My, my, a curious and lost lamb. What brings you to read these words? Did you feel the grass may be, as they say, greener? Patience, my lost lamb. You may someday have a choice between pastures, seas, and flames; does a lamb not belong in a pasture? Of course, every soul faces this choice: heaven, purgatory, or the inferno. Will your choice be easy for you, or difficult? Look to heaven, and the pastures of God. Cosimo
CCCLXV I' vo piangendo i miei passati tempi i quai posi in amar cosa mortale, senza levarmi a volo, abbiend'io l'ale, per dar forse di me non bassi exempi. Tu che vedi i miei mali indegni et empi, Re del cielo invisibile immortale, soccorri a l'alma disviata et frale, e 'l suo defecto di Tua gratia adempi: sí che, s'io vissi in guerra et in tempesta, mora in pace et in porto; et se la stanza fu vana, almen sia la partita honesta. A quel poco di viver che m'avanza et al morir, degni esser Tua man presta: Tu sai ben che 'n altrui non ò speranza.
365 I go in grief for the times I spent bent to the love of a mortal thing, never lofting the wings of my soul to fly after your perfect image. You who know my disgraceful sins, King of Heaven, shadowed, shining, pity my soul, weak and astray, and repair my faults with your grace. And as my life was wind and storm, having found port, let me die in peace. If life was vain, the parting is honest. In these moments of life that remain to me, and in my death, Lord, save me: you know I have no hope but you.
I never imagined that Petrach's words would be so apt. I still do not believe in much of what he says -- but I never have come so close to the desperation embedded in the last line, or the hope. I have learned the visitor's name, and its origin... his origin. S'bhuth, I understand now, has traveled to our world. The conception of that journey, though, is so difficult for me. It is like the image S'bhuth showed me many months ago, of a map folding in on itself, but the complexities of that folding!
Worlds beyond imagining, yet I'm beginning to grasp the vision of these worlds. I also am beginning to grasp the threat which so concerns S'bhuth -- the visions of flooding, of destruction, of cold, freezing, frigid death -- these are not idle fancies. This danger is real.
The ideas that S'bhuth has shared with me are the very paths of destruction. I must return along all my paths...I must find these manuscripts and prevent the likes of Machiavelli, or Borgia, or the Venetians from using them. S'bhuth tells me that I will not be able to find these manuscripts on my own, and begs... wondrous strange! a shadow begs me in dreams...begs that I help him conceive a sort of engine. An engine through which time flows like water. The absurdity! And yet...the hourglass sand flows, does it not?
What truly frightens me is the thought of this creature's motives. It seemed at first that he wanted to share these wonderful insights, and now, he fears the consequences of those insights being put to ill use. Why did he want to share those discoveries with me? And why does he fear so for the fate of the Italian states... for our neighbors... for all of Europe?
A quel poco di viver che m'avanza et al morir, degni esser Tua man presta: Tu sai ben che 'n altrui non ò speranza. S'bhuth has revealed his full plan for recovering my lost manuscripts. Oh my God, forgive me. This...this entity will put the entire world...and his entire world...and other entire worlds...in the hands of one savior, and S'bhuth's kin will follow. We have no hope but him. I have put the world at risk to call forth a deliverance. We must sin to find our salvation.
How was I drawn into this tangled web? I have come to know S'bhuth's lament, and the fate of his kind, and their enslavement... all their tiny, clear, pure voices singing in massed harmony, bent and twisted to purposes obscure and obscene...and the hungry mind of S'bhuth himself... ...after all my searches for the center of the soul, leading me through countless crypts and countless nights of candlelit study, countless skinned corpses, I find a soul without any body.
