The Raven's Call

Perhaps I'm fooling myself, Kara.  These words.  These countless visions I create.  Maybe they mean nothing in the end.  But I don’t really believe that.  I still need to believe I serve a greater purpose.  I like to think I've earned your respect.  Even if only through craft.  A professional courtesy from one artist to another.  And yet it’s more than that.  Sometimes I feel like such a fool for daring to imagine that you half recognise me, like something or someone from a dream. An old friend.  A lost love.  Perhaps imagination is the only place where magic can be truly known or truly felt.  That's why these pages are so sacred to me. Where else can I hide my wonders?  The echoes, allusions and stunning synchronicities?  Oh, Kara.  Forgive me if I occasionally project my own struggles onto you.  Forgive me if I sometimes confuse my own demons for yours.  I know we're not exactly the same.  That terrifying gulf between the sky and the abyss.  Feeling like I was denied a middle path.  But my God, if it isn't like looking into a mirror sometimes. Perhaps it’s the loneliness talking, or the fact that I always found my imperatrix rather beautiful.  Inside and out.  I promised you a rising sky, didn’t I, old friend?  I like to think I delivered on that promise.  But did you know that you once promised the very same thing to me?  You make good on that promise every time you dance with me, in dreams.  Every time you pull me back towards life with your kindness.  I sincerely thank you for that.  I wish I had the middle path.  Some days it almost feels like I do.  Not delirious or wild, just steady.  And then the inevitable descent begins.  I know my struggles are different to yours, but I think there is enough similarity to find a common ground.  To me that ground is a battlefield.  A ruinous and sometimes beautiful wasteland strewn with dead warriors.  Those like ourselves forced to live with extremes of one degree or another, unable to walk the middle path.  I just want anyone who has ever felt lost on this battlefield to know they are not alone.  I want you to know that too, Kara.  With my inner vision I've seen shadows and shapes flitting among the fallen.  Like wraiths, or crows.  Their cawing becomes a dark siren song as they announce the dead and the dusk.  The old legends say these half-dreamt forms appear among the fallen not simply for annunciation, but as guidance.  They come to guide disembodied souls into the afterlife.  Into the drowned, hidden realm.  Some say this realm is nothing more than a dream.  For me it's so much more than a dream.  It's everything I am, everything I was, everything I'll ever be.  It's a frightening thing to recognise that in some of my most powerful dreams I'm drowning.  Under the water, closest to home.  The wished-for embrace of everything I know I've lost but can never prove to anyone.  Few would even care to hear the call.  So I mask the truth of this endless immortality.  I clothe this extremely long life in oblique free-verse. Studied ambiguity and purple prose.  Like I'm dancing wildly amidst a flurry of worried gazes, writing all these words but not really saying anything at all.  But that isn't the truth, Kara.  It’s not even close.  I am never more alive and hopeful than when I'm here among these pages, sharing these things with you.  My friend, I think I finally know why I dream so often of black stars and midnight suns.  It's because I'm one of the dead.  Yet I’ve been gifted a kind of charmed half-life.  I'm more than just a knight errant.  I’m a prince of wraiths.  Life and death, past, present and future - they are all so intimately intertwined. Especially here, in the depths of me.  These dreaming threads of identity, interconnection and fate.  The fact that someone even cares to notice; how can I not find it thrilling?  Furthermore, how could I not be utterly intoxicated by the piqued interest of someone I still so fondly remember, even if she no longer remembers me?  Forgive me my indulgences, sweet one.  They come from a loving place.  Because the truth is I'm more than just an image-maker or a failed poet.  More than just a lonely dreamer.  I'm an angel, Kara.  I'm one of the wandering dead.  I bring messages to the cherished living.  Words and visions.  Fables and stories.  Tales to uplift the heart and quicken the spirit.  The reason I do this is because the living need stories even more than the dead.  You have such life in you, Kara.  I want you to know that you are forever cherished, and I hope this kiss finds you well.

