9: To Sleep Perchance To Dream

eternal is the sleep as is the night neither shaken nor creased it is a path of divergence legion so much so that it is a mere plane of simple thought glossy soft silent and still

in rest you find relics from within and about cast aside and starting back always returning and murmuring the million secrets you hold but will not hear  and stretching for them you find they gracefully avoid your grasp as they float in muted revolution spinning slow and silent in the obsidian darkness of a consciousness disquieted

behind you is before and before you is after the paths neither begin nor end yet weave and merge having yet been here before so shall you be again constant yet never the same

these things we need not tell you  yet we know full well  the utterance will make for comfort   you have been roland beowulf achilles gilgamesh you were called a thousand names  and a thousand more shall answer to before our work is done   they were heroes you knew though yourself you do not understand  for given life but a few years their deeds were done and their flesh grew weak once strong and taut it grayed and faded as did the works that would praise these names for centuries until at last they were forgotten  as the generations teeming faded them from view

Yet you were different, whence God bore destiny on the eighth day so came you, though so many enter this plane kicking and screaming you suffered the weight to contain the burden of a birth so monumental, hiding it beneath the soft lines of your face, only now so human.  Here. Do not fret; a plaything.  I have not forgotten your affinity for such devices. Do you remember... the burning sands, far away from here, and far away from now, the sand so red as a sea of embers, a dead place, a citadel, the top from which you avenged the fathers of your newfound friends, the flowing beings that spoke without words and thought through technology, reuniting them with kin believed dead but hoped alive?

this is enough for now  warriors are not to dawdle on things past for such are the interests of philosophers and kings and gods  take what you will from this for within it is the key to your being and mine as well  I find no offense in the fact that you do not yet remember me. though in time through time this too will come to pass

gaze now upon the sea of your possible paths they lay before you in patient wait waves they make warm and inviting choose now and awake later to the reality of your decision    What must be done is clear.   the blood to be spilled levels the scale