The Mother’s Three

The following is an early unedited chapter from Book Two of the Phantammeron, the dream-like section called the Anakrasitra.

In the deepest holds of the Dreaming Seas slept the dreamer whose dreams bore the tides and the fates of the many. She alone the waves held closest to its heart, this child born of prophetic sight. For beneath the crashing waves of the Dreaming Seas, within its wide watery bosom, had lain hidden a sleeping beauty, the daughter-of-the-seas named An.

The Mothers Three

This secretive girl-child of the waves the swaying seas had long coveted within its dreary depths since ancient days when the seas were first made. For An, entrapped in endless sleep, enwrapped by her mother’ ocean’s restless tides, held alone within her dreams and visions the countless faces of those who through this world would someday pass. 

For An had been granted the gift of divine omnipotence, of far-seeing visions, seeing by her inner eye the woeful fates of those that would come to live and die in the lands that lay beyond her mother’s troubled shore. In the depths of the Dreaming Seas in a house of glass An had long slept.

There her visions of the world’s endless train of the living forever flashed before her in her restless mind, until in death they return to the seas again. For beneath the oceans vast lay that Land of the Dead where the many spirits would come to rest. And to this ghostly place would they throng, winding their way through forbidden lands, following spirit-paths to those lonely forlorn shores.

In her dreaming mind had walked many solemn spirits, travelling in great rows through Time’s endless hallways, passing through Death’s dim doorways and beyond. In her endless slumber it seemed a thousand ages had passed before. Echos of sweet voices caressed her mind’s shadowed corridor, playing the concordant songs of happy lives as they but plodded on.

An then hearkened to their laughter and their mourning as their countless tiny feet plodded on through lives generously lived and lost. Yet strangely that ocean-child could not recognize their face nor form. More pronounced their fates had seemed to her with each passing ghost, appearing then disappearing in her mind within the haunting host.

Then strangely they were born again into a world more beautiful than before, until their final and tragic fall when they were shown to her no more. Lit from afar as by a searchlight, their living lights then faded and were blurred, never to appear again in any living memory or mind but hers.

But as Time crept on through the great ageless play that she had seen, none would know but her its final tragic act. And so she wept for what had been and would be. Yet in her shadowed dreams born of vast and tragic fates unseen, An reached out to each child with compassionate arms, desiring only to comfort and embrace them all in the midst of their final acts, these sad events of her mind’s mirrored eye that would someday pass.

For devoured by dream’s phantom mists, their ghosts lasted but a moment more as their dying lights travelled down her dream’s misty corridor towards some cruel oblivion, she could not follow more. For the desires of dreams that pass before the longing eye are there but to lead us mercilessly on some fruitless path, through our hollows lives and beyond, driving us onward like a fleeing will-o-wisp we long to grasp but never will, whose tempting lights dance just beyond the farthest hill.

She would remain cursed to keep that heroic host in her sleeping mind bestilled, knowing she would never touch nor know their loving faces still, nor their children’s children’s in the end. And this pained desire she felt would be left ever after unfulfilled. She then felt great sorrow at what she had foreseen and what would come to pass, crying for them in her sepulcher of glass as she slept beneath the rolling waves.

An then wrapped her arms about herself, holding her dreams close to her, fearing that which touched her heart would but melt away with the waking light of future’s cruel and callous day.

But the spirit of the Great Mother, she whose celestial seas fill the worlds between this and all others, had heard An’s mourning from afar, in a place beyond her cosmic star, having bathed in the tears of the world long before its making. For like the Dreaming Seas, that sad mother had borne her tragic and mournful waves upon sleepy tides of endless heartbreak and woe, the suffering of the Children of the World, many times before.

From Her had come many previous worlds’ births and deaths, the endless fashioning of worlds without remorse or regret, their cyclings having no beginning nor end, born of endless tears. For she alone had borne all their tragic tides, washing clean again their dying dreams, this mother of the weeping oceans that yet sweeps all sorrows away.

Out of her, the watery womb of the world, much had been birthed that had returned to death and dearth, the dust of countless worlds swept away to be reborn again as dreams rebirthed, from ever-hopeful visions she fulfilled and then unfashioned.