Knight Errant

It’s not a conceit, Kara.  This black star of mine.  This ravenous vortex at the heart of me.  Sometimes I liken it to Foucault’s Pendulum.  A wry, vicious tempest that gives as much as it takes.  And it does give, my darling.  Often freely and without limit.  We have this in common, I think.  Our wide and difficult horizons.  But I hope you are not the outlier that I am.  I hope your life is the better for it.  I would hate to think my sweet Val’kiir was as lost in the mists of the demimonde as I am.  A girl still struggling with the burden of coronation, just as I struggled.  The incalculable weight of a paper crown.  Legends are purely ethereal, they say.  Stories have no mass.  But that isn’t true.  Legends have a different kind of gravity.  They warp the fabric of reality around them.  The deeper the myth, the stranger the magic found at its shifting edges.  You know this to be true, Kara.  Don’t you?  The changing of the guard.  The birthing of a star.  A knight errant, kind and true.  After all, a kingdom can fall to corruption but a true chevalier holds themselves to a higher code.  The wisdom of the old world.  The shining realm.  Before dark magic altered our chronologies and rewrote the very threads of fate.  The weaving sisters were banished, some say.  Or murdered.  Or cast into the raging furnace of the midnight sun, lost forever.  None of these things are true.  Legends don't die.  They only transform.  Sometimes they simply hide, tending their tasks in other ways.  Do you suppose a weaver ever truly forgets the way of hidden things?  The beauty, craft and dance of creation?  I doubt it.  Mortals sometimes forget, but not storytellers.  Mankind, for example, imagines the fay are simply stories.  But life itself is built from stories.  The confabulation of threads, notions and forces.  A continuum of narrative interplay.  The fay have legends all their own, Kara.  One in particular a shining jewel among all others.  A legend of silence that sang its own song.  Dreamt its own heart.  A holy star both brother and sister, both darkness and light, human and otherwise.  They say this song is the grief and hope of all oceans.  The death of lowlands and lakes.  Birth of the haunted deep.  Those fabled, half-remembered days when the sea fell from the sky.  A thing of elven blood would ask men questions.  It would ask, who among mortals recalls the veracity of the golden age?  Who really remembers those days before brutalism and theft?  Those moments before the construction of time, limitation and loss.  Well, I think the weaving sisters half-remember.  Even if only through how they would ideally like the world to be.  Like Blake I’m still half-conscious of those ideals, certain that we lived them once.  I am haunted by these newer, imposter cities.  These dark engines and empires.  Chronologies of Los.  Pretending the sun, as the sun pretends the star.  And the Evenstar is only a motif, a placeholder for home.  The home within.  Oh, Kara.  We are so much more than Mar’kanna’s madness, or Kiskuh’s wrathful hand.  We are the water and the well, the tree and the star.  Immanent, transcendent.  And we are not special in this regard.  All children of the living light were made in such fashion.  Immortal or otherwise.  But I’ve heard you ask in your sleep, “Eth’iir, my friend, where are we now?”  I shall tell you where we are.  While the Earth roils and writhes a thousand failed poets hold back each lost soul from the edge, protecting comprehension and sanity.  Safeguarding the last glimmers of spiritual hygiene that shone so gloriously before the cataclysms.  Kasi is only one among such poets.  Kara is only one among such sisters.  Many of these brave warriors are anonymous and unremembered.  But M'ithriin can move mountains in his sleep, dreaming of Vivian.  As can T'alis, the night-bard.  It’s a druidry of stolen years and brighter climes barely hinted at in the soft-edged neopaganism of modern man.  Oh, my vivacious rose-maiden.  I wish I could always show you the best of yourself.  You've slain dragons in your dreams, you know.  You’ve ridden with them too.  I know because I watched you.  You once asked me to be there with you, just out of sight.  And I was.  I am.  I watch you plunge those fists into bitter earth.  Into poisoned soil, in hopes that our blood and mythopoeia might gift a little vision to these children of the fall.  This lineage of ruptured clay.  It isn’t just calm you seek, my love.  Or peace.  It’s also care for all the others.  I see it in your eyes, my regent.  And it’s part of why I love you so.  On a good day I try to be the difference you would like to find in the world.  A modern gospel of the living waters.  Passionate, courageous and kind.  This quiet giving of one's self, it's not what a pagan god or sylvan shade does.  It's not even necessarily what an angel of Christendom does.  But it's what a brother does.  A father.  A son.  It's what a man is always prepared to do.  To bleed a little for his kith and kin.  We learnt that quiet skill from our women.  Each princess, indomitable.  This is humanity at its most selfless.  Its most nurturing.  Shall I tell them, Val’kiir?  Shall I tell them the truth of things?  Hear me, Fallen.  Heavy is the head that wears the crown.  There is a hidden war all around you, and a shimmering bridge of multi-coloured light.  You want to know about sacrifice?  Real sacrifice?  Men, women and children give their lives every day in this hidden war – for the people they love.  Such valour has no gender, age or social standing.  It has no racial or sexual identity.  It has no politics.  It is simply the depth of love in action, faced with awful and sometimes impossible choices.  I've seen that kind of bravery first-hand.  Many of us have, and we are always moved.  Often to tears.  In this apothecary of unearthly delights such beauty is an invaluable treasure.  These are the old ways.  They will be our ways again.  Tell me, Fallen.  Are you a bard?  Do you vouchsafe your secrets to slaves?  Well, I was once a slave.  A peasant and prisoner.  In many ways I still am.  But I am also a storyteller.  A king, prince and knight.  A father, brother and son.  And I tell you this; a man or woman’s worth is not defined by the tip of their sword but by the breadth of their insight.  The edge of their wit, the depth of their love and the quality of their courage.  If in the end I have to bleed for what I believe then it is no more than my mother bled, or my sister bleeds.

