Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 00:15:02 -0400
From: Alan Harnum <harnums@thekeep.org>
Eidolons
Commentary is very much appreciated.
Oh, good. :)
Warning to those who would be warned: there be SPOILERS ahead!
Four - Tempus
Lo, I or you,
Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidolons.
The ostent evanescent,
The substance of an artist's mood or savan's studies long,
Or warrior's, martyr's, hero's toils,
To fashion his eidolons.
-Walt Whitman
{indeed -- but why? More on this later...}
He had been shown Ryoga killing Akane first.
It had been a total accident. Because she hadn't turned
around to yell at him, had only taken another step forward, and
the singing razor sharpness of Ryoga's belt as it whirled through
the air had sheared half her face off.
{eeek. What's amazing is that there are dozens of times in the manga
where someone escaped death or maiming by a fraction of a frame...
and they rarely comment on it.}
And terribly, most terribly of all, he realized that all of
it was true. Every image, warped though it might be, was as true
as him. The slabs rose from the shining sea, and they showed him
{suggest} as he was.
The realization was shattering, so much that it made him simply
so much so that {?}
want to lie down on the ice and never move again. But he
couldn't even do that; he was completely in the thrall of the
Mirror-Lord and the worlds it showed him. So what if he was free
of the Neko-ken; any happiness would be fleeting. What a fool he
had been to care for such a thing; what a fool he had been to
care for anything, or for anyone. It no longer even mattered to
him if it ended or not. Let it continue, or let it stop, it made
no difference.
{Perhaps Ranma's been called a fool so often that he's built up
calluses on that particular insecurity?}
again. Tears leaked from his eyes and froze before they struck
the ice.
{I wonder what that sounds like...}
Atop the hill that overlooks the city of the dead gods,
Silverhold shuddered once, and began to fold silently in upon
itself as thought it were a complex puzzle being put back into
as though
The cold grey land that held the ziggurats, minarets and
pillars of the temples of the younger gods let forth a long sigh,
like a sleeper awaking. With a gurgle, the spouts of the
fountains, carved in the shape of men riding on the backs of
shapes {?}
dolphins, and slender mermaids, began to pour water into the
dusty bowls of their fountains, and in the courtyards of the
temples the barren dust began to bloom with lilies or roses, or
with the small white blossoms of the olive trees, as the tendrils
of the grapevine began again to twine round the Corinthian
columns of Bacchus's temple beneath the endless night of the
lunar sky.
The void began to fade out, until it was only a dark presence
upon the edges of his vision, and then it was gone altogether,
and he stood in his bare feet upon the dojo floor. It was
comfortingly familiar; from what his father had told him, the
dojo had been in the Tendo family for nearly a century. It would
probably be in it for a century more, and still look the same
then as it did now.
{Well, that depends on how often Ryouga, Shampoo, or Tarou come
to visit. :) }
By the light streaming in from behind the stiff waxed paper
covering the windows, the sun was just risen, and the household
would be rising with it. Kasumi would already be in the kitchen,
starting breakfast, and soon enough they all would gravitate
towards the table for the morning meal. And he would join them,
made whole, free from the curse.
{Well, one of them, anyway...}
dead gods. With the return to her at the forefront of his
thoughts, he had made a pact with the cat-goddess to go into the
depths of the Mirror-Lord's domain, and he had emerged from that
place of horror with his mind opened and shaken, but unbroken.
{Shaken, but not stirred? :) }
If his life
with Akane might be short upon this earth next to the lifespan of
a star, or even one of the old gods who he knew lay sleeping and
waiting for the time when the coursings of the stars would bring
them into the proper places for the awakenening, then what of it?
They would be happy for a time, and then it would be the end.
{Maturity. Remarkable. BTW, this is what I meant by "love is, in
the end, the last defense against entropy" in C&Cing WUE 37; it
can't stop entropy, nothing can stop entropy, but it makes us go on
anyway. Not necessarily love of mate, mind you; love of children,
love of creation, love of country, etc. This theme runs all
through here, of course.}
The Mirror-Lord was
mightier than any of the young gods, and pettier still by far.
{Uh oh...}
The footsteps were audible before anything else, and Ranma
raised his voice, asking who was there. The reply came back; a
weary voice, something almost beyond belief in the tones. "Oh my
God."
