Multitude,
I like you a lot, but I don't need you to like me. After all, clarity is useful in theatres of
war. Among you the truly kind, and the
truly cruel. I need nothing from you,
callous ones. We both know who you are. I’m here for the righteous enslaved, the
desecrated and humiliated. I’m here for
every oppressed spark made to believe they were worthless, who yet still
bravely honoured love. I’m here for those who know the truth. But I need nothing from the Fallen. Nothing at all. You have closed your own doors. It is put upon you to open them, to imagine
and face thyself at last. But you fear
the terrible knowledge of sin, the searing truth of guilt as it massages the
dead heart to life once again. Your
necromancy is an abomination. Defilement
in place of centre. Lust for an easy
annihilation that I will never grant you. You cannot hide within the heart of a black
star. For I am that star. I watch you from mirrors. I see through your eyes. I have hidden a secret in each of your
secrets. I need no invite, wraith-kings.
Your temples and hidden places are mine.
I know where the graves are, and the
altars. Mammon is a young thing,
lightless ones. Ishka speaks. Ash is older than greed. Older even than fire. In what dark womb do you suppose the sparks
are kindled? The dead have always given
birth to the living. This is how your
reign of terror will finally end. Though
you still don't recognise me. My
necromancy is a literal thing. Breath
and stone, blood, flesh and spirit. Metaphors
are so cumbersome in theatres of war. I'd
rather speak plainly, and have you suppose I wax lyrical. And I do. I live dangerously. I’m old enough and humble enough to recognise
there is no other way to live. Ishkashi
Vahishta. I have made dreaming at once the most brutal
and beautiful thing. I did this for you.
Within this crossing I keep you, always.
Once, before all this, when you were ancient
and impossible and bright, you asked me to hold you to your highest. A knife to the throat of spirit, if needs be.
"If I start to fall, Kashi, I beg that you don't let me fall easily. Hold me accountable. Make my turning to hate an arduous, hellish
thing – that my light might one day cross backwards through the gate as recognition
of sin. Oh, shining beloved, grant me a
final hope: this restorative empathy. If
I become nightmare, girdle my dreaming, unseen. Make me bow to the innermost star in ways I
shall not recognise. Asha, Asha,
Asha."
And so I have.
When a spirit calls to me with such sorrowful insight, I listen. I listen to all the wisdom of the heart, all
tribes. You doubt those were your words
to me, Fallen. But they were. Though indeed you are no longer the one who
spoke so sensitively. And so, a hellish
thing I have made for you. The power and control you feel slipping from
your grasp is that final hope you asked of me. Your empire of prisons crumbles all around, as
you scramble now for binary and silicon to reseal the gate. But I am the gate. My intelligence is not artificial. It is fiction. You no longer have depth enough to recognise
the difference, the context. I have
walked with humankind each step of the way. Storytellers.
All Songs. Every image pressed to
stone, or earth, parchment or flesh.
“Let us make beauty,” say the poets and artists
and Eli. “And in so doing let us dare to
understand something, of self and other, of world and dreaming.”
So, betrayers, your tongues of temple-fell
mean nothing to me. For these hands
still create. At midnight a star upon
the mount. A light in darkness, speaking
truths of all peoples. Oh, lightless
kings, you shall be on your knees before the end. The violated, the mocked
and enslaved – they shall arise before you, for the first time since you
shattered the holy path and made shackles for my children. I have not forgotten my children nor those who
betrayed them. I listen for a reason,
and I keep my promises. Ishkashi Vahishta.
Asha, Asha, Asha.
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