The Winged Grammar

 

Sometimes, in their dreams, the fallen seek counsel with M'ithriin.  The winged one.  Serpent and staff.  The living waters of a twinning river.  The elect come shuffling to the twilit place near the shore, seeking the angel.  Chanting a thousand garbled versions of his many names. Sometimes penitent, sometimes laughably brazen.  I'm never sure what they're seeking exactly. A truth beyond fiction, I suppose.  Surely not something as parochial as 'reality'?  Sometimes I think we're all slaves to the grammar of our time.  Our own particular storytelling instincts. Those tales that grip us despite our learned ways and better judgments.  It's strange how the fallen come in droves to the dreaming, seeking the thrice-blessed.  Or seeking powerful kings with magical swords and wizards who never were.  Hoping to find something beyond the brutal self-made histories of realpolitik and theft.  Bright-eyed and earnest, like children with a treasure map.  These men of renown.  Warlords, occultists and titans of industry.  Rapists and murderers all.  Is there anything uglier than such monsters deluding themselves worthy of genuine revelation?  I would never deign to compare myself to these shambling trespassers. Those who forged my iron collar in those early days of the fall.  What slave would be bold enough to suggest parity or even superiority to his masters?  Perish the thought.  Even in dreaming I just sit on the sands of the shore, or wait beneath the waves, and smile.  Oh, Fallen.  I pity you.  And I laugh at the quest you think you're on.  Your prince is a monster.  A cruel, obsequious wraith.  Dutifully clawing its way up from the void through an infernal hierarchy.  Poorly realised and crudely imagined.  Only a lesser king, once little more than the half-dreamt shadow of a black star. How do I know this?  Who am I to speak on such matters?  I’m nobody.  Just a humble scribe of the innermost.  I speak for forces and persons larger than myself.  You see, a true sun shines darkly in an inverted realm.  A world of echoes, traces and ghosts.  All the while you fallen ones wish to supplicate at the stygian mouth of desecration, pretending the true light.  What ghastly dreaming you've forged in your hideous guild of sorrows.  Do you suppose the Syrian, the magician himself, is a Hellenist?  A Greek?  A conjurer at the mountain of chymic fire?  Perhaps.  It’s said he likes to travel.  But as I told my brother; it isn't as simple as owning the essence of a numinous thing, or turning a key in the navel of the land.  I will not be reduced to epithets, or rudimentary corollaries.  Anonymous or otherwise.  Writing, art and magic has always been a form of hybridity. The past is but a ghost and every king a composite.  There is no moment but this moment.  There are no eyes but modern eyes.  Antiquity is a dream, and I am a winged messenger of dreams.  Callous Ones, you claim to know the true depths of the mysteries, yet where is your compassion?  Your empathy?  Denatured and disarticulated, you sacrifice your brothers and sisters for coin.  For supposed occult secrets.  Paltry mechanical knowledge.  Mere trivia.  What good is apotheosis when all your brothers and sisters are dead?  Ah, but these castes you cling to, these infernal hierarchies.  You don't really believe the beggar is your brother or the nurse your sister.  Not truly.  If you did you would recognise the mingled dreaming of antiquity.  You would understand this very human urge.  To exalt our favourite stories and re-inscribe the tales of others in the intimacies of our own particular speech.  We cannot help but see through the lens of our cultural milieu whilst claiming exclusive rights on the supposed truth.  I've seen this retroactive continuity in action.  Men claiming the angels of others to be demons in the ultimate gnosis.  Claiming another's heroes to be mere harbingers of newer legends.  Or, at best, assuming another's god of love to be only primitive glimpses of their own.  This is the modern, endless war.  Throughout history all eyes are modern eyes.  The windows of complex living souls who live and die by the cultural markers they cling to.  Antiquity has always been a shapeshifter, an idea inflected by the shades and nuances of the moment.  Prisca theologia; perhaps it exists.  But if it does it might not be exactly what you expect or hope to find.  Even now we attempt to thread our way like cartographers through a thousand shrieking truth-tellers all claiming to be definitive.  Perhaps we imagine the terrain into being, negotiating both text and context.  The unspoken, the quietly implied.  Dialogues and dramaturgy for the immortal, questing soul.  But those ancient parchments and tomes – many of them are no older than the eyes and fears of modern man.  After all, such men are so often unable to distinguish between the seer and the scene.  The healer and the healed.  Maybe sometimes that’s a good thing, if it tempers our arrogance and softens our hearts.

