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11-05-2013, 10:42 PM
Just because you cannot see the shadow doesn’t mean that the shadow has gone.
I learned that little thorn embedded in the famous adage relatively young. Likely very few people notice at all: such is the irony of clichés. There was the apparent wisdom of turning your back on the darkness and, beneath it, the childish implication that being unable to see the poison might make the poison cease to exist – but the shadow remained, clinging to your ankles and your back and dogging your every footstep.
Waiting.
Keep your face to the sunshine, they should have said, so you can't see the shadow slowly killing you.
---
The moment she told me I would not be welcomed in the Basin, I knew I had to go there. That was my big red button, my Forbidden Forest, and if the universe decreed that we must suffer for our curiosity then I was quite prepared to do so. I coped far worse with unanswered questions than I ever did with pain.
The stars felt brighter here in the mountains. It was what had drawn us to the soaring peaks of Delphi those long seasons past, and what urged me onward past the Steppes now. What little thought I had given to caution had evaporated with the dying sun; I was home, or as near to any home as I had ever had, and the heavens blazed with starlight and an altogether different celestial fire that danced and slithered across the blackness like a great ghostly serpent.
I had not seen an aurora since we’d left the Inlet.
It seemed at once absurd to me, surrounded as I was by this splendor, that I should not belong here. I could scarcely have drawn a more fitting place from my infinite imagination. For once, the chill of my brother’s absence did not bite so deeply into my shoulder as I bounded deeper into the valley.
This general disregard for territorial boundaries is probably hereditary. Sorry.
I learned that little thorn embedded in the famous adage relatively young. Likely very few people notice at all: such is the irony of clichés. There was the apparent wisdom of turning your back on the darkness and, beneath it, the childish implication that being unable to see the poison might make the poison cease to exist – but the shadow remained, clinging to your ankles and your back and dogging your every footstep.
Waiting.
Keep your face to the sunshine, they should have said, so you can't see the shadow slowly killing you.
The moment she told me I would not be welcomed in the Basin, I knew I had to go there. That was my big red button, my Forbidden Forest, and if the universe decreed that we must suffer for our curiosity then I was quite prepared to do so. I coped far worse with unanswered questions than I ever did with pain.
The stars felt brighter here in the mountains. It was what had drawn us to the soaring peaks of Delphi those long seasons past, and what urged me onward past the Steppes now. What little thought I had given to caution had evaporated with the dying sun; I was home, or as near to any home as I had ever had, and the heavens blazed with starlight and an altogether different celestial fire that danced and slithered across the blackness like a great ghostly serpent.
I had not seen an aurora since we’d left the Inlet.
It seemed at once absurd to me, surrounded as I was by this splendor, that I should not belong here. I could scarcely have drawn a more fitting place from my infinite imagination. For once, the chill of my brother’s absence did not bite so deeply into my shoulder as I bounded deeper into the valley.
This general disregard for territorial boundaries is probably hereditary. Sorry.
