The Next Tale (hopefully a proper Harming Tree canon)

[tinhuviel]

Far off galaxies were reflected, spiralling in the depths of Cadmus Pariah's obsidian eyes. He blinked slowly, allowing himself to go ever further outward into the cosmos, reaching out spidery tendrils of ancestral memory, where his ancestors had taken their first breath and sung their first songs of Creation. Across the multiverse he travelled, taking in each galaxy and naming it according to the ancient Tarmian ways. And he pulled to him the presence of the black hole at the center of each heavenly body, that inevitable dark matter that was the source of the life that chose to ignore its origins. Black holes were the realm of the Pariah. Surely the songs pulled into their ineluctable gravity fortified their existence, forging the event horizon that was the only indication of their presence amongst the vibrations of the living stars. It was at these times that Cadmus grasped at his philosophical apices only to realise that he could actually feel wonder and amazement without the assistance of his long-gone beautiful pets.

He shuddered in reaction to the moisture that pooled around his endless irises. Such emotion presented a kind of terror in Cadmus. He was wholly unsure what to do with it, and so he fought it with every fibre of his being.

He blinked again, his heavy lids resting at half-mast as he absorbed the light around him. The blessed dark would always be his primary realm, that rhapsody in which he could touch eternity by gazing into the impossibly ancient stars, and the dark matter that suspended them in time.