The Void-Touched (2020)

Return to the shelf.
Return home.

What is it about the void-touched?
Those driven mad by visions of worlds that only they can see,
Yet more real, perhaps, than any other.
Are you to catalog them? Analyze them?
Synthesize a knowledge of the unknowable
From their shadowed corners of reality?
Or merely explore, experience, expound,
Knowing only that the true realms are theirs?
You do not know your own purpose,
Strange attractor in more ways than one,
But you need no purpose in order to revel
In the intersections of your world and theirs.

The strange, wondrous twists and knots of the world,
Stuffed into a humanoid form only imperfectly able
To contain the anomaly within--
It is heartening to know that you are not the only one
Coming apart at the seams.
We stitch ourselves together, hastily and unknowingly,
In patterns unreadable to those who have not done so themselves.
The strings hum and interfere,
Chords upon chords of a melody describing itself.
These tunes are our language.
They are muffled by those who find them discordant,
But hearing those of another is the truest concert.

We walk in these spaces carved from void,
Sanctuaries, allegories, origins.
We know we are here by accident,
And so we retreat to the unknowable,
Sheltering from those who will not know us.
It is dark here, and quiet,
Free from the tyrannies of distance and form.
We were not made for such things--
It helps to escape them when we can.
We live here, among dimensions and dreams,
Because we never belonged there in the first place.
Perhaps it cast us out after one too many questions,
Into an abyss intended to be hellfire but really an Eden.
(Only in a manner of speaking, of course--
There are far more gods in void and in space, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in that philosophy.)
Perhaps we were never there to begin with.

Your whorls unsettle the world.
Luckily, they only ever sweep up
That with no tether to begin with.
You watch them swirling about you as Azathoth's court,
And rejoice that you may finally join the dance
As the music of the spheres plays on.