writing_shadows

There are spirits of all kinds. All which is, bar the human, has spirit. Hate, fear, trees, houses, everything. It is a simple truth, but one which changes everything.

The world blooms, like spring
In shadow teems endless mind
All things have spirit.

David walked through the shadow, wincing at random things, shuffling, eyes half lidded as he progressed slowly, touching every corner, every small thing he could. All around him the world teemed with energy and life. The very walls moved subtly, with the beings inhabiting them, and the ground underneath pulsed with the energy, the essence that filled the area. This was the very heart of the locus, the holy place to knowledge.

Darkness of winter
Unlike ignorance's blackness
Holds promise of dawn

Across the thickness of the gauntlet, the university life moved on. Students shuffled from place to place, some bright eyed and hopeful seeking to find their path, and learn some new truth. Some, dead eyed and staring into the distance, uncaring at the efforts to teach them, and dreaming only of the next night out.

Wisdom from teachers
Knowledge imparted feely
Falls like autumn's cloak

Here in the hisil, though, the real world as David saw it, the students learning meant only one thing – power. Each moment of brilliance, each sudden enlightenment was food to spirits, spirits which lived and thrived on knowledge and learning. Each time they fed, they grew more powerful, fraction by fraction. Each time they grew more powerful, they made him that little more powerful. But only if occasionally he worked for them. Pay each spirit in kind. Their strength leant to him, meant he had to add his to theirs.

Like bright summer light
repay each spirit in kind
wisdom shines from past

A simple tribal oath. But one that lead him to be scurrying from department to department, desperately trying to give them a little symbolic nudge. Sciences, engineering, maths... all of these were his old specialities, back form when he thought like a man, and not a spirit. Finding a symbolic gift for each had been easy. Moments of construction. Signs left on whiteboards. Images and ideas, fleeting through researchers and inventors. A quiet moment's advice to a man on the edge of a breakthrough. Nothing any one would remember, except maybe a rumour of an odd man who was sciences muse.

Whiteboard equations
Computer simulations
Form a dawn of sorts

The humanities, similarly, had benefited from books left open at the right page at the right moment. References hand written on books and new ideas in quiet moments. It had been a lot of work, but he had oddly enjoyed being able to write to his best ability, even for another.

Writing mankind's past
Man's proper study is man
Parting veil of night

Each department had demanded it's due, until at last English had caught him. There he was searching for his greatest aid, and there he could not give hints. David was a hunter, a mystic and a sorcerer. He searched in hidden angles and dark shadows for secrets that no man should have heard and no human is allowed to see. But he was not human, and had not been for a long time. The spirits here were more kin to him than the people he had aided. But they demanded a work. Something for them. He had to create it for them, Haiku after Haiku.

English is not mine.
My tongue is thick with riddles.
I still give this gift.

David drops into the office of an academic, locks parting at his touch, while the moon looks down on him through the window. Moment by moment, he carves the haiku into the office, covering them over with gifts of shaping which makes the materials run like clay. Each moment he works in the silver light, carving his poetry into the room, and hiding it from sight. After a moment's thought, he disappeared into the spirit world as if he had never been. There he carved on a tablet of black stone his final poem, and looked back wincing at his attempts.

Dath shi no monar.
Gath si mi nach do so mar.
Shi rach doch donar.