#also the canon fact that your wizard has not bathed before or since azteca??????

[zafaria]

Precious Metals

Sometimes, I just feel so intimately connected to everthing in the Spiral...

It may strike a wizard as a rather mundane fact to know that the Spiral is dust. That they, are dust.

But think on this a moment. What is dust, and how much of it is scattered across our Spiral, throughout the worlds and on top of them, and on top of the things within them? 

How many farm plots have we seen across the lands, one of Farley’s brothers always graciously tending it? Maybe we even have dust in our homes, whether it’s in our own fields that we water and shape, or across the tops of our books that we haven’t touched since we were novices. We think ourselves too advanced for such texts now. But, we are the same as we were then, at least with regards to what we are made of.

Is it not dust that makes dirt? Bartleby grows in the center of Ravenwood, but not between cobblestones and brickwork; he grows on tender earth, just like the Tree of Life does, just like Yggdrasil above Nastrond does. And though he does not grow on them, those cobblestones around him are made of, well, stone. They are pressed and fused rocks. Like all brickwork, soil and dirt and, yes, dust, had to be cemented together to create those walkways and those bricks and those buildings. Whether they are grey, brown, red, black, green, or yellow, they are from clay, from earth.

If we were to go back, one-by-one, we might remember the many different strata that bend the worlds and create our universe. In the crypts, in Darkmoor, or the Djeserit or Ahnic tombs, there was dust. Some we made (or, rather, brought forth) with fire, some we witnessed. The books in the mausoleum crumbled from parchment, not into nothingness, but into imperceptible fragments. The telescope at the top of the study had a glass lens made from sand. And that sand, in its crystalline form, did wonderful things, broke other rock in the form of an alabaster phylactery, freed souls, brought light, healed ancient wounds and let them become scabbed, confined things. After all, the soft fibers of a bandage come from a plant that must grow in something. We beget softness, kindness from these spots.

In Krokotopia, we might well remember the raging sandstorms that sheltered the old families in the Sphinx or the Well. We might remember how these bits tuck to us, with us. In our shoes, in our mouths, under our nails, in our hair. 

We might remember the sand falling from the top of the Pyramid of Fire, or pushed up against its sides in little hungry piles, leaping upwards. We might even remember finding the location of Alhazared, but not until after we cleared sand over a small map, pointed a solid blue crystal over the projection, and let the magic of light and dirt do its work.

Later on, we called upon old spirits and unfathomable demons using crypt dust, soot and dirt and cobwebs. We lit candles, and the wicks burned and tinged the wax with black powder. We opened portals to unseen realms, places where cursed spirits still lingered, freed from their dust, but something more remained, trapped. Just like they did in those places separate from space and time, those places where stars fused metals overhead, leisurely, like a smooth and thoughtful artist stirring paint, still readying to lay down the strokes.

On the rooftops, there is the soot collecting from the chimneys, and the coal that gave Stoker and the clockworks life, that made gears and wood and ropes and cogs into meaning into existence. In the Dark Cave, the large stalactites that hung over our heads, reaching downwards, intertwined with great roots. Maybe from Bartleby, or any of the saplings around him.

And then the matter of the specialties of all these particles. There was the small collection of sand above the ocean in Celestia where the sun never set and the fronds grew vibrant, and the center shallowed out for a little oasis, no other one quite like it. There was the rich soil full of nutrients and magic and leaf litter that let the jungles of the Aeriel grow so densely; the dust, the dirt cemented into stones used to build the Athanor, imbued with electricity. The scorch marks from our crashed ship.

There was Xibalba. And it, too, was dust. The things that have power to seemingly create can also seemingly destroy. They transform. Just as Xibalba was a conglomerate of particles picked up from the sky, the fragments made from it and the soot from its fires are made of the same stuff. Only, with different intent.

And then there are the fractured segments of the primordial forest, the birch trees falling into flakes and pieces and bits, into earth. All of the fragments of the world itself, circling around, with a haze of colors blue and orange and yellow and magenta, leading the way between them. The streaks in the sky that could be seen on a quiet, level beach, or from the top of a blue-ice mountain.

In Mirage, amidst storms of the stuff, the very flow and moments of time itself are kept bundled together in an hourglass, a whole field of magic dedicated to its study, its control, its knowledge and its mercy.

And what might all of this have to do with us, the forsaken heroes of these realms, the curators of all that exists within them, and even those things that exist without them?

In this grand spectacle, we are the same as any of these other things. We are the stars that long hung over Celestia. The ones that exploded because they saw a better way forward. 

We are the dirt from around the base of all those great named trees, the same life-giving, vibrant clay that was blessed by the roots we hold so dear. 

We are a product of our environments, whether we grew up in a brickwork apartment in Chelsea Court or a simple red farm with yellow soil and a riveting tornado out back the cellar.

Perhaps we are mighty, but think to the last time we fizzled. Think of the hope, the promise, the passion of all those spells before they collapsed--crumbled--before us in the air, the thing that only soot could do. And if we were less hasty, if we counted our cards after battle and looked around us a little longer before taking off for the next great thing, maybe we would have noticed that all of those fizzled spells, well, they pile at our toes, piles of soot. We take our dreams. Even when they don’t turn out as we hope, they are brought into reality as something else. And maybe that soot still contains the passion and the promise that we originally cast those spells with. We leave our signals where we’ve done battle. We memorialize with ash.

Think of our journey. Think of us winding through the lands and the sleeplessness and the heartache of it all. Think of us tripping in any of the many forests we’ve explored, or sliding on sidewalks or decking. We did not wash our hands, or our bodies, until and since Azteca, for things moved so fast. And from this, we collected. We collected grime, we collected dirt. When we fell on the ground, we skinned our knees, and the sticky wet layer of skin collected, too. We walked for weeks then, with small black smudges that trapped themselves over the wounds and hung around the corners, forming the barrier between new and old. 

Actually, we are exactly new and old. There are old great trees in us, fragments of Dragonspyre’s warriors running in our veins, the old Celestians connecting, constellating, and forming our minds. I look at my nail and I see the half-sliver of Xibalba streaking through the sky. I look at my freckles and see spots of earthy poison from swords in Avalon against my skin. I know there is more, like the onis in the spirit realm, Tatyana bound to Darkmoor, the whispers and legends of the Celestians. But something important is in front of us, around us.

For, we are made of the most potent stuff the universe has to offer. We are the dust of dust.