The world of EverEnding is primarily conveyed through various stories and verses encountered along the way. The storytellers, with their motives and perspectives, vary wildly, and all are a little suspect… but, with details of environment and character, a picture begins to emerge.

The Sun’s Daughters

They say the sun had nine daughters, and that he loved them each with all the furious heat of the heavens, but also that he had two favorites, the twins Terra and Luna.

These two were inseparable, and whenever the sun-daughters would go to play amongst the stars these two would always go adventuring off together. Terra was bold and daring, and rushed from one place to the next, always eager to see more, dragging her sister along– Luna, however, was meditative and insightful, and often held her sister back so she could show her some new and delightful facet of the things they discovered together.

One night, they encountered a strange old star as he traveled across the night sky. They met travelers infrequently, and Luna was shy around them, so Terra came forward to speak to him. She asked why he wandered so, and why he had come to her father’s kingdom: He, with a grave and peculiar courtesy, told her he was a wishing star– tasked to travel from sky to sky, he said, hearing wishes in penitence for a crime long forgotten.

He seemed kind, but his words struck an unknown chord of dismay in Luna’s heart. She bid the star a good night, and moved to depart, but Terra would not budge: She refused to leave without first begging a wish from the traveler.

“It is not for me to refuse,” he said, “I hear all wishes.”

Terra told him excitedly of their great father, how he had created this majestic kingdom in which they all lived, and wished that she might one day be able to create as he had.

The star said: “It will be so.”

Terra felt a strange sensation, the tingling momentary edge of a helpless kind of power. The star continued on its lonely way. As they returned home, Terra seemed strangely subdued, and though when Luna asked she said she felt fine she seemed, somehow, distant.

In her head, the faeries spoke to Terra for the first time. “Power, yes, you may have that dear, the power to create and the power to destroy– and time, yes, we will take ours dear, and yours as well as whatever we may find.”

The next day, she showed her father the first wonder she created with the faeries help, a strange and pretty metal trinket she wore, and he was proud of her but also, down deep, concerned, for he more than anyone knew the terrible price that creation sometimes bore.

Terra continued to make grander and stranger things with the help of the faeries, beautiful creations of spun glass and woven steel, magics coded into wire and blood, arts incomprehensible and compelling…

Luna grew jealous, both because she envied Terra her ability to create and because she missed being able to spend time with her sister. She would beg Terra to come out and play, or at least to take a short break from her labors, but would be met only with distant-eyed dismissal, and she her own clumsy efforts at creation fell far short of what Terra could achieve.

As she became more and more frustrated, Luna became determined to see how her sister worked her little miracles of creation. She snuck into Terra’s workshop, one night, to see what she could see…

Her sister was there, sitting asleep at a work table, and for the first time Luna saw the faeries at work, flitting to and fro creating tiny and amazing wonders that took Luna’s breath away to look upon. After a moment, though, she noticed that every once in in a while a faery would fly over and pluck a hair from Terra’s head, or pull a glittering thread from her dress, or prick a drop of blood from her fingertip– and then she looked more closely at her sister.

Once, the twins had been identical, but now Terra’s hair had thinned so her scalp showed through. Her dress was tattered, and the flesh which showed through was pale and unhealthy. Her face was deeply lined, and she looked troubled in her sleep, and even when Luna cried out in dismay she did not awaken.

She burst out of hiding and cried out to the faeries to leave her sister alone, but they gazed upon her with tiny burning eyes and refused. “Her wish is our command even if it means her end, she wants to be a maker so, if her wants unmake her so, then that is destined, we weren’t made to question the ends of our creation.”

They continued to work, incessantly, and she saw her sister grow older by the moment. She grabbed one of the faeries and demanded that, if they must harvest materials to make their wonders, that they should take them from her and leave her sister alone.

The workshop went silent. The faeries gazed at her and she did not like what she saw in them, for within burned the fires of creation, the spark of a terrible and insatiable hunger.

The faeries looked upon Terra, exhausted and ragged, and then upon Luna, with their greedy burning eyes, and saw everything they might need to pursue their grand works.

