The truth - as we have painstakingly established across the previous chapters - is this. There is no idea so grand that it may not be murdered one day in the slumber of its own complacence.
There is no tool which may not be repurposed, no meaning which will not turn to nonsense - given time.
Time is the cruellest and the kindest deity, for it mocks those who seek to triumph from it; for it suffers no power, humours no tyrant; it topples every great justice, dismembers reason, rots progress, forgets the stories we laid down at its feet.
i'm just so, so grateful that the silt verses finale said this isn't a story where people get what they deserve. this isn't a story about showing mercy. the answer is not, and has never been, making self-righteous value judgements that you can justify to yourself in the telling later on. the greatest thing we can do in this world is to be kind to one another. to give without expecting anything in return. that's all that ever was, and ever will be, what we owe to each other. that's all.
what she’s thinking: the story brought both carpenter and faulkner to their inevitable end points that have been foreshadowed from the v first episode of the show ambiguity of carpenters death aside she stood on the banks of the river singing like her nana glass and was gunned down by the military and faulkner was drowned dragged delivered by the god and story he had let devour him but. but. before those things happened right before the narrative reached its end both of them stood up and said no! i want to go forward! i want to find something past this whatever it might be i don’t want it to take me yet im going to keep on walking! and it was too late! the thing is it was too fucking late!!!!!!! the aquifer was already flooding the soldiers were closing in she was to hurt to run he can’t swim. the chance had come and gone at the beginning of the episode for any hope of them reaching each other ever again but even though it was too little too late never ever going to be enough they both looked the site of their doom in the eyes and said i do not accept this. not here. not now. i am staring at you– the thing that will eat me — and resolving to pry open the jaws and choose to use the last moments of my life (whether i know it or not) to run and stumble and crawl and cry and sing in the hopes of reaching the people who matter to me more than being made your meal. and of course they got fucking eaten anyways. of course they did bc they were walking towards it from the beginning. but there is a way out, there is a way forward, there is a land beyond the storm that is possible to reach if you choose to step out of the story that has been built for you to find it. we walk on, with a rough and tarnished hope, and a tangled, ruined love. it can end with love, and it can end with kindness. even as the jaws are closing. ours is a world of miracles.
Let Me Speak First Of Revelations
And Next Of Dark Deceit
Then I'll Speak Of Champions
Of Lovers, Gods, And Beasts
My Song Is Long And Twisted
It Worms, It Winds, It Wends
It Carries Few, It Drowns Many
And Those I Love, It Rends
My Song Has Taken Hold Of Me
It Grips My Tongue, My Throat
My Voice Cries Truths I Never Knew
And To Fight Is Just To Choke
So Let Me Dwell Eternal
And In Ruined Flesh Ascend
For My Song Has No Beginning...
And The Current Flows On Without End
If I Could Trace With Bloodless Fingers
If My Hands Could Shape The Flow
I'd Bear This Song To The Precipice
And Rend Us Both To Dust Below
We'd Both Go Plunging Downwards
One Final Fall From Grace
I'd Howl, I'd Scream In Victory
And We'd Be Gone Without A Trace
But We'll Never Be Rid Of Each Other
My Song, My Sorrow and I
So I'll Bear It Trembling Onwards
To Drift On, To Dream, To Die
And Where My Final Footsteps Fall
Something Dreadful Shall Arise
Its Gaze Shall Fall O'er Trembling Plains
Its Wrath Shall Scald The Sun
And Where Its Howling Forebears Walked
Some Day There Shall Be None
The Wise Man Knows The Taste Of Rot
All Lovers Part As Dust
And Even The Kings In Their Bowers Of Steel
Shall Wither In Ruin And Rust
This Rotten World Shall Wheeze Its Last
This Hateful Hymn Shall Cease
But As My Last Breath Splits My Throat
I'll Wheeze Through Splintered Teeth
One Last Song Of Revelations
Of Prophets' Dark Deceptions
Of Love, And Gods' Defeat
Of Love, And Gods' Defeat
"To become a Katabasian is to shed skin and soul, to drown, and in drowning, be born anew!
Do you accept this offering from the depths?"
alts under the cut
Keep reading
I truly couldn't decide between the versions, so you get them all. I would like to thank Jon Ware, Muna Hussen and B. Narr for giving me insomnia
[ID: A digital drawing of Brother Faulkner from the Silt Verses podcast. He kneels in a shallow part of a pool of glowing, green water under the Grand Aquifer, straddling Sibling Rane, who lies limply at the bottom with their face right under the surface, visible where Faulkner's reflection would be. Faulkner's face is upturned, with the water surface reflecting off his skin. He is wearing an expression of exaltation morphing into dread and staring into the distance. On the first picture, his head is surrounded by a halo. On the second, by the Withermark. He is alone. End ID]
From Carpenter's beginning, a jaded heretic with a kill count that she doesn't allow to keep her awake at night, a past and a present drowned in blood - to her ending, laying her brother to rest despite the tears of rage in her eyes.
From Faulkner's beginning, a boy trying to find his place in the parish that calls himself their family and desperately hoping to be something more - to his ending, wading into the water he can't swim in for the sake of walking at his sister's side.
From Hayward's beginning, a perpetrator of the system, up to his neck in violence and all too eager to believe that he is right- to his ending, telling Paige to go on without him with no hesitation to lay down his life for her safety.
From Paige's beginning, a suit who sits at the board room and wonders aloud how to make their bloodshed sanitized - to her ending, allowing her godchild to fester in her body so she may watch her people walk onward to better lands.
From Shrue's beginning, a politician who cares only for being reelected, who wavers at the very idea of radicalism - to their ending, dying for the most radical of causes, screaming a cry for change with their last breaths.
From VAL's beginning, a weapon of war, razing lands under her feet and nothing more than her anger - to her ending, using the last dregs of her strength to give people their greatest desires.
At the end of the day, they all chose kindness. They chose to love, despite the cruelty of their world and the horrors they saw.
I don’t need an empire. I don’t need a nation. I just need one shadowed nook where their light doesn’t fall, and a chance to grow something in the darkness that is mine, and mine alone.
It doesn’t matter if you do it today in this sodden ruin you’ve created, or you wait forty years until he’s old and quaking and calls it a blessing to have your servants crawling out from behind his eyes to seek new light - you’ll take all that was good and all that was rotten and every ounce of potential in him and you’ll eat every part of him up.
And you’ll keep on whispering to him that he’s right on the verge of realising something, gaining something real and true, and he’ll keep walking his way towards your baited fucking lure as it skitters away at every turn until you’re ready to bite.
Doesn’t that make you ashamed? To scavenge off our lives, when they’re all we have?
So I wade out into the very centre of the torrent, the water rushing about my feet as if it still longs to drag me down with him, bearing my brother before me-
