Monograph of a Waterless Netch

Va'Krin, 4E 299, Frostfall --?-- Sun's Dusk --?--

I am older than I'd like to be. What a selfish way to start the end.

What I remember most is the chanceless red tint of my mother's womb, like sunset but wetter and softer and mine. I have been searching for a purpose that excluded me, even then, when I plopped out like a drenched brown white tomato screeching for position.

I am older than my daughter by sixty eight. My daughter is dead and buried somewhere in the Ascadian, but I do not know where and only know so because her deader husband's voluntary slave (what I called a 'complicated relationship' out of reluctant tolerance) had the kindness to scry me a bill detailing the silver-bladed shovels he had to buy in order to shove her body into the ground.

I was under the impression she would not want to be buried, but you know what they say about impressions: they're not much except what you think ought to be and not actually what may or may not be.

Writing back, I said something along the lines: "If we pass again in Suran I will make to sure to leave your joints as an offering to the notgod's who've ignored me."

I am an old cat. Don't pity me, but know what I am. I am curled in an excavated cave at the northernmost tip of Southpoint, where I've gone unbothered for the better half of a decade, chiseling at my stone comfort inch by meekly inch, easing into a life away from what I've been told is civilization, the sum of progress so far, but all I've seen are nations with pillars tied to their ankles ready to sink into the oceans that hold them up. I see colossal garish barnyards flooded in hogshit and a mess of toilers who'd bathe in it before they'd raise a rag to clean.

In Rimmen, I had few to speak my troubles. In Leyawiin, fewer. All of the ones I loved told me there was no way to the world, that history was a sketch of incongruity, learnedness a false flag waving in a wind that's raping and burning it at the same time.

They gave me books that told me why. They gave me Sul and Jarth and Elinhir and Townway. They gave me histories and dramas and men who called themselves truth.

These led to Mannimarco, Camoran, Vivec, the tomes of which took years to find, and offered no comprehension whatsoever, seemed identical in a certain kind of word-guided lunacy yet with differing results. At first, I saw three shaking curs trying to untangle the untangleable, like toddler's at a knot. But they are not the same.

The life-riser was a subject of misfortune or luck or both, depending on your most likely shaky interpretation, not resilience, and the usurper's bastard was a subject of piety, promises of divinity that were scourges wrapped in Vvardenfell silk.

I read their ponder and in them I felt corruption like nothing else, so much so I could never shake their rot.

They are lies in the way water is a friend - truth until there's too much. Gorge and you'll find yourself like I have, alone and partially mad and without an expense but the ones you steal and a spirit that needs a spirit to liven it. Had I not read the words, had I not left Topal.

Vivec, unlike the others, combed and scraped at quilts sewn by Gods because he saw himself fit to be one. Sil and Ayem are equally responsible and their ends shrouded in betrayal and laughable madness should be evidence enough of Vivec's insanity-abetting philosophy. The notion of this derisory ascension should have us all shivering. That fully grown, fully minded, fully realized individuals like Sil and Ayem absconded on every one of their mortal principles in order to bully themselves into dominion should compel you to take up arms against every tribunal-rat available. What sort of lesson is at the center of this parsimony? This churlish arrogance in I are We?

What I've come to believe, in all its wrongness: Vivec's testimonies, when compiled, when taken in by the right or wrong person, are the Numidium-cursed sprung to life. They are delusions meant for mantled dragons and no one else.

And then I wonder, if these Ways are the ways, and the scribbles of a god, could he not have made them clearer? I've not seen too many gods roaming the estuaries -- perhaps it's different in Mournhold, but to me that's a tally of a job poorly done. Perhaps best that way.

And clarity aside, couldn't the Gods have made it easier for everyone in the first place? Or like the Gardener do they all delight in seeing confused cats bludgeoning ink at their own heads?

Like my mother, and my father, and my daughter, and the love who carried my daughter, I will die and be forgotten and the tithes I owe will disintegrate somehow, as if they never meant anything in the first place. All my nights of dithering, clawing at my temples -- all my nights envious of the unattainable and driven to violence by it at the same time -- worthless. May as well have been a stillborn netch.

Tomorrow, I will row into the sea and like always let the water be my friend. I am, of course, kidding, since the cave I worked so hard to craft just hours ago collapsed in on me, trapping me to surely die of dehydration, which I will surely do shortly. End of words is the end of troubles, I hear.