Location: Greater Everfall, errant. Period: First year’s awakening journals
I have lived many lives in many worlds since long before waking and walking Aeternum.
From Earth to Norrath, Midguard to the deserts of the Ireiki, through the Kodo graveyard and beyond; so many more lives and dreams of other-ness.
Inevitably, the feeling of becoming empty simply from the weight of all the impermanence has long since guttered the concept of ‘me’.
Yet in this destruction, creation; as it is with all things. Some questions are too big to answer definitively and others are too small to answer as fully as deserved. Creative Destruction is the one, True herald of the pure seed and the patterns of its infinite, recursive unfolding.
So it is with this experience called “my” life: My most compelling lives and memories are bound to the fates of entire universes that wink in and out of existence like the light of a firefly.
“I am a leaf upon the wind.”
My literal being is a tree of life that calmly endures the rigors and rages of the seasons; setting aside the best parts for the future, for life, stretching and swaying sleepily to embrace philelias, The Sun-Loving Song.
Telesilla, an ancient name, and the others, they flow like a litany (or perhaps a liturgy) – pages of a book in progress called “my” life. Khyrene of Rubi-Ka, Myela of The Glade, Injahl Kharika of the fiercely nomadic desert Ireiki, and more… the silken weft unfurling back into the shadows of history.
But never has it seemed we move far from pack dominance and herd dynamics; not nearly far enough for the truth of an old virago like me.
“Well behaved women do not make history.”
They certainly gain insight and wisdom; if they are extraordinarily fortunate, they walk the streets of new settlements, forge or follow the paths along which trade moves, drowse in the depths of shadow as in the warm face of the sun, and see again and again that we are far from alone.
Maecia of Everfall speaks of a slow healing from the horrors of the Daybreak expedition; the story is new, the names and places have changed, but within these universes, these worlds, there are always echoes that reveal deeper truths: There is tethering beyond the experiential moment that ripples into view once you know how to seek and see it.
As a creature of life, a being of emergence and continual change, my willingness to coddle the slings and arrows of any world and the robustness of its presentation of my totality (or failing by paucity) has faded with time.
The leaves rest in piles against my legs, the canopy rustles overhead, and I am once again connected to a fuller, more vibrant existence. The echoes in this place are strong, they ring with the collected sorrows and songs of breathe… the leaves in this place stir the same, the golden, dakini breathe still lifts me from one life’s submersion to another’s immersion.
I am now known only by an epithet that slowly cracks beneath the weight of our animal truth. Once upon a time, a virago was the rare woman who gained the favor and status and freedoms reserved for being superior, for being a man:
“We won’t kill you because we cannot. So then, behold, our gracious magnanimity as we present to you signets of our conference of status as one of us.”
You see, that is the role of a virago – to exist without apology or animosity – to serve the cause of life and its continuance – to befriend or be yonder so the ultimate cause may sustain in the face of unwavering corruption and threat of decoherence.
As if there could be a reason greater than life itself; one more compelling to bear the olive branch rather than the armory? Particularly before those whose summary dismissal of equity as well as equality assure the inevitable decay into a cycle of ultimate decoherence and decline.
Life. It is, always, and in all ways, life.
I am called The Virago and I roam this world as I have the others, with all the many others I see sporting with death while ruin usurps ‘neath our clay feet.
My house, a small and humble company, The Soldiers of Tunare; its sigil, a small lump of amber within which a softly glowing wolf’s fang rests. The pendant has a twin depicting the duality of the moon and the sun, representing both survival and hard-won wisdom. The face, a phoenix, rampant, and conversely, the whisper wind death of the owl’s wisdom to humanity’s ego.
The stories differ, but the morals remain… a quiet pulse of richness and flow, of Azoth, the great transmogrifier; philosopher’s stone and secret hiding in plain sight.
Once upon a time, I served the All-Mother, great and rampant growth in service of life. It is here that the veil is thinnest and the echoes are best heard.
“Bind the heart and mind with trust, both are gold that can never rust.”
But should e’er these gifts be broken or betrayed, surely you shall then learn why the term “VIRAGO” was made.