Seventh Transmission:

Adventure and heroism are tableaus. To take a role within this static thing is to become unchanging: to put your future and past deeds in permanent relief before you.

You become the path that you are set on. You become the trials of necessity, their outcomes a matter of predestiny. You become the calamitous villain, who’s gravity of overflowing power demands correction, and the hero, tasked with finding power themselves.

You become all things in this stale frame, and so cannot live within it.

-Coyote

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This heaving beast asked me if I had been named.

I answered that I was a small person, and that it hadn’t mattered.

“I am Accretio the Hoardosphere,” It rumbled at me.

Glancing longer at the shadows it cast from its inner light, it looked like a turtle might, had it swallowed a lamp. “I have a name, and so shall my Witness.”

“Elk,” I answered, without much thought.

It seemed as though I had been tasked with something. There were expectations of me.

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Requirement: it was a quiet vacuum pulling me in a direction outside the physical.

Recognizing that you have never once been compelled to action, I suppose, occurs upon it first happening. It was like suddenly walking upward.

“Elk of the Ashen Wake, Witness and Shepherd of Accretio the Hoardosphere,” Accretio spoke, and so it was.

I sat atop their grand craggy shell as they bore through the forest and thrust aside the dense wooded fodder. They took bites occasionally.

“This world has entered a phase of Titanic Digestion. The forces that hold it in physicality are breaking down; creatures of chaos digest the flesh of reality. What remains is matter of the conceptual and abstract.”

“I’ve seen it happening,” I said. “Some of us were trying to figure it out, others were trying to slay the things doing it.”

The rise and fall of Accretio’s gait was slow and deliberate, a natural force with a gravity I adjusted to quickly: a boat in calm waters. They left pale ash that striped the path we took, a trench in the forest to let the moonlight in.

They snapped a toppled tree in their maw, the sound of gravel, and they continued. “You fought one such creature yourself. Your unassuming mind was an overwhelming force upon this creature of chaos. To see these things for what they are is to put them back into a physical state, where they cannot survive. It will become more difficult, then impossible, the more you do it.”

Sunlight from this edge of the forest we approached, low on the sky, humble and red. “I don’t think I’m so unassuming now,” I said, squinting slightly to adjust to this odd light. “Already, things are apparent to me although you have not said them: There’s no sense in returning to Speculation City, people aren’t going to like us and I’ll be expected to have an opinion on things.”

We broke the wall of the forest. Rocky steppes of grassland led down to a wide world in front of us. Wide ocean scattered more reddish light back up towards us far in the distance. A cliff with a torrent of falling water pooling calmly before carving snakish through pebbled and reedy riverbed.

There was so much. A full world put in relief before me, where prior I only knew the wastes and a place called Speculation City, now devoured.

“Some things have been true before you speak of them, Elk of the Ashen Wake, and some things can only be true once they are spoken. In the age of Titanic Digestion, words have a vital strength”

I had mixed feelings.