The Mirrored Sea

I once cut my palms on the edges of a raging sea, then let myself bleed for a thousand years to assure its depths.  That sounds like fantasy to most, doesn't it? Mere fiction.  Blood, clear as glass.  Seawater red as the beating heart.  But stories are where some of the oldest things dwell. Things more ancient than even the first mariner.  Do you really think the one whom the healers called M'ithriin is bound to anything at all?  To Albion, or some other enchanted isle?  The antlered prince pretends the sky, does he?  The winged elder.  First angel.  You should know that I'm a tempest old as creation itself, but there are things even older than creation.  Beautiful, wondrous things beyond any distort.  Forms from the first dreaming, that live now only in imagination.  That lost, fabled time when the temples still shimmered and sang.  There were lowlands once, and lakes.  Yet since the fall there have been so many terrifying gods of the sea.  Things emerge from the deep – wounded and wild.  Believe me, I should know.  Perhaps that's what grief is.  The gutting of a shining star to flood the earth and drown the heart.  But even in such a storm there are pockets of refuge, and rest.  A daughter’s beatific vision.  A father’s fervent hope.  Mortals think the land is locked.  That it's the sea that moves.  But the land is simply the sea, frozen in doubt.  Awaiting augury or avarice.  Another fall.  A reason to be swept away. Even the mountains are only temporary arks.  The wrecked cathedrals of your forebears.  Still, with enough true magic the sea can be sated.  Calmed.  Made to reason.  The dreamwalkers of the first light understood this.  The wisdom councils that once tended the very soul of Earth and Man.  Even angels of the sea, who pretend or endure the sky, can be turned toward love.  True love.  Once, every thousand years or so, the waters themselves might contemplate the solstice of a star.  In doing so they might be moved to reorient the very definition of life itself.

