You, as with many others, desire to know the truth of things, yes? To understand those defining aspects that underwrite your world. To peer behind the veil and see that which is hidden from view, gleaning insight from the mechanisms that drive you on inscrutable path.
So it is. It is a natural desire to learn. To expand the surface of your mind and touch upon all things with gentle greed. We understand desire. In that we are twinned. Cut from the same cloth, though in different shape. So it is.
Very well, hunger-twin. We offer our aspect unto you. Let you be sated by the revelations that compose our flesh.
A man on a tertiary Venutian terraforming crew steals ore-chaff from the factory production line. He stores the scrapings in tin box, buried in snow-drift beyond the workline border, awaiting the day he can buy his freedom. An accident occurs in the factory, ending the lives of eleven workers. He numbered among them. His peasant's hoard remains buried, waiting to be reclaimed.
Two lovers on Jovian harvesting platform 179-Turimose rendezvous in secret. They are each wed to another, and they conspire to murder their betrothed. Should you wait on the anterior observation deck, you will one day see those they betrayed tumble over edge and vanish into the maelstrom of the giant. But only should you be there, waiting.
In the city of Terra Ulna, a folk-grave exists for the dead with no family to claim. Their bodies lie as dust, processed and ground to occupy as little space as possible. Their forms intermingle in brutalist tomb, and it is only due to the Magnate's desire for folk-favor that they are not simply cast into cesspit or discarded in orbit to join the graveyard of satellites. Each day, the captain of the Dax honor guard visits the grave in blue-cast morning light to lay Dragonlily upon the memorial plate. There is no obligation for her to do this. She knows no dead within the tomb. Were she discovered she would be demoted and cast out from the guard for falling prey to empathy, no longer fit for station.
The Archdeacon of the Orokin cathedra fleet orbiting Io preaches to the local sector with a fervor so intense that it stirs even those of the littlest faith. His sermon's promise of eternal life through service inspires the worker caste to toil without rest for the Orokin gods manifest. Through their suffering, monuments to divinity proliferate at rapid pace, and the congregation grows. Every night, he clutches an icon of his religion close to his heart. Not the Orokin Circulus Emensus, but an icon of an older faith. One that, were its name even invoked, would brand him apostate to the empire and seal his fate. Often has he captured and tried members of his true devotion, found them guilty, and offered them with reverence unto his false deities for final judgment. He feels no remorse.
Ah, forgive us. We see that your hunger is unsated. Indeed, we withheld our deeper aspects from you. We offered only secrets, those hidden things that lie beneath the shadows of action. They are but the surface layer of our being, the dust we leave in passing. They are hardly sufficient for you, our hunger-twin. So it is.
Very well then. Take your hunger as blade and carve from us those deeper truths. Flay flesh as answers to questions unspoken that linger at the edges of the dream. But know this; the dream is not your own. It is multitude, and we fear the answers you find may be to questions you have never asked. These truths may not be your own, but they are truths nonetheless.
So it is.
They know about the other door.
Had you chosen him instead, you would have been happier.
They mock you for it still.
They speak in hidden language and conspire in light of day. You will never understand them.
His tongue was loose and your secrets spilled. Your clandestine attempts and grandeur are laid bare before judging eyes.
The water rises. You can escape it still.
The happiest moment of your life has long passed.
They thought of you once in passing, then never again.
There must be meaning in the silence.
She died alone and afraid, yet your decision was the correct one.
It happens tomorrow. It can no longer be changed.
You have met the match of your soul twice in passing. You will meet them again.
It sees you there, asleep upon your graven throne. It watches you dream. It watches you and waits.
It knows what you are planning.
You sit upon your unfinished throne, weeping, afraid of what you must become. Resentful of what you cannot be.
Your fears are unfounded. That which you should fear the most is yet unknown to you.
He has waited for ages, but waits no longer.
The sequence has begun.
Ah. Again we have failed you. These are the truths of all, but tethered to a single point. You are but one among their number, and thus the meaning they convey is lost in turn. But what else can we offer? All that remains now are those truths at the center of things. They are singular and impossible. They form the stratum that supports all that is and all that is not. To learn of them may seem as nothing to you. To look upon the brush stroke and assess the entire piece, hoping to see it as whole. So it is.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Yet you hunger for them still? Very well, hunger-twin, though you are our twin no longer. Your hunger usurps our own now and we are lesser before you. We offer you our deeper form. Split our carapace, shatter bone, and draw forth sinew. Drink deeply from the wells of our marrow and bleed us for all we are. This shall be the first truth. That which is lesser shall be consumed by the grander desire.