She stood still as they swarmed towards her, as they crawled over her and sought to claim her, and it wasn’t long before the first fight broke out, a spark which singed her dress… and it wasn’t long after that that a second fight broke out, and a third, and more, until the faery fire flickered over every inch of her.

When Terra awoke, all of the faeries were gone, burnt to dust, and her sister lay dead, pale and seared bare. Terra mourned her sister for a thousand years of ice and, as the anniversary nears each year, she is reminded and mourns once again. She holds her sister close, and hopes that one day she may reawaken and they might be together once more.

But, in the end– did she learn her lesson? Ice melts, and faeries always seem to find their way into even the most level heads…

The Orphan Garden

A long time ago there was a kingdom which waged war with itself. No one knows how the war began, but once it did it raged on, day after day after day, until children were born and raised within it and had no memory of its beginning and no conception of its end. Perhaps it rages still.

Everyone in the city stood and fought together, secure in the certainty that their cause was just– almost everyone, that is. Not everyone was able to fight: The sick, the deluded, the orphans, especially the orphans, were trampled and starved and killed in the midst of the fighting and there was nothing they could do. They lived day by day in sorrow and despair

It went on like this until, one night, as these orphans clung to each other and cried, they were overheard– the night herself heard their tears and was moved to pity. For, you see, her own children were long dead, her beautiful star children suffocated and extinguished by the dust and the poisonous haze of war.

She could see the entirety of the city, she touched it everywhere lightly, so she knew where the orphans could be safe. She appeared to them that night, dark and silent, and told them of the great palace gardens, long since abandoned and overgrown, where the walls were cracked open and where no soldier ever bothered to go.

That night, there was a silent pilgrimage of orphans through the war-torn streets and into the peaceful gardens. They left the city to its ceaseless war.

Over time, the other poor souls lost in the war found their way to the gardens as well, and were welcomed, and were sheltered. For a while, things were good. Fruit grew plentiful on the garden trees, water ran through it to nurture them, and it was spacious with no dangerous animals. The children’s cares abandoned them, and they played in the trees.

But the war raged on and, day by day, crept closer to the gardens…

The night mother saw this and worried. She appeared once more to the orphans and told them they should take steps to defend themselves. The oldest and toughest children should all band together and be ready to fend off any intruders.

This they did, and sure enough some stragglers soon began to investigate the garden, and were rebuffed. Several times this happened, and each time the older children protected the garden, and it remained secure, and the younger children played.

However, the more attacks they repelled, the more restless the older children became. Why, they asked, should they have to live in fear? They had become strong, more than a match for anything out there– or so they believed. Mother night knew better, and appeared to them once more to try to warn them from this folly, to plead with them to stay safe in the gardens– but, this one time, they ignored her words, and planned their sortie with childish fervor.

They were preparing to leave when the sky went black. The gaps in the wall were filled with thick impenetrable darkness. They could not leave. The night had come to love them so, she couldn’t bear the thought of having to watch them perish even as her own children had: So she wrapped them all up together in her great black nightrobe and held them tight, so she embraced the gardens in an endless and safe and loving night.

And they were never seen or heard from again.

Twin Cities

Once, there was a kingdom with two capital cities. One was beautiful and lively, the other one somber and quiet: The people called them the day city and the night city. The king, a wise man, valued both greatly. He knew it was of utmost importance to keep both cities safe and healthy if his country were to prosper, and he alone understood the delicate balance between them. Every day he sent out a letter which carefully instructed the people on how the cities were to be maintained, and thus kept them in perfect balance.

One day, the king was called away to a neighboring kingdom on a mission of peace. The letters slowed and stopped, which dismayed the people at first, but they soon adjusted to making their own decisions– for a while, that is. The people of the day city were too carefree, too joyous, and soon stopped worrying about the future.

Soon, the day city stopped being beautiful. Its streets filled with garbage and squalor, and the people began to leave, a trickle at first, then a torrent, until the entire city was empty but for vermin. They left, and where do you think they went?

They filled the night city to overflowing and then kept coming, lined up outside the gates, a great line of people which crossed the entire kingdom and entirely consumed the beautiful roads which the king had maintained so carefully. They waited, there, to come inside…

And waited… and waited… and waited…

Eventually, word of this came to the king as he negotiated in the neighboring kingdom, and he was furious. He sent a letter to his son, who himself was fresh back from a war, ordering him to find out what was going on and to figure out a solution.

