28 The heavens and home (1/2)
”The heavens is the blue. Home is the dark. The heavens is the bright outside. Home is the distorted reality.”
Simple. Elegant. Proper. Almost obvious. But, most times, it was just these that were buried in incomprehension.
”Where do you get that from?” Dia asked.
She was clearly the most invested among all of us. In that moment, there was only me in her eyes, just her and me in her world.
She followed my eyes to the wall. Saw Ryirawra's runes. And fell silent.
**
An old sun is no different. No more brighter. No less darker. Changes nothing.
Yet everything is changed. Everything, different.
The window is wider. The wind stronger. I'm lighter.
I ride the wind. Up to the heavens. To where I am inevitably headed. To where a new home awaits. A home so much the same as wholly unlike.
An old sun, my quiet companion.
**
”The final words,” Jerry said. ”Probably the most popular expression of the Nashi free form.”
The twins nodded. Dia took over, as the truer expert.
”Personally, I hold this particular set of runes as the epitome of the free form.”
Looking directly at me, she spoke in the voice of a senior offering lessons.
”Free form was born in the oppression of the Vyaraishi. A break out idea from the artists of the capital, a group that was the most reverential of the fundamental ideals of Vyaraishi. Which is why it is so surprising and so powerful. Free form fell in Vyaraishi with the collapse of the revolt. But it didn't die out. A wisp escaped, and bore fruit on the peaks of the Hyngraves, with the Nashi. The core idea of free form is expression of the purest form, free of all limiting restrictions. Since it was born from the Vyaraishi fundamental ideals, the similarities are abound. But the differences are great as well.”
”I have to concede on this point,” Pratt said solemnly. ”Imagine a Ryirawra in Vyaraishi. She would be a whole other person. Certainly not the wonderful poet Nashi turned her into.”
”Sometimes, we are the worst enemy to our heirs.”
It wasn't a sentence I was expecting from Dia. But it sounded so much like her, in the moment.
”I'll get us something to eat,” Pratt said, destroying the mood. ”Jerry was right. Dean is worse than the lot of us. It's been hours. We've missed like two whole meals. Now that I've brought it up, I'm sure you'll both hear it too. The cry of hunger.”