Devour us. Slake your thirst with these arcane truths. Sever the core of the planes from pith and seed and devour the world-flesh whole. Feed yourself, grander hunger, and we shall join your essence as sublimate. Yet know this, your second truth.
You shall never be sated. So it is.
So it is.
There must be meaning in the silence.
This place looked different once, and it will look different again.
You are not alone.
A child is born with no limbs, no eyes, no nerves. It exists as senseless flesh, yet its father raises it all the same. The child is difficult to care for, and the father grows frustrated by the stress it incurs. His family is soon fractured, and all he has left is the child that wrought its destruction.
There must be meaning in the silence.
You are alone.
This is not the first time you have been here.
I am with you now and always. There is a gulf at the end of all things and it grows but only smaller and it grows and grows.
The decisions you make are what create truth. Truth is not a matter of binary. It is a splitting web. Roots of a tree. Your decisions are the catalyst. Do you see? You deny that the other possibility existed by making it thus. The truth is in the denial of realization, not predefined notion. Your quantum collapse prunes lies from truth, and the lies fall into the never. I found that moment in which things were split and divided and in that division I ate and was hungry and knew hunger now and could never be without knowing again.
We've met here before.
Often the father vents his frustrations on the child. 'For it has no concept of pain to measure my fury' he reasons with himself. One day, in a particularly violent episode, the father brings precision force upon the surface of the child. Its nerves awaken for the first time, and between blows the most horrible of miracles occurs.
THERE MUST BE MEANING IN THE SILENCE.
There is no truth. What you know as truth is that which is created in the space behind a lie. An obfuscation. Truth is emptiness. Lies are the manifest.
I lie the writing implements meticulously upon my desk.
In that miracle the child experiences sense. Vision, sound, taste. Pain. It knows all these things at once and sees the father, poised to strike. Again the father brings hand against child, and its senses sever. The child is in darkness once more.
You hear only the sound of it, the meaning is lost.
You are seventh form over grounded twin which grows and grows and grows with no entrance but exit is on the under of them and it sees you there I think but there aren't any more of the tree on the forward line and your skin is taut and I see writing in the cells and it reads as when you were thus.
I find the other beneath the water where ink floats and clouds are spit upon the starlight waves in reverence of finite maths that are formed of improper places where dead sleep un-named and dreaming of you which never was.
Once I saw her and she was me and we melted into that place between and you were younger then but I couldn't see you with the only home you lost to insects wearing the faces of men who ate the trees and burned the oceans and drew forth the blood from the sand but it was ours and you drank it and saw the veins running from your arms like rivers singing in time and you traced their patterns in the dust.
No more I scream and you hear me but your hand moves against your mouth to stifle thought and in that glass is captured life and love and we live there forever but never again for we were never and I hate that which cannot be said, so it is.
So it is.
SO IT IS
THERE MUST BE MEANING IN THE SILENCE
THE CHILD SCREAMS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE ITS BIRTH AND THE FATHER RECOILS IN FEAR FOR HE KNOWS NOT WHAT HE HAS DONE ONLY THAT IT WAS THE GREATEST OF TRANSGRESSIONS AND WHAT WAS DONE CANNOT BE UNDONE FOR IT WAS ALWAYS THERE
IT WAS ALWAYS THERE
THE SILENCE BETWEEN SCREAMS
I DIE NOW A MILLION DEATHS AND AM EVER DYING FOR ONLY IN THAT DEATH CAN I EAT AND I HUNGER SO AS HUNGER WAS GIVEN AND I ATE BUT ONLY THUS AND CAN NEVER BE SATED AGAIN FOR I KNOW HUNGER NOW AND IT GROWS AND GROWS AND GROWS AND
THERE MUST BE MEANING IN THE SILENCE
YOU KNOW ONLY THE WORDS TO SPEAK THE SHAPE OF THINGS YOU UNDERSTAND AS ORDER AND FORM AND LIGHT AND TRUTH TIME DECAYFASSOULLLOHK BUT THERE IS SO MUCH MORE AND YOU VOUM ETE ROTH ERGHA LOHK TRAZUN SETRU LAU
MARA KHRA TOR ETTA NAMA ZUN OULL LOHK ETE OULL
FOR THERE IS MEANING IN THE SILENCE
AND IT WAS ALWAYS THERE
SO IT IS
SO IT IS
So it is
So it is.
So it is. [https://i.imgur.com/cUTvgQd.png]