The prince was dutiful, and went to see what could be done. He rode to the once-lively abandoned day city and nearly gagged at the stench, but when he tried to get inside he found the gates locked tight– with no one inside the city to open them.

He rode then to the night city, searching for help in opening the gates, but when he arrived it was almost as though he had never left the day city– the refugees had learned nothing, and turned the night city into a mess every bit as stinking and squalid as that they had left.

The prince tried his best. He commanded the people, organized them, brought them back to force the gates and re-establish the corpse of the day city, but to no avail. Nothing could bring back the dead cities, could make them any more than husks of what they once were. But he tried! He labored day and night until he was worn and stooped, and one day he looked up to see that the king had returned.

Side by side, they looked almost like brothers now, both beaten down and worn by grief and hard labor. The king helped him to his feet, then said:

“This place is over.”

The king said:

“Go, take the people, use what you’ve learned… start a new kingdom. And don’t… ever… leave.”

The king said:

“Make your own kingdom. I will stay with what’s left of mine.”

They said their farewells and the prince left, fighting tears. The king sat in the ruined city, sighed, and closed his eyes. He never moved again from that spot. Over time his body hardened in place, he took root, he grew leaves… Now, today, there stands just a tree where once stood two cities, one beautiful and lively, one somber and quiet.

Pandemonium

The night was lonely, for her children had died long ago, drowned in the endless poisonous haze of war, and had left her all alone. What few of her friends still survived had become so familiar to her that there was no companionship, they were just lonely together. Whenever the sun would leave, she enveloped the world in her wings and watched as the people beneath her waged their endless wars, had their love affairs and their hate affairs, and wrote their stories into the sand.

So many of them were lonely, too.

She had been following the sun for an eternity, and the things she saw made her sick with anger and sorrow. Why would one create children just to be orphans? Why would you comfort them with warmth just to take it away again?

The night began to adopt these orphans, bringing one after another with her to become her faerie children. They played with each other all throughout the night, every night, and lit up the sky– but they could never stay in one place for long before the sun came and chased them away.

She wished she had the strength to fight off the sun, the power to make this world her home, or the power to create a new and better world–

New worlds do not come easily, and even with all those she rescued she was not nearly strong enough to fight the sun. She sent her new children out to find more, to find siblings, but there were simply not enough orphans. Even in this lonely place, people still connected themselves to each other, somehow, a chain of buoys in a heaving ocean.

What was she to do?

She did not tell them to do it. Her faerie-children, they began to kidnap newborns and raise them as brothers and sisters. She did not tell them to do it, but she didn’t stop them either. The new parents were distraught with grief, orphaned by their own children, and soon were taken in as well to play in the night.

The night orphanage began to consume the world. She hoped to create of herself a sunless paradise of night without end, without sleep, where all creatures cast their own light and their own warmth and all were as family to one another.

Was it her fault that those who remained, who saw their fellow inmates disappear without a trace, came to fear the hungry night? Was it her fault that they lit the great bonfire and created, of themselves, a sun? She did not foresee such foolishness, but was caught up in it, along with everyone else, and with them banished to the afterlands.

Her children– many did not make the trip. These were trapped in the interstice between the heartlands and the afterlands, where they grew feral and vicious. Thus it was that Pandemonium, the night orphanage, established herself at the outer borders of the afterlands, to protect her children and to protect from them, to rehabilitate them, that they might once more someday join her in the quest for a second paradise.

The Hunt

Once, there was a tiger. She was a fierce hunter, the undisputed ruler of her realm, until the day when, while chasing her prey, she slipped, and fell, and broke her leg and many of her teeth. The leg didn’t heal well– the teeth didn’t heal at all.

From that day forward she was forced to hunt vermin to survive– she who had been queen, and my how that stung her pride. One such day, she cornered a serpent, and she was preparing to devour it when it spoke:

“Listen! Do not eat me, mighty tigress! I would only make your stomach hurt, for they say I am full of death. Follow me, and I will bring you to a new land, with a new prey, plentiful and weak!”

