XII. Overtaken by the Dawn-breaker

In the second gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

A critical juncture will be overtaken by
The Dawn-breaker;
Queer and base, his sublimity is barely perceptible;
Cunning and brave, no-one will judge him at his
True value.
Three unimpeachable historians will call him villain,
A shabby clown performing in tapestried parlors.

In iron shoes and a steel jacket with prismatic
Dorsal plates,
A prisoner languishing in the cavern of a hundred walls,
Retains stewardship of ten thousand illuminated
Manuscripts.
Light and glory, honors and commendations, reward
Her perseverance.

Parched encroachments into every water on earth
Will be forestalled by a deep reservoir for the
Entire planet;
The lion’s share for two million in the sacrificed
Territories.

XI. A summer’s marriage-feast despoiled

In the dialected gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

From a summer’s marriage-feast despoiled in reel
And rout,
The knight stands aloof; he wears upon his shield
The puppet crown
And slays with his sword fifteen long-suffering captives.
In thirty long years he will defeat twelve generals,
Burn ten churches, demolish ten temples, and build
Ten cities.

His denatured bride, widely praised and most
Closely guarded,
Arises with his silver-bedecked allies to supplant him.
The perfect cavalier cannot comprehend this opportunity
For ambush;
In the absence of the sun, fountains spring like a cloud
Of fire.

In a great arc she brings down the cursed hilt of
His saber,
Forged in witch’s oils burnt green, blue and white,
Which fractures his unwary skull but does not kill him.

X. Quaint and infamous traditions

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

Quaint and infamous traditions prevail after
The quakes
Caused by the gravitational anomalies
Of the Y1 asteroids.
Sailors melt down the entrails of manatees for salt;
Soldiers carve hawthorn for bullets and scatter
Poppy seeds and amaranth before the thrones of infants.

Such is the fruitfulness of the original chaos:
Green child-like primates, clothed with flames,
Living along rivers and streams, bury their coffins
Filled with rich food and eat dirt from their tombs.

Gypsy bandits paint the thumbs of sleeping travelers
Held in place by a circle of rice paper and javelins,
Secured by their necks and shoulders with violin strings.

IX. A vampire tainted by burnt blood

In the sixth gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

On the crib of a child born with a caul
A starling finds the inscription of the Venirregantha
And tells of seventeen boundaries of existence.
A new voyage around the world will measure
The demeaned climates of several coasts and islands.

The torture of pilgrims of a children’s crusade
Along the borders of the Field of Wrathful Dieties,
Will be avenged
By a bronze-footed creature, a vampire tainted
By burnt blood,
Victim of murder on the adjacent soil of Letlapa.

Foxes and jackals swim through black water beneath
The cleft gate
On the near side of Royal Asia’s western fortification,
Descending into the belly of the largest kitchen of five.

VIII. The towers of the humming world

In the fourth gyre of the Age of Eichenblon’s Crater:

All things are parallel, yet many are askew,
And a new leaf will be locked fast into a skin
Of consequences.
Across the wine-soaked fields of chamomile and poppy
Stand and fall the towers of the humming world;
White crows feed on the seven spleens of the coastal
Wardens.

A dusty adder marks the grim man’s mossy face
With the bloody token of the mercury ion.
Inscriptions of a greatly distant empire are drawn
On the linen cloth placed under him when
He is beheaded.

The air is replenished with various living creatures
Shown in orange-red weather on rising lake waters;
This intensely cold isthmus is not of the earth.

The Chosen Wolves

I first thought words like “phinnaft” and “diumalk” were words from some kind of angel-language. The Lorwolm let me labor under that assumption for quite a while, until one day I asked Nihr Avna-attu about it. That’s the way they work, they’re not big on long explanations. If I want to know the details, I have to ask a specific question. Nihr Avna-attu informed me that there is no angel-language, that angels use mortal languages when they need to speak. Different angels know different languages; Nihr Avna-attu knows twenty-seven human languages, although he/she might have learned more since he/she told me that fact. Any particular situation will usually dictate their choice of language; for example, there would be no point in speaking to me in anything but English.

