Sparkling ember. A volcanic mountain range overlooks ‘The Sand-snow’ of Aner Ba’hyt.

The region’s poets native or in pilgrimage mourn the loss of seasons as mid-way through praising Summer in odes we will not hear, the clear sky flips as would pages skimmed through, and Winter falls with such immediacy the poets are convinced of their own madness and ask: had Summer ever come to that land at all?

We see the unprepared and underdressed scramble for cover.

∞

What is The Sand-snow?

A cosmic shower of comets recurrent, scratching and scuffing across the atmosphere; the planet Ehl’yiteth a blip on the galactic convoy’s eternal journey.

Who knows what mass they truly circle - this asteroid belt uncoiled - ‘where kirkwood trees and dust’.

∞

The frozen comets clash against the desert’s heat, and so The ‘Sand-snow’ of Aner Ba’hyt drifts down and the cultures of that sandscape long have set their ways around such harvest. A pattern or science was found in ‘divination’. Just as some may tell the future from how tea leaves settle in a cup, these peoples discovered a language-almost in how long or short the sand-snow falls, with telescope or microscope making simple notes, gathering with - what then were years - their observations, until they could prove their Truth again and again reliably. This land, where heat’s dynamic laws were discovered.

∞

From the first to the last this practice has been known as Sifting, the art in which Ahlzvyr is adept, for this frosty-sandscape burning is or once was his homeland.

Some may Sift by holding sand to sunlight and watch how cosmic light catches the falling grains. How moonlight and sunshine tell different tales. Those with great spectacles look at the tiny snowflake shapes, as certain shapes mean certain things. Categorising: how many different shades of blue could there be?

Others may toil through the fallen sand-snow, stirring shards of glass the divine sound, listening and by that alone coming to conclusions on the nature of Nature.

Pottery, glass making and blowing craft, are thus the core contributions of these greatest of peoples.

∞

Alas in Timelessness, Summer’s scorch and burning has too long baked the landscape; Night is in exile. Day is forced to stay awake. The skies alight with the passing of comets that cannot end. A happening once annual has too long stayed, the volcanoes of overlook have grown cold and ‘nameless snow’ rather than ash spews from their abyssal belch. Frail flakes in which no expert can discern a pattern, mounding higher than wind or broom can sweep away.

∞

It is among these peaks overlooking the Dune-Kilns of Aner Ba’hyt that Anaxagyr’il, The Firelord, long made her abode in Falsehood’s ages. From there she divined, communed and advised. Known by glance in the peacetime proceeding Falsehood’s fall and Evil’s cure for her short fiery hair and the totem-dagger at her hip, its sheathe a long, hollowed ruby. It is all that remained of a meteorite she helped avert from its deadly course, when all of Life’s passion was hers.

Some have laughed at this and remember it was her master pulling off such grace, and write there was no meteorite from above but an earthquake more terrible.

∞

In the Autumn of her life and ‘between apprentices’, when she heard on the winds that Falsehood’s Last King was dead at last, she returned to Nature’s volcanoes, leaving Human towers behind, having helped set them right and sadly seen enough of them she yearned. Yearned for those mountains where her parents took her digging and climbing, themselves shamans of more local matters than the grand scales she would in age help to guide.

∞

Across the volcan-side were plenty of caves for her to sleep in, full of forgotten art to study and catalogue in the archives of her thoughts. Seldom she would return to Aner Ba’hyt, city of The Grand Scarab, and visiting monks from The Libraries of Ba’hyt Al-almaerif would in varied mediums commit to eternity all she had found. Long were her twilit chats with young Gargarensyr, his restless sister Arensis and their short, tipsy master Passag’wyr Ironbane.

∞

Peacetime passed with only scholarly incidents I will not here recite, until in one such cave she was reading hoary glyphs that should not be so cold embed in the volcan-side; glyphs depicting whales against dragons. One of the whales escaped the dragons, its likeness scratched into the utmost corner of the cave, with nowhere else to go.