Intrigued by his offer and put off by his smell in equal measure, she assented, and followed the serpent for she knew not how long, until she found herself in a far away land.

The serpent showed her her prey:

“Look! So slow they move, walking on twos! So weak they are, no venom, no claw, no fang! They are yours, my queen!”

With great joy the tigress leapt upon her new prey, whom she had no difficulty outrunning or overpowering. She devoured him, and with a full belly she fell into a deep sleep…

She dreamt of walking on two legs, dreamt of talking in intricate phrases, dreamt of creation and destruction and salvation and damnation, and though she didn’t understand why it was so, these dreams filled her with a terrible longing.

She awoke, and immediately set out to find more prey, but just over the next hill she encountered a lion:

“Stop!” said he, “I am the king of this land.” He looked at her and could not help but be intrigued by her exotic beauty and power. “I have not seen you before, but you are welcome in my kingdom,” said he, “provided that you do nothing to disturb my peace.”

The tigress looked at him coldly, and walked away without a word.

He was helplessly smitten in that moment. No one understands the full breadth and nature of these connections, but something in her dark and bloody majesty set a fire in the lion’s heart, a fire which might have been love, had he not then passed over the hill and seen what he saw then: The human remains, the leavings of the tigress’s meal.

The lion was no pacifist, nor was he squeamish when it came to blood, but he had long since reached an accord with the king of the humans in his land: They let him hunt as he would, and he let them build as they willed. Over time, he had even come to befriend some of them. So it was that when he saw this dead man he became as furious as though it were his own child, there, dead in the dirt.

He raced after the tigress, who was even then devouring another human and marvelling at the strange new visions and thoughts going through her head. She was completely unprepared for the fury of the lion, and when he leapt on her it was all she could do to struggle free, scratch his face, and somehow escape alive.

That night, as she licked her wounds, the serpent slithered up to her. “Listen!” he said, “the lion is racing to tell his ally the human king about you right now! They will hunt you, they will kill you, unless you do exactly what I say…”

She ran, as best as she could manage with her lame leg, all day and all night, ran to the great human city where the king lived among his people. There, she rolled in the sand until her fur was yellow, and she stuck long tufts of grass between her ears and over her head, and when she saw a small human ride past on a horse she pounced without hesitation.

The cityfolk found her on the child, half-eaten already, and ran to tell the king of the crazed man-eating lion that had murdered his son, the prince. By the time the soldiers arrived, the tigress had run.

Such it was that, when the lion finally arrived to warn his friend of the danger, he was greeted by his allies with a body full of arrows. His heart was cut free from his body and brought to the grieving king, who had his chefs prepare it and ate it that night, salting it with his tears.

He slept strangely, afterwards, restlessly. In his dreams, he saw the noble lion do battle with the tigress, saw the bodies of the men she had killed, and in his dreams he saw how he had been tricked.

He hunted her– to protect his people, to avenge his son, to honor his friend, he hunted her for two years, but he was always one step behind the trail of human carnage she left. She killed hundreds, and with each meal she grew a bit stronger, a bit cleverer, a bit more wicked… a bit more reckless.

One night, though, the king finally did catch up to her. He saw her there, by a river, in the moonlight, devouring some poor soul, and ordered his soldiers to silently surround her and trap her against the rushing water.

The tigress was lost in strange visions that manifested themselves within the reflections of the moon on the water and didn’t notice, but her true friend the serpent bellied up and tried to warn her:

“Listen! You must flee, for the human king has found you here, and even now the jaws of his trap are closing!”

But she was beyond help. All she could see now was prey and, without thinking twice, she gobbled the serpent up. It didn’t bother her stomach at all now, for she was full of death, herself, already.

The soldiers had their orders, and the arrows found their way, thudding home into the tigress’s body. She roared, an impossible and monstrous sound that made many of the soldiers fall to the ground, dead of fright, and made the rest curl up and cry like babes.

Only the king, with the heart of a lion, stood strong against the terror, and as the tigress raged towards him feathered in arrows his blade took her under the jaw and finally ended her monstrous life.

