The Sentinels the breeze it wrapped around me, as I stood there on the shore

where ... did all this come from ......

in looking to the dun man, deirdre watched his lips move and heard the incomprehensible thing that came from them. her brow furrowed, and the cherubic witch turned to look back toward the world. this cold did not feel calamitous where she stood, but she knew that if she moved into the snow-field she would not like what came from it. it was knowledge gained not from seeing, but from the sting it gave to her soft paw exposed only to the earth here, and the soft rugs of fur. deirdre did not wish to be surrounded by it, and so stepped back and pressed further into the warmth of her father.

it seemed deirdre had enough. she was ready to return to the depths of their dusky abode, and beckoned to her father to join her. i won't go, she babbled to him, preferring the dimlit atmosphere here to the too-bright scene out there. she and emaleth were veritably cimmerian for their desire to dwell only in the dark—deirdre would take the dark warm here over the cold light there, without question! but this was her when she understood; but understanding was leaving her, day by day. the babe had begun omnipotent, but now any knowing, any certainty, seemed to escape her. not totally, not yet, but soon she would forget it all, and all things she had carried with her would leave her in a violent deluge. 

deirdre was aware that this would happen. she had been asked a question—do you want to understand Them? it took no thought, so immediate was her reaction: yes! but the answer was cruel. to understand Them, you will understand nothing of what you once had. something else--when you speak but five words that came from Them, and truly understand one, you and your beloved will speak The First Language no more, nor will you understand it! you will relearn it all. deirdre was crushed by the weight of this knowledge. to no longer speak with her! deirdre wept at the feeling, attributed to night-terrors. her sister would know, of course. by her telling, or the telling of those whom spoke to her, it mattered not.

but as The Giver and The Bringer spoke to her and her beloved, deirdre felt the temptation more so to know what it was they talked of! the voice had been tenebrous but not at all evil, a guide. an unspoken thing that showed her paths she might take, and informed her of the consequence. well, to understand them, the price to pay was much. sweet, powerful witch; We could take you with Us, where you would know it all in an instant, and know it all forevermore! and that was tempting, too! but it meant leaving this, and not being a part of it, and deirdre was so very near taking a bite of that sinful apple that nothing else would matter anyway, because in The Great Forgetting—where one forgot the answers to all of the universes questions—she would forget The Knowing, which was grand!, but in comparison to the life to be discovered, living and questioning seemed grander.

you see, the answers to all of the questions of the universe were supplied immediately. deirdre knew what came first, and how the world came to creation, and whether or not it was a Who or a reason of science that created the world, and if there even was a Who to worship, and if that Who came before or after the place on Earth came to creation [which came with the knowledge of the worlds genesis]. these were all very important! but what was not provided was the means to communicate them, or the means to understand those who roamed the earth who asked the questions. she knew the point of existence, but others lived for different and independent ends, and so as to get to the point of that: all lived to answer their own questions, all before they were moribund. when she had come to being inside of The Giver, deirdre could not understand why others would choose anything else but the offer of Knowing for always (the funny thing was that at each New Body she inhabited, that Old Question lingered); but as she felt the gaze of her parents, and the body of her sister, deirdre could interpret why.

the words she was told of love and its meaning and its existence could not compare to the feeling of it from those that surrounded her. they had told her of life and its temptation; how it would pull you in again and again! but the voice seemed to honor her will, and love her, in turn, for her choices. its love, too, felt unconditional.

deirdre, in thinking this, lay there and watched her father with apt interest. for she was still tugged in two directions. the witch knew she would need to decide soon, and felt the approach of sickness that would take her from this world if she chose to become a part of nature, then and there. to be the wind that kissed The Giver and The Source, to be the stream of light that warmed Their backs, to be the river They drank from to slake Their thirst... to speak the language of Ancients unto Them, as the Ancients did with her then.

she shivered at the vision of it. terribly lovely. her wise eyes stared even still at the gaze of her father, where she willed him to aid her Old Soul in her journey of becoming new again; she had a great magic in her, a culmination of something withheld until now in The Givers seed had truly blossomed in the womb of The Source, that now brought them to this moment where she thought, and imagined, and he watched with a warmth that kept the will to continue on her path with the living greater.

deirdre was aware that she would do it, for the Two that stayed and sated and warmed her body and her soul, if they would... they would what? she was not sure. deirdre sighed and averted her eyes at last, the weight of her decision truly overbearing. she was not too young to make it; deirdre had lived for a long, long time, truly. she vaguely remembered the peril of her previous life, and knew that life had not always been such a way, and that this was yet another chance. deirdre remembered, too, years and years of her own questions; questions she laughed at when she again, at the time of being reborn, she remembered. she remembered, too, she had always been a great and powerful witch, formidable and strong, condemned though, by those with cold and cruel hearts...

but this life here would be perhaps the greatest that she had lived yet. her skin prickled at that. a question without an answer. Those that Know would not reveal that... but she felt that she knew it to be so, as her gaze again shifted to the man.