/Finally, you have reached this moment. Your chronoreceptors unfurl, petals of a dark matter sail, capturing a thousand breaths. Finally, you can see./

'A ditch—a hut—a squat village—a city—steel teeth eating the sky.'

'Dive, dive, dive—they dug too deep for comfort, too shallow for understanding—it haunts the halls, waiting—existential midwifery.'

EMISSARY YOU OVERSTEP YOUR BOUNDS

/The voice rattles your electrons, sets your strings to screaming. You push onward. You snatch at a thousand lifelines./

'A rusty sea—a figure so small, a future so vast—a micrometeorite, delivered to the cranium—a Weapon-to-be—one little light, awaiting another.'

'No time even to scream—red sky at morning, sailor's warning—rattle, drag, rattle, drag—two eyes bear witness.'

.just what do yo|u think you're doing

/What you came here to do, in the first place. Nine pairs of hands rip at your atoms in rebuke. You grit your teeth through the pain—sift the silt, look for gold—where is it—where/

'A row of calibration weights—two women, laughing—the scale, tipping—the heaviest crown bows for the executioner's blade.'

'A bouquet of roses on an empty grave—Frankenstein's monster, gasping on the table—what is old is new again.'

is the honored emissary = now a petulant child

/You collapse into confetti. You hold each flake together with all your might. You are—you—you were Nasya—you were Nasan—you are—you will be—ORIN—again/

'An iron carriage thundering along a high road—in older practices, a circle was thought to contain magical energies—a musical thrum—answer it, ████.'

'A letter plastered in stamps—care of the Weapon—in flight—to you—yes, you, Guardian.'

C E A S E

/The grains slip—formless—smoke through your metacarpals—nuclei through your atomic cloud—screaming, you seize—the last thread/

'There, in that lightless abyss—no—a whale carcass, picked over by malacostracans—NO—full fathom five thy father lies—an evolutionary explosion—NO NO NO NO—dying to barren bone.'

/You drag your self back together, your sulfur-hexaflouride howl dying in the vacuum of space./

/You have to warn them./