Wednesday, April 04, 2012

To Attempt Great Things

Sample from Ehaema. For more information, please contact the author

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The path changes often.  In one direction is the known, and in the other direction a shifting tide of smells and possibilities.

Our scouts are the best at sifting those possibilities.  They turn impressions into directions, discern sweetness from the unknown, leave messages for the hunters who solidify the path.  Scouts are our dreaming mind, heading into the unmarked void on the most gossamer of promises and hopes.  When they succeed, the path grows and the colony thrives, all of us.

When they die, they die alone and unknown.  Sometimes they simply disappear; other times we catch the faint scent of their dreaming innards scraped across the summer pavement, and we know that the path cannot go where they have gone.

Now we journey through silent halls, stark and strange and filled with termites or spiders.  Mad gods live here, shaking the landscape with each footfall.  If we are lucky, they are oblivious to we silent soldiers foraging.  If we are unlucky, they descend with sharp bellowing cries, drowning us in foul stenches, crushing us or sweeping us away like storms made flesh.

But there is treasure here, nourishment that might make us rich and strong for generations.  

We grow old, walking the path, forth and back, forth and back.  Each day there are less of us, each day the weariness grows.  The cold is coming.  The dangers of the world have left their mark, and they grow no weaker while we grow no stronger.  Now, now is the only time.  The most important time.  Now is the time to attempt great things.  

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