The Lorwolm give me words like phinnaft and na-awult (words from the future, from a language that will be called Bruyeil-Pacifican) because these words come from languages that will be spoken by the people who will be able to decode and understand the ecteiroglyphs. These people will be the true prophets of the Lorwolm, called the Alleiliosek in Uru-nauwi, another future-language. Which means the Chosen Wolves, but you must understand that they are not chosen by God or any Entity, they will choose themselves.

The next question I asked was the obvious one: if the Alleiliosek will be speaking Uru-nauwi or Bruyeil-Pacifican, shouldn’t I be writing the ecteiroglyphs in those languages?

Nihr Avna-attu’s answer to that?

“No.”

VII. When ring draws upon ring

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

When ring draws upon ring in the sky
Towards the right,
The flesh and spirit of the ransomed king wanes
In the growth of the moon’s scorched stone heart.
And a new sickle cuts no sharper than the song
Of a skylark besotted with a frost-broken brute.

In one burst gun fate opens for a follower
Of the acorn mage,
Walking with a scroll in the sole of his shoe,
Holding in a bird’s-eye glove a blossomless vine
With spined husks from the branch of a barren tree.

Hidden will be the changeling, a rough female
Of one talent,
As she crouches in the round grave of storm-dogged
Loa Mu,
With a tooth in each of the twinned bodies of law
And faith.

The Poet and the Woodlouse

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

Said a poet to a woodlouse–”Thou art certainly my brother;
I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole;
And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and smother,
In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.

“Yea,” the poet said, “I smell thee by some passive divination,
I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion,
Had the aeons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.

“The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion,
Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test;
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question,
And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best.”

“Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of awe stick
To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight:
Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch of solar caustic,
On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate.”

“Notwithstanding which, O poet,” spake the woodlouse, very blandly,
“I am likewise the created,–I the equipoise of thee;
I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie
The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.

“I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,
And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush:
Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,
And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

“I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings,
Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee:
And earth’s soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs,
Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.

“And I sacrifice, a Levite–and I palpitate, a poet;–
Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things?
Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic;
Earth’s worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me! I have wings.

“Ah, men’s poets! men’s conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like,
And the world’s wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod:
We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight,
And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet to God.

“For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles,
Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through the sieve of thunderstorms,
Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels;
And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.

“Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us;
Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right and steer wrong?
For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,
Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.

“Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through humanitarian passion
See that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism;
Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,
Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.

“Pass, O poet, retransfigured! God, the psychometric rhapsode,
Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink;
All eternities hang round him like an old man’s clothes collapsed,
While he makes his mundane music–and he will not stop, I think.”

The Heptalogia, 1880

VI. A lunar wolf will emerge

In the third gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

After years of seclusion frequented by terrifying
Hallucinations,
The fugitive from the sky becomes the arcane priest
Stirring mad dreams in the younger son
Of the saturnine mogul.
Torture, paralysis and remorse are the gifts
Of the gaudy Moccawmune
Who speaks of truth and patriots with a ferret’s tongue.

When machines believe in cold ghosts,
From the depths of a maze, a lunar wolf will emerge,
Followed by a coarse terrapin with two legs of lead
And two legs of silver,
Bringing a map from the echidtors
Of the diminishing moon.

Strange objects cross the unnatural verge
Into the alkali soul of the immaculate triangle,
Shattering the turning point of a serene world.

Heaven: You’re soaking in it

I have asked all three members of the Lorwolm about heaven.

Of Tsitao-utna I asked “What is heaven like?” There was several moments of silence, then a voice unlike Tsitao-utna’s customary voice spoke from above the blue bowl: “You’re soaking in it.”

I refer to Tsitao-utna as a female because she uses a feminine voice. This voice was also female, but it was apparent to me that someone else was speaking. The voice was weirdly familiar; I felt like Tsitao-utna had played a recording of someone I had known in my childhood. It took a few days, but I finally realized who had spoken: “You’re soaking in it,” had been the catch-phrase of Madge, a character from an old Palmolive commercial. Madge was the manicurist who praised the gentleness of Palmolive dish soap to customers who were surprised to find that their hands were soaking in it.

The actress who played Madge was Jan Miner; she died in 2004, but I am sure it was not her speaking from beyond the grave.