Requiem : Hollow Vessel
Writer's note : Go, seek forthwith to mechanical familiars and clockwork oracles to unriddle this and the rest of parchment trilogy's part; for without artificial crutches, the noble-way written scripts shall remain a sealed sepulchre to a wit-shorn gaze.
There is a tedious psaltery in a pitcher that claims the profundity of a cenote, yet sequesters not a minim of restorative dew. This mendicant of sanctuary flitteth from ingle to ingle, ever orating of "autarky" whilst reclining with a sybaritic weight upon any timber that will sustain such inanition. "Utmost industry" is but a sovereign tithe claimed by a cavernous shell, awaiting the drudgery of others to fill the void.
And now, this bauble hath found a co-equal, a reredos of gaudy aurum, hewn from the softest deal. 'Tis a match of exquisite narcissism: a fop who spends the sun’s whole perambulation admiring a private lustre, convinced that the glint of the leaf is a succedaneum for the essence of the portrait. Behold a monument of philautia, a statue that hath never known the grit of a real struggle.
Aah it is a most recondite permutation: to move from the fellowship of tempered steel, where hands comprehend the ballistics of the strike and the silent gravity of the plummet to the company of pulp. Why crave the magistery of the world, or the martinet discipline of the hoplite, when one may dally with a knick-knack that merely postures in the luminescence? The stark reality of the citadel is bartered for the histrionic scenery of a pageant.
The demesne inhabited is surely a farce of errors; a scullery where the spit never revolves and a focus that yields only the effluvium of petulance. "Manumission" is vaunted while the vessel clings to the dado like parasitic lichen to a carious wall, execrating the very oak that forestalls a final shattering. 'Tis a manse of umbra, where implements are but theatrical devices.
Oho! Behold the rim and the void, a collection of ciphers destined for the shards. Within a vortex of mutual fascination, the frame extols a concave nothingness, and the vessel aspires to a meretricious polish. An oneiric fog surrounds those who believe that to be pulchritudinous is to be exempt from the inevitable tax of utility.
There is a sacrosanct quietude that descends when a fissured tintinnabulum is finally extirpated from the belfry. The joists no longer groan with the cacophonous wail of a thing that cannot fulfill its teleology. That dissonance hath found a new habitation in a small, sequestered court of the unadept, a fiefdom of torpor, where "virtue" is but a synonym for "idleness," and a sinewed limb is but a mannequin.
The welkin in the foundry is much purged. While this tacit commerce of specula and vainglory continues, the true opus of the world proceeds in the meridian. Let these objects sit upon a perilous cornice, gazing upon a principality they lack the sagacity to marshal. There is a stark requital in the knowledge that when the great tempest of Wyrd blows, the gilded frame shall splinter, and the hollow vessel shall be the first to meet the lithic floor.