Then, in the moonlight, the king cut her heart out. He ate it, raw, as he looked into the raging fires of her funeral pyre, and he saw the strangest visions flickering in the flames…

The Light Bringer

I saw the stag by a river, and was preparing to strike when it spoke to me. He enchanted me with a strange story of star mothers giving birth to all the animals of the world– I fell asleep listening to his words, and when I awoke he was gone.

I was infuriated by his trickery, and I hunted him down and devoured him. Now I wonder if he just needed someone to hear his story before the death he perceived just past sight caught up to him.

Only later did I think it strange that a stag should speak, and that I should comprehend. Particularly happening, as this did, before the birth of language.

Over the years I grew in power and wisdom, and fell into a position of leadership. I was the most capable, and in those years that was all that mattered. I held many lives in my hands. Things went well for a time.

Those were good years.

One night, I dreamt of the stag. “Look,” he said, “I wear a crown, and so do you, for you are me and I am you. Ruling over a handful is not enough,” he said, “and if you do not widen the hole you have dug then the walls will soon collapse.”

I did not listen. It was one year later that the strangers came, over the hills, and killed many and enslaved the rest.

I tried to rescue those who had been taken, but for naught– just more death, and more pain. Eventually, those I knew were dead and, worse, their children grew complacent in their lot, became satisfied in chains.

I wandered, and wherever I went I would tell my story. Over and over– I became very good at telling it, until my audience came to shed a tear for each of mine. I told other stories, too– Strangers’ tales and dreams…

I do not know how long I wandered, but things began to change. I heard people in the streets repeat the things which I had said, word for word. I heard my words, my story, used to defend the weak, to free slaves, to stop wars. They had listened.

But– they had listened to me, to my voice, not to my words. I was their prophet, regardless of the prophecy I bore. Every city held their own image of me, a different image, for I had changed greatly in my travels, and– they fought.

The bloodshed was unimaginable. It never stopped. Never. Never. Soon, when I would try to tell my tales, I would be met with anger, hostility, violence. They who had been my flock hunted me, hounded me, hurt me, tried to burn me as a heretic against myself.

Perhaps I am.

I hid, for a long, long, long time.

I hoped that the years would erase these schisms, but instead I found the factions calcified, their hearts hardened against one another. They fought, each holding a different saying of mine as war banner– though often, too often, these were sayings I had never said.

I dreamed of the stag again. “Look,” he said, “can you not see the sun? We are born of the sun, and to the sun we return. Rule them, and guide them to light!”

I ignored him once more. I roamed, I told people that it was no matter which prophet they believed in, for they had all each ordained peace and brotherhood, in their own time and their own way. Some listened, but others… did not appreciate my message.

This is what broke my heart: People don’t want peace, they want something they can understand. People would rather be gluttons among the starving than well-fed companions. They do not want happiness, they want victory.

They locked me away somewhere, deep, deep, deep. Distant pilgrims cried my name in prayer, and those who had buried me did so as well, with false piety, with smirks in their rancid souls.

I clawed my way out, through the stone, up towards the light, up to the sun.

I emerged to a world full of wonders, miraculous devices I could have never imagined. All that, yes, in the hands of the same vicious and short-sighted simpletons, who still murdered in my name.

The stag spoke: “It is not enough to guide,” he said, “they spend their days dazing themselves with light, wrapping their hearts in gauze, muddling their heads with drugs. You can not bring them to the truth. You must bring the truth to them.”

I do not like power, as much as it likes me. But the stag’s words– my resolve wavered, then, and I found myself ruler of a great country.

I tried to negotiate a peace, and I suppose what was eventually wrought was a peace of sorts. Some would rather die than be left behind by the world they live in, some would rather there be no world than a world without them in it.

And now here we are. Is it so terrible that everything ended? Perhaps now there can be a new beginning.

At least I did it. I brought the light to them. I brought them to the light.

Birthday

Would you like to hear a story? Of course you would, everyone loves a story– at least one story, anyway.

  This was a long long time ago. It’s the old story, the oldest: Boy meets girl, they fall in love, make some kids… and everything’s good, for a while, for a good long time. It’s just them and the kids, their beautiful and talented daughters.

