OVERTURE
- Rise!
Open the black maw of desire,
Sojourn a red moment of breath,
See through the blue mirror of death;
So join the white music of fire.
But to be wise, is to beware,
For one comes, even there,
To unmake the choir;
One not black nor red,
Blue nor white, but dread
Fate lies in those eyes of ire.
Arise!
(The Lost Song of the Libbannawiht)
here are voids in the bright web of creation, black pools and oceans invisible to an eye permitted to detect only light. The stuff of sense, life, time - reality - can exist only in the fabric of the web, not in the voids which give the web shape. And though the web is limitless, without the void it affects to contain, it would collapse. Reality is the prisoner of an unreality it cannot conceive; light cannot exist without darkness.
A net dipped into a stream billows with the current but allows the water, heedless, to pass. But there are things of their own conception in the water, in the void, which for good or ill take notice of the net. When the net, the web of creation, encounters such a Thing, the bright fabric of reality is tested, and the dark but essential unreal prison is threatened.
In the breadth of eternity a pebble, a mountain; a sigh, a shiver or promise - a life - doesn't count for much. In tallying up infinity
one quickly runs out of fingers. So we deal with the detail at hand and disregard the rest. The sublime tread touches not the mundane trail; the young clerk explains all from his perspective.
Accordingly, perspectives vary from an arm's length to a lifetime, not - surely! - to the ends of everything. Or so we hope. But this is a tale of one who found infinity, and returned.
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