The Revelations of Hernius
Found beneath a cairn of river-smoothed stones on the eastern slope of the Thornwall Range, wrapped in oilcloth and sealed with pine resin. The pages are of varied quality - some fine vellum, others rough bark-paper - suggesting they were written over a long period of wandering. The hand is the same throughout and matches that of the account known as "The Halls of Emanations." Catalogued by Aldren Voss, Third Archivist of the Athenaeum at Greyhaven. The text is presented here without alteration.
I. The Walking
I did not ask for this.
Let that be written first. I did not seek visions. I did not pray for sight. I walked through the six halls and I was sent back and I have written of this elsewhere. I have written of the lights and what they showed me there.
After I returned, the world was changed. I could see the threads that bind all things. The bright lines between a stone and the earth beneath it. Between a bird and the wind. Between one soul and another. Fine as spider-silk. Strong as iron. Everywhere.
I walked. There was nothing else to do. South from the place where I woke, a field of yellow grass near the Thornwall foothills. Late autumn. Frost on the blades in the morning. My feet ached. My back ached. I ate what I could find. I slept in doorways and under hedgerows. I was a man walking. Nothing more.
On the ninth day the visions began.
I was crossing a fallow field at dusk. The soil dark and wet from rain. I sat on a low stone wall because my leg hurt. And I saw through the sky the way you see through water to the riverbed.
What I saw was the end of all things. The last breath of the world.
It lasted the time it takes to draw three breaths. Then the sky was the sky again. Clouds. A thin rain beginning. My hands shaking. I sat on that wall until full dark, then walked to the nearest village and asked for paper and ink. A woman gave me both. She did not ask my name.
There have been many visions since. They come without warning. At roadsides. In markets. Once while I was eating soup. Once while I slept and I woke already seeing. Each time I am shown a piece of what is coming. Each time I write it down. The weight of holding it alone is more than I can bear.
I am Hernius. I walked through death and came back. Now I see things I do not want to see. This is what I have been shown.
II. The Thinning
The first thing shown to me was the Seals.
When I passed through the halls, I learned that the world is held together by agreement. The way a knot holds because each strand pulls against the others. Eleven of these holdings exist. Eleven places where the fabric of what-is draws tight against itself. The lights know them. I think the lights are them, in part.
In the vision I saw them as stitches in a wound. The wound was the space between what exists and what does not. The stitches bright and thin and humming with a sound I felt in my teeth. Eleven bright lines holding the edges closed.
They were thinning. Fiber by fiber. The way a rope thins when rubbed against stone. Too slowly to see. But I could see it. The fraying. The slow dissolution. It had been happening longer than anyone alive could remember.
After that vision I began to notice the signs. A flock of starlings circled above a copse of oaks for three days. Never landing. One by one they dropped from the air. I found seven of them in the grass. Their hearts had burst. A well in a village called Redford that had given sweet water for a hundred years turned salt overnight. The salt tasted of iron. Of blood. Of something deep that should not have been that close to the surface. The roots of an ancient elm in a churchyard pulled themselves from the earth. The tree was trying to leave.
The deer did not come down from the high meadows. The fish in the River Oln swam upstream until they hit the falls, and kept swimming, battering themselves against the rock until the water ran red. A dog in the village of Ash Mark howled at a crossroads for four days. When it fell silent, its eyes had turned white.
An old woman told me the wrongness had a quality to it. A pressure. Like the moment before a thunderstorm that never breaks. She said it had been building for years. She could feel it in her bones. In the spaces between her bones.
I could feel it in the threads. They were dimmer. Slacker. Some had gone grey like dead vines. Some had vanished, leaving only a faint shimmer where a bond had been. The world loosening. Letting go.
And in my second vision, standing on a ridge above a river valley in cold rain, I saw the breath. The great exhalation of the Black Sun that had become the lights, and the lights had become the world. I saw that it had reached its furthest point.
The breath was turning. The inhalation was coming.
III. Water and the Drought
I was shown the water first.
