You could hear it in the air.
You could taste it in the water.
You could smell it in the earth.
You could feel it in the sunlight.

The western wind brought you your dreams
as you caught the scent of legend,
your soul filling with the breath of horizons,
baptized in the light of 100,000,000 stars.

But ignorant of the price,
how could you not fly into the riving storm?

For the world knows nothing
of the western wind.

This is how we become.

And so we learn to pay the world
with our dreamwings,
with our soulships,
with our heartfire.

But what in return?
What precious return for such a precious sacrifice?

A frail imitation of Pandora’s Box,
overfull with terrors and darkness;
and once opened,
nothing.

Nothing.

The eye’s spark
becomes a feast for the void.

Our heads angle
downward.

And then on, and on.
Anon.

And in the small moments,
those fleeting scraps of time,
when the light angles just the right way,
a little breath of the air brushes past,
carrying… something.

You can almost remember.
It is a whisper, and then gone.

You can almost remember,
because you were written
in a convergence of the violent death of suns
and the birth of worlds ascending.

How peaceful, the mountains in their defiance.
How inviolate, the mote of your flame.
How simple, that wings must grow feathers anew.

Behold.
The wind rises.