∞

The sun later set as it should and in her shamanic dreams her trance was deep, having chewed on the stalks of a certain mushroom and inhaled its roasted spores that she may better search the halls and shelves of her memory. The glyphs had unsettled what she knew, and no flame of hers would warm them. She tranced for guidance, to speak with her old master now an ancestor, the previous Firelord Cal’il, whom she believed had ascended to become a great star, a solar system her own to bridge and govern.

∞

She met no ancestor as she wished and in that uncommonly deep state where she was accustomed to the sounds of flame, only water was loud. A boiling ocean as none should ever have to hear.

∞

And through that ocean of screams swam a young lad, his skin blistering apart, his hair longer than himself. Anaxagyr’il cast forth her palm and dagger, with incantation cutting through the scald with living flame.

∞

When she woke in her lonely cave she was not alone. A campfire’s light was glowing across her from the cavemouth, and by its side sat the young lad. His hair was ungoverned by any gravity she knew, now dry and flowing through the nightly air as though still submerged, sparkling for all the black sand ran through it, caught by moonlight. White paint made spots and dashes across his skin; he was from a tribe to her knowledge unheard of, leading some to believe that whatever book Iron-Chest had read was a work of bizarre fantasy come true.

∞

Anaxagyr’il had brought the boy back from her trancing dreams; ethereal becoming flesh though wounded he was with bruises and lacerations, burned patches.

“Thank you for rescuing me.” He called down the cave with a sore throat.

∞

He helped her return to health, for her act of kindness or instinct had not been without consequence, as a great weakness soaked her bones having brought him from wherever he had been. A curious shaman she thought - the healing ways of Water he already knew well yet his totem a longsword was clearly of Fire’s brand, aflame with white as are the distant stars, and she wondered how something near could seem so far away.

∞

He did not heal his own wounds. As she recovered the sky would flicker from night to day and he told her not to worry, his wounds to scars forming proper.

“Who are you?” she asked him when her strength was enough.

“Time. In your worlds among you, Humanity, I choose the name Konisoki, having been Ikosinok. A current I leave behind.”

Anaxagyr’il took that name no further than the cave, as The Lords of Earth and Spacious did not believe this lad was from her dream. With echoes they convinced each other there must be a different explanation, that she was being tricked or turned weird by isolation. As ever in The Windlord Gada’il, Anaxagyr’il would find an ally.

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∞

Through fireside smoke The Firelord asked:

“Why are you here in our plane of plainer things, Time? And how…”

“An attempt was made on my life, when I was not yet conscious.” His long, twisting-spiral tusk got in the way of certain words. “Or so it feels, or so I was told.”

Anaxagyr’il was quick to question, almost in jest she said: “A Divine Twin in my cave. What else could harm you but your sibling Entropy? Surely I hope, they are not conscious as well… and why…”

“She is.” Konisoki paused remembering, as one remembers the lost. “It is not right when siblings fight, do you agree? We had watched Humanity and Human Nature long from our home, Star Lake its name in your tower-found tongue, and so I know from heeding in the dark that my divine presence is to your Courtdom a blasphemy. We did not choose this. Human travellers found our lake and we were roused into being. I wish I could return home, to the sleep that is unconsciousness. Life can be beautiful, but this is not where I belong.”

“You are what Reason killed and Love preserved, renamed.” Anaxagyr’il scowled before her second thoughts caught up with her. “There must always be an ideal Humanity holds above itself, lest Falsehood rise from its grave. You are not that. You hide behind the name of Time, hide a name that Falsehood only spoke in hypocrisy, not truly believing, or they would have acted very differently. I will not speak your other name older, what here you have become.”

"There is much I leave behind on this long road home. You have helped me into your world, as I was caught again between variations, my one ‘life’ has become many. Since being murdered or almost, I am in many places at once. I will show you.”

