Tag: prose

you want to know my climate. i have none. you demand insight to my core temperature and my core temper. they have no average. “where,” you slam your fist down, “are the records of your tides, who keeps the collection of your common sediments, which museum holds the species of your soul?”
and i say: nowhere, nobody, none.
because i am weather above the ocean and my storms cannot be predicted. you will find me in the lightless depths of waters that gave life millions of years ago, where rules are crushed under tons of air and salt. my tracks lead into the atmosphere where climate is an unknown name and clouds sing another hymn every day.
i won’t be measured in your steady units. my body may be rain-smoothed stone, but you cannot guess the earthquakes of my actions with your questions.
i have and always will be made of seasons and water, of air and soil and if i still – if i rest – it’s only to because my summer has ended to invoke autumn in me.

There are countless stories about lovers being separated by magic, but what if instead of falling apart, they grew too close?

Imagine.

A wizard that traveled the lands, selling their art to those who need it for just enough to make a living with it. Their power without comparison. Nobody knew how they did it, what their secret it. It was too much strength for one, and the rumours spoke of dark contracts or monsters inside.

Only when their apprentice, a young one that was still learning and endlessly curious in their character, asked the one question: “Master, how are you so strong?” Then, the wizard said:

“It is a story that you have heard a million times. My magic came through lost love and the power that it gave.”

“Oh,” said the apprentice, shocked how their admired master could do such a thing. “You sacrificed someone to gain something.”

“Not quite.” And the wizard began to spread out a story of a human so beloved that nothing they shared felt close enough. No breath could be taken too near, no hand held for enough hours to feel two pulses as one. The apprentice sat still and with a wildly beating heart when the wizard stood and bared their back, shoulders to waist, and cruel eldritch lines slither across skin that was filled with old scars.

“We wished to be closer than anyone.”

The wizard’s face was white in the night, and their eyes carried the same darkness that curled in the shape of a human figure over their back. A whimper rose in the apprentice’s throat. The shape on their master’s back shifted, black tearing open until skin twisted in the hollow mouth of a thing that could have been human millenia ago.

“Oh, our wish was granted. Closer than anyone, that we are. Nothing is closer than making one out of two.”

The universe couldn’t have expanded into a more brilliant world of simple complexity than the one we have, and it’s incredible to just think about it.

Everything we have is so wide that our minds can’t comprehend it. 

An ocean is deeper than we can fathom by multiplying our own body length, how many of us to stack until we touch the dark bottom, how many to span endless water from land to land, we can’t imagine. A brain has more connections than we can take breaths, more impulses than notes we sing or words we could ever speak in three lifetimes. And even a murmuration of starlings encompasses the entire sky over our head, horizon to horizon across the field we stand on to let the rustle of millions of feathers drown out our own blood.

All of it is big and seems different, and then we learn it’s not.

We learn that the shift of water molecules is the electric jolt between neurons is the wing beat of a starling, that all roll like a wave of atoms that make us and the universe, that everything is infinitely complex and so simple.

Our world isn’t complex because its parts are. The single molecule of water, the small neuron, the lone starling – they’re simple.

It’s the chaos and the entropy of the tiniest elements, the infinite possibilities of their touches, that turn order into life and brilliance.

i’ll never understand why movies and literature try to make me afraid of a villain who has nothing left to lose. one who has no fear of dying anymore is terrifying, one who has looked pain in the face and suffered enough for a hundred people can make your breath freeze in your lungs, that’s true.

but that villain is nothing compared to one who has something beloved left.

nothing creates a warrior more easily than resting a blade where his heart is.

thank you so much for pointing out that my accent in your native language is heavy, horrible or strong. i understand why you’d say that. an accent is a strange thing to anyone who has never bothered to get one for themselves. 

ask your questions. don’t back down. there are answers, there’s a whole universe full of them and it’s waiting for you to come. demand the knowledge you are owed and bring new questions for answers to discover.

and if someone asks why you do it, ask them why they stopped.

“A multiverse?” He scoffed. “Ridiculous. There has never been and will never be such a thing. There is only one universe and we are in it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish reading and I don’t appreciate you interrupting my story.”