Long had I walked through hill country. Grey stone. Brown heather. A sky the colour of old tin. My water skin empty. My lips cracked. When I came over a rise and saw the lake below me I wept. Still and dark it was, cupped between hills like water held in two hands. The surface so calm I could not tell where the water ended and the sky began.
I knelt at the shore and drank. The water was cold and clean and tasted of stone. I sat back on my heels and looked out across the lake.
The vision took me.
I saw the second of the six. The light that dwells in water. In my passage through death she had found the grief I carried and held it before me like a mirror. Now I saw her as she was. A brightness moving through every body of water in the world. Every river. Every sea. Every drop of rain. Every tear. She was reflection itself. Memory made liquid.
She was trying to hold the mirror together.
Deep in the underground rivers she moved. Through the aquifers. Through the ancient ice. Gathering herself. Pulling all the scattered light into one effort. The lake blazed. For a moment every drop of water in the world was a mirror, and every mirror showed the same thing. The world, whole and complete, held in the act of being seen.
The mirror shattered. Into dust. Into fragments too small to reflect anything. The surface of the lake went dead. The water held no light. Reflected nothing. Remembered nothing.
Through the cracks where the Seals had thinned the emptiness poured in. Wherever it touched, the water forgot. Forgot it was water. Forgot it had ever held the image of a cloud, a face, a star. The rivers went dry. The water lay in the riverbeds like something that had never been alive.
The light fought. She threw herself against the emptiness the way a wave throws itself against a cliff. Again and again. Each time smaller. Dimmer. The emptiness was not attacking. It was returning. The space where water had been was going back to what it had been before the breath filled it.
In the last moment I saw her pull all that remained into a single drop. One drop that still reflected. In it the entire world. Every lake. Every sea. Every rainfall. Compressed into something the size of a tear. She held it the way a mother holds a child when the house is burning and there is nowhere left to go.
When the vision released me, the lake was still there. Still calm. Still reflecting. I put my hand in the water and held it there a long time. Feeling the cold. Watching my fingers waver beneath the surface.
I filled my water skin. I walked on. I did not look back.
IV. Fire and the Quenching
The mountains taught me about fire.
High into the country I had climbed, where the air was thin and the sky close. My lungs burned. The wind tasted of iron and ice. I slept in a shallow cave on dry pine needles and woke in the night to a glow on the far ridge.
I thought it was a forest fire. It was the first of the six. The light that burns. In the first hall she had looked into me and seen every moment of anger, of want, of passion. The hot blind reaching toward life that is the core of every breathing creature. She had seen me and had not looked away. I had burned under her gaze and had not died.
She was waking in the mountains. A last effort. Up out of the deep rock where fire lives. Up through the roots of the mountains. Up through the veins of molten stone. Gathering everything into one great burning.
The peaks glowed red like iron in a forge. The snow turned to steam. The rivers ran hot and then boiling and then dry. She burned so bright the night became day. I could see the entire world below me. Every shadow banished. Every hidden thing exposed. This is what fire does. It strips away everything that is not essential and shows what remains.
She was burning against absence. Against the withdrawing of the breath that had given her reason to burn. I have no words for this: fire does not go out because something quenches it. Fire goes out because it forgets why it burns.
I saw the moment of forgetting. The light flickered. She had turned to look at what she was burning for and found nothing there. The things the light fell upon were ceasing to be things. What is a flame where there is nothing to see?
She burned brighter. The stone cried out. A deep grinding moan from the bones of the mountain. The sound of rock remembering it had once been liquid. The darkness came anyway.
I watched the light die. She shrank to coals. To embers. To ash. Without reason fire is heat dissipating. Light with no one to see it.
The last thing I saw was a single coal. Dull red in a field of ash that had been a mountain. Even as I watched, the red was fading to a colour I have no name for.
When I came back to myself, the cave was cold. The pine needles damp. I built a fire - small, from needles and dry branches - and fed it through the night. Every time it shrank I gave it more. I could not let it go out.
