Torn from the inward pressures of the Sun’s dreaming, my hope of speaking traveled in waves and pulses, like the ripples of light upon water disturbed by a sacred wind. But silence was to be my fate — not song, not words. The deadly blankets of time fell upon me like the rain of bodies from war, and the collected weight of myriad sorrows recanted my alliance to become my tomb. Years turned the pages of my book, and they crumbled, leaving only the ragged skeleton of a story largely departed into dust; riddles wrought of snakethought by lightning’s finger.

My speech, then, was hidden in the tears of mice; tiny shining spheres in which worlds emerged through the slow accumulation and arrangements of exotic pollens, drawn to and assembled within them by the strange gravity of Murdaen suffering and concern. Never to be known or heard by men, my impassioned homilies were studied by nascent angels, the delicate ghosts of fierce storms, children conceived but never born. My arrangements of silence were treasured by the spirits of metals in dust fallen from space, whispered by the feverish departures of shadows whose forms capered and warped upon those waters secured against all mortal seeing.

Neither acclaim, nor song, nor mortal memory was mine. My hope of speaking was obliterated like my human life. Now, I am gone, never to be found by any who might seek me, and my voice occurs only in the recondite arrangements of unseen clouds, the patterns of fallen leaves on water, the fatal constellations of such maps as are only apparent across the dreaming ache of knots in time; tangles in whose arcs and locks the souls of sleeping sirens tense and tumble.