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.