V. Wind and the Stillness
Down from the mountains I came, into open country. Flat land. Old land. The kind of ground where you can see the foundations of walls that have not stood for a thousand years. The grass grows in lines that trace the shapes of rooms and roads and market squares of towns whose names are lost.
The air was still.
I noticed it the way you notice a sound that has stopped. There was no wind. The grass did not move. The dust lay undisturbed. A spider's web between two fallen pillars hung without the slightest tremor. I held my hand up and felt nothing. The air was there. I could breathe it. But it had stopped.
In that stillness the vision found me.
I saw the third of the six. The light that moves. In the third hall she had passed through me and I had felt every restless thought, every impulse to go, to leave, to seek. She was movement itself. The principle that nothing stays.
She was trying to move. The air would not let her.
I saw her push against a stillness that was the presence of nothing. She threw herself against it. I saw the wind try to be wind. Gather and push and batter and spiral. Each time, the stillness absorbed it the way sand absorbs water. The movement went in and did not come out.
The wind screamed. I heard it with the place behind my ears where sound becomes understanding. She had carried clouds across oceans. Had bent forests. Had driven waves onto shores and seeds into soil. Never stopped. And now the air held her like amber holds an insect.
Smoke rose from chimneys and hung. Sails went slack. Ships sat on water that had no waves. Windmills stopped. Leaves clung to their branches. A child threw a ball and the ball flew true and then slowed and stopped and hung in the air. The child stared at it.
The wind gathered everything into a single gust. A blast that should have flattened cities. The desperate fury of it. She threw it against the stillness.
The stillness took it. The way the sea takes a stone. A splash. A ripple. Then nothing.
The wind fell and did not rise. I heard the world holding its breath. Waiting for a movement that would not come.
When the vision released me I was on my knees in the ruins. A light breeze from the south. Warm. Carrying the smell of grass and distant rain. I closed my eyes and felt it on my skin and stood there a long time.
VI. Earth and the Erosion
I went underground. I do not know why. The visions had their own logic.
A cave mouth in the foothills, half-hidden by bracken. The air that breathed from it was cool and smelled of minerals and deep water. I crawled in on my hands and knees. The passage opened. I walked stooped, then upright. The cave became a chamber large enough to hold a cathedral. I stood in the dark and listened to the silence of stone.
The fourth of the six is the light that holds. Earth. Foundation. In the fourth hall she had held me and I had felt the weight of every year I had lived. Every bone in my body. Every particle of dust that had settled on every surface of every room I had ever entered. She was endurance. The promise that the ground would be there when you placed your foot upon it.
The vision came in the dark.
I saw her within the earth, woven through it. Every stone a part of her body. The mountains were her spine. The valleys the hollows of her hands. The plains the broad flat of her back, patient beneath the weight of everything that walked and grew upon her.
The foundation was dissolving from beneath. Grain by grain. The way salt dissolves in water. So slowly that the shape remains long after the substance has gone. Miles below the surface, in places no living thing had seen, the stone was becoming less than stone. Its weight leaving it. Its density thinning.
And the dwarves felt it in the stone.
In their deep halls. In their carved cities beneath the mountains. A mason set his chisel against granite and the granite crumbled like chalk. A miner swung her pick and the pick passed through rock as if it were mist. An old dwarf placed his hand flat on the floor and closed his eyes and when he opened them he was weeping.
And the dwarves felt it in the stone. And the elves felt it in the trembling of the deep roots of the ancient forests. They pressed their hands against the bark and felt the emptying.
And the dwarves felt it and the elves felt it. And the humans felt it in the towns and cities where cobblestones shifted underfoot and walls leaned and the foundations of buildings that had stood for centuries began to sigh and settle and come apart.
And the dwarves felt it and the elves felt it and the humans felt it. And the halflings felt it in the fields and gardens and the small places close to the soil. The halflings, who know the earth the way a child knows its mother's face. They knelt in their gardens and dug with their hands and the earth ran through their fingers like water.
