fr0ginthemoon

[fr0ginthemoon]

“Now, listen to me very carefully.” Sir Caspia leans forwards, pulling my eyes to him. Wind gusts around me, billowing through the tall stalks of grass like waves in the sea.

It’s finally time. A tremor of excitement oscillates throughout my body, starting in my chest and working its way out to my fingers, toes, and to the very ends of every hair on my head. Magic. I can’t help but wonder what I’m going to cast first. I grew up watching the nobles call fire from the sky and iron from the earth, and now it's my turn to join the hallowed ranks of heroes that I've adored for so long.

Sir Caspia raises his voice above the wind. “I want you to repeat after me exactly. Don’t change a single word. Do you understand?” He meets my eyes and refuses to look away until I affirm the words. Then he leans back. The sky behind him is a dark gray, and growing darker. Briefly, I wonder if it will rain. Then I return my focus to the lesson. Sir Caspia takes one breath, then another, steadying himself.

My heart is racing, my mind whirring between every possible outcome. It’s a little scary, casting for the first time. But the thrill overcomes the fear and besides, I’ve practiced this a thousand fold. That’s right. It’ll be just like practice. Sir Caspia spreads his arms and turns his face to the sky. Then, he cries,

The sun and the moon follow after you, the eternal keeper of peace. You are the object of our hearts, the light in our eyes, and we ask that you show your face to your devotees. Come, now, and hear our woes.

I chant the invocation, channeling all of my soul into each word. They roll off of my tongue with an eminent sense of familiarity, a deja vu as if I had said these words before, or as if I was always meant to say them. The words spark with a comforting warmth, flowing out through my body and into the cold autumn air. For a moment, nothing else happens. It is a moment further until I realize that nothing is exactly what has happened. The grass is frozen in place, the stalks bent by wind in waves across the rolling plains. The first drops of rain float suspended mere feet from my hair, which moves in slow-motion, trailing behind me as I twirl to take in the scene around me. Even sir Caspia stands inanimate, like some statue erected in a town square. No sound comes from the landscape. Everything is tranquil, unmoving.

Peaceful.

Then as I watch, the clouds split as if parted by an invisible hand, rending them in twain. A presence descends to the ground, invisible, yet powerfully present in that manner which only a god could possibly devise. It drifts over the ground, wisping this way and that until, finally, it comes to me. It curls about me, embracing me like the first warm morning of January. It is a breathtaking feeling in its presence, intoxicatingly comforting. It is at once a fire in the midst of the harshest winter and a lover’s kiss, drawing my soul to its center. Each moment here stretches out into eternity, and one that I would loathe to give up. It is food to the hungry, a home for the broken, and new life for the weary.

Sheer bliss.

The presence leans even closer to me, whispering into my ear. In its voice is an unfaltering will, and every word it speaks is law. “Be still,” it whispers. “Be calm, daughter of the moon.” And my body sags like a cub held by the nape, held up only by the presence as it gently croons to me.

I can feel, in the way that it holds me close, that it knows. It knows my past and future, my greatest accomplishments and my deepest fears. It feels intimately every regret and sorrow. And it is that which it whispers of. It reminds me who I am, and tells me that no matter how long it takes, that it will always be here, waiting. Then it utters one last thing. The name, “Amaranth.” It hums with potential, a name so hidden in the depths of the earth as never to be found unwilling by the presence.

“This is my name, my very essence. Should you speak it, I will be wherever you are.” As the presence ascends back into the sky, it shows itself, briefly. Eight arms adorn a body far larger than life. It is covered with eyes of all different colors and origins; on its forehead is a hawk’s eye, and along its arms are the eyes of every woodland creature. Then, the apparition is gone. The clouds close, and just as suddenly as it stopped, the rain once again begins to fall. Sir Caspia blinks once, then looks at me, sensing some change. Certainly, I feel different. It is as if there is another being inside of me, laying dormant in my chest

“Did you succeed?” Sir Caspia offers me a cloak from his pack.

I reach for the cloak, then turn my hand towards the sky. “Amaranth, be with me.” The name seems to resonate with some other plane even as I whisper it, and at once Sir Caspia and I are seperate from the rain. It slows, then stops as it approaches, forming a dome of safety.

Sir Caspia smiles, the first genuine smile I’ve ever seen from the stoic behemoth that is my tutor. “Congratulations, my lady. On becoming a knight.”

[fr0ginthemoon]

Directory:

Dreams, Visions, and the Robots that Watch me when I Sleep:

Eternity and a Robot

The Termites that Gnaw on my Brain (And my Google Docs):

The Glass Project:

Amaranth

[fr0ginthemoon]

I had a vision of a robot waiting at a bus stop at the edge of town. It was rusted, nature having taken hold of the iron gears and pistons, birds and insects nesting in its joints and vines creeping up from the cracked concrete, through the gaps in the ancient aluminum bench to cradle its desiccated body. As I sat next to it, it moved. Its decayed head creaked as it turned towards me, asking, "When will the bus arrive? I have been waiting for quite some time now."

I responded, "The bus doesn't pass by this way anymore. The concrete is shattered, and the sky-rail carries travelers overhead. Except for the rail's roaring, there is no sound of man nor machinery that comes by this path."

The robot seemed puzzled, not quite computing what was spoken. It points to the now-fallen bus-stop sign, nearly hidden in the underbrush. "The bus comes by every half-hour. I have to board it."

"Why do you need to travel aboard the bus?" I question the robot. "Where would you go?"

The robot once again raised a hand to point, this time into the woods beyond. "I want to leave the city. When my mistress left, she told me that we would perhaps meet again one day in the forest. She told me about the cottage that her father went to, many years before her. 'A place beyond the struggle and the sounds of the city,' she called it.

"That sounds like Heaven." I thought aloud.

The robot recognised the word. Its dimly glowing eyes flashed brighter in remembrance. “My mistress spoke of Heaven, in those last days,” It said. “She told me that ‘Heaven’ was the name of the forest, before the city forgot.”

At this I fell silent for a while. Then, “Maybe it was. But the forest is real, you know? Heaven is a dream. It’s comforting, but no more than that. A fiction to soften a harsh reality.”

“Heaven is the forest, though, is it not? Where humans go after they leave the city.” The robot slowly blinked at me. “That’s why I have to get on the bus, so I can see her again.”

I realized, then, that the robot could not understand impermanence. Neither that the bus would not come by ever again, nor that its mistress was long dead. And I wished that I could be like the robot, waiting forever at the bus stop, never coming to grasp what it does not, cannot, comprehend. Heaven fills the gap in its understanding. “The bus will arrive soon,” I said to the robot. “But let us speak for a while more before that happens.”

The robot nodded, dislodging an acorn from its neck. We talked, then, for longer than I remember. About what lies beyond the stars, about the creation of all things and the turning of the void. Day faded to night, and as morning finally broke over the forest, shining off of the twisting spires of the city, I finally asked, “Do you think there is a god?”

The robot did not respond for so long that I thought for several moments that it had lost power. Then, “Perhaps. It is something that my mistress spoke of as often as fortune or the lack thereof would occur. If there is a god, then it is the amalgamation of that which my mistress did not understand. She asked it for comfort in hard times, and thanked it when she came upon fortune or glory.”

I came back to myself when it said that, back to the real world on the same park bench overlooking the lake. Those last words stuck with me, though. “God is that which we do not understand, both knowledge and the comfort from it.”