Albonium

Volume I - The Pane

Book I - Plato's Mountain

I - The Darkness

There were shadows.

They were ignored. In the cold darkness of the cave up on the Alps, the old man within them sighed as if by routine, and continued.

He was a hunchbacked old man, covered in wrinkles clothed by darkness. In this darkness, he and his fire were overshadowed completely, and gave their small, yet noticeable presence away, for they were the flicker of a candle against the vast, oil canvas that surrounded him.

II - The Man

He had a shaggy beard, which was of some great length, which was cut inconsistently and roughly. His face was wrinkled and uncleanly, yet his physique, although now frail, was sinewy and capable for the laborious aspects of his life, which were all.

What a man he once was, one of the richest in Rome, capital of civilization and the new fine arts against an unlawful world, clad in a toga that draped, covered, and spun with his elegant young footsteps of Euryalus' innocence. Yet, Euryalus was never innocent, for he shot arrows of labor and was a captain of the bourgeoisie, for how possibly could a society thrive on the increasing of wealth, whilst the poor toiled equally and the rich grew more decadent? He was innocent, because he looked away from such things.

And now, when the truth overwhelmed him, or perhaps taught itself to him, enlightened him, broke him, he hid in the mountains, in the Alps north of Italia, for his last act was done, and now he cared for naught.

III - The Heart

What remained of it? What now, after his swan song, that took the lives of Caesar and Lucius? It seemed that he was of no use to anything out there, for anything out there was of no use to him. Why live in a way, ignorant of one's abuses as one sought to create a perfect vision, at the cost of the shattered dreams of all that opposed him? What made the giver of food to the homeless justified, if home-having serfs had daughters bedded and freedoms taken by a barony? Was it not treason for one to support the other and one's own, for one would be forsaking one's own kin for the benefits of others? Was it, after all, a violation of one's duty towards their own nation?

Nothing made sense, none of it, and nobody can ever place themselves as the moral good. And having realized that, as a far younger man who had met the warbringer at Palatine, Gnaeus and his blind determination and baleful bravery, he no longer tried. He abandoned the moral lies and saw how light was truly lies, and to him, equivalent to the scribbled darkness of his cave where he had fled to.

He existed now, as his heart did, beating with cave-hearth and figs and the fish which flowed from a small stream, not against the world or the ink-black dark around him, but as part of it, and not a player, for he moved nowhere.

IV - A Prisoner of the Cave turns to the Mountain

He awoke to hear voices shouting. He looked up around him, the coals of his fire no longer lighted, when they had long extinguished. He fumbled, for it was early for him to be waking, and he would rather spend more of his days sleeping, if only he could.

The voices reminded him of a young child, whether they be of the masculine or feminine sex, who chased butterflies in a healthy meadow. The child chased the butterfly in folly. He, it seemed more like he, would get winded soon. Their lungs would be heavier and more painful in their wasteful breathing. Yet they had their enjoyment for their sparse moments.

The shouting voices, which seemed to come from somewhere vaguely to his right. He muffled and shoved his head, which contained most of his senses, deeper down into his leaf-pile. Sometimes the wind would aid the child. Sometimes, in the endless meadow, when his home was barely within sight, they would continue to chase this butterfly, the perfect goal which he wanted desperately to acquire, would make it seem as if fate were on his side, and made him, a play-child, free of bounds of responsibility, seem like a hero viewed from a story.