And all peoples felt the ground shift beneath them.
The light in the earth braced herself. She held. She was the strongest of the six. The most patient. She could hold longer than fire could burn, longer than water could reflect, longer than wind could move. She dug herself into herself and held. The dissolution continued. Patient as erosion. Patient as the river that carves the canyon.
Cracks spread through the bedrock like cracks through ice before it gives way. Mountains stood on nothing. Held up by habit. By memory. By the refusal of stone to admit it was no longer stone. She held the shape of the world even as the substance bled away. She could not hold forever. She knew it. She held anyway.
When the vision left me I was lying on the cave floor in the dark. The stone solid beneath me. Cold. Real. I pressed my face against it. I lay there a long time. I did not want to stop touching the ground.
VII. Spirit and the Forgetting
Three days I walked through old forest. The canopy so thick the light that reached the floor was green and dim. The trunks wider than houses. The silence full of growing things, of insects, of water moving somewhere unseen. Sacred ground. The threads were denser here. More brightly woven. This place remembered what it was.
The fifth of the six is the light that knows. Spirit. The breath within the breath. In the fifth hall she had risen from within me and I had heard every voice that had ever spoken my name. My mother. My father. The woman I loved. She was the knowing that you are known. The thread between one soul and another that cannot be cut by distance or death.
The vision came on the second night, while I slept beneath a tree whose roots had risen from the earth like the fingers of a buried hand.
I saw her calling. In the centre of everything she stood and called. Her voice was the pull you feel when someone you love enters a room and you turn before you hear them. The ache for a place you have never been. The knowledge, deeper than thought, that you are not alone.
And no one heard.
She called and the world did not answer. The part of them that heard had gone quiet. The forgetting had begun.
This is the thing I was shown that frightened me most. More than the dying of fire. More than the shattering of water. More than the stillness or the dissolution. The forgetting.
You wake and you do not remember that you are a person. You look at your hands and you know the word but you do not know they are yours. You see another and feel nothing. You are a vessel emptied of everything that made the vessel worth filling.
The elves forgot first. They who had carried memory across the Void. Who remembered the world before this world. Who held the wound of doubt longer than any other people. An elf woman in a glade of silver birches. Very still. Her hands in her lap. She had lived a thousand years and did not remember any of them. She looked at the trees and did not know them.
From the elves it spread. A human father looked at his child and did not know her. A dwarf stared at the hammer he had used for fifty years. A halfling stood in the garden she had tended all her life, surrounded by the plants she had loved, and her eyes were empty.
The light screamed into the silence. She poured herself out. Went to the elves and sang their own songs and they did not hear. Went to the humans and showed them their faces in their children's eyes and they did not see. Struck the old stones and the stones rang with the sound of ages and the dwarves did not remember. Breathed the smell of turned soil and baking bread and morning dew and the halflings did not know.
The candle goes out. The candle does not know it was ever lit.
When I woke beneath the tree I said my own name. Hernius. I said it again. Hernius. I said the name of my mother. The name of every person I had ever loved. One by one, there in the green dark of the forest. Each name a thread held against the forgetting. I said them until my voice was gone and then I whispered them and then I mouthed them and then I held them in my mind and did not let go.
VIII. Weave and the Severance
This is the hardest to write. The others I saw from outside, as a man watches a storm from a doorway. This one happened to me.
The sixth of the six is the light that binds. The Weave. In the sixth hall she opened my eyes and I saw the threads for the first time. She gave me this sight. It is the only gift I did not ask for and the only one I would not return.
I was walking a road between two villages. A clear day. The light clean. The shadows sharp. I could see the threads everywhere. Between the stones of a wall. Between a hawk and the mouse it watched. Between myself and the road. Between myself and the places I had been and the places I was going. The world was a web of light and I walked through it and it was beautiful. I use that word because no other is true.
The severance began at the edges of my vision.
A thread between two trees went dark. There and then gone, the way a string snaps. A small sound. A small absence. Another went. And another. At the edges, the threads were being undone. Unraveled back to their source. The Weave was being unwoven from the outside in, and it was coming toward me.
