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Author Topic: Colmus at the End of Days Cafe
rwhegwood
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An Interview with Colmas at the End of Days Cafe.

You want to know who I am, where I am from, where I’ve been, and what it was like in the old days. Where to begin? I know my name, Colmus. That was the name given to me as a child. I’ve been known by other names as well, none of them so small and simple as that name I bore when I came to the Douglas plantation an orphaned boy of eight or nine back in the old days, the days that were old even to your grandparents.

I’ve aged well. That goes with being a rosswalker, as you’ve no doubt read in your history books…but they aren’t real books anymore, are there? No smell of paper, no rustle of pages, no heft in the hand…just dancing spook lights behind your eyes.

But that’s not what you really want to know…not the story of my life, though it is quite a story. You want to know about the leviathan. I am the leviathan and it is me. I do not know, not exactly, where it ends and I begin, or vis versa. And yes, I am dangerous, terrible, the very hypostasis of ravening hunger, of burning thirst, a hellmouth ready to spread its jaws and swallow the world like a little green olive with a juicy red pimento at its heart. And I could do it too…as easily as drawing a breath.

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Robert Nowall
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Well, you seem to have a backstory that fits into a couple of possibilities...and you jump into a couple of things that make no sense to us in our current cultural era. What is a rosswalker? What is the leviathan (beyond being you)?

It's still a matter of introduction. Time, Colmas, and a longer interview, will further it. Who are you?

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rwhegwood
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The world is not equally fallen. Other worlds cluster round ours like the bubbles of a spittlebug on a stalk of grass. They are all that's left of what was. Some worlds are rarified, all but impossible for us to inhabit but for a brief period, like the summits of exceedingly high mountains. Others lie closer to us and we can move and live in them with greater ease. The life in these other worlds is both similar and different, the higher the world, the more vibrant, more pure, more nearly heavenly than those lower. The leviathan belongs to these higher worlds, but through my own childish ignorance I bonded with a young one who had lost it's place I nurtured it, and now I'm like the dormouse who dared to bridle a blue whale.

The trouble with such unequal bonds is that you risk being subsumed...either drawn into it, in it's native habitations, or worse, it pours into your world through you. There is not enough to nourish a leviathan so low down where we dwell...if trapped and is unable to ascend again, because change is slow here, rapid there), it goes mad with hunger. To use the modern parlance of the black hole which consumes all in it's reach, so is the maddened leviathan, the hellmouth which unfettered makes such a desert that it starves and vanishes away. Mine is still constrained, fully grown, able to move and feed as high as it wishes...but that came late, after longer hunger had damaged it's mind.

As to your other question, a ross is a nose...a headland, a precipice of one world visible from the next lower to those who can see, like me or my old master's people. Rosses generally mark places where paths can be found to move from world to world. A rosswalker is one skilled in moving between the worlds, sometimes more than one at a time.

You ask who am I. Would that I could answer you. I do not entirely know. I am Colmas, an orphaned servant of great house whom I brought to ruin. I am the defeat of great enterprise, for I cost the South it's bid at independence. I am the nightmare weapon turned upon it's maker. I am a ferryman...for a leviathan in many ways is a world unto itself at maturity....a communion of many lives that may travel where unaided flesh may not and live. I am the far traveller returned and want only to see if any of my own yet survive after all these many years.

[ September 17, 2014, 10:16 PM: Message edited by: rwhegwood ]

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Robert Nowall
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But are you, Colman, asking yourself who you are? In certain ways, only you can answer that question.
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rwhegwood
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Colmus, an easy mistake. I no longer ask who I am. the answers are to many, too confusing. Others have. A few still do, perhaps. Besides the answer to that question, and I suspect to most others of that ilk amount to nothing. I am Colmus, that is enough I think. My mother and father, God remember their souls, gave it to me, and I like better than I once did long ago.
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Robert Nowall
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Typo, maybe.

Are any others asking who you are? And who are they?

