Day 5: Before The Caldera

Perhaps the story from here on out shall be of much greater clarity, this I assure you Reverend. Before you had rolled in here along with the scribe, I’d arranged the following events in an order I’ve come to believe as chronological. Despite this realization, it had not been clear to me then as it is now, that somehow Moth and I had been sent to a time when Ennoia’s waters still flowed. I’d realized where we were upon sight of the Great Caldera, the foot of which Moth and Koda’s father had built the ramshackle kubu of their youth. 

In the memories I had accessed regarding Moth’s youth, the Caldera had only been a tale told by her neighbors. Possibly great and wise creatures in their day, reduced to the crooked, hollow-eyed and sharp-eared Hylic. Such is the case for those who had been reduced to living of the scraps of ancestors long-dead. We’d never seen the Caldera! Its peak seemed then, to have pierced the skies and sunken into the void of the Bythos far above. 

There I recognized it, on the long pilgrimage once taken by our divine ancestors, I saw it. Though I had not believed the crater before me to be the Caldera as its peak had not pierced the Bythos, neither was the soil as desolate as to cause flesh-cravings amongst the desperate Hylic. I’d expected as well to have noticed the kubu of Moth’s memory but found the land too unrecognizable as to even begin actually locating it. Regardless, Moth had gone so far as to not return home, yet in a way she’d made her way back to the place of her birth.

As we stood before the Caldera, mountains smaller than what had been shown to me in Moth’s enlightened memory scattered themselves around the blue water. Like sharpened teeth was what I had thought, given my somewhat recent vision of myself having surrendered fully to Moth’s eidolons that had begun to repair my mangled body. Given the gift of speech, though with a texture unlike what you hear now dear Reverend, but one similar to the barbaric practice of dragging your spine down the bark of the tree so as to expose it, making yourself bare to the Paraclete.

This practice is unfamiliar to you if I understand correctly. This form of flagellation, I had heard, was reserved for the most extreme of cases had our divine ancestors fallen to the state of a Hylic. This was their method of returning to the Pylonic Ideal had they been unable to return to that state intellectually.

However that is beside the point Reverend, as that moment before the Caldera was the moment I had been convicted in my complete faith to Moth. I’d managed to ask her then of all that had led up to our arrival in this new Ennoia, where the Nerys was no longer just a river, but an ocean. I’d challenged her then, as one must towards any teacher, for I could not believe her. Her appearance, having looked more like the Hylic (though still mixed thoroughly with that of her form when she has ruled over the eidolons) could not be explained. How had Moth changed so much since she’d first found me? How is it that we remain alive or that we, who had done none but march towards an uncertain goal, wind up surrounded by oceans of water I’d never dreamt of or stand before the Caldera once thought to be myth. 

Moth sat on a rock, the sunlight struck her so as to say nothing in that moment was more important than herself. She pointed towards the sky with her left hand, and to her chest with her right. She looked at me, draped in the cloak I had taken from the broken automaton, and told me that all we would face ahead was already determined by her. That in many times she had failed and from consciousness to consciousness, she’d determined the constants and what had made the constants constant. She’d determined under an indeterminate amount of time, the map that gave proof to her enlightenment. 

There was a caveat to this however as she had said next not to trust that any greater being beyond us had been the one to decide our fate, as that would be no different from pure happenstance. Instead she told me to believe in her, who was in commune with greater forces, who in my eyes could only be perceived as providence. To that word, Moth would spit on the ground as to her pointed ears, that which could not be believed in was only that which does not exist. And so, In that moment, I believed in her who now stood before me. 

Beyond Moth, stood the Pylon nested into the center of the Great Caldera.

This perhaps is the part of my story that may interest you the most dear Reverend. But like any story, the most exciting part cannot exist or even be perceivable despite it being written in front of you should there have been nothing to suggest it. That is why I ask that we return to ourselves for today and continue on tomorrow; when I have fully considered the truth of my feelings as we entered the Caldera of the Paraclete.