- Location
- Tel Vos
The Numinous Realms
In the darkness, before shapes, and light, and music, and color, there was a mountain.
It was. Its dimensions were without beginning or end. It stretched beyond all limits of vision, dazzled beyond all the vagaries of the senses; its breadth without ambit, its heights without altitude, its summit lost beneath skirling leagues of cloud and snow.
It was the Mountain-Before-Names. Men have given it other titles, too, vain endeavors to grasp at the true essence, to snare its urnymic in the shackles of language---Otumnos, the Stone; Masovaruda, the Womb of Heaven; Ilamm, the Axle; Biyya'a, the Anchor; Holo, the Pith; the Allsource, the Firmaments of Creation, the Pinnacle, the Forge, the Acorn, the Root, the Flower.
But the Mountain is treacherous. To scale the spires of creation is to be humbled.
The Mountain has no name.
A trackless passage of time elapsed. A cup began to fill. And the snows which crowned its peaks began to melt.
Rivulets trickled down the Mountain's imperious faces, became tumid and swelled to chutes, grew wider and fell to falls, and finally, tumbled from the heights as cataracts. A drop became a river. From the foot of the Mountain-Before-Names, Ur-Rahab, the grand tributaries of creation, spangled and reached into infinity.
There was no place where its waters did not explore. Its laughing streams danced and twisted into the hidden spaces, where secreted remnants from prior twilights were left for their quenching. Their grasping fingers pried open the starry locks and made havocs upon the prior orders, upending the stellate tomes, dusty with veiled mysteries, beaming all the way. Nothing was left dry in its inquests: the hollow places were filled, the secret places invaded, the hearthfires exhausted. All was laid bare and drowned, even unto the Mountain's frosted peaks.
Then, the cup overflew. More water was spilt over its edges, sending forth streaming jets. But in this detritus there was more to be found. The first Children were born, whooping and leaping from the weeping cup, and the Mountain laughed and was content, and the River laughed and was content.
How they mewled, then! In their birth-throes, what water they made!
They lived on the Mountain, for a time. They laughed and chased one another, hid behind hoary boulders, assumed disguises to deceive their fellows; they played in the shallows, and some even tried themselves against the current. The bigger ones wrestled with one another, testing their prowess. They made expeditions and explorations and learnt what they could.
But the mountain was a lonely place, and small too. Soon the Children could scarcely breathe, so large had they become and so little room there was. Although they loved their home on the Mountain's pinnacle, what now could they do? They would only grow further.
So they begged to have their own dwelling place. One in which they could dance and run and move and be without the presence of anyone else. The Mountain recognized the wisdom of that.
The River lowered then, leaving trailing wakes of silt and clay streaked upon the Mountain faces. Again its waters tumbled and seethed, but not wildly like before; ordered traces they made, fingers gently plumbing. They made hollow places of their own creation; bubbles of being and light, where the Children could languish at their leisure.
Seeing what the River had wrought, the Children exulted and laughed. They leaped from the heights and found their places, delved and marked them with their sparks.
"How pleasant it is!" they exclaimed, lounging on their velveteen couches, "How pleasant it is to be alone!"
They did not yearn for their fellows, then. In the miracle of their solitude they learnt much of themselves. Something quickened within them, something which they could neither encompass nor abandon. The bones of a great becoming filled their shapeless forms, made erupt leafy shoots where previously none had branched, struck fire upon cold hearths.
What was your great becoming?
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