The Little Brother's Tale

[Aelesh 540]

 

(𝄞𝄞𝄞)

 

A letter is hidden in the back of one tome or another on the philosophies of those obscure Latter-Prophets.

 

 

Greetings and ukhai from this tusked-one.  Here are written down some few burdensome sparks of inspiration, of a fire heavier than the coal which produced it.  These wilds which I call home are thick with the wounds that you exalt.  Though your whole meaning evades me, my heart beats comfortably to the rhythm of your work.  A portent, perhaps, of a beneficial friendship.  What follows is a myth in the way of my ancestors' paths, inflamed with my dwindling sparks.  Sage prophets, may all the spirits remember their true ancestor.

 

❉

 

Little Brother was walking in the cool of the evening, through the fruit groves where the sunshine lingers longest.  There, the riverwaters babbled and twinkled as they danced between the roots, alive with brightening starlight.  When Little Brother sat on the precipice where the garden fell away, he began to hear two songs like lovers departing from one another.  The sunlight against his skin slowly quietened her voice as the stars began to serenade his eyes.

 

How great are the seas, ‘pon which my first rays fell!  How great are the mountains, which conquered the seas!  How great are the trees, which churned up the stone!  How great are the Men, who made forts of the forests!  And the stars responded with one phrase, repeated for every little light surviving the darkness of the heavens.  

 

Seas swam, mountains wandered, forests foraged, Men crowned!

 

The sunsong he had often heard, but the stars’ tiny phrase was spring-newness to his soul.  Little Brother loved their hope and desired their wisdom, but knew not how to lift his voice to their ears.  Night heard his dream, felt his reaching hands, and so from circling overhead a twisting spiral of nightfeathers came fluttering down in Crow’s shape.  Little Brother could not tell the glimmer of her eyes from the promise of the stars, and sat entranced, his sister nestled on his shoulder.  She spoke with a whispering croak.

 

“What separates you is not distance, but time.  The starlight is stretched between this place and the eternal hour, which was before all hours.  If you spoke the sound would never reach them.  If you danced only the first movement they would see, suspended forever like a painting.”  Little Brother was distraught for their loneliness.

 

“So how do they hear each other, singing together as they have for me?  Is it merely one cry repeated?  One tear from all their glowing eyes?”  His worry was so pure, innocent, that Crow unfurled a wing like a sail around him.  “Are they all merely a sorrow in refrain?”  Crow shook her head and made a sign with her talons, each claw pressed together into one point.  So cleanly she sliced between the winds!  Little Brother stared into the world-wound, saw how it bent the grove's branches like water refracting, and touched something from long ago in a treasured silence.  When the chill made him gasp, Crow clasped his lips together with her beak and drank the sound before the silence could be named ‘Pain’.

 

So Little Brother struggled with his teacher all through midnight and beyond.  Between the seconds they cut voiceless songs into the grove’s pattern, digging the roots of the trees deeper and deeper still, until they found the soil of a stranger time.  Every cut was the flowering of new lungs that sung with the voice of a quiet world.  Little Brother’s smile was moon-twinned, a gleeful slice, a joy that made even sister Crow dance like a chick again.  The world melted in their play, the fruits into their bark, the stars into their darkness, the horizon into its firmament.  Heaven touched the last outstretched branches, drawn down from high above, loud with voices repeating that precious phrase.

 

But time could not be halted.  It marched on, its footing sure like Krug’s mightiest warbrothers, even in that place that had fallen so far down into yesterday’s root-shadow.  The stars were lifted on growing sunbeams, the pillars of an invisible temple, and set in the loftiest heights where none could reach them.  They had become again the faces of farseers and heroes, saints and kings, the bodies of all the dead and the dreams of all those yet living and yet still to live.  When Little Brother began to weep for the departure of his friends, who had told him so many wonderful things whilst unmasked, sister Crow did not steal out from him the sound, for the time of silence had ended.  The wheel of the day was thundering loudly with her winged siblings, larksong lusciously thick like lard.  She slipped between the raucous threads of shattered music and leapt over the edge of the world, into that sunless place where darkness and moonlight are stored up like wine in a cellar.

 

Little Brother’s looted wisdom was lighter on his shoulders in the daylight.  Lighter, perhaps, because sister Crow no longer rested upon his shoulder.  Perhaps, because those stars whom he had befriended had left him all alone, saving him from the weight of their eternal weeping.  Yet through the loneliness that had grown in again, tended by the sun’s warmth and radiant love, a thread red like fresh blood still remained, woven in his plaited hair with divine promise.  It was like the root of some secret plant he had uncovered in that furthest place beneath the grove, a plant with ruby petals seeded when Krug first raised his blade against kin.  Toying with it between his fingers made him strangely giddy.  There were voices in the garden that said remember and forget, that said dream and define, voices that he could hear in the thread’s twisting.

 

He sat again by the garden’s precipice and believed with all his heart that he could still see the stars, hidden in the folds of the valleys and behind the branches of the tallest trees.  That reddest thread was like a map between his heart and his desires, tugging at him to follow the road walked by all but whose end none had ever found.  He would swim the seas and wander the mountains, forage the forests' most excellent herbs and maybe, one day, he would both be crowned and would crown others with crimson and gold.

Edited August 12, 2025 by Aelesh

[Holyland 3650]

 

“The truth shines strong within this one; even as they know it not.” The progeny of the innominate, named amongst Men as Wahrheit, raises a hallowed hand skyward, and his brilliant meaning is sent forth through motes of dye shaped into worldly meaning upon a singular piece of paper. The winds shape his blackened, matted locks into curlicues; and even still, he yet spies his message to them;

 

‘Questions are the only truth. Seek us where the leaves dwell silent.’

‘Truth Shines.’