How Emptiness Gained Weight
How Emptiness Gained Weight
A Ballad of Velaria
On the banks of the Tei-Pei River, where the mists lie so dense,
A fierce, bitter struggle raged with unyielding offense.
Men fought against men, all kinship and dreams left behind,
And under a broken war chariot, 'midst the wounded and blind,
Lay a stricken young couple – a man and a maiden soon dead.
He breathed not at all, and she, with her last strength, instead
Held onto the child in her womb, growing cold with each drop of her blood.
Her whisper rose skyward, a mix of meek love and dark flood:
"Not for me – not for me, aid, oh Spirits, I feel my life end...
But grant just a moment's reprieve, that my life to my child I might send !"
And high in the sky, o'er the blood-sodden field where hate reaped its cost,
A translucent shade took form – Arevir, who first
Heard in that whisper a call both so precious and true:
A plea not for power or wonder – a chance for a world made anew.
She descended to where the girl lay, with a palm touched her brow, soft and mild,
And into the body, now fading, she poured living light for the child.
Not loud magic – a blessing, a quiet parental caress,
To plant in the heart of this infant, who knew not the world's distress,
A moss – not of malice, but tender remembrance of those who gave birth,
Who loved so profoundly they loved him still, even leaving this earth.
And so on the sunset-drenched plain, when the clamor of war finally ceased,
Amidst the field charred and forsaken, by a ruined window's deceased,
Lay not an infant – a young one, not fragile, but woven from light,
From the glimmers of dusk and the droplets of morning dew, bright.
He breathed. And within his pure eyes, not yet knowing how tears are to fall,
Burned not the weight of an orphan's dark void, but a sacred, a solemn call –
To carry two vanished lives inside him, like two precious seeds in his care,
So their memory would not sink into Lethe, like dark river-foam, lost in despair.
She was named Velaria, which means "loyalty to the wave,"
And from her first days showed her nature, in hardship both stubborn and brave.
No mere child of a Leviathan, born by the whimsy of fate,
She became a bridge between worlds, which she herself would create.
She sang so that iron would weep and stone soften to dust in its place,
And in her unceasing dance, even wounds of the earth could embrace
A moment's reprieve from their pain, their old bitterness, their ancient spite,
For her every motion was memory seeking to move, to take flight.
She is artful, devoted, and stubborn – three traits intertwined.
Devoted – to those she ne'er witnessed, but holds in her heart enshrined.
Stubborn – in her will to live on, not to be just a shade or a ghost.
Artful – for her whole existence, from when she was needed the most,
Is the highest of arts: from the pain and the dark, from the weeping and groans, to create
Not vengeance, not sorrow – but melody, potent to heal and translate.
Thus emptiness gained its true weight. Not the heft of a stone or of lead,
But the weight of a feeling most potent, held sacred until we are dead:
