Cum formidulosum est salire, tum ipsum saltas. Alioquin, in eodem loco per totam vitam manebis, quod ego facere non possum.
When it is scary to jump, then you jump. Otherwise, you will remain in the same place for the rest of your life, which I cannot do.
- Oscar Isaac
Betwixt subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion. Just as a candle cannot
burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing end them : to live, to laugh and to love in this life before the cold fleeting embrace of an ever restful slumber to die, to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end.
For to be, or not to be, that is the question. The heart ache of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation, devoutly to be wished — to die, to rest, to sleep and perhaps a chance to dream. For in that ever restful sleep of death, what dreams may come to be when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Thus we give pause and reflect upon the undeniable fact that the dread of something after death is the undiscovered country. From whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, but hope against the greatest of adversities is nothing short of the highest form of faith and yet also the purest. Solitamente is something pious because The Gods approve of it? Or do The Gods approve of it because it is pious? Such is the nature of wisdom and truth, older than the mere confines of time themselves.
As they tend to continually progress
towards infinity without any versch wommenes, just as the first
man came to live without his first wife. Still bestrickened with the pale cast of thought, as moments and memories of joy and sorrow. Began Gradually losing their savory splendor, as orphaned children learn to grow up without their birth mothers. Dado que all of their past sins and transgressions forsakened nor forgiven, but not forgotten.
Albeit in the simplest and purest forms of providence and veracity, he was never truly an orphan. Quite far from it, yet death became his untimely importance --- a cold coin resting beneath his tongue. Driven by a lingering unknown temptation in a parallel plane of thought that never actually intercepted his own before, a quieter will moved brushing against him like a languid breath beneath a closed door. Something or better yet someone, faintly whispered as if underneath one's breath.
"Long time..."
"No see, old friend."
A low distortion — not merely sound, but pressure upon the architecture of serenity — propagated through the interstellar dark, as though some forgotten pulsar had resumed its dying broadcast.
Of a low and sustained resonance, beyond the tolerance of the human ear. Vibrating through the continuum
betwixte stellar bodies, yet it did not emerge from the void --- instead the void rearranged itself around it.
And what gathered there was less a figure than a negation of form — a density in the cosmic background, black not by absence of light but by a malignant absorption of it. As though photons, encountering its
trajectory suddenly reconsidered their allegiance to illumination.
With light gathering around it as though in worship, like moths to a flame yet none survived contact. The glow did not reveal it, but in lieu it was utterly devoured. As this figure, stood there in a way that if it were to be put gently into words had a strife with nature as if to out doo life itself which altogether seemed completely alien and attributed to something unbound by orientation — at an angle foreign to Euclidean expectation, misaligned with the grid by which minds misaligned with the grid measure space and time.
Like an ancient lighthouse erected before the invention of oceans, it emitted no beam, yet compelled navigation. Inclined at a degree unknown to terrestrial geometry, a deviation from the expected curvature of reality — and in that deviation lay its authority.
And those who felt its presence found themselves guided not towards harbor, but rather the thin membrane of the veil where dream decays into revelation.
To behold it was not to witness a thing, but to suspect that the cosmos had been whispering long before one possessed ears. And whatever whispered, was merely the echo of the mind collapsing under the strain of it's perception.
"Wast thou ever friends *!@%?#$"
And then precipitously, without warning a second voice intruded — echoing not louder, but clearer.
As though it had found a frequency the first one had only disturbed. Adopting a peculiar warmth, almost human --- although the resemblance felt engineered instead of organic.
Resonant with an authority that suggested not benevolence, but ancient function. It answered the first not in language, but in harmonic opposition as though two stellar bodies had entered gravitational dispute. And what followed after was not merely sound, but convulsion. As the surrounding background tremored as if interstellar orbits of space itself had shifted beneath an unseen strain.
Thereafter, a massive concussion rolled outward — vast, seismic and unmoored from any planetary crust of celestial bodies. Reverberating through the dark like the settling of some prodigious artwork, long buried beneath epochs. And beneath that thunder lay a susurration — innumerable murmurings braided together — not speech, yet unmistakably articulate
with meaning propagated beyond syllable and syntax.
The estranged exchange did not resemble conversation as normal minds conceive it. But it was alignment, a calibration between immense entities — a mutual adjustment of incomprehensible vectors. To bare witness to it was not to hear nor listen to dialogue, but to perceive the cosmos correcting itself.
"They first came to me as echoes from the aether..."
"And thereafter as lamenting screams of agony and despair"
"The dying breaths of The Bhikkhu Monks Of The Mikkyo Order."
