even the sky
Life is madness, y'all. Packing for college and being a shopgirl (where is my Cocky Bastard With a Time Machine(tm), eh?) and otemen arriving in less than a week, and getting ready to say goodbye, and still managing to find time to become hopelessly addicted to Doctor Who in the midst of it all. (Why did no one tell me it was written to play to all my exact kinks? Or, if you prefer, why didn't I listen? Gods, I'm slow.)
I went shopping today. I exchanged bits of silk and dye and paper, stylized representations of wealth-- a concept that doesn't actually have a definitive material form-- for stuff that comes out of oranges that grow on trees, and bits of wax with cotton stuck through the middle, and sort of repressed the urge to giggle. It's madness, all right, but it's not bad, not bad at all.
Charon, Edward "Lord" John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany (and no, I'm not even making that up.)
I. CHARON
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.
Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.
And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.
Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.
"I am the last," he said.
No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.
I went shopping today. I exchanged bits of silk and dye and paper, stylized representations of wealth-- a concept that doesn't actually have a definitive material form-- for stuff that comes out of oranges that grow on trees, and bits of wax with cotton stuck through the middle, and sort of repressed the urge to giggle. It's madness, all right, but it's not bad, not bad at all.
Charon, Edward "Lord" John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany (and no, I'm not even making that up.)
I. CHARON
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.
Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.
And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.
Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.
"I am the last," he said.
No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.