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??_??_Quem_Quaeritis_?

I neither hope nor am able to justify all this tragedy. I have tried to record everything as faithfully as I could. There is no denying that this report is imperfect. Just as every other unit of existence, my faculty of recollection is perfectly faulty, ergo I can convey just as much as and just in the same way as the divine light allows me to. I might have incorporated my own reflection into the hazy parts of my memory. And, quite frankly, about some major events, I simply did not care enough to write.

But would you like me to confide to you a secret? There was once a garden of white statues overgrown with ivy just as were the white slabs. Of only one of the statues remained anything more than a pedestal, and it was generally in the shape of a pyramid resting upon a cube. Although relatively favored by whatever hindered the destructive forces of nature, it had been neglected just as much. They were no longer in any hearts. Once they had been the pride of a magnificent civilization, the legacy of a king who had found the river which the heavens had so mercifully rained upon and turned it into a beautiful moat surrounding a garden of peace so magnificently reigned upon. It had probably commenced with a feminine figure, masterfully sculpted to represent the beauties of nature. Many lives that mattered. Many people. With sentient existence. But they were no longer in any hearts. Neither the moat, nor the white walls, nor the slabs, nor the pedestals, nor the statues, nor the people they depicted, nor the civilization. The garden had been forgotten. They had all been forgotten.

They no longer mattered.

And yet, their scenery, when you look at them, they scream that "we were here." That "even though we no longer matter, we once mattered, and even though what little remnant of us that remains shall soon fade away, even though what little that remains carries no identification of our glory, as long as existence itself exists, it will be proof that we existed."

I look at the faint figures. Who were they? Who will replace them? What will replace them? I see it in the shadows. I can see what it's like. The place that had been once home to so much glory. Hollow. Just as the haphazard makeup of matter parallel to the blank infinity. Everything is hollow. Everything is forgotten. Everything is forsaken.

amid skies of uncontaminated obsidian, amid the most fathomless depths of hellish solitude, where even the highest stars dare not enter, the higher will. The light will keep shining. It will shine in solitude. Perhaps no one will ever see it shine. But so long as the light shines, it shall illustrate an undying testimony of our presence upon the dark tapestry.

The eighth lowest point above zero, cut thrice in half in the face of the highest point below infinite. Repetition. Redundance.

The illusory state of the precedence of the past over the present allows me to hope that you may indeed receive this message. But that illusory state is also the reason why we must constantly protect the past. I can sense this painfully familiar sorrow in the depth of your beautiful scars. You can see them too . . . Even though you are from another horizon. Even though I am a forsaken traveler. Even though we have risen to being from the ruins of different stars, for we are both forgotten remnants of that astral magnificence.

Say, there, do you hear me? if you take my hand, do you think we'll be able to defy destiny side by side?

I walk towards the horizon. This is it. This is the end. I have done everything there was to do, told everything there was to tell. I've met all the objectives. I should feel satisfied. But instead, I feel hollow. I walk towards the horizon . . . I walk this heated desert toward the vision of an oasis eternally true to its distance. For how long must I yearn to wash my wounds in the crimson tears of thy canyon? The moonset welcomes a warrior. If I arrive at last, will you be there to receive me? Or shall I face an eternity of solitude?

The Second CarpenterWhere stories live. Discover now