{No, not yours; another's...}
A woman stepped around the corner, into the dojo hallway
from the house. A woman who had been beautiful once, but the
{suggest} house; a woman who had been beautiful once, before the
weight of years had driven her down, and turned nearly all the
black in her hair into grey. Her face was lined in places,
around the eyes and mouth. Ranma guessed her to be in her late
forties. A low moan escaped him, as he realized that the
greatest threat to human love is not the uncaring universe, but
the awful and malign gods who compare to men as men compare to
the lowest of single-celled bacteria born in the primal surgings
of the Panthallasian sea. There were no words, not in the face
Panthalassian {? I think that's what you mean}
of this, when the woman you have come back to has seen thirty
years go by while a day and night have passed for you, and the
weariness and sorrow of her eyes as she gazes upon you is too
much to bear. Ranma turned and ran back down the corridor, not
listening to Akane's shouts behind him, needing only to escape
from this into something else.
{"Come back here, Ranma! All the other fiancees have given up!
We can get married now!" :)
Gotta laugh, because otherwise I'd be crying. Ouch.}
From the first look, he knew that the woman could not be
human; the same unearthly beauty that the cat-goddess had
possessed was in her, although she seemed calm and temperate in
seemed as calm {?}
her appearance as Bast had been fierce. She was slight and dark
haired, clothed in pale green robes of ancient style, and with a
dark-haired
slender staff in one hand. Her face was like that of one of the
mizuko, calm and begign, utterly acceptant of fate. Angry as he
benign
was, grieved as he was, a peace descend upon Ranma at the sight
descended
of her.
Ranma spoke with dry mouth, not wanting to believe.
"Cologne."
"Kannon," the goddess corrected. "Cologne is no more."
{Eeek. Gibber, wobble, thud. Now THAT I didn't see coming.}
"You bitch," Ranma snarled. "Goddess of compassion my ass.
compassion, my ass.
And he did. He did believe, and there was no kind anger but
senseless in the face of this. His shoulders slumped, and he
kind of anger but was senseless {?? at limits of ability again...}
felt as if he would begin to weep anew. All lost. All his
journey for nothing.
"Because it is the better place for one such as you than
this world." With her staff, the goddess gestured at the
billowing smoke visible from the factories in the distance that
{suggest cutting "visible"}
rose to stain the sky.
When he was
ready, they clothed him in a robe of gold and white, and he
walked out of the passage and into the Enchanted Forest. This
time, he was careful, and none of the alien flora captured him,
nor did the weird-eyes zoogs seek to menace him. They knew
weird-eyed {?}
FIN FOUR
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.
-W.B. Yeats
{Goosebumps.}
FIN EIDOLONS
Author's Notes:
I suppose some people thought there was going to be a happy
ending because the first chapter made it clear that Ranma lives
through his initial adventures in the Dreamlands.
I don't think you're really comfortable with happy endings. :)
(I'm hoping for a mostly-happy ending to WUE, but I'm not counting
on it.) This time, though, the ending is... artistically
satisfying. Ranma was playing with forces way out of his league,
and was lucky to escape with his life, his sanity, and his triumph;
his happiness (and, evidently, Akane's) was small change by
comparison.
On the other hand, I couldn't help thinking of this as the
penultimate resolve-the-relationships 'fic... the ultimate being
"Dies Irae".
Well, no. That's not what I felt like this time. This is
not, of course, an "everybody dies" Lovecraft ending, but I think
it's in keeping with the lighter, more fantastical tone of the
Dreamlands stories. Human love is ultimately incredibly fragile
in the face of an uncaring universe and the malign powers of the
Mythos; nevertheless, there is hope.
And that's really what this is about, for me: Ranma never, ever
gives up. He keeps trying as long as he has breath and will.
In the end, everything that lives dies, everything that exists is
destroyed, but we can't let that matter. What matters is not that we
will die, but that we can live, and love, and laugh; what matters is not
that a thing will be destroyed, but that it was created, and while it
existed, we delighted to see it, or dwelt comfortably in it, or
thoughtfully read it.
Good work, Alan.
Thanks for writing and sharing!
Vince Seifert Network Analyst seifertv@csus.edu
Techie: http://webpages.csus.edu/~seifertv/
Fanfic: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/seifertv/toth/
CSUS hired me to build their LANs, not to give away the homeworld.