#progeniture

[envraccity]

#ladescendance #progeniture #6piedssousterre #independant #lecrew #lapetitecouronne

[toutplacid]

Enfants tombés du ciel — feutres studio couleurs primaires, carnet nº71, 2001

[postcardsfromanothershore-blog]

Vox Dei.

[broamalia-blog]

Progeniture, Part 2 (smaller sections, more appropriate to the medium)

...Ah, but there it goes again, she thought. Her mind was following the little side-paths that took her away from the present moment and into the past. She dug her fingernails into her palm to refocus.

She'd been standing still throughout the morning and well into mid-day, intently watching a lump that was nearly hidden in the deep underbrush, about fifty paces back from the opposite tree line. She knew the lump was watching her just as intently, though it had been equally motionless.

When it finally did shift, a little after mid-day, her leathery cheek twitched. The waiting game was one she never lost. A small, shaggy boy-creature approached hesitantly, with a low slink that would drop into a sideways knuckle-walk every few steps. He paused frequently to sit back on his haunches, and peer up into her eyes.

He knew where to find a lie, she gave the little pup some credit for that. It meant that not only had he dealt with other traders in the past, he'd survived their treachery.

His own eyes flashed between thick chords of matted black hair, buried in a face made dark from several layers of grime and dust, making them seem to shine even brighter.

Strange eyes, the old woman mused. They glowed a brilliant emerald in the sunlight that filtered through the canopy, but with a rich depth like they'd absorbed shadows from the deep woods.

[broamalia-blog]

Progeniture, Chapter 1 (WIP... Any note or suggestions [positive or negative--my skin is thick enough]are more than welcome. Otherwise i hope up you enjoy!

The shrivelled, ancient woman stood cloaked in shadows, hidden beneath the small meadow’s tree line. She leaned heavily on her staff, imagining that she was sending roots down into the earth. The sensation that her flesh was slowly transforming into wood had become familiar over the ages. She knew that eventually she would just grow into the soil, and become another shrivelled little Father tree. She’d been sceptical, once. When she’d been in her weening decades, the old stories had seemed far too bizarre to be true. She’d always considered them to be strange myths anyway, but when the village Elders tried explaining that they weren’t myths, that they were real events of the past, she’d… scoffed, to put it mildly. For almost fifty years, she would laugh whenever she passed by thier grove. it still made her chuckle to remember how furious Elder Beech would become whenever he heard her approaching. One time he even tried to take a step toward her, and would have snapped and fallen if there hadn’t been a school of children nearby to catch him. She still wasn’t sure what he planned to do if he reached her, but then he probably didn’t either— the thoughts of Elders often took many days to unfold. That was why it was amazing that she could stir such anger in them. She’d taken some pride in it. She’d been a terribly arrogant little sapling, according to them, and her mother. The centuries had crept on and on, however. As she came into her middling centuries she began to venture further and further from the tribe’s hidden vale. She slowly came to know more of the world, of its inhabitants, of their wants and their ways. She saw things with her own eyes too fantastic and bizarre to put into words. She traded with creatures impossibly strange, and often strangly similar to herself. She’d heard stories that made her tribe’s myths seem almost mundane. What truly changed her mind, though, were the changes that began to take place in her own body. Her skin grew course, and rough. Her joints became stiff and rigid, prone to creaking whenever she moved. Her bones, however, grew supple and strong. It was in her sixth century that she began to pay more attention to the old tales. Many of them sounded absurd even now—especially the story of the Ancestors.

Before the five Eon Winters, and the four Eon Summers, the myth claimed, the Ancestors had tightened their grip, and tried to rule over all things—even life and death. It was said that their reign lasted for a mere twelve millennia. Within that short time, though, they tore apart the whole world and painstakingly remade it. Their re-wrought landscape was one of definition, order, structure. They surrounded themselves with massive palaces and temples which rose so high that they scraped the sky’s underbelly. It was the Ancestors’ fortress in the stream of time, built in an effort to control the future. And it was hardly suprising that they sought control. The myth said that the Ancestors rarely survived their first century. Their brief lives left them with no time to prepare for their release, and so they struggled to ignore, deny, and delay the Great Embrace any way they could. All things must die, though. This has always been an unchangeable law. And yet the Ancestors thought themselves above it. They believed themselves to be new gods, exempt from the old god’s laws. They sought ways to overcome such limitations, and through countless hopeless generations they searched for a path around mortality. The Ancestor’s learning had grown so immense toward the end of their reign, the myth claimed, that they gained mastery over the Life Scroll— the sacred text that permeates the body of all life. The Scroll blesses all creatures with form and function, and upon it the history of all life’s forms are transcribed. It was through their manipulations of the Scroll that some, the ancestors of the old woman’s first tribe, eventually found a path. Not immortality, maybe, but close enough. They read paragraphs from the Scrolls of the Bristecone, Cypress and Yew trees, copied them, and found places for them in their own Scrolls. It was the First Mating, and it gave their offspring the nearly ageless strength and vitality of the Father trees. Of course that was just before the first Eon Winter, which lasted fifteen millenia. It froze the Ancestor’s world of order, crushing it beneath miles of ice. Most myths were in agreement that this is what truly forced different kinds of men into becoming different species of men.

She’d been letting her mind wander off, the old woman realized. It did so quite often did these days. She wondered if it was finally nearing time for her release. She remembered her mother becoming that way as her own time came— more absent-minded, more frequently lost in the cavern of memories that stretched back into eternity… Just think what truths lived in such deep memories, like those of the tribe ancients, who’d seen nearly five hundred centuries, each. Did they have truths that they never shared, about the Ancestors, about what they did?