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JSchuler
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Well Colmus/Colmas, that's a bright, cheery story you have there. Tell me, where do you find the strength to resist the leviathan's urge to consume our world? What has prevented the entity from completely subsuming Colmus/Colmas?
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rwhegwood
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Typo. It's Colmus.

As for what restrains me...You may have heard the gwarders bound me long ago…back during the war and again after. They tried. They failed. They just did not know they failed.

It is this that binds me; this ancient loop of knotted string upon my wrist. It was a gift from my master when he was a boy hardly older than I back when I came into the service of the Douglas family. He was kind to me when others were not, and though in time I gave him cause enough to regret it, he never did. I exhausted him in the end as I exhausted them all…the Douglases, the Galenborn, and too many others to name. And when they were helpless before me, when my soul lusted for revenge for the ten thousand calumnies visited upon me when I was small and weak, this was the frail tether that restrained me, that restrains me still.

There was a poem I read once about a lion who loved gazelles and because it loved them, it would not hunt them, and so lion died slowly from hunger but the gazelles lived long from love, and never knew there was a lion, and never knew they were gazelles.

The world has forgotten me, forgotten the Galenborn. The gazelles race across the golden savannah not dreaming what their speed is for. They do not see the golden eyes staring from the yellow grasses, the crouching sun that does not burst hot and red upon them. Mankind rushes outward to the stars. He thinks himself the master of the glittering void, heedless that in the twinkling heavens eyes starved for the sight of him wink and burn.

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Robert Nowall
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Intriguing.

So it would seem you had a common / ordinary origin, and in time evolved to what you are now. Would you say it was common / ordinary?

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rwhegwood
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My beginning was ordinary enough for my kind, though my family was poor, and moved around a bit as best I can remember. The troubles followed upon finding that little beast abandoned, alone, starving...piteous stuff. I was too young and inexperienced to know what I did, bonding with it. I kept it alive and through me it brought to ruin everything and everyone I ever cared about...not that it wanted to, or entirely understood what it did...it was just hungry, and down here below the rosslands there is far too little for it to eat...it was always hungry. You think the passenger pigeons in their billions went extinct because they were over hunted...well one might say that.
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Robert Nowall
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Your account of yourself seems, well, a little moody. I suppose what you went through that took you all the way to the End of Days Cafe (and maybe the End of Days, too) would make anyone moody. But surely you didn't interact with your family and friends and masters and servants that way to begin with...did you?
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rwhegwood
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Oh no, I was ever the decorous and faithful "boy" on the outside. I was cared for well enough. I knew my place and did my duty, and my masters were good to me. But, given my special situation, what I was and what I was becoming excited the imaginations of my betters. Some wanted to kill me to get to the creature. Some wanted to kill us both lest we become too dangerous. They were the wisest, but they were overruled by those who wanted to save us both, only a few wanted to because they loved our lives. To the others who wanted to save us it was mostly for the opportunity to study a rare but powerful creature up close. I was an addendum...a necessary, but unwanted thing.

I swallowed all the gall of it, bowing and scraping, but I knew I was becoming more powerful than they ever suspected, far more powerful than the lot of them combined. My singular flaw, the one that has brought so much to ruin is my youthful envy. I was every bit their equal and more and yet they considered it a privilege to let me black their boots, clear their tables, and help them dress for bed. I envied them terribly and out of envy did foolish things that ended up costing me the few who actually cared for my soul. I had to go nearly mad to realize that...to want to be better than what I was, and to try and make amends.

As for the End of Day's Cafe, in local parlance it's a Thow-dive, a place frequented by the descendants of the Galenborn servant class...like me...mostly like me. I'm only half thow. My father was half Minsterman and half Brendenfolk, a people from the third ross who preceded the Galenborn to the new world by a bit over a thousand years.

I'm here on Mars, at the End of Days to meet with a couple of young folk who want to reconnected with their past. They are mixed Minstermen and Thow. They keep so little of the old ways...so diminished. It is sad. But they are what is left, and with a little help they might recover something of their former glory.

