Forgotten languages
1: Whispered hymns to a fledgling god. Myrrh and frankincense filling the air and turning the bed into an altar. A little apotheosis, every time.
2: A thousand years of religion tearing away from these words, leaving long flensing-strips of sacrifice and love in its place. A scab being removed, prickling, stinging, ecstatic.
3: Poached gods from conquered little kingdoms, once-proud progenitors being forced to bend the knee to their offspring. Libations of wine are drunk deep by the ground and form rivers of prayers beneath the skin of the world.
4: Seven silk scarves binding the wrists. Saffron perfume dabbed at the seven holy places. Eyes and gyration and ululation in the dark, in the place that is beneath the moon, but above the sands.
5: The beating waves against a shore, against your naked flesh. You step deeper into the waters. It fills your lungs. You cannot speak drifting at the bottom of the nephrite-black lake, but you do not drown, either.
6: Gore and leopardsfur. The taste of something you made yourself. No mourning, no madness, but always an ever-greater hunger.
7: Birthing half of history's civilization from between the two river-legs of your loins. No one speaks these words anymore. The syllables are sand and crumbling lightning-struck brick in the back of your throat.
?: The act of creation. Turning water and wheat and stone and sugarcane into something that becomes more than the sum of its parts. You know now why it is called the mother land.
