alnahn’tahna’shoreshik
Sermon Sixteen
he Hortator wandered through the Mourning Hold, wrestling with the lessons he had learned.
²They were slippery in his mind. He could not always keep the words straight and knew that this was a danger.
³He wandered to find Vivec, his lord and master, the glory of the image of Veloth, and found him of all places in the Temple of False Thinking.
⁴There, clockwork shears were taking off Vivec’s hair. A beggar king had brought his loom and was making of the hair an incomplete map of adulthood and death.
⁵Nerevar said, ‘Why are you doing this, milord?’
Vivec said, ‘To make room for the fire.’
⁶And the Hortator could see that Vivec was out of sorts, though not because of the impending new power to come. ⁷The golden warrior-poet had been exercising his Water Face as well, learned from the dreughs before he was born.
⁸Nerevar said, ‘Is this to keep you from the fire?’
Vivec said, ‘It is so that I may see with truth. ⁹It, and my place here at the altar of Padhome in the house of False Thinking, serve so that I may see beyond my own secrets. ¹⁰The Water Face cannot lie. It comes from the ocean, which is too busy to think, much less lie. Moving water resembles truth by its trembling.’
¹¹Nerevar said, ‘I am afraid to become slipshod in my thinking.’
Vivec said, ‘Reach heaven by violence then.’
¹²So to quiet his mind the Hortator chose from the Fight Racks an axe. ¹³He named it and moved on to the first moon.
¹⁴There, Nerevar was greeted by the Parliament of Craters, who knew him by title and resented his presence, for he was to be a ruling king of earth and this was the lunar realm. ¹⁵They shifted around him in a pattern of entrapment.
¹⁶‘The moon does not recognize crowns or scepters,’ they said, ‘nor the representatives of kingdoms below, lion or serpent or mathematician. ¹⁷We are the graves of those that have migrated and become ancient countries. We seek no Queens or thrones. ¹⁸Your appearance is decidedly solar, which is to say a library of stolen ideas. We are neither tear nor sorrow. ¹⁹Our revolution succeeded in the manner that is was written. You are the Hortator and unwelcome here.’
²⁰And so Nerevar carved at the grave ghosts until he was out of breath and their Parliament could make no new laws.
²¹He said, ‘I am not of the slaves that perish.’
Of the members of Parliament only a few survived the Hortator’s attack.
²²A surviving Crater said, ‘Appropriation is nothing new. Everything happens of itself. This motif is by no means unassociated with hero myths. ²³You have not acted with the creative impulse; you fall below the weight of destiny. We are graves but not coffins. Know the difference. ²⁴You have only dug more and supplied no ghosts to reside within. Central to your claim is the predominance of frail events. ²⁵To be judged by the earth is to sit on a throne of wonder why. Damage us more and you will find naught but the absence of our dead.’
²⁶The ending of the words is ASV.