Anaxagyr’il listened closely now, trying not to dismiss his pleas or comments in panic or disgust, having encountered a force beyond human knowing. Past his wounds she sensed grace within him, a great imbalance swerving to realign itself. Too long she had been isolated with thoughts and study alone, having thought she had no more to give. Still with much to learn from Humanity having far longer been Nature wholly, so Time asked of The Firelord:

“Will you help me, train me in your ways?”

He asked far from the power she assumed of him, searching for his sister Entropy estranged. The Firelord spoke across the crackling, whipping flames she had not made:

“The more I teach you, the less you will be Time and the more you will be something else, something new and uncontainable. Uncontrollable without name, or a name we have not the ears to hear.”

A name she could not bring herself to speak. His scars shone in fire and starlight, his eyes bloodshot and innocent. Eyes that should never have known hardship, of Time that should have remained separate and divine. Unfit for the gallows we will hang him from.

∞

Anaxagyr’il later wondered as the lad slept exhausted. She paced about her caves. She sent her starlight-smoke to the winds in signal that Old Gada’il would hear her conflict.

“Long with peace were the ages before our own.” He whispered from a great distance made slight by Wind and Spacious-everywhere. “Unfair that all of chaos erupts in ours, though Truth it is; all around us. We have been called to do our utmost. My apprentice a runaway, and you find a stray unwanted.”

The Windlord’s chuckle helped her see another side to things.

∞

Unwanted indeed, scarred and beaten the lad Konisoki, and Anaxagyr’il did not know why. Until a while she meditated on his wounds and walked her eyes across them imagining all the curses of imagination we all have had. Whenever something we loved was lost, Time we hated for taking it away, with wishes of going back. Truthdom taught these imaginings away, to accept what cannot be changed, that Reality must not be put on trial. And The Firelord asked of her flames:

“Gada’il, Konisoki told me that travellers came, their presence awoke him and his sister. Who could have travelled to this ‘Star Lake’ where the Divine Twins long slept abstract?”

“Too long I believed: no compass of Reason could, only Love would dare so far. Then I think even Reason could have found a route with What If its rule. I have learned it was an expedition, of not one but a group of souls.”

∞

Anaxagyr’il came to train the lad Konisoki, for the wilderness once his home was no longer safe for him, laden as it was with a humanity she no longer understood in the better world she had helped to make; a world not meant for her.

∞

The Firelord taught him of the stars he was from and had forgotten, showed him the pattern of orbits and purpose in forest fires. His power was unimaginable to her, and a long while she spent helping him with his own conclusions on responsibility, that he must not become the thing she dared not name.

“I could if I wished to?” he asked her. “And they would call me the lord of lords.”

His eyes later were orb and marble black and white. She knew he had in illusion hid his true, bloodshot eyes to protect himself, his eyes that had become bloody in Humanity’s treatment of him. Did all his kin have such black-white eyes? Else what disguise could bloodshot afford him?

“You are Time or were… you have seen how long and far Falsehood reigned without unity on such things. So many its faces that did not know they all were the same face. You have seen the waste and discord… only now have we come out of those ages dark.”

“And yet you are here in your dusty solitude? You cannot face what you helped to create.”

“I will spend the last of my seasons here, where there still is beauty.” She held her hand in the fire of her making and her skin was unharmed, and at that she seemed disappointed. “We of Courtdom have done our duty, and shamans are no longer needed. The moderation will maintain itself. If you travel you will see it: Need has been cured by Greed’s bounty, Evil hung from our gallows.” She stopped, eyes alert with horror and then sorrow having realised: “Time is all that is left to pass with cakes and games.”

She looked at him then, Wounded Time, and it was a struggle to turn from despair as she asked her apprentice, asked her flames and all she had ever known:

“Of course they persecuted you next. What have we done with our freedom?”

∞

In their cave-mouth trances together, master and apprentice beheld the scattered names of Serib and Minim’Syrib, of Konisoki and Ikosinok. The names were new yet those journeys were nothing at all new under the sun. In response to those visions, Anaxagyr’il spoke the tales she knew of souls against themselves. Showed her new apprentice the caves where such things were first recorded - when the skies were safe enough - as many a page passed and Boiled Angels patrolled the skies.

