Pilgrim of the Eternal Morrow

What is the worth of a single grain of sand in the hourglass of wind that even Time itself has forgotten? An hourglass inverted, surrounded by the golden sand of a remote desert, from which exiled grains have been locked outside? How did that one grain – so strange, so dissonant from the others – manage to find the secret entrance to the tomb of immortal time? Destiny, perhaps? A fate chosen or written? A blessing or a curse? Why, surely it was precisely because it was different.

Yes, the tiny grain of sand had earned its eternal place within the artifact – but at what cost? What matters how Time will remember it, if its long journey is forgotten, its arduous path untold? What matters where it arrived, if history buries the storms it survived, the wars it fought, alone and wounded?

For the despair and anguish of knowing that its love for the echoes of the past is precisely what suppresses its own sound, is infinitely more painful and unbearable than the torture of living blind, lying alongside the other grains of sand. Lying about the role they were fated to play. Lying about the character they were meant to become in that desolate desert, ignorant of the treasure dwelling in the present. For it is better to live in a lonely truth that delivers than within the performed illusion of the many. That is why a choice emerged and a decision took form in the heart of that isolated grain of sand: it were to embark on a long, solitary, and irreversible journey toward the lost horizon of itself – even accompanied by the self-inflicted fear of what it might find along the way and at its end.

Carried from soft breeze to wild wind, from torrential tempests to dire droughts, the fragile grain ventured through placid valleys and majestic mountains. Through resplendent palaces and shadowed ruins. Enchanted forests and haunted swamps. Impossible places that sharpen inner senses and feed the imagination. It sought the core of that inner underworld, going as far as the wind could carry it – far enough from the echoes that had forged it. Echoes of ancestral voices that sang dirges and hymns of sorrow to drown out the little one’s own voice. Fiery voices pealing in the hollow that it thought to have been left behind, yet felt growing deep within like roots of an ancient oak. An absence it journeyed endlessly to fill, only to cascade back into it.

And so it dove deeper and deeper into the bottomless primal lake. Ever farther from the desert where it had been born. Ever closer to the legendary hourglass that had once tempted it.

…to be continued…

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