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<span class="mu-i">Eight pairs of hands press down on a score-wounds, as what was once a man leaks blood-turned-saltwater into the Ocean. The boat lurches on the sudden waves, red droplets spray, flicker, twist, land in the sea as a swarm of fish, a tangle of drifting seaweed, half a crustacean's shell.
The body is a fragile mechanism, all mistakes and hopes and dreams wrapped across a calcium scaffolding. It is so, so easy to leave it behind, to ascend, to twist, to move, to strive, to become - and why not? Why not be the wind? Why not seek the fire? Why be content with the harsh limitations of ligaments and livers, why bow the vagaries of whatever deranged designer dreamed up the knee-joint structure of a biped? The wind is fast, fire is power and with a touch of cunning and enough applied disassociation you can punch your sense-of-self through the wall between Here and There and replace skin and scars with new forms stolen from the world itself.
Be water, friend. Flow, instead. Never worry about the rigidity that comes from having something so profoundly profane as an <span class="mu-s">endoskeleton</span>. Free, true, strong and coursing.
There is, of course, a small, tiny, miniscule blip to all this. Even the most Starmad theurges recognised the danger in Sigilidry and Animism both: Bound by the flesh, free in the soul.
The human spirit, for all its indomitable ambition, is better served by the confines of our craniums than we know. Without these sharp delineations, we drift. Our dreams are endless, but fingers make a hand and two hands a set and with such small limitations each of us becomes wrapped up in the world. The wind has no friends. Water has no memories of a first kiss. The Grand Empyreal Fire is all strength, all passion, all glory, and what need has the High Icon for pressing eight pairs of hands down on a score of wounds simply for the sake of something as wretchedly human as . . . a friend?
The world becomes so blurred in its small human distinctions. Borders, meaningless. Replace your nerves with the rich ore of the mountains, push your will and soul into the chiselled form of statue, become one of the few vaunted, hunted Rockhounds that scour the Sarethian Desert, and all it will ever take is the little bits you leave behind. can a heart made of rock feel remorse? Do Leviathans . . . dream?
Does the ocean hope for better days?</span>