Yin and Yang
Yin and Yang
And so, the Scourer takes you to the depths of the Tower, the foundations of the monolith, deep beneath it, where the Tower both begins and ends.
And you find yourself in a space which is impossibly vast and which reveals and hides nothing.
He leads you across a narrow bridge which passes over a sea of darkness; the bridge is made of the same stuff as the tower and it is sharp and slippery, and large spikes stick out of the bridge at odd angles and you know that you must not touch them or they'll slice off your fingers.
Pillars fall from so far above that you cannot see where they begin, and they go down so far into the darkness that you cannot see where they end.
And the Sorcerer tells you that these pillars - the foundations on which the Tower rests - do not end, not ever.
The sea of darkness which your carefully stumble over is, in fact, bottomless, and the foundations of the Tower, in truth, rest on nothing but the abyss itself.
And you walk with him across the narrow bridge, over the Abyss, and the pillars around you - made of something that does not quite look like the tower, something a touch more gilded - seem to go on forever in all directions, and the Sorcerer tells you that the foundations are not quite one-and-the-same with the Tower.
These pillars, foundations, are an expression of the Abyss itself, a something which came from nothing, rising forever through infinity and eternity until even the endless Abyss found an end, and the pillars held up Something from the fiery Nothingness, about which nothing can be said, for Nothing does not contain anything which can be known about.
Indeed, it is unknowing itself, a void of mind, which creates mind, a void of substance, which creates substance.
And you can't help but stare down into it and think that it looks like any other hole you've even seen and that, surely, if you throw a light down there it will find it's bottom eventually.
And the Sorcerer laughs heartily; that is good, he says, that you cannot fathom the Abyss but with your spacial understanding, that you cannot imagine something truly without end. Those who spend too long thinking about the infinite, he says, are doomed to stretch their minds all across it, their thoughts becoming thinner and thinner, but never quite snapping or breaking. In the end, he says, as they grow to impossible thinness, they are doomed not to die, but to think forever, beyond forever! Into eternity! A plaything of the meaningless Abyss...
And, eventually, the bridge comes to and end and you find yourself under the heart of the tower, the only place where the Tower itself reaches down to the level of the bridge, and you can see the material of the Tower forming into a jagged shape like an inverted pyramid, but covered in uneven spikes,
and where the bridge ends there are a few other bridges going off in other directions,
and they go so far into the darkness that you cannot see their ends.
And underneath the bottom of the tower, at the bottom of this inverted pyramid, is a misty grey shape about the size of a wall clock, which gains resolution as you get closer to it,
and you realise that part of it is black and part of it is white,
and the Sorcerer ushers you towards the shape which floats above the bridges and he motions you towards it with a smirk,
and you see what it is,
Yin and
Yang.
But not some imitation of the idea of Tao, or cosmic balance,
it is the balance, between something and nothing,
between the forces of creation and destruction,
and the Tower grows out from it and rests on the foundations of the Abyss,
and you cannot help yourself but look upon it
and feel like your humanity is slipping away,
blasted out of you as if by a scorching wind.
And you feel so strange, like you are not what you once were, not even a human any longer, not anything, not even a mind, just a set of beliefs, not even understandings, just patterns of beliefs, like an algorithm, or a robot, or a set of parallel lines.
It is all blasted away from you and without the beliefs you once held,
without even knowing it,
you do not know what you are,
and you do not know what is real and what isn't,
because all that you thought was real,
was only what you believed.
The wife of the Sorcerer is the Goddess of Flowers, but the two are not often together because they have their own affairs to manage; it is not that they do not love each other, they do, they love each other without end, but, rather, it's because love they share for each other is based on who the other is, and how they express themselves, not based only on their closeness and shared experiences.
When does a gravestone become a gravestone, rather than just a slab of rock? Yes, you know, in your head, that it is a slab of rock, but it only becomes a gravestone when flowers are placed upon it and when it brings out of the tears of those left behind.
When the flower are placed on the grave, so does the Goddess of Flowers squat next to them and give the gravestone it's power to draw out the cathartic emotions of those who mourn. The Goddess watches the flowers wither and die, and so the rot feeds her, and it gives her the power to draw out the healing tears and take pain from the hearts of the mourners.
When does a pile of wood and rocks become a house? When does a house become a home?
When the building is able to draw out the emotions of those who reside in it, when it is able to make them feel love, rage, hate, grieve, and cry. When the home of your family can bring out feelings deep within the people of the house; all that which is pushed away and forgotten, and all that which is shameful and absurd.
Feelings left in the corners of the mind are wont to rot, and so the Goddess feasts on them and so it gives her the power to draw them forth and bring them to blossom. That which is hidden from the world blossoms in the house of man, and if it does not them the world is consumed by madness.
Men are wont to misunderstand the Goddess, for each man wishes to gain control over her and to keep what they feel buried in a deep ocean, but this desire is false, for the Goddess must renew a man by drawing out what he feels.
If men were left to their own devices then false towers and walls would be built, false wars would be fought forever and the feelings which went unanswered would soon turn to madness, and madness would turn to amorality, and amorality to grandiosity.
Each man tries to fend off the Goddess, and many succeed, but what the Goddess offers is beloved by the wise, for she gives them the power to turn their rot into blossom, and she gives them the power to make the barren soil of their minds into gardens.
She is receiving, and she is drawing; she draws out from men what they do not wish to be seen, and often at the times that they do not wish it to be seen. She draws the tears from a man while he watches his daughter become a woman, and she draws out the rage for his father which he buried so deeply at the base of his tower, just above his abyss.
She gives this power to all women; the power to draw out, to heal, and also to hurt, for some men are too hard by far, their minds not soft enough for the drawing out and so they must be shattered, lest they build a tower too high and become a god to themselves.
It is easy for a man to build a tower so high that it touches the face of God, but it is not so easy for him to be at peace in the soil of the Earth, with it's worms and slugs. He feels himself above that, but men who reach so high that they touch the face of God become themselves a part of God - for no knowledge of God can exist outside of Himself, and so He maintains his wholeness by claiming the mind's of such men for himself.
But the fool will build his tower high, and each time is knocked down he will learn, and he will build it higher and stronger, until he touches the face of God.
And then the Goddess comes to him too and offers her hand, and the fool must make the choice to be wise or be lost forever; if he does not take the hand of the Goddess then he is lost in the mind of God forever, a playing of Ein Sof, his mind yoked by tides which are beyond thought and reason.
But if the man on his high tower takes the hand of the Goddess then she flings him down again and he falls, through a forest of thorns, and mud, and wet leaves.
He rolls down a hill, unable to stop himself, until he is filthy and sodden with bugs and grime. He submits himself to the downward fall of gravity, and he sees that gravity is a force more powerful than his tower of thoughts, that it drags all down in the end, that is the weight of being alive.
Then the Goddess makes him speak to himself, and draw out his own deepest feelings, she makes him see himself in the Mirror of Truth, where he cannot ever be unaware of his own other self, the self which feels, and cries, and pities.
And the fool becomes wise when he sees that his feelings are destructive only to himself, yes, but that if he lets the Goddess blossom them forth then they become beautiful to those around him. He shakes his head at his own tower, now in ruins, and he wonders why he saw the value in it.
He finds a seed of infinite colour, and he plants it... and from it grows a garden from the barren earth which he had previously neglected, the ruins of his tower now covered in vines and fruits and his heart easily filled with love, which he too now knows how to draw out from himself.
And so he stops his never-ending battle within and he stops thinking about what evil forces he might defeat; he thinks now of how he might build, not a tower, but a home for himself and those he loves. He thinks of how to build a temple for the Goddess
on the dirt of the Earth.