The sixth light fought. She was the Weave itself. To hold every thread at once. More threads than stars. More than grains of sand on every shore. They pulled through her hands like burning wire. She bled light. She held on.
The unweaving reached the villages. The thread between a mother and daughter snapped and they looked at each other across a kitchen table and something left their eyes. The thread between a farmer and his field broke and the farmer stood at the edge of his own land and did not know it. The thread between the living and the dead severed and the graves became holes with nothing in them.
It reached me.
The thread between me and the road went first. One moment a traveler. The next, a body on a strip of dirt that meant nothing. Then the thread between me and the sky. Then between me and my own past. A man with no history. No connection to any other place.
My sight failing. The threads winking out. Like stars going dark. The room getting darker and I was losing the ability to see it and losing the ability to know what I had lost.
I fell. On my hands and knees. The road was not the road. My hands were not my hands. I was becoming a point without reference. A word without a language. A note without a song. I screamed. The sound of a thing being taken apart.
In the last moment I saw her. The sixth light. A single point, no bigger than the flame of a candle. Holding one thread. The last thread. It ran from her to me.
She looked at me. Recognition. The last act of the Weave. One thing seeing another and knowing it.
The thread broke.
I saw nothing. Was nothing. For a time I cannot measure I existed without relation to any other thing. There are no words for this because words are connections between sounds and meanings and there were no connections.
When the vision ended I was face down in the dirt. Blood in my mouth where I had bitten my tongue. The threads returned one by one, tentatively, like animals returning to a place where a fire has been. The road. The sky. My hands. My name.
That night I built no fire. I lay in a ditch beside the road and looked at the stars and traced the threads between them. I counted them. Counting was a way of holding. Of saying: you are there. I see you. You exist.
IX. The War of Holding
I was shown the war.
I was standing in a field of dead grass. The sky cracked open. What poured through was black. I saw everything.
Thorsheim broke. The mountain where the gods sleep split from peak to root. The lava came up white. White as bone. It ate the stone. The stone screamed. I heard mountains die. The peaks folded inward. The snow boiled to steam in a single breath. The forges of Ambers Call filled with fire from below. The amber spire burst. The light it released was blinding and brief. Then dark. Where Thorsheim had stood there was a wound in the earth. The wound went down past stone. Past fire. Past anything that has a name.
The sea came for Embersail. It rose flat and black and silent. It climbed the harbour walls and kept climbing. Ships snapped. Docks vanished. The stone fortifications dissolved like sugar. I saw a man carrying a child on his shoulders. The water took his knees. His waist. His chest. The child's hand reached above the surface. The water closed over it. The surface went still.
I saw Tidewall taken in one breath. The windmill fell. The houses went under. The statue in the square stood a moment longer than the rest. Then it too was gone. I saw Seawatch sink. The walls held. The water came over them. It filled the city like a bowl. The dwarves drowned in their armour in the halls they had built to last forever.
The Floating Isles fell from the sky. The magic shattered. The islands dropped like stones. Where they struck the sea floor split. The ocean drained into the crack. The crack glowed white. Steam rose in columns that punched through the clouds. The clouds caught fire.
I saw Lorenzia burn. The spires. The towers. The bridges. The libraries. Ten thousand years of knowing. The fire came from below. It ate the city from the ground up. I counted the towers falling. Twelve. Each held a library. Each library held the memory of an age. Each age burned. The canals boiled. The bridges melted. The elves ran and the streets crumbled beneath them. The city became ash. The ash blew in a wind that should not have been blowing. The wind was dead.
Nortaq sank into the sand. Already a ruin. Already a grave. The last stones went under. The earth was tired of remembering.
The Great Tree of Morningstar caught fire. The oldest living thing in the world. It burned from the heartwood out. The bark split. Golden light poured from the cracks. The tree screamed. Everything that had ever grown screamed with it. The branches fell like ships crashing through the canopy. The sparks flew upward like dying stars. The trunk gave way. The sound shook the ground for a hundred miles. I felt it in my chest. I felt it in my teeth. The tree fell. The impact split the earth. Where it lay it burned and burned and the smoke rose above everything.