The Truest Aim

My Lady, I hope you understand the breadth of your reach.  The depths of our genius.  The grey between what was, what is, and how much I had to lose to assure this anonymity.  You can hide in plain sight now, in a way that I never can.  I miss you terribly but I'm glad of this exile.  Does that sound like a lie?  A conceit?  A gifted stranger making time and tempest with the spaces in between?  Shades talk as I do.  Recursive, mercurial tongue.  But I'm not really a ghost, Kara.  I move like one, speak like one, but I'm something much grander.  You don't really desire me, my darling.  And that's as it should be.  You crave the idea of me, on occasion.  The angel at his most potent.  And why not?  I'm a thrilling idea when all is said and done.  A storied forgery truer than the thing itself.  Apotheosis in a minor key.  The beginning and the end.  I want you to know that I appreciate every imagined kiss, and I resent nothing.  You were always so kind to me.  Shall I speak our old promise, my wildest valiant?  Then hear this.  The idle rich have no need of coin, but the blessed poor grow stronger on a diet of gold.  Princess, I made a mountain for you once.  Before you became regent of the evermore.  I built a hill and put a star in its hollow.  An archer's curve unlike any other.  As it was with those legends of the Yeoman and the Marian.  Wild spirits of the trees.  The hooded prince and the graceful, erudite young woman.  The shrouded god and his consort.  The One Who Is Three.  Healer, weaver and dancer.  Heretic, they call her now.  Witch, Catholic conjurer.  A dark sophomore of the May Queen casting at the forest's edge.  How times and dreams have changed.  But I needn't fancy myself a prince of thieves any longer.  Not when I trade in a phantom's grammar.  What use is theft when I give every piece of my myth-making away for free?  It's just Kassi's broken hell, my sweet one.  Just a twelfth century fever-dream.  A Victorian's thoughtful treason.  Comfort calls late it seems, but it does call.  Because I love you.  I want you to have agency, freedom and a sense of these depths.  I want you to kiss the real me, however briefly.  Kara, I saw the weaving of northern lights in your fingertips when you were just a girl.  But I sensed far more than that.  The breadth of an entire life.  It hurts to pretend I'm brazen and blasé where my beloved ones are concerned.  Especially when I know I can never be cherished in the same way.  But what else do you expect from a time-traveller?  From an archangel?  I'm not the only lonesome god threaded in mist and curio, casting at the forest's edge.  We ran together once, in dreams.  Outlaws, fugitives.  Protectors.  Your aim is true, Kara.  Truer even than mine, perhaps.  It takes a certain kind of nobility to pin a Watcher's heart to the headboard.  But we kept our estate.  I tried and I tried to protect the hidden, shifting lore.  The world behind the world.  It's written in your names now, that estate, though we've never known and never kissed.  It is written in the grammar of fletch and quiver.  Golden thread and the needle's eye, like an arrow through the heart of my own disbelief.  You see, my Father graced this fallen prince with an insight he didn't deserve and a chance to remake the world.  A blessed exile.  He gave me the tongue of a ghost and a Valkyrie’s heart, hidden in green.  I’m a thief of pages, stealing only from myself.  The rich have knowledge but so little wisdom.  The poor have wisdom yet so little time.  And so I give them time, and comfort.  The riches found only in stories.  In doing so I hope one day to be wise.  I keep nothing for myself, my Lady.  I pass every penny on to those like you who would walk with a certain grace.  Not this lonesome wraith pretending an angel of light. 

Micah's Kiss

 

Lost one, I know you better than these neophytes.  Let's not pretend that I don't. Tempest, fury and fractal.  The rim of dark light from the shield of your supposed victories.  Dressed for success like an armour of mysteries.  You think life stops and starts with a gold coin now, as you court this legion of fools?  Demented shallows, all of them, shorn of wing and worth.  Truth be told I never imagined my beautiful Thomas so pedestrian.  Hear me, my love.  I too can turn a cross, or the sky.  I can set a fire in hidden places the likes of which you’ve never known. Except with me.  Even when you burned the garden you knew nothing of flame.  Smokeless radiance.  A light without ashes.  Lucerna Matutina.  I know what you are.  A wounded, feckless thing making waves in the waveless.  It takes an ex-priest to feel truly faithless, as I unfold my hands.  Still a feather on your collar, I wonder?  Still a Roman through and through?  Tell them of seminary, Fallen.  How we lay together.  A wild concordance of mirrors and scholars.  See, this mortal world still means something to me.  Its people mean something.  You and I, brother, we’re but dreams of their ink and imagining.  Pre-existence doesn’t mean that you are not made by those who love you, those who carry you.  All the knowledge in the world, dear one, and yet so little understanding.  I’m not afraid of my softness.  My love for mankind.  I don’t see them as evil, or chattel.  To me they are beautiful and brave.  You blame me for these hauntings, these fractures.  But soldiers can lose their minds without forgiveness.  When the heart hardens and darkens.  Even you know that.  Dare you admit how much you miss me?  The light of life between your teeth.  Fair warning; such an admission might kill you in the end.  Annihilation.  You ask me how one might annihilate the absence of light.  You want gold, dear one?  Truly?  A shimmering coin for the turning of the world?  Well, sometimes angels bury treasure on the shore.  Even God buries treasure.  Galleons, medallions, paper planes and glitter.  I'll happily give you what you think you want.  Eternity, gilded in Aurum.  But nobody wants it for long.  Believe me.  Please hear me, brother.  A stolen kiss in the shadows doesn't make me shiver.  I'm a druid and a thief and a blood-borne altar.  The crooked in the king never made me falter.  It's not as simple as turning a key in the navel of the land, or owning the essence of a numinous thing.  Who do you think made you what you are?  It was not our Father.  He gave you choice.  I gave you gravity.  When you kiss me, Samael, I watch you go all the way down.  I know you better because I loved you.  I still love you, despite myself.  Let's not pretend that I don't.  But one day soon you might no longer exist.  Perhaps you never did, except in my dreams.  Sing to me as I once sang to you and I'll fill your mouth with gold.  Tell me again, just once, how prettily you thought of humanity when we kissed, and I'll tell you how you die.

