volant

 Severian

“”Through the window and door I could look out unseen on all the bright life of tree and shrub and grass outside. The linnets and rabbits that fled when I approached could neither hear nor scent me there. I watched the storm crow build her nest and rear her young two cubits from my face. I saw the fox trot by with upraised brush; and once that giant fox, taller than all but the tallest hounds, that men call the maned wolf, loped by at dusk on some unguessable errand from the ruined quarters of the south. The caracara coursed vipers for me, and the hawk lifted his wings to the wind from the top of a pine. 

“A moment suffices to describe these things, for which I watched so long. The decades of a saros would not be long enough for me to write all they meant to the ragged apprentice boy I was. Two thoughts (that were nearly dreams) obsessed me and made them infinitely precious. The first was that at some not-distant time, time itself would stop . . . the colored days that had so long been drawn forth like a chain of conjuror’s scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out at last. The second was that there existed somewhere a miraculous light—which I sometimes conceived of as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau—that engendered life in whatever objects it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew slender legs and waving feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and scurried up a tree.”

—The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Once more we see life from the tomb. Even birth. From the home of ship, rose, and fount. If symbols live, our apprentice is declaring allegiance once more. The escutcheon of a procured nobility heralds the promise of his days. 

But cast in the light and darkness of his visions. The End and Beginning. The expected demise with a rebirth to greater life. Our humble narrator of the neverforget is framing the quest with nary a wizard at hearth (nor sepulcher). Casting visions from the tomb, our lost boy, sees the conclusion but the hope.

New better life we know the Conciliator gifts through talons. Splinters. Promise. Dead raised. 

“Darkness closed over me, but out of the darkness came the face of a woman, as immense as the green face of the moon. It was not she who wept—I could hear the sobs still, and this face was untroubled, and indeed filled with that kind of beauty that hardly admits of expression. Her hands reached toward me, and I at once became a fledgling I had taken from its nest the year before in the hope of taming it to perch on my finger, for her hands were each as long as the coffins in which I sometimes rested in my secret mausoleum. They grasped me, pulled me up, then flung me down, away from her face and from the sound of sobbing, down into the blackness until at last I struck what I took to be the bottom mud and burst through it into a world of light rimmed with black.”

 —The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Fenrir accounts the baptism an ejection from the underworld. Its Mother casting out the refuse. In death he hears the dead. Who keens? His lost matron? The coming one? Has time folded? 

Nenuphar crown the burial, and decorate the deceased. Life amongst the mire. In contrast to our torturers bloom. Yet both discourage and repel. 

To what is our Jack Ketch reborn? To follow our Locksley? It seems this sunders his home. No longer at rest. He descends to burst forth. He fell through the underworld. There was no work of climbing nor willful aspiration. Our severian is swept along by bandits, symbols, stygian mothers. Visions promises his path. The coin his duty. The coat of arms his call. 

Guiltless? Worthless? But it is his tongue . . . carved by the wily wolf.