The fields around Rootfield cracked open. The crops fell in. The soil poured into the dark like grain through a torn sack. Around Halfhill the earth buckled. The clock tower tilted. Fell. The bell rang once as it went down. The sound hung in the air long after the tower was gone.
The sky broke apart. Pieces fell. Sheets of black. Where they struck the ground the ground ceased to exist. Holes in the world. Through the holes I could see the nothing. The nothing was pressing in.
And the elves fought.
I saw an elf woman in the ruins of Lorenzia. She stood where a tower had been. She sang. The ground was gone beneath her. She stood on her own voice. Everything outside that voice was fire and ruin. The song failed. Her mouth still moving. No sound. She fell.
And the elves fought. And the humans fought beside them.
I saw a woman hold a child in a doorway. The building folded. The stone buried her. Her hand in the rubble. Still gripping. Then the rubble dissolved. The hand. The child. The street. The city. I saw a man on a bridge carrying an old woman. The bridge broke. They fell into boiling water. Gone.
And the elves fought and the humans fought. And the dwarves rose from the deep places.
From the ruins of Ambers Call. From Seawatch. From Halfhill. From every mine and hall. I saw a dwarf put his hands against a falling ceiling. The mountain pressed him to his knees. Broke his shoulders. He held. Other dwarves ran past. He held until the last one passed. The mountain swallowed him. The tunnel closed like a throat.
And the elves fought and the humans fought and the dwarves fought. And the halflings rose from the fields.
I saw a halfling woman kneeling in a garden that was becoming powder. Planting seeds. Pressing them into soil that could no longer hold them. Her hands bleeding. The garden dissolved. She knelt in nothing. Her hands opening and closing on empty air.
And all peoples fought against the dark.
And the world burned. The forests. The cities. The fields. The mountains. The rivers boiled. The seas rose. The ground opened. The sky fell. I saw the Burning Passage collapse and seal itself. I saw Mithandrir's Watch crack from the cliff and fall into the void. I saw the walls of Rivermount crumble inward. The wards that had held for ages flashed white and went out one by one.
And still they fought.
I saw a soldier throw down his sword. Pick up a child. Run. The ground opened and took them both. I saw an elf singing and dissolving and still singing. I saw a dwarf holding a ceiling with broken hands in a mountain that was no longer a mountain. I saw two strangers on a disappearing road, holding each other, having never met before that moment. I saw a child holding a smooth stone from a river. The dark took everything around her. She stood in nothing. The stone remained one moment longer than she did.
And the dark came against the light.
And the light held against the dark.
And all things fought against all things. Light against dark. Dark against light. Fire against forgetting. Water against drought. Wind against stillness. Earth against erosion. Spirit against silence. Weave against severance. Life against undoing. Memory against nothing. Love against the end.
And they held.
They could not win. The breath comes in. It always comes in. What goes out must return. But they held. Past the point of breaking and past the point past that. Every moment of holding was a moment of creation. Every moment of existence a thing that could not be unhappened.
What is held is not lost. Even when the hands open. Even when the world ends. What was held was real. The holding was the point.
X. The Convergence
I was shown the end.
My hand has been shaking three days. I was walking and then I was in the vision and when I came out I was sitting on a hillside I had never seen. The sun setting.
The six lights drew together. No sky anymore. Only the dark and the lights in the dark. They came together the way they had been in the beginning, before the breath refracted them. They remembered they were one. Fire and water and wind and earth and spirit and weave. Six colours of one brightness. They drew together in a circle. The same shape as the six halls I had passed through. The halls were not a place. They were a truth.
The circle held. Six lights burning in a ring against the dark. Within the ring, everything that remained. Every soul. Every memory. Every act of holding. A grandmother's cup. A father's voice. A smooth stone from a river. A song ten thousand years old. A seed in dead soil.