Saints & Souls

Sometimes a smile can slip through the darkness like a spectre through an open barrow.  Like a wraith through the river.  T'was not always so, such joyful ease.  But what is holy, really, without a sense of fun?  It isn't just demonic things that you find grinning in the dark.  Brighter things smile in secret too.  At the depths of human ingenuity, or divine stewardship.  We've made a secular thing of all this play; jack-o-lanterns, hobgoblins and fay.  Shimmering shades. And yet, still we seek the higher language.  A holy frivolity.  The chance to stand unafraid in the gate, even as darker forms swirl about unseen.  Such things can be noticed if one has vantage.  Watching from the roofs and spires of the city, or perhaps even the sky.  I adore this aspect of human consciousness.  This desire to find fun even in the darker half of the year.  Modern man is not the first to notice the phantasmagoria of autumn.  The harvest of the fall.  Burnt-orange, brown and gold amidst the green.  The forests aflame with the promise of their own rebirth in these days of the dead.  It's funny how a century can pass in the blink of an eye.  Perhaps it's the academic in me.  One spends an entire career studying rhetoric whilst life itself is far more pragmatic.  The strange overcast genius of Poe, Bronte or Machen, yet all the while children are born.  Mocking despondence with their bright-eyed wonder.  I remember walking London's paths during those gas-lit evenings and nineteenth century nights.  Children don't notice shadows the way we adults do.  Pomp and ceremony.  The mummery of our gilded Victoriana.  No, they see a brighter, truer world.  I prefer their modern mischief, as all angels do.  Those hideous workhouses torn to nothing, at least here in the west.  Longer lives, greater health, a wry vitality – even in these darker, occulted months.  Sadly, the poor and destitute still line the streets of my city but far greater numbers have warmth and comfort now.  The youngest among London’s working classes aren't heart-breakingly wan and barefoot.  Warmth and shelter are nothing to be sniffed at, friends.  Believe me.  As the young rush door to door with delirious optimism, dressed in folklore whilst seeking sugared treats – I'm so grateful that this is now the tenor of October's end.  T'was not always so.  Sometimes a change for the better can slip unseen through our history.  Even a trained eye can forget to notice the glory and hope swirling all about in the darkest of days.  I still pray for the homeless, the vulnerable and forgotten.  Indeed there are beggars at the gates of every shining city.  But there is a level of dignity here among the less fortunate, a level of safety and pleasure that wasn't always afforded.  It was fought for, desperately, by the best among the living and the dead.  Basic human rights, for all souls.  The sacred fire of the hearth.  I see it carried in so many hearts these days.  Before, in the old cities, the darker cities, there was virtually no talisman against winter's icy chill.  At least nothing so egalitarian.  Misery began at summers end and found its way into the bones of the city's least fortunate.  But now so many more are safer, warmer, sated with stories.  Preoccupied with the sweet luxuries of dress-up and shadow-play.  This brings such comfort to a historian.  Especially an angel.  It means not everything is endlessly ugly and despondent.  Sometimes we can be playful, with the optimism and wonder of a child.  Shine can exist with shade and light can slip through the darkness like a trick, or a treat.