∞

“Shall we summon up an illusion with our clouds, master?”

Using Fire’s knowledge was long a method used by shamans to hide themselves, removing what was there and replacing it with what was elsewhere. These the ways that heat and light can play. The Firelord did summon, keeping those stone gargoyles patrolling their skies without event, passing right over their prey unaware.

As they passed over, Anaxagyr’il studied their stone forms, formations of faceless militancy far from The Triumphs of Arthur and his Knights-a-Legion or the Hadaeans that once had flown with them against Falsehood. What virtues guided these?

∞

In Time she knew well how to exert her will over the elements without harming their balance, the simplest way being to not exert one’s will at all. Alas a power all the more difficult to temper in Timelessness:

“We must be prepared to move.” The Firelord warned her apprentice.

Deeper than this, Anaxagyr’il knew among the angels would be one whom illusions could not fool, and of that one Konioski said to his master:

“You see it? Silence, The Black Angel.”

“You were fleeing from them, when I found you…”

∞

She felt its absence - as astrologers would note stars circling a point most black unexplainable - so The Firelord knew that creature ‘of void and darkness-speed’ - of shadow many-winged leading its greyer kin of lesser stone.

As might a comet fall it flew, a lead that none could follow. Caught in myths unravelling until they were true, Anaxagyr’il tried to understand what Silence was. An aura by sound impenetrable, or are we no longer bound by such physical realms and explanations? Was Silence to each and all malleable, a personal silence changing from this story to the next? Shaped by whichever fear was foremost.

“There is fire in them.” She closed her eyes, speaking with her apprentice. “Is their body stone as the other boiled angels, or blood darkest, old scabbed and hardened over. Are they Timelessness in flood and flight, embodied, as you are Wounded Time alive before me? Is that and more…”

∞

The Firelord sat in daylight at the cave-mouth, the extinguished campfire by her side. The fruity smoke awoke her to the morning’s stillness. Afar the dusty mountains of her childhood walks were moving as they should not move, in a patchy horizon whose misty blur was clearer or thicker in patches and partings, not all one distance blended.

The defined ‘squares’ insane, far in that distance yet the goats climbing their sides, tufts of parched wildflowers, the blinking of a lone reptile and other motions were eerily magnified, and the undefined ‘squares’ of closer magnitudes were being slotted further away, blocks of colour only.

Sand-snow fell as miscoloured ash across the nearer things.

∞

“Go.” She stood, unsheathing her totem-dagger from its hollowed ruby at her hip, more flame than any steel its shapeless length.

Her hand she cast forth in mastery and from the dry lands came titanic worms of magma making bridge and column across-between the mountains distant to one another, and whether these constructs were of fortification or illusion further Konisoki did not know, as his master called over his awe:

“As I have shown you. Follow all kind winds from here to The Windlord Gada’il. Hurry away from here!”

∞

Time, such as he is now Konisoki, ran. Out of the cave and up its cliff as a lizard able, and soon from there the planes were flat into cacti fields and steppeland crag. His long dark hair behind him trailed longer than he, sandy with sparkles in Summer’s sunlight.

∞

Unable in his rush to ever thank her, he left Anaxagyr’il to her chants, to the fires of her eyes straight at the dimension-darkening skies of Silence, The Black Angel.

In that meditation she thought back to the Summer of her life, when the sand-snow’s annually returning convoy veered too close to the world, or the world’s gravity had too great a pull.

Four of those meteors had collided together as one great storm, and it was that storm she and her master averted not without aid. When they crashed to the earth a wizard stepped from the cataclysm, from whom she learned much. It was those stellar metals that now were molten and worming to her defence at her emblazoned call:

“Fallen of Leonid, forth Horologium, Octans, Pyxis and Quadrant! To the seabed swallow Silence, to the neverborn pit of its whence!”