As the voice echoed a gushing violent brilliance erupted — not merely light, but a saturation of perception — and within it unfolded a procession of images too rapid for ordered thought.
They did not flash, but rather they accumulated --- layering upon one another in dreadful simultaneity.
Cities reduced to geometric ruin, fields sown not with harvest, but with the still architecture of blood stained contusions, lesions and scars.
A misfortunate but fleeting niche of the rotting and decaying flesh of fallen bodies, as smoke rises in patient columns from countries whose names had not yet been conceived.
Yet the spectacle did not accuse, but it only catalogued. War appeared not as event, but as principle — an inherent tendency woven through the species like a genetic inevitability. Each and every single moment seemed increasingly more dire. Like a sesspool of miserability and despair, the staggering confusion felt as if one was being torn through a sunder of different worlds.
"Their vital essence, now forever sealed within The Trident Of Devastation"
As it quivered, in divine assent as all ancient vessels must when the current of decree passes through them. Just as, all of the celestial instruments strum when the deeper statutes of existence are spoken aloud. For within it's threefold triune crown it endured the reverberation of eighteen hundred million extinguished breaths.
Relinquished neither sanctified nor avenged — only recorded in the still ledger of existence in quiet accord with the utterance of the faint, ceaseless murmur of only the subsumed into the vast and indifferent calculus by which the cosmos inverts excess.
"The old laws grow ever so weaker..."
"And soon they will wither away along with these barriers..."
"Then the ugaritic walls of the stereoma will come tumbling down, like the falling leaves of an old dying peach tree."
Yet before the single moment could fracture into event, there was merely no reaction inclined nor did any colloquialism betray the intrusion of change. Au lieu de there endured a silence rather so absolute it seemed ancestral — older than mere speech and even thought itself, akin to that of that profound and suffocating hush which attends to the dead and does not concern itself with the living.
Lo and behold, miraculously out of the blue as though by some unseen providence something compelled the dreadful sight to sodeinly fade into complete utter nothingness. With it's shadow inferably quenched by a mind opening light, that inexorably shone unexpectedly as impetus stimuli gradually envelopes. And one fully succumbs, waking from the subconscious tether of the psyche.
He wakes up gasping for air, veins throbbing. As the andreline rushed to his beating heart in his pounding chest. Sweat clung to his skin, damp and slick as his mind registered only fragments of what he could still recall and conceive : illusions, phantoms and delusional misapprehensions of a sense that the world had shifted while he slept.
As he sits up slowly, as though the act itself might fracture. Every single heartbeat sounded like a drumbeat in a corridor of mirrors, reflecting a version of him he did not recognize. The dream — no, the vision still lingered in his mind, a corrosive residue of shapes and voices that were not there, yet could not be denied. And for a moment he considered that he might be dead, or better yet even worse awake inside someone else's body.
Rational thought fluttered weakly at the edges of his consciousness, trying to stitch together feeling and memory but it all recoiled under the weight of raw, absolute bewilderment. For that night Appolyse had several disturbing recurring dreams. A mysterious figure with burning eyes chasing after him, then falling but never hitting the ground and the faint whispers from the hoarse voice of a ghostly shadow. The mysterious figure with burning eyes held out his hand, and in his palm carried a Maduvu double bladed dagger. With which he then uses to stab young Appolyse in the back, before he falls.
Reality itself seemed to tilt. And he realized, with a shudder, that the horror was not in the dream. The horror was that he could not be certain he had ever truly woken. Now disdained by the mental images that have been burned into his retina, he simply gets out of bed and heads outside for some fresh air. As he steps out his sleeping quarters, slowly breathing in and out --- each inhale and exhale a gentle rhythm as though the night itself had begun to pulse with him.
Above, the midnight sky swirling and dancing in quiet frenzies — of deep blues and indigos curling into one another, flecked with pinpricks of light that shined like distant coronae in the glimmer of the aurora borealis. The constellations of stars were not fixed, but twirled in luminous eddies, their brilliance spilling across the endless dark canvas in rippling arcs of golden and silvern halos.
With the horizon shimmering faintly, for 'tis was still dusk before dawn and the morning sun had not yet risen. The edges of the world alive with the first signs of approaching dawn, a pale brushstroke of color that bent and wavered with the wind.
As the faunachrons above and below
seemed to lean toward the sky, their shadows galloping about in the luminescent starlight. Quivering as if the night were breathing through them. Time felt suspended, his presence a soft pulse in the living artwork of the sky, a solitary witness to the celestial dance that spun and glimmered far beyond human comprehension.