and still I wait
Jan. 12th, 2004 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icewindsI can see the box out of the corner of my eye. It is insulated, padded as though the glowing brown stone should be kept warm. I am told that this seals in the power.
I slide two fingers to the lid, open it and look at the - topaz, is it? Amber? The chain looks like silver - surely it cannot be? Pewter or white gold, perhaps.
Suddenly I have the urge to face my fear! To loop the chain around my neck, pick up the scroll and ... This time I close the box on temptation. This time...
I turn away and go on with the account.
How many of my own secrets will I have time to find?
My childhood; chapter 3.
I suppose that all children look at the world in which they were born as though nothing could ever change. I remember when my own world changed beyond salvation or recovery – the day the truth-singer came.
These creatures have a hundred names – and some translate into curses. I suppose that many of those involved react as I once did – as though the truth-caller had caused the world to be cruel. Now I am older – and although I have little learning there are those who have tried to school me in the ways of wisdom.
The seeds of doom were in us, deep within – and they were sprouting when the singer came. Our Leader was old, long deprived of his life-mate and dulled to his duties, going wearily through the motions of the days. Those who trained the young were lax.
Hindsight shows almost all - and we trusted too much in our distance from the human towns, and from the travelled trails. (At least, so I was told, later, when I still had the starving need to understand. As an infant I questioned the bored impatience of the Teacher no more than I questioned why water lays flat, or why the winds blow. So it was – so it must always have been.)
But I was very young, and if I tell what happened as I saw it, any reader may be as bewildered as I was myself – but it is no easier to tell it as I see it now, older and trained to accept my fate.
The story that we tell now is that the Singer came to wake the Leader to his duties to the Clan. That the Leader should then have led with re-awakened strength and skill or stood aside to let another lead – or perished in the testing.
Then, though, I was so young that I hardly knew that spring follows winter, or that the Festival of Change comes yearly. So when I woke to a day when a most dour neighbour sang of his pride in his new sleigh in the open street, (in a voice with more charm than I thought was in him,) I only thought it interesting.
Even when his new wife sang in harmony to tell him he cared more for his machines than for her I was more surprised by her honesty than by her song (She was one who had never warded her expression in front of a child. So I had known her thoughts, but believed that she would never speak them.)
The greatest mystery was why she had married him at all, but then I was far too young even to hazard a guess – or to understand the guesses made by neighbours.
I slide two fingers to the lid, open it and look at the - topaz, is it? Amber? The chain looks like silver - surely it cannot be? Pewter or white gold, perhaps.
Suddenly I have the urge to face my fear! To loop the chain around my neck, pick up the scroll and ... This time I close the box on temptation. This time...
I turn away and go on with the account.
How many of my own secrets will I have time to find?
My childhood; chapter 3.
I suppose that all children look at the world in which they were born as though nothing could ever change. I remember when my own world changed beyond salvation or recovery – the day the truth-singer came.
These creatures have a hundred names – and some translate into curses. I suppose that many of those involved react as I once did – as though the truth-caller had caused the world to be cruel. Now I am older – and although I have little learning there are those who have tried to school me in the ways of wisdom.
The seeds of doom were in us, deep within – and they were sprouting when the singer came. Our Leader was old, long deprived of his life-mate and dulled to his duties, going wearily through the motions of the days. Those who trained the young were lax.
Hindsight shows almost all - and we trusted too much in our distance from the human towns, and from the travelled trails. (At least, so I was told, later, when I still had the starving need to understand. As an infant I questioned the bored impatience of the Teacher no more than I questioned why water lays flat, or why the winds blow. So it was – so it must always have been.)
But I was very young, and if I tell what happened as I saw it, any reader may be as bewildered as I was myself – but it is no easier to tell it as I see it now, older and trained to accept my fate.
The story that we tell now is that the Singer came to wake the Leader to his duties to the Clan. That the Leader should then have led with re-awakened strength and skill or stood aside to let another lead – or perished in the testing.
Then, though, I was so young that I hardly knew that spring follows winter, or that the Festival of Change comes yearly. So when I woke to a day when a most dour neighbour sang of his pride in his new sleigh in the open street, (in a voice with more charm than I thought was in him,) I only thought it interesting.
Even when his new wife sang in harmony to tell him he cared more for his machines than for her I was more surprised by her honesty than by her song (She was one who had never warded her expression in front of a child. So I had known her thoughts, but believed that she would never speak them.)
The greatest mystery was why she had married him at all, but then I was far too young even to hazard a guess – or to understand the guesses made by neighbours.