  But, eventually, dad gets to thinking, “wouldn’t some grandkids be nice?” So he has a big meeting, calls all the girls in, and tell them to make some grandkids. Unfortunately, this is way out in the middle of nowhere, and there ain’t no one else around– but it’s okay, see, because dad is a great wizard, and he gives each daughter a piece of his great burning soul so they can make grandkids with his magic. However, as he gives each piece out, he warns them:

  “I am not infinite, I won’t be able to do this forever. You will have to make your kids so they can make their own kids, and on and on, forever.”

  As the daughters left, as they went back to the river to play, they thought about what he had said. Some of the girls hid the bit of fire, in tree trunks and river stones and markings in the dirt, other girls kept it deep in their hearts to warm them at night. The images of their dream children took shape within them and began to shape them in turn, and the girls who kept the fire inside began to swell as the ideas gained substance within them.

  One of those latter was named Dawn. For some reason not entirely clear to the others, she was always daddy’s favorite– Oh, she was smart, I suppose, but not as smart as she thought she was, and she wasn’t very fast or agile, and she was somewhat vain and arrogant. Worst of all, though, she was naive.

The day comes when dad brings them all together to see what they’ve been working on– a birthday celebration for all of the little works-in-progress. Dad, granddad now I guess, offered to give each child a blessing, whatever the mother wished for– wisdom, keen hearing… flight, and so forth, until finally he got to Dawn, saving the best for last I suppose.

And he asked her, “what do you wish for, child?”

What do you think she said?

“Oh, father,” she said, “I wish for my children to have the fire of creation in them, even as we your daughters do, and be free to do with it as they will.”

…

And even as the words left her mouth it was so, and with them a burst of fire came up as the spirit within her body magnified a thousand times and ripped her asunder. Her children tore free in an instant and spread across the world as though they had always been, as though they belonged, and left her shattered and burned body behind as her sisters watched in tears.

That was that. Dawn was gone, and granddad was forced to leave and watch from a distance in accordance with her final wishes. The remaining daughters were left there, alone, to see their children attacked and consumed by Dawn’s mad orphan offspring.

Until, eventually, they set the whole world on fire, and died as they were born.

So what’s the moral of the story? I don’t know, I think it has something to do with fire safety. Hey, I’ll talk to you later, okay? Bye.

Seven Sisters

 

Seven young sisters lived alone in the woods. Their father left long ago on business and never returned.

One day the youngest grew ill. Her sisters tried all they knew to cure her to no avail. They prayed for their father to return and cure her with his power but he never came. They buried her in the yard.

From her grave grew a strange tree, flat along the ground, white as bone. It grew in the shape of a door, and though they knew from death it grew and to death it lead it called to them each night.

One by one, they left their beds to enter the door down into the dirt. They were not ever seen again above the ground.

One sister ventured beneath and saw the Birdcage Row, the bars she spun about herself to keep herself safe and to hide her beasts from the world. She walked down it, seeing the bars that tore when the beast had grown too great to contain, or when some greed too great had torn them through to devour what was inside.

She fell asleep in a cage, there, and when she awoke it was all she knew. The silver lattice was so beautiful to her that she was blinded to the prison it comprised, and lived the rest of her days there, deep in the land of oblivion, believing herself to be free.

One sister ventured beneath and found the Sleeping Chamber. She awoke, then, in her own bed, certain that it had been a dream. And awoke again, and again. She went mad, trapped between a dream of the future, pressed underground, and a vast past that always ended in fuzzy failed memory.

She never awakes, now, for fear of the weight of responsibility that thought brings. Easier to commit oneself to the dream, to be secure in one’s own irrelevance, than to always be trying to be in two places at once.

One sister ventured beneath and fell into the sink of the Red Kitchen: A sea of churning blood, the massacred swaths of those she had killed or caused to never be born by existing and by surviving in this cruel world.

She struggled in the bloody mess and made a ship of bones, with a sail of skin. She became queen of that rancid sea, for it was either to embrace it or to drown in it. She sails it, hunting those who do not have the will to kill, or to accept that they must, and wears their teeth, and laughs, and dances.

One sister ventured beneath, into The Deep End and sank deep into wet dirt. The fingers of mud crawled through her hair and into her mouth and crushed her into the black depths of the earth. She sought nothing, and nothing is what she found, a nothing too great to be regarded without being consumed.

