Djara

The Time of The Child

Spiralling, tumbling, and wondering.  The Child came into being, in a swirl of light and warmth.  Half-blind, even so, it saw light.  Cut off from true cold it felt warm.  Its very existence relied on its lack of sense, and in every sense The Child was crippled.

Spiralling and tumbling and wondering... but all the while questioning.  Why?  Where?  What?  How?  Who?  When?

Through it all was the pain: the pain of emptiness, the pain of being torn from another, more peaceful existence.  And, underlying everything was the overwhelming sense that something was missing from this new world.

And what of memories?  The Child could remember non-existence and the explosion of light.  One event followed the other and what of now?

The Child sought to understand its chaotic world of sensation.  The only way to make sense of the welter of feelings was to attempt to ignore most of them.  Ignoring the pain was the hardest, but most important lesson to learn.

The Child focused on the light and saw itself growing vast.  Yet, however it tried, The Child could not see the true nature of its self.  Wherever it looked there seemed to be change.

The Child focused on the warmth and felt the swirling there.  With the warmth came movement and that change within itself.  It was then that The Child knew that warmth enabled it to grow, but that warmth would not last forever.  It was then that The Child began to understand the true nature of Time: that to everything there was a beginning and an end.

The Child understood then, too, that its self was the beginning and the end.   It sought a name for itself.  The sound of 'Tau-tom-Uray' slipped from the swirling foment of its mind: 'The be all and end all' would be its name.  In short it was Tau: 'To be' or 'The being.'

And so it was that Tau set forth to understand itself.  Thirteen eyes furnished Tau with sights of its self and what lay beneath.  The confusion of visions tore at Tau's sense of being.  In an effort to hold onto sanity Tau chose to close all but three of the thirteen eyes.  With one eye it could see forwards in Time.  With one eye it could see back to past memories and the third showed only the ever cutting edge of 'now.'

With a blink of the ten remaining eyes, Tau could glimpse the realms of what could have been: therein lay hints of dreams and hopes and all that belonged to the great 'what if?'

With all of Tau's eyes closed, he began to dream.  In those dreams the light was not alone.  The light arose from the dark... a seeming absence of light.  To Tau this was a revelation.  The light that he had always known could cease, but the light was what brought order to Tau's world.  In that moment Tau knew fear of the dark, for in the dark was Chaos and there, too, lay Tau's end.

In dreams, Tau saw other beings and other worlds.  In his dreams he could talk and share ideas and escape the loneliness that was Tau-tom-Uray.  For the longest time, Tau became lost in these dreams of 'what if' and 'what could be.'  It was only when he awoke to feel cold, that he knew that the dreams of others had only been sights of different parts of Tau-tom-Uray; 'The Be All and End All.'

The coming of the cold brought an end to the pleasant escape of dreams.  Ahead lay a task that would decide the fate of everything.

The ever increasing cold had to be stopped.  Tau's ultimate end had to become one with his initial beginning.  There was a way, of that Tau was sure, but in finding the answer Tau knew he risked losing everything that he held dear.