Thread: The Purple Piper

Prologue

There was a low humid breeze during the Moirae’s testimony, and life was beginning to seem ephemeral. The place was not yet known, but seemed to resembled a Victorian-esque squalor on the outskirts of Birú, or at least that is what I can recollect from the vivid memories of being able to see the first thing life threw at me – the locations name on a placket of sorts. There were two of them to see me through my birth; it wasn’t at all how humanity portrayed them; and they were holding a decadent box shaped like a dragon eating its tail. The cyclical image conveys a flow of both life and death, and how the two are interlinked with a form of rebirth after death – a persistence of sorts, so to say. The two grabbed an unwritten harmony from within: there were no words or images of any kind, but a perpetual emptiness drawn across this now unsealed document like it established some form of truth beyond the truth. They whisper incantations in a dialect which seems faintly like a combination of Greek and Latin, but it never was either or – just a form of gibberish. The ending words materialises a flute from thin-air, and the apparition of a box into the void unseen by ghostly eyes. These eyes have been in deaths kingdom, so had the Moirae – they laugh of it. Fear isn’t a necessity for the two, but for me in this moment of infinite knowledge. I know it all: my eyes are red and they strain out tears of a nature of mourning; my head is pounding with boundless information; I’m dying. Death is no such thing as to be feared or envied, but it was not yet something I had hunger for – ‘it’ had made sure this never happened. Sprawled out on the floor of deaths kingdom was the flute with the engraved letters ‘p.u.r.p.l.e.’
It had been chucked at a high altitude out of the void, and I was sucked outside with it. My soul was entrapped within that which gives out no answers, but only questions. Before all is told, the two share a smile, but it is saddened – so sad, they must go now. They are gone. I am here. I’m running through the void and it is becoming more and more of an unseen shade of white with every pacing step which echoes untold truths. I want to stay here, I want all of knowledge for eternity, and I never ever want to go, would you? The end is reddening the entrance of the end which is now pure red. I’m awake. For the first time in all of reality, I know I will constantly question my conscience in either despair or delight, never either or. I know the truth only for this split second, this split moment – you never get to know it again. There is no time but now in which the perusal begins, and my destiny has already became known by those in which I will never know or see. There is but a flute by my birthplace containing a sealed message. It said ‘This is the answer, and this is the question: what it is to be a human, do you know?’

Under the ruby eyes of sapphire lies a paradox and a name – it is all concealed within the letter. The truth beyond the truth has called me paradox. This is the beginning of my story for truth the Moirae have set upon the wall of prophets, and with every start will be an end.

This is pure non-formalism in my eyes, no set structure and a sweeping undercurrent of suggested symbolism and imagery. Seemed like a short burst of garbled sentences at first but later in the paragraph I gave up simply reading the words and began watching the slideshow of deathly and surreal images in my head; this made the feeling of the piece come out nicely. And feeling is usually more important to me than context. So yeah, I liked it. I think for a piece like this 500 - 1k words would be enough, or it would become too confusing. This could be a bit more organized though, for smoother "image" transitions. I will have to reread this several time to get a clearer picture of course. Keep going, this could be damn good.

I second Alex's comment about reading this a second time. It shows promise and I'm confident that I'll get it after the second read through.

Thank you for the feedback. This might turn out a bit different from the Prologue, but I wanted the prologue to suggest the themes of what I'm going to be writing of (it'll be in a similar, and not so similar structure). This is the first chapter (in which I have ended at a suggestive cliffhanger of more could be written, but I want to mainly know if this flows onwards from the prologue nicely).

Disdain of the Gods

There always was something eerie about this birthplace of mine. The town of Birú – home of the arts; home of the prosperous; home to many mythological creatures and entities, so they say. It had once been known as the “Village of Scholars” or “Home of Philosophy” over three-hundred years ago until the dysterian disease came and perished all life residing here. Around that time, it had been at the peak of architectural significance in all of the country, with many beautiful cathedrals and churches; and both Victorian and Georgian complexes scattered across the land. Then in 2030RD, around seventy years ago, the old generation had come to proclaim it, and began fixing the damage caused by the hysteria. We have been living here ever since. Not many of us live past the age of twenty-five, so there was more of a filial affection for us newcomers in life. We got taught mainly the arts’ and things considered arts’ from the age of four upwards in our preliminary years. Our education establishment demanded prominence over the disputed fact that we got the best education in all the country, so we would do what the after-generation had done over thirty years ago. The system worked with different tenses, so a lot of English words lost meanings or had procured new definitions. In this case, the old-generation is forwards, while the new-generation is backwards. It was confusing at first: but our leader Führer Venire soon made sense of things.

