I no longer sound like Shara. Now I sound like a gossip magazine.
I sometimes go to the sections of the city most disrupted by the Blink. The stairs there look like fields of giant cornstalks, rising into the sky, ending suddenly. The children play a funny game: they run up the stairs, see who is bravest to go the highest, then run back down.
Up the stairs & down the stairs they run, over & over, always hurrying, yet never quite going anywhere.
I sympathize.
I must focus. … I must examine the threads of history, the calendars & timelines, & see if they align.
If they do not, as I expect, what does this mean for the Continent? What does it mean for Saypur?
29th of the Month of the Sloth
Yesterday I met something I am not sure is legally permitted: an Olvoshtani monk.
I think it was a monk … I am not sure. I was taking a break from my work, reveling in sunlight on the Solda, sketching the bridge (it is so much narrower than nearly every bridge I’ve seen—I forget, of course, that it was meant solely for foot & horse traffic) & the walls behind it when she approached: a short, bald woman in orange robes.
She asked me what I was doing, & I told her. I showed her my work, & she was very appreciative. “You have captured its essence exactly,” she said. “And they say there are no more miracles!”
I asked her her name. She said she had none. I asked her the name of her order. She said she had none, only a “disorder.” (A joke, I presume.) I asked her what she thought of Bulikov these days. She shrugged. “It is being reinvented.”
I asked her what she meant.
“Forgetting,” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.”
I was so struck by this I fell into deep thought for some time. She skipped two stones across the Solda, bowed to me, & walked away.
2nd of the Month of the Turtle
Amazing discoveries, & terrifying ones. The discussions I have found taking place just before the Great Expansion have shed so much more light on the strange relationship between Divinities & mortals.
In 768 through 769:
In Ahanashtan, a priest stood on the shore & daily preached his reflections of foreign lands; in Voortyashtan, a sparring master pointed to mountain canyons headed east, below (then) the Dreyling lands, & commented on the way the rain must fall on the other side of the mountains, inspiring numerous exploration parties; later, in Jukoshtan, a starling-singer (must research this term later) sang a three-day poem of the currents in the ocean, & how they carry one so far away to distant places, & perhaps distant peoples … & so on, & so on.
One can see, then, that the Continentals were thinking about lands besides theirs. I have discovered a wealth of text that noses at the boundaries of their geographic knowledge.
Yet I have trudged through Divine decrees of all kinds during this same period, & have found no Divine mention of anything beyond the Continent’s boundaries & shores!
It is odd that the Divinities remained silent on a conversation surging through their mortal flock.
But look how the discourse changes among the Continentals between 771 & 774:
In Kolkashtan, a town magistrate claimed that, since the Continent is blessed by the Divinities, there is nothing they do not own—they own the stars, the clouds, & the waves in the ocean; in Voortyashtan, a “gallows-priestess” asked why they make blades that will shed no blood, for there are no more wars to fight in, & debated whether this was a sin; in Ahanashtan, a “mossling” (some kind of nun?) wrote a poetic epic about what will happen when Ahanashtan grows so large (was the city alive? I must research further) that it begins to harm itself, bringing disharmony, starvation, & exhaustion. This epic was terribly successful, & caused many debates & much anxiety, with some even demanding the mossling’s imprisonment.
The Continentals were thinking, however peripherally, about expansion. It is patently obvious to anyone that they feared exhaustion, starvation, & moreover they began to feel that they deserved to expand, & take ownership of new places.
The Divinities, however, were not thinking about expansion—Kolkan was starting down the train of thought that would begin with his period of open judgment, & Taalhavras, always the most distant of Divinities, was adding onto the walls of Bulikov—and, I believe, altering the nature of Bulikov in many more profound, invisible ways. … All of them were off on their own concerns, while the people of the Continent fretted over the future.