Unconscious to all things, the timeless Mother in her sleep had yet always known of the mournful destinies of all future worlds, bearing witness to the sadness of their final fates all at once, knowing all-time and the fate of the many in but a single solemn glance. For though eternal, she was not blinded to the bliss of being, nor the cycle of life and death, nor free from the suffering and sorrow of the living and of life’s burning passions in all her children, which she would ever know.

And so at the calling of An’s deep sorrows had the Great Mother’s vast and loving heart awakened, flowing forth from the Sea of Eternity upon which her spirit rides, with love and compassion to guide this daughter-of-the-seas now trapped in endless woe, soothing the sleeping sea-maiden in her time of unending heartache and sorrow.

The Great Mother then bestowed upon An the gift beyond prophetic sight. Like a dream within a dream, from the first mother to the second, thus was granted the will to fashion a timeless tapestry, a Loom of Fate, upon which she would forever weave the countless lives she had seen, wrapping its tragic clothe about the waning world. And so was granted to her power over the fates of those spirits soon born into this world’s tapestry. 

“It shall be if you but will it”, she whispered. An then knew by her wise words she had but conceived in dreams that which her heart desired, granting life to the children she had seen but as fading ghosts. And so she cried with the joy that only comes at Creation, finally seeing the dying night of her dark heart give way at last to loving light and life.

To An through visions had thus been granted stewardship over the world’s living spirits, setting their lives as she so desired through the weaving of the fated yarns which she now guided through the spinning of her ever-turning and churning wheels. For the Spirit Divine was but the golden thread that she now bore. And her children’s lives and destinies formed the colorful pattern upon which it was sown.

She then took her loving gift and fashioned from her mind’s imaginings the fates of Phantaia’s unnumbered children upon her empty loom, weaving the futures of many that would live and die within the wider world that now loomed beyond her shores. She then made real their colorful lives as she had seen in vivid dreams, until all things merged to fashion her tapestry’s glorious whole.

But An desired that these blessed children she had seen should not die in vain, but enter this world pure in purpose and with courageous heart, meeting fate as one would will it. And so she sought to give each the power to hope and dream as she. And so with strings unsown she so willed they should turn the wheel of their own lives upon a loom of freewill made as they should wish, weaving but a part of their own futures, facing what destiny may give them, one that only they may yet dare to view.

The dreaming mother born of timeless tides thus knew all the threads of lives upon her loom and the final world’s collective fate, yet with many mysteries within yet sewn or known. For she by choice knew not all things, nor knew not what lay beyond this world’s final passing days.

For those no longer born into this dream must in final days like the world itself perish then pass through some new dream beyond. They must travel on to some undiscovered country no one even with prophetic sight might see, but which the Creator alone should know. And yet the only truth that stands before the Almighty in this world and all others is that all things that begin must also end.

With courage and hope, An’s silver fingers beneath the sea sublime then guided the first silver yarn that spun and turned through the ocean’s brine, until a magnificent fabric was formed beneath the sea. From its cloth was then revealed to her the tangled paths that the living alone would choose, yet that which would later entomb them all within some grander design that would come to pass.

She then saw with bittersweet joy what peace and war, love and hate, beauty and horror, her hands had sown. For though splendid was the silk that An had woven, sad was its patterned cloth as it lay upon the corpse of this fallen world. And so was set the hidden glory of the many, the long and tangled struggles of those yet to come, and the desperate longing to be free of the many entanglements within the wider world’s web. For only among their bravest would that freedom ever be found.

This daughter-of-the-seas then looked upon this truth as but a gift, and so sublimely fashioned the heroic spirits of the world, those whose great destiny would but turn the tides of time, ones she desired to be shared and known by all, so that in the end-days of their lives, long after their own death and the world’s demise, their spirits would gather as one and know the full grandeur of their lives within the more glorious whole.

Thus, in the end would her bliss, and the world’s, be fully known to them alone.

Her tears of joy and of sadness then shined out upon the ocean floor as shining pearls for the nighttime skies to behold. For its majesty was more than she could behold. The Great Mother whose spirit dwells far beyond this world then looked down through the wasteful depths of the Dreaming Seas and viewed those ocean-pearls as upon a sky filled with many twinkling stars, reading in them many signs, knowing by those tears An’s love for the world, as her son’s, was at last made whole.

The time of An’s own tragic part in the great play of the world was now complete. And so, the Dreaming Seas and Phantaia both danced to the song of the great play they now shared.

– the Author



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