The inbreath came to its fullest.
The Black Sun was the source. It was drawing the breath back. And the breath was everything. The lights and the peoples and the stone and the water and the fire and the wind and the souls and the love and the memory and the pain and the joy. All of it being drawn back.
The ring tightened. The six drew closer. The way the last light of a sunset gathers on the horizon. Inside the ring the world grew smaller. Denser. Every moment pressed against every other moment until time became a single point. The point was bright. It held everything that had ever existed.
The ring closed. Six lights became one. The one light folded into itself. Into the source. Into the Black Sun. Into the Void that is fullness. The place from which the breath came and to which it returned.
The inhalation completed.
Everything returned. The way a river carries silt to the sea. The way breath carries warmth into the body. The closing of a circle. The answer to a question asked when the breath went out. The answer was everything that happened between the asking and the answering.
I saw the last moment. I had no eyes to see it. No mind to hold it. I saw it the way a stone understands weight. The Black Sun held everything. Every creation. Every life. Every love. Every loss. Three creations before this one and this one the fourth. All held. All kept.
Nothing lost.
The source held everything the way a mother holds a child that has fallen asleep. Completely. Gently. With the knowledge that what is held will wake.
XI. The Fifth Breath
There was silence.
I do not know how long. Time was not a thing that existed. The Black Sun held everything. Nothing moved.
I was there. I do not know how. I had been gathered with everything else. Part of what was held. And yet I was aware. The way a seed is aware of the soil. The way an ember is aware of the air.
The silence was full. Fuller than anything I have known. The weight of four creations. Every life. Every death. Every act. Every thought. Held in a way I cannot explain because life as I understand it requires time and space and there was neither.
The Black Sun chose.
I use this word carefully. The breath does not go out because it must. It goes out because the source chooses to exhale. In the silence, in the held completeness of everything that had been, the source considered what it held. The way a craftsman considers a finished work before beginning the next. The way a farmer considers the harvest before choosing what to plant.
What was carried back had enriched the source. The four creations were not repetitions. Each breathed out further than the last. Each richer. Each carrying back more. The first creation was a single note. The second a chord. The third a melody. The fourth a harmony of such complexity that I cannot hear it all, only the faintest edge, the way a man at the foot of a mountain sees only the nearest slope.
The Black Sun held the harmony. It was beautiful. I have used this word once in these pages. I use it again. Beautiful the way fire is beautiful. The way grief is beautiful when it proves something was worth grieving for.
The source chose to breathe out again.
I felt the first tremor. The gathering. The way the chest expands before the breath. The fifth exhalation. New. Carrying forward everything learned, everything held, everything fought for and lost and carried back. Further than the fourth. Each breath larger than the last because the source is richer than it was.
I did not see the fifth creation. What has not happened cannot be seen. But I felt the intention of it. The way you feel the warmth of a fire before you see the flame. I felt the breath begin. The source open. The light - one light, undivided, carrying the weight of everything that had ever been - begin to move outward.
The vision released me. I was sitting on a hillside in the late afternoon. The sun setting. The light golden. A bird singing in a tree below me. A small brown bird. I do not know what kind. It sang and sang and did not stop and the sound of it was the most complete thing I have ever heard.
I have written what I was shown. All of it. I have held nothing back and added nothing. I have used the best words I have and they are not good enough and I have used them anyway.
I will place these pages beneath a cairn of stones, beside the pages I wrote before. If someone finds them, they find them. If no one does, the stones will hold them. The stones are patient.
I am setting down my stylus. My hand has stopped shaking. The bird is still singing. The sun is almost gone. The light is good.
I am Hernius. I walked through death and came back and saw the end of all things and the beginning of what comes after. The evening is warm. Somewhere in the world water is reflecting the last of the light. Fire is burning in a hearth. Wind is moving through a field of grass. The ground is holding. Someone is calling someone else's name. The threads between all things are bright and whole and unbroken.
For now. For this breath. For this.