Our leader was both a megalomaniac and a manipulator: he was also insane with power. The term etymology had been banned by the Führer 22 years ago – one year before my birth – so anyone caught speaking about past definitions, or anyone caught saying the word out of hours, were to be publically executed. The whole thing was a shamble, but no-one dared to oppose him. There were other phrases and words that were prohibited; such as the eccentric ‘swears’, ‘Garfunkel’, ‘Vainglorious’ and ‘The seven deadly sins’; alongside accusing any Teacher or Government members of mendacity (if something was truly defined, and could not be defined any other way, you could not argue that the ‘said so thing’ was a lie. However, a Loophole in Proclamation 5 stated that: “newly discovered artefacts and information could be challenged, AS long as it was to an understandable degree”).
Having even stated all this, it was not without warrant that some phrases would have to come to acceptance during our curriculum. Such as history – my teacher in the past had to teach us about that in which resides forwards, so to do so, he would have to use forward terms, and that meant using the etymological meanings of words. The system was a bit haywire – I never followed it in my spare time, and used the correct and proper definitions of words.
I myself am one in which studies that which takes place in the ancient-and-not-so-ancient past – philosophy. From the greats of the past: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche’s, to the confusing of today: my father.
My father named me at birth: I was named Paradoxical, because it was a miracle that I came out alive. I had apparently been dead for 2 minutes inside, before I properly got out of the womb: then I was alive. No explanations – just alive. A paradox since I should be dead. However, I proved that the statement of death was, in fact, false over the time of minutes. My mother had died during the birth procedure, so I never knew what it was like to have one. I had only heard that she was ‘fascinating’ and ‘poetic in nature’ when it came to my dad describing her.
I can remember, that during my basic preliminary years, I was a very rowdy child: with no mother to take care of me, my dad had to raise me. I was once nicknamed Eris by my father, after the Goddess of Chaos, since I went out of my way to destroy anything I could get my hands on. I snapped out of this odd phase around the age of 10, but I was left as an oddball in mannerisms: especially when it came to science. I liked to dissect things to see how they worked, while at the same time I asked very challenging questions to my teachers, which could be challenged back themselves as mentally disturbing.
Father himself was a very odd man. He was 39 – technically very old – and was once known as the professor of Philosophy and Science at our local University, until he quit the job unexpectedly 7 years ago. Father was actually really renowned for his inquisitive thought-provoking questions, and his own ideology on life: he had been a big idealist in Socrates theory of what it is and is not to be considered human, and was very obsessed with how the definitions of what we consider knowledge or beauty had changed over the years He consistently left memoires and dissertations on epistemology and the study of human behaviour; and in a psychological endeavour; how the brain functioned under certain circumstances.
He had done a lot of taboo experiments on the latter of what I described about his passions, and was sometimes personified as a monster of the diplomats. But it was Führer Venire who gave orders on human experimentation – I never got to know anything about this.
Then one day, out of the blue, he quit his position as professor. I asked him at the time why he had done so: I was 14 then. I never really knew what I wanted to be at the time, and I always had rather despairing thoughts over the possible outcome that I might be a ‘nothingness’. However, that brief conversation with my dad gave me leading ideas to my profession of choice. When I questioned him on the matter, rather than explaining thoroughly what led him to this decision, all he had said to me were two things: he “had seen a truth beyond the truth” and that “there were three, not two”. Upon further investigation into this matter, he gave me a baleful stare and shook his head in a negative manner. He left a year later, when I had reached the age of maturity. I haven’t seen him ever since: just the odd letter from him now and again, leftover memoires, and a flute. Now to get onto why I decided to become a philosopher myself.

Why I became a philosopher was actually because of three reasons:

1. I had such an inquisitive nature about the way of living that – unsurprisingly – I needed to know more and more, and thus strived to be knowing and known.
2. I wanted to know what possessed my father to quit his job in more depth, and why he quit at the peak of significance.
3. ...The Memoires leftover, and that conversation with my father.

The memoires leftover indicate something very peculiar: they were all on just one topic. The topic of choice was about a mythological legend that revolves around a musical instrument which grants ‘Life’, ‘Death’ and the manipulation of ‘Time’. It also revolved completely around the Greek legend of the Moirae: the three sisters of judgement. The legend says that they were of equal value to that of the Gods – if not higher – and that they were the curators of destiny. They had been depicted by many religions, cults, and were also mentioned in Homers ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. Above all, they were actually feared by the Gods themselves.
In the memoires, it states that “a child of Disdain would be borne by the fruits of the Gods unto this planet to create a disharmony upon it, which will give the Moirae the ‘Celestial Throne’ of the Universe”. It had a lot of information on those in which were visited: all very long dead from over 3000 years ago, a placket of sorts, and a poem. The poem reads as follows:

“Life, death and time:
The three sisters of judgement.
The Luminiferous glow, of a cigarette
Seen in the still-water chambers
Now becomes a symbol: death...

Life, with her cultivating arms
Will create life on the raw planet:
The unyielding arms of Emmerald eyes
Reflects the beauty of all.

Death, with her cultivating arms
Will thus create a law of death:
The yielding arms of Ruby eyes
Shows despair thus abides it.

Time, with her cultivated arms
Will thus create the physics of time:
All sought lost and found to rest,
A planet short of time.

...With all three comes a meaning:

Energy, Matter and Space:
In which everything has a start.
Confusion, delusions, illusions
They all have the same in common:
Life, death and time.”

My dad used to read it to me as a child. The poem at the time was implemented into something that he read to me during bedtimes. But, when finding them in the memoires, it both surprised and disturbed me. Everything was frankly obvious, all at once. I had decided to set out all surrounding ambitions when I read through these dissertations, and to become a philosopher to understand what spooked my dad.