Part Six - Look to Windward
The poet came to me in dreams, thin and restless.
Reeking of ink and sleepless nights, he wrote of endings. Like a man walking into fog, he drifted through my threshold, foolishly asking questions he already knew the answers to.
I showed him the drowned sailor, stripped of name and memory as he is lost to the dark water.
A reminder that time erodes memory the way water erodes bodies. It dissolves people from one another as easily as the sea dissolves rock. Every relationship, no matter how fiercely held, is a receding tide.
The lesson he carried back into waking was one all my visitors eventually learn.
Human relationships are as delicate as breath on mirrored glass, always one exhale away from vanishing.
You cling to each other as if permanence is possible, and I watch, knowing it never is. Death is a stark reminder of human fragility, the inevitability of decay, and the futility of worldly ambition.
So, I must warn you, reader, to turn your head from the past and look toward what is coming, because dissolution spares no one.
Life, the Vore predator it is, longs to consume you regardless.