It was a starry night, above a world filled with the rich, rolling blue of seas. Waves capped in silver and cream, so vast they would have blotted out the sky to any human who stood on the ocean's shore, rolled up and over themselves, seeming to hang poised at their apex before crashing to their place in the tide with a deafening roar that covered the shores in abandonment. Not a living thing for miles dwelt above the ground, but had there been someone, they might have been able to hear the lustrous, heartbreaking strains of whalesong that the waves carried with them. The rivers in those realms ran silver, thick as the drink of Immortality, the bathwater of merfolk, the wine of the Fey. Winter never froze its beauty; summer never baked it to sultry stillness. Vast, spiraled towers of black and white marble and glass stood rooted, forever unmoving, except when a brittle bit of rubble, a brass roofing tile or jagged fragment of striped turret, fell from its height in the heaven to break the tide-smoothed virginity of the wet sand, always dark. The footprints of Men were forgotten centuries ago, even by the stars, who had memories longer than the span of the earth.
Was it possible one still lived? That under the starry dome of the world, in the vast swaths of silence unplumbed by the green and blue whorls of brinèd chaos, there might yet dwell, in the hovelish ruins of the Old Cities, a lamp-lighter who amy yet breathe, may still have eyes to behold the glories of the reborn lands? Was it possible that it was not only the faerie children who danced in the gleaming streams, not only the treefolk who sang to the stars in the perpetuity of unpollutable nights?
Nay, and yes—for he was an Archaia, a man who had learnt the manner of living forever. He sat alone in his tent of broken obsidian, and though he could no longer remember the art of making a fire in wood or coals, nor the manner of consuming food that was good for the body, nor the words to speak prayers to render the soul secure,he remembered the undreamable intricacies of the Knowledge. He recalled the thoughts that one must keep forever in the forefront of one's mind, the measure with which one must count one's steps, the iron tenacity with which one must hold one's will steady.
He no longer remembered what it was to be human—
He knew only what it was like to live forever, with the same songs in one's head, with the same words on one's lips, with the undying burning of one's deepest core, the inner torment and pleasure of the lining of one's soul. His eyes, which had once seen men's faces and women's bodies and the streets of bustling cities and the multihued flare of kings' banners and the sheen of sweat on horses' haunches and the saliva spooling from the jowls of panting dogs, now saw only the unbroken, incomprehensible mundanity of pure, beauteous nature. He who had heard the whispers of lovers and the gruff rapport of business partners and the strident tones of a general's command and the screams of children beneath the horrific clamor of booted feet and unsheathed swords, flashing in the brightness that had once been sunlight, now heard only the tide. There was nothing else to occupy the senses, for there was nothing else in life but the sea and the sky and the rivers. The world had died in apocalypse itself, and been rebirthed in the ever-lusterful swaddling of desperate prophecy and deity's regrets. The air that had once been thick with noise and dust and disease and laughter and change now hung in stillness and perfect clarity that could have no antecedent and no scion.
The love that had once given substance to the air was centuries lost; now it was so thin as to never be breathable, never intended for human consumption. What could have been drowned in was now forgotten, buried under the eerie sheen of the meteor that hung in the air, one figure perched atop it: a tree. The Great Tree, the World Tree, the bearer of the memories of all that had existed before Time. before Time and after Time—what was the difference? There had been footprints, but they were long washed out by the tide. There had been clouds and blood and typhonic entropy. Now there was eternity—and even that word no longer existed, for outside of time there can be no proportion. there can be no understanding of passage, no apprehension of movement, no clarity of gradience, no cognizance of nuance. There can be no build and no death. At the moment when every wave marries itself to the thick wet white grit of the seashore, there is an identical breaker rearing its curling, arching mane to the stars.
And yet the Tree, and the Man, live on. They will not die. They cannot die, outside of Time. The Tree existed before Time, and saw all, and was thus outside of Time and could not be ravaged by time and its happenings. It was the Man who discovered the true secret: to survive Time is to escape it. To remain unfolded by the unstoppable entity that shapes universes to its will is to remain unbowed by epitomized creation and destruction itself. To live through is to live on. To die, to dream, to drown, is to fail. to change is to surrender to the unrelenting ebb of Time. But to live is to conquer for all of existence. To survive is to exist is to die is the be immortal.
The stars have no major qualms about the shape and history of the shadows they cast.
And the tree is. And the man lives on, perfectly dead.
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