Beyond the Pale

[DISCOLIQUID 2701]

A step away from the royal lineage, that was the closest she had ever come. An advisor, a vizier, a hopeful watcher, and that was the closest she had ever come. In the years past, if she had merely waited, and bit her silver tongue, the Xalyth would have offered her a status eternal. That was the closest she had ever come. Now, in the aftermath of her exile, she could only call the surface home. It hurt, that lurking star, the occuli of Gods that glared down upon the stretching world: the sun. How close had she been to the true center of darkness, and now her only providence was the thin Night, that thing that came and went with the folly of that leonine, roaring beast of luxurious light. 

 

Cycles. She learned now, of their repetitive truth, the patterned tapestry of day and night. Below the soil, underneath the cover of eternal shadow, the Mori’quessir had grown complacent with an understanding that belied the profane reality of the world. The sun rose, the sun set, the moon rose, and the moon fell. This churning process shocked her. The mortals of the surface divided their time like this. For every day, for every night, a triumphant rise to power, and a catastrophic fall into oblivion. 

 

It gave Phithali a horrifying sense of insignificance. Beneath the sordid shadow of the Mori’quessir, time was measured in adrenaline. In plots. In the comings and goings of figures of importance. The world felt self-contained, a tight knit web of conspiracies that bound each moment to the next. The immortality of Fae rendered a foggy view of time itself, set more as a vague association of cause, effect. Plot, payoff. Scheme, success… or its brutal failure. 

 

But here, every moment, every slice of time gave its eternal honor in the onslaught of this perpetual penumbra; the rising, the falling, the shining, the dimming, the fire, and the shadow. But here, oh, but here brought a rich, rich truth – too sweet to swallow, too grand to comprehend, a realization borne out of deep time & deeper axioms. Watching the sun shriek as gloaming knives bid it back into the underworld, Phithali drank in the depths of starlight. She had a moment of realization, as she bore an honest judgement from sun up to sun down, tracking its hoary gleam across the satin of Mundus’ sky. As night yawned its gloomy maw, the Mori’quessir’s eyes looked at secrets beyond the firmament that the sun hung in. Phithali knew that deep in the earth, shadow, furtive secrets were abundant. Here then, on the surface, the sun came and went. But she saw, far into space and its astral amazement, that beyond the bleaching sun, was a darkness far more expansive & wide than the mere shadow of the Underworld.

 

Truly, there was more darkness than light.

 

When she laid down her head upon the soft grass, she suffered the most peculiar of dreams. Bid before a great sky, under antediluvian night as dark as Phithali bid up a surreal gaze clouded by somnambulant psychosis. The sun rose, and fell; the moon built to crescendo, and diminished. Again, and again, and again, and again, and again, 

 

Until the rippling light and warping shadow began to look less like a sky, and more like an awesome winking eye. It opened, and shut, and opened, and shut, until the milk of its pupil ran into one blind color, and then wholly gone, gone, gone. The sun was a thin, singular lie. In the vastness, there was no time. No space. The darkness beyond her face was the same darkness beyond her arms the same darkness beyond her eyes the same darkness beyond her home the same darkness beyond Mundus the same darkness beyond reality. One unerring web of uninterrupted shadow, from here, to there, from source to oblivion.

 

Infinity.

 

 

When she awoke, she saw nothing.

 And further out, everything.