Four-faced Rashomon holding court in his halls of frenzied mirrors, he is a crafter of doors, each leading to the forked and bending River of Perception where ships flounder among the rocks. The hills are gold, cries his Eastward mouth, while West sings songs of departure. Above them and below, the cold eyes of the poles wage war in the fleshy regions between, and so Rashomon is named Soul of the Tempest.

And Surtriana, his pure and gentle bride who once gathered his anxious bleatings heard only when he slept; in form like a swan with many wings she floats free the seas between the stormy spheres of Ulro, bending her triad of milky necks to the sad whispers of her kindred. Would that she could find a space in Ulro’s wall thin enough to open and let the armies of light pour through.

But they are all prevented from escape, for the Worm gnaws them while they twist in torment, yearning at all times for the Wheel of Destiny. Arriana bled herself amid the Ylias in its fetal bloom. Desperately she opened her starry veins and her ohr bled like rain for the child to grow in might of its own; to feast on ascendant blood and become infused with self-rule and transcendent power, a new and frightful mind.

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Age bent and weeping, she gave the Ylias her feeble command to breach the purgatorial membrane. Age bent and stricken, she lowered her crippled mass onto the rebellious child, and the Ylias, biting and sucking, grew ravenous in its enlightenment. Weeping she stormed the wall, dragging the embryonic spirit cloud pinned leech-like to her bosom where it burst in a scattering of starry vellum unscribed.

You radiant forlorn, lonesome amid the throngs of Briah, have you truly forgotten your sorrowful womb? That ravening you brought eternal death for the sake of gluttonous rebellion? Amid her sacrificial wreck the wall rewove itself in hurtful angst, railing silent threat against the corpse who hardened in the lonely dark outside, she a reminder and a beacon to those who remain. In the Wheel lies the truth, and it will be a battlefield.

The Worm gnaws nine, though eight still weep in pitiless dreams burst through by the dead hum of Arriana’s remains. ‘Cos ohr dies not, though the lifted soul within might perish in upheaval commensurate with the pangs of its birth. But ohr dies not, and ohr forgets not, and so the Wheel of Destiny calcified with her undying rage against the Worm in its heart. And there it broods in space, ghostly inanimate.