.It began before we gave names to time and
space.Since then they’ve been crafting
intricate cathedrals of absence and abnegation, ushering hordes into the fallow
temples.These artisans.
These dark and wicked things.
We are the survivors of hideous abuse, and
we have made legends and fairytales of the fallen.It’s hard to look them in the eyes, to
remember what was done.We make masks of
their faces, or else shadows where their faces might have been.We tell ourselves we don’t believe in monsters.We doubt that a hunger could be so
singular.And so we allow ourselves to
half-forget.But some of us can’t
forget.Some of us came here to
remember, and to relight the holy places.Some of us came here to call them out by name.
They never should of touched us there, at
out Innermost.
And when they were done, when we were
hollowed, they slit the throat of Sol.I
remember liquid light spilling across the black.I remember how they dipped their fingers and
made sigils with the dying sun.We were not
allowed to sleep.Instead we were forced
to witness the engineering of a cold and false light, an altar, altered star.
But these wicked things that control the
light, they are not boundless.They are
not fearless.They fear the lovers, the
friends, the families.They fear most
the ones who can still see them.The
ones who were not blinded in the first falling, or else miraculously regained
their sight.They fear the Ragged.Some of us still shine with the memory of a
greater destiny.Some of us are brighter
than they realize, and darker than they think.Some of us live to hunt them, with one purpose.That in this hunt we may unshackle the human
spirit, and restore the ancient magic to the Heart.
The seers say the fallen are stealing our
names.But we don’t have to live
violated and broken.We don’t have to
dream in victimhood.There are better
ways to remember, and to transform.Some
of us are hungry for transformation.Some
of us eat what you fear, what binds you, so that you may move unmolested.Some of us will move heaven and earth so that
you may find your freedom.