She is still there, her pure white bones looking up through the dirt, listening to the many footsteps of those waiting to join her. She is happy there, in the deep cold mud, and the dimly remembered light of a candle keeps her warmer and safer than our sun could ever keep us.

One sister ventured beneath with her friends, and found herself alone together with them in a tiny red room. They spent so long there that they began to breath in sync with one another, to have the same thoughts at the same time, until eventually each forgot that they were not the other and became one person.

And yet, every night, she dreams that her shadow speaks to her in different voices, the voices of people long ago consumed by a hungering mind. She wakes to find the pictures, drawn against the faded white walls of the red room, left there by an unknown but familiar-seeming hand.

One sister ventured beneath and found a Forgotten Study. She found a book, there, which told her of another book, which she also found. Each book led to the next, until the stacks piled up into the night sky.

She climbed the stack until the air grew thin and weightless, until one day she slipped and fell upwards. Now, she has only the last book she found, and reads it over and over, and somehow, for her, that’s enough.

The first and youngest sister ventured beneath before any of the others and planted the tree that would lead them on their way. She found for herself a paradise that only existed in her heart and, because it could never be, she came to know that she could never be.

The disease that took her was a poison she drank. The light of the sun could not have cured her: Her sisters prayed in vain. Her poison was her paradise, and she left a door in the earth to lead her sisters on the way. They never found her, but she will never know, for all is the same, one way or the other, where she is now.

The Final Story

There was a man who lived forever. A wizard once told him the trick, long ago, to each and every day looking up to the sun and saying a prayer, or perhaps a promise: “I am happy to be alive.” And so he was, and so he did, every day, forever.

All things end, even forever.

Time passed, as it does. He married, had children, his children had children– but, standing outside time as he did, he outlasted them all.

He missed his prayer for the first time the day he buried his first wife. He could not bear to lie to the sun, to claim happiness when all he had come to love had begun to decay.

He did not mourn forever. He soon regained happiness, and started praying to the sun once more, but on that one day, for the first time in half a century, he became one day older.

Forever is a long time. He buried so many wives, so many children, so many friends, and though no one tragedy ever weighed as much as the first, there were bad days, unbearable days, days when the sorrow was simply too great and there was no way he could face the sun.

I do not want you to believe that his was a tragic life. He had so much happiness, so much love, so much friendship– but there were sad days, yes, and one-by-one, day-by-day, they aged him.

He became afraid. All men fear death, but for him, he who had eluded it for so long, death became an obsession, and it drove him to a fearsome and terrible decision.

He disappeared.

He left his friends and his family behind, he left his entire world behind, and travelled far away, went somewhere abandoned, somewhere hostile– some say an island, some say a desert, some a mountaintop, but we know this much: Somewhere where he could see the sun clearly.

He did not eat. He did not drink. But, every day, he would tell the sun how happy he was to be alive– and he truly was, for though this was not the life he would have chosen he was still a man who loved life.

However, a strange thing began to happen– his prayers became less and less potent, and slowly he began to age again.

He began praying twice a day– was it just him, or were these days getting longer? Then– three times a day, then…

Forever is a long time. Even an act that takes but one moment, done over and over, can consume one’s life.

Over one tiny eternity was he consumed, the prayers forced closer and closer together until he knew nothing else. He went blind from gazing up into the sun, lost his voice declaring his happiness over and over, and his limbs became useless and withered…

Was that the end?

Is there an end?

We approach our destinies in half measures, and this way convince ourselves that we’ll never see the end even as it reaches out to embrace us. A half step closer, a half step closer…

Is this the end?

