In the beginning, there was a Universe, lush and abundant, a paradise inhabited by the opportunities of boundaries and ragged pathways and winds that blew this way and that without giving pause, a world where a man could understand wakefulness and fatigue both, satisfaction and deprivation both, because it was a world that put his will to the test again and again. With the assistance of a memory that moved forward whilst its head remained turned to the past all the time, men knew where they did fall and where they did sprint under the light of dispassionate stars, and within the strange bounds of disappointment and elation men understood who they were, as if they had looked into mirrors and seen faces, as if they knew what the world knew of them.
A time came when the world began to fade, when the ground was no longer what those who still walked upon it had known it to be, when lay dust was picked up by the raging winds and whipped into the skies above, when ultimately the moon was red and bleeding. Trees began to be stripped off their leaves and rivers flowed far from their courses, gouging valleys and gorges out of the world's floor, and before long, mountains lay prostrate on the ground, flattened into a dismal stretch of boulders and soil that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the ugliness they had boasted of before. Men were beginning to lose direction, walking in search of what they knew was dying and dying in their presence and yet, both knowing and unknowing what lay beyond the horizons once guarded by an old face of nature: they strayed into unknown territories that contained no borders, no sense of progress but the moon and the sun that traversed the skies for ever and on.
The unwillingness to embrace fatigue against the threat of permanent change, the hopelessness that consumed victory each time they looked behind their shoulders to a world they knew had once been, men kept walking. It was akin to toil, nay, it was toil itself, but the memory of the world's knowledge moved them into newer lands. The Universe was closing in around them, bringing them closer and closer to their brothers; they constantly found themselves in each other's company whether they turned north toward the cold or south toward the warmth. And when hope and will began to walk together, to take measure of the treacherous plains stretching before all their eyes, they were one in murdering an identity that had once existed, that had once known walls. Where did the walls go? Who pulled them down? Why did the world have to fade at all?
The answers lay in the hidden memories of their feet, beneath their leathery, distance-worn soles, in the pedestrian muscularity of their shins and knees, which could still recall the thousands upon thousands of miles that had been tread: the world had changed to change man with it, and significantly yet, had changed because it knew the face of man thoroughly and withdrew its restraints and laws, its pervading sense of order, to a womb within itself, so they may gestate their until the day came when man would be lost again, so that the face he had befriended would fade and recall the Universe to its original duty, to a preternatural body that would nature nature. It was a cycle that lasted for days one time and centuries on another, but the cycle moved through space, time and the mind, where everything else took proper shape.
Almost forgotten between these two entities, perpetually depressed under the burden of their strange purposes, lay a span of time incredibly short and hungry, as if a fold that had been fighting a tenuous battle against whatever held it there, be it hope, be it will, or be it a memory of ice. What lay there, so, was a monster, a beast brought to lay dormant until a moment was upon some chosen ones by an expedient force from history, burgeoning with power and, therefore, open intentions toward dissonance, it resounded like echoes from the future, seeping into the present through impudent doubts. Some called it the Oldness, others the First Form, the aging skein of the first mountain that man had clomb, impugned within its soul the first evening they had spent together, man and nature, loss and possession, light and shadow, a memory upon which was founded a necessary darkness that sought to steal faces.
There was no way it could resurface and survive; its place was within the earth whence it had first come, and it had returned, awaiting the return of a friend, so that, once more, they may know the embrace of the earth.
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