Sigils

Words were called for and not just any old words. The time had come to transcend the hidden barriers of text and summons the existential forces of Eros and Thanatos.

He was to spend the early hours cultivating words, each one teetering on the brink of insanity and simultaneously alluding to cosmic truths. The syllables were to tessellate; and each sentence, read aloud, was to resonate with instinct and alchemy.

It were at first blush to be a dense text, almost impenetrable, yet concise at the same time. It was to torch the skies and scorch the earth. It was to be nothing short of terrific, a voyage into epic realms of divine chaos.

All of this from the protagonist, a mere urbanite, a dilettante in the early hours of night.

If language were liquor, then this was to be a distillation of emotion. Its consumption gives rise to a complete departure from sense.

And what medium should such a text take? Into which language, if any, should it be recorded? What parchment can there be to bear such weighty ink?

The protagonist talks of a poem in the greatest of traditions, concerning itself with the one and only matter of relevance and the utmost of importance.

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Where the walls of sleep no longer confines dreams, the daily surety of reality is eroded.

There is a brightness in the garden that is perhaps a clue to the otherness that is encroaching his senses. Is he still asleep? Although he isn’t so much asking himself this question, more just pondering the concept. For he knows too well that the fractured reality of that surrounding him, extends well beyond the boundaries of what is called sleep.

Whether he is awake or not has become irrelevant. The two worlds have collided in his mind and he runs the border between the two like a smuggler in the night.

The midday sun gently warms his skin and attempts to persuade him that the garden in which he finds himself is in fact part of the world that he came to know first. The part of the world where there are norms and rules.

The faint scent of honeysuckle adds a sense of familiarity to proceedings. All around him there is green. The soil is rich and fertile. A modest stream carves its way through limestone and pools of turquoise reflect the copper therein.

She is late. Not that they had agreed to meet in this unknown place, but he had anticipated to see her by now. He studies his watch, it has stopped. It bears the time of one minute to twelve, the second hand rests at the fifty-ninth degree.

He shakes his wrist. The movement embraces a final breath of life and the second-hand jolts to twelve before resuming its final resting place.

“What are you doing here?”

Despite her aggressive tone, he was elated to hear her voice. Turning around he sees her siting underneath the canopy of an enormous Blue Cedar tree. She is beautiful and that is her licence to talk to him like that.

“I see you are as charming as ever. I could of course ask you the same question. Nice to see you too, by the way”.

And there it was a flicker, her eyes betrayed her for a fraction of a moment. She was pleased to see him too, although she was clearly never going to admit it.

She holds eye contact and asks “what is this?”

“I don’t know, but we seem to be talking about it. Does that make it real?"

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He trawled cobbled streets and narrow alleys to find the heaviest of parchments; a medium robust enough to withstand the gravity of such words, such a poem.

He now commits those crude symbols, those futile devices to the paper using his very best scrawl.

Holding a small block of red wax to a candle, he seals the envelope, embossing the seal with the most powerful of sigils.

He thumbs the edges of the envelope and runs his fingertips over the seal. It is secure.

He hesitates for an eternity that lasts as long as three of his earthly breaths and holds the corner of the envelope to the candle. It instantly catches. The flame is prolific and testament to the quality of the parchment, if not the words. The dense, impenetrable text is reduced to nothing but ash and dust.

All that is left is his word. His word is all that he has. He gives her his word.