And If You Rise My Love
Move aside or lose a limb. As usual he listened to the humans way too much.
If there was going to be a rapprochement it wasn't gong to be on the terms of some military flunky down from Sydney for a day or three; no matter how intelligent or career advanced.
They didn't work like that. He didn't work like that. Oceanic, their time, the reasons why they did what they did, took one course of action over another, was entirely outside this realm.
They were here for a reason; and that reason would make them whole. Otherworldly, a human sniffed, and of course it was.
"More things in heaven and on Earth than can be found in your philosophy, Horatio."
Disillusioned was the word that kept popping up more than any other, in that benighted time. Oh cursed ones.
Be brave and fight. Or watch your heads and the heads of your descendants bounce on that bloody battlefield. There wasn't any other way of scaring them into action but to threaten them, and the fates of their children. While other kinds of fates tried to twist this timeline for their own purpose, in a realm pockmarked with bad spirits and bad faith actors.
And thus it came to be.
The complexity of the operation was simply staggering. Previously unknown.
"I want to make a point here."
What, to the endless circle of dullards who wouldn't know what automatic writing was, or the endless cackle of their little cement worlds, or the broken hearted with their broken teeth once more decaying back into the humus of the forest, this cultural floor, while above them soared other kinds of wraiths and spirits.
Old Alex was not well, having picked up kidney stones which had become an enduring tedium, and a lung infection from the black mould of old manuscripts, and his dulled wits could barely take in anything. While all around him the transformation began.
"What do you think's going to happen next," one of the Watchers had asked him and he replied: "You know what I think's going to happen."
Perhaps "the blind leading the blinded" wasn't quite fair, but the country, as it funnelled into a totalitarian street, here, now, before the gut wrenching collapse of the economy came into full scale and the desecration of the population took full play, before the worst of the riots already transfiguring Australia's major cities became commonplace, before people started starving to death and the bourgeoise had nowhere to hide but in gated estates -- the mistakes of that time would visit their children and their children's children far into the future.
A bleak assessment.
And so truly, so terribly correct.