She Is (d10)

She is there in every fragment of reality, in every plane, on every level, through all the histories and times. Like a fleck of darkness in a gem.

1. Sometimes she is a city of dark pines and darker towers, black iron bridges hung in chains, lit at night by pure white flames burning only on the highest points so that the masked and downcast wanderers below walk in their silver shadows to and fro. Sometimes the wind howls there, piping in the iron links, turning the white fires to blazing pennants and sweeping the robes of the flaneurs into blotches of spilt ink. The people love the wind and storms and racing catastrophic skies. Midnight gales are met by carnivals and wild parades, bone masks switched for harlequin grins, public dancing in their robes, puppeting constructed fantasies about, some lost and pulled from the hand by the barreling clouds, cast up and over the city like lost monsters in a dream, borne up on joyful laughter like the ringing of unexpected bells.

2. Once a dragon writhing in the shadows of a city ruined sunken in the bottom of a lake with water clearer than a cats eye. She nests immune, forty fathoms down, wandering in the markets and the floods of bone. You can see it like a window from the boat, and she see you. Hoards of Jade and Malachite are piled in coliseums and she sleeps blackly like the lines of a drunken script all tangled up in piles of precious stones. The lake is hers, and all the waters to it, and as far as she could reach when dusk or dawn, while the light of the sun is in the sky but its circle was not whole, she flies, taking everything that she desires. Summer is a hated season there, with its easeful shiftings of hourly light, and winter prized for its quick fastening of night. Warmth brings war as nearby kingdoms lose their tithe to her black wings, winter: peace, and a shield of ice upon the lake.

3. On some worlds she is a sybil to the god of visions, hierophant of the imagined thing. On some this leaves her begging in the streets, a faith of one, as all mad people are. On others armies move at her command, janizaries hurl them selves en-masse on pikes to form a road of flesh by which her word may pass. On every world she is alone, silent in the cell, hidden in the corner of the street, burning cities with her glance and whispering to the rats.

4. When she is a star she is alone, never placed in any constellation, and when the story of her star is told then the story stands alone, unconnected to the other tales, spoken as the fire burns down when most have gone to sleep. When written down she is apocrypha. Her star is bright and constant in the sky.

5. Sometimes she is a demigod or daughter of the gods. She knows no fear and walks, friendless and alone but unopposed, in the blackening moors where danger lurks. The brand she carries burns. She comes upon the traveller in the night, as friend if they are lone like her, or scourge if they be cheery, bright and gathered in a group. Heaven help those making noise. All single things attend her and all monsters either fear her brand or bow before her word. Her word is stone, her name applied to oaths to keep them tight, her honour inviolate and world renowned. Her promise absolute. She is a walker in the wilds and symbol of those things seen truly only when we see them on our own. The irreducible experience, the unremarked last stand, the final terrors and the secret joys.

6. When she is a land that land is high and cut by streams, rocks breach through the loam and forests bend and grow like curls of smoke before the infinite wind from the sea.

7. When she is a sea she covers wrecks and casts forth islands of ice like blue-white jewels cast idly on the ground, she mothers ancient serpents and freezes swimmers to death. She is banked with advancing cloud and mother to storms.

8. When she is a planet she is dark, cold and orbiting without a star, yet never still. Curls of rare matter condense in her Jovian skies. Strange gravitys clash through her obsidian continents and frozen carbon dioxide seas. Her moons orbit closely, sending tidal strands of stone and ice tornadoing across her face. She cradles darksome life, wise, ancient and indifferent to the wheeling of the distant stars. Her world goes on unnoticed, hanging in the darkness, far from the stellar empires. They are wise not to investigate too much. This world is not for them.

9. Sometimes she is a thought within the mind or a dream within the sleeping brain. She is a dark idea, not quickly put aside. She is an impulse to wander and walk out into the night alone, to abandon everything and disappear, climbing some forgotten crag or watching from a glass, releasing the tiller and tightening the sail, when the wind is navigator she is there, when the wheel is lose and the accelerator down then she is there. When she is a dream she lingers through the sunlit afternoon and makes you wish for silence and a darkened room.

10. When she is a god she is the last, either death or deaths destroyer. She is will and resolute desire. She gives visions for release and darkens the night sky. She is with the wild things in the woods, the shadow self, unrelaxed, aside from life. She is facing into the dark to see what comes. Her sacrifice is love and what you love. Her protection is absolute and her aegis unbroken by time, you should not worship her in groups. She is chthonic in the sacristy. Dark and mystic. Her testament is sung and never written down.