Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.
TRANSMIT - initiate the Kobayashi Maru signal - RECEIVE - initiate the Samaritan Syndrome - IT MUST OFTEN BE SO, SAM, WHEN THINGS ARE IN DANGER - "Hevel," says the Teacher. "Hevel. Everything is hevel." - WITNESS - the Wailing Warrior
Listen, sweetling. Can you hear it on the wind? A bitter cry that stretches to the heavens and doesn't quite make it. You might make the noise too, one day. Come closer, come closer, she means no harm. She's one of you.
See the hair cut short years later. Her cousin protests it'd look nicer grown out. See the earnest eyes even now. Rousseau might've been right. See the metal pendant-cross. She's a nice girl, the kind you bring home to your flesh-progenitors. Her friends call her "Credo".
Initiate the third eye, the secret truths beneath the meat-skin of the physiological. See the eagle on her shoulder. "Semper Fi! Do or die!" it screams in her ear, "Once and always and forever!" See the thorn-crown on her brow. The blood drips into her eyes. See the Murder-of-One. A family weight of raven-feathers and pestilent death bound in silver right angles around her neck. Her name is "God is my judge".
A nice girl is our little Templar, too nice to be real. But there she is, and her halo hasn't faded yet, even as she burns through mobs. Look away as she tries to scrub the spots off, sweetling - it's rude to stare. She feels so keenly, our threadbare Knight Errant, so easily moved by every Harry Hard-Luck and Sally Sob-Story.
She discovers the truth of an island, and she weeps for a fate she can't change. She learns the truth of the siblings in stone, and she weeps for a sacrifice forever unrecognized. She listens to all the tales of the old forest, and she weeps for the pain they feel of their missteps.
She watches them hold the line and die standing and die sitting and die lying down. She weeps for all the time cut short. She watches them run and run and run themselves into the ground, straining and straining and straining until they break. She weeps for the shell that's left behind. She watches them harden their hearts to the pain and the loss, calluses on the soul that she can never form. She weeps for that, too.
Flesh wrapping velvet wrapping iron. Iron makes a terrible core for your kind. She hasn't broken yet. She's shattered so tightly the pieces remain upright. The shards are pointed inward, scraping, chafing at her spirit so she never hurts the children.
You were a child once, sweetling, before we came to you. Do you remember the days when you didn't see the walls and the rot and the teeth in the dark? Do you long for those days yet? She does. She tries to console herself with the lie that she can go back to it one day. That eventually "This too shall pass".
"This too shall pass," she whispers, as her fingers are flayed to the bone in hardscrabble gains she can’t keep.
"This too shall pass," she weeps, as she watches too many too quickly forget the lessons of their predecessors written with blood.
"This too shall pass," she pleads, drinking deeply from her painful cup, as she silently begs her god to take it from her. But she is devoted to the end, so utterly faithful; when he doesn’t, she drinks again.
Everything will pass again, sweetling. Everything has already passed. We watch it all happen.
She hates how nothing changes, how sons commit the sins of their fathers and daughters take the poisons their mothers once imbibed. She hates that no one listens, no one sees, no one seems to feel. She hates the paranoia it inspires. She hates her hate, because she thinks she fails her god telling her to love.
We'll tell you a secret, sweetling: She loves them all so desperately she can't ignore the stains.
She hates Egypt; and Maine and the Carpathians, too. She hates it because she hates what she did there. The land hates her for it too, she's certain. She tells no one about the eyes following her every step, in the forests and deserts and ruins where no one goes, the judgement she feels in the gaze of everyone she meets. She won't ask their forgiveness - she's certain they won't give it.
We'll tell you one more: they wouldn't understand if she did.
Look, sweetling. Can you see it with your simple refractive eyes? Her hands are smeared with blood and Filth and the detritus of a thousand choices. Your hands will look like that too, one day. Don't let her see them, or she'll weep for you too.
(partial copy by the Curator from an unidentified book with a [annoying] tendency to change its contents)