 

The Worshipper

This gear in the watch
This grass in the field
This grain in the dunes
This drop in the sea

I am not the watch
I am not precise
I am not reliable
I am not above time

I am not the field
I do not lie vast
Under sun and stars

I am not the dunes
I do not lie vast
Under stars and sun

I am not the sea
I do not crush continents
I do not feed millions
I do not embrace the world

But all of these things
Would not be the same
Were I not here

Time overwhelms me
I live in the fields
The desert is distant
Someday I will return to the sea

I measure time
I plow the fields
I map the desert
Someday I will return to the sea

The Lost Child

Little wolf pup ran to see
Her mama called to let it be
She kept running through the trees
Kept going ’til she was free

Free to eat bugs and splash in the rushes
Free to tease bears and dash through the brush
Free to sleep in sun and howl at the moon
Free to dig in dirt from morning to noon

Little wolf pup all alone
Her mama called to come home
She can’t hear ’cause she’s gone to roam
Chasing a bone all on her own

Alone in the rain and shivering wet
Alone in the woods and hungering yet
Alone in the dark and scared of each sound
Alone in the leaves piled up in a mound

Little wolf all curled up
Her mama calls out through the trees
Finally finds her crying pup
It ain’t easy being free

Little wolf all curled up
Her mama called to let it be
She kept going past her pup
Bones in leaves she couldn’t see

Dying Alone

Do falling trees make sounds
when there’s no one left to hear?
Maybe they fall into oceans
and one day they wash up here

Tangled driftwood tangles
provide spark fire comforts
for cold travellers on their travels
searching for lost forests

To the doctors she’s a slab of meat,
a bag of bones, a sack of crap
Someone’s paying to keep her breathing
Someone’s praying that she’ll die

A government’s a covenant
An undistinguished entity
A story of our society
A sophisticated lie

So let’s prod her, so let’s poke her
pump her full of healin’ squeezin’s
Keep that little drummer drumming
though the band has all gone home

All of my friends were in the television
The boob tube, the idiot box
They won’t miss me when I’m gone
This show’s such a tragic comedy that
I don’t know how to smile or cry
I don’t know how to move my arms

What does the tree think
as her body groans and the earth rises
and she begins a long deep sleep
longer and deeper than even trees know

But I am not a tree
And a heart beats inside of me
But what’s left here won’t be me
And soon so soon I will see
I will see
What is coming next
What
is coming
next?

I Wish I Could Fly

His eyes were locked in place as the paralysis set in
And he could no longer distinguish near from far
far from near
the shards of glass and the stars became indistinct from one another
Some twinkled with the passing of stellar dust
Some twinkled with the passing of headlights
Sirens wailed
Though from here, lying on the pavement, maybe it was birds
Or weeping women or whalesong or yowling cats

With each ticking, numb, dripping moment
Things became more the same
And he thought, well, this is nothing new
I have always been tiny
Insignificant
I have always been ground bound
Ignorant
The only thing that is different is right now I see something amiss

Later, looking at the photos of his wife
Who was now among the stars
He wished he could fly
And finally have the height to see the difference
Between what is mundane and what is meaningful
And fly up to her
And let her know

The Historian

There was a great war once of old
between man and beast it is told
the beasts were not winning
and man he was grinning
in victory’s clutches so bold

A conspiracy led by a raven
treason ‘tween beasts in a cave an’
man wins a war
in exchange for
granting these creatures safe haven

Thus the war soon was ended
man helped by beasts he’d befriended
dogs who guarded
horses who rode
asses and oxen to carry the load
sharp eared cats
and clever rats
and birds who told secrets they knowed

But some beasts don’t easily tame
and continue to hunger the same
and if some men vanish
in a manner not mannish
might be there’s a raven to blame

There was a great war once again
And again and again and again
No war once was won
But no one could run
If they could, they wouldn’t be men

A raven might take some away
but war marches forth day after day
birds don’t build infernos
everyone with a heart knows
its the ones left behind we should blame

The Traveler

A cat walked through the crack of the door
the space between frame and the floor
he couldn’t quite choose
between the two rooms
so he walked through the crack of the door

A cat walked in the between
into places he’d not ever been
no one thought to make them
for no path could take them
to the places just this cat was now seein’

A cat walked into its mind
its body was left long behind
It found its own mystery
and solved its own history
but there was no path back home to find

A cat walked in its old home
took its old seat with its old great aplomb
But things weren’t the same
In its life it remade
its new world was reframed
by the roads it had laid
no one called out its name
and it hurt when it stayed
when the cat walked in its old home

A cat walked through the crack of the door
the space between frame and the floor
sick of debates
between two like fates
he walked through the crack of the door