As for my family and friends, the last of them died well over 100 years ago. I am as alone as I ever was since the day of my orphanage. I just accept it now. It is the way of things, the particular felting of my fate. You thought "fate" a kind of tapestry. It can be, but mostly it is felted, densely tangled, snarled and compacted into this form and that, hung together like sacs of spider's eggs in the great loom of creation.

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Robert Nowall
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Are these young folk potential new friends? If, as it appears, you have no end coming to you, while others do, the loss of old friends would be inevitable. New friends might help fill the void of it all...
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rwhegwood
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Friends? It is not out of the question in time, but these two are quite young, not entierly out of their adolescence. They have potential, but they do not know they are meeting me, nor have the slightest inking of who or what I am.

I will not live forever, though I will live long enough, baring calamity. I've chosen them to know...or rather to discover where the others fled away, where I carried the last nearly spent members of their race who followed the old ways. Maybe in fifty to a hundred years they will put the pieces together and seek me out again. I'll leave a few breadcrumbs to point the way. When the time comes I will permit them or their descendants to shear my bonds, and I and the beast, my other soul will fade away.

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Robert Nowall
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It's hard to relate to someone who seems to have withdrawn so completely from the human race (if, indeed, that was what it was you've withdrawn from). Do you laugh at anything? Did you ever fall in love?
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rwhegwood
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Passions are dangerous for the Galenborn. They are especially dangerous for me. I am a monster, do not forget, appetite incarnate, or near enough. I have known love, the love of a child for his parents, the love of a master for his faithful servant, the love of a grateful servant for a kind master, the love of a rare friend, the love of God. Those loves I have known, and betrayed. But I have not known the love you speak of, nor do I want it. Romantic love was always the debauchery of the sleepers. The Galenborn did not entertain it, rather they treated it with great disdain...and a little pity...the way one might feel both disgust and forbearance at dogs being dogs. What low appetites are permissible for beasts are a disgrace countenanced in a human being, a great danger and a disgrace in a Galenborn. Marriage among the Galenborn was a question of moiety and lots chosen before the family icons. The love of husband and wife grew quietly, soberly after marriage. That was our way. Outside of marriage or with our kinsmen, the sexes largely kept their own company as is befitting the dignity of being human and not a beast.

It is my wedding to dispassion to keeps me some part of me human, that saves me from utter subsumption by the beast. I withdraw from the human race because I love them. I am the lion that will not hunt gazelles. I starve, but they live, though at a price for us both.

And yes I laugh, at the folly of it all, at the bitter irony of my life. I only wanted to be kind to a lost calf, of sorts and though it has made me greater than any Galenborn since the sundering of the world, it cost me all and everyone I ever dared to love, beginning with my own parents when I was only seven years old. Had I not been taught the path of dispassion, the world you know would have been made a smoking ruin over two hundred years gone.

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Robert Nowall
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You withdraw to save them...but you seem less human after the withdrawal.
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rwhegwood
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Should I rather risk the alternative, to return, settle down and melt into madness once more? Where are those capable of restraining me should this hunger grow unchecked? Those few fled the earth long ago. My people are gone. What few stray descendants remain here and there are ignorant of who they are and the legacy they are heir to. Who would take me to their bosom? Who would survive being taken to mine?

"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?"

Even so long ago, it was a rhetorical question.

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Robert Nowall
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"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." Book of Job, 38:4.
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rwhegwood
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Precisely.
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Robert Nowall
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But the implication of it all is that you are God. Are you God?
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rwhegwood
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No, I am the levitation whom only a fool would imagine he could seize me with hooks or make a covenant with me.

God alone and the heavenly powers can subdue my kind. But may it please God to show us mercy and keep us safe if we behave ourselves until we are called to give our account...at least till I am called.

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Robert Nowall
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But you've got to step outside yourself and see how you look to others. Will they take you for God or a powerful being, or will they, say, think you'r just some cranky old man with mental issues?
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rwhegwood
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I suppose time will tell, but it will be a very long time before they know enough to even question what I show them of myself, before I trust them to know more than I allow. It may be I find them unsuitable. The I will fade away, a human curio they once knew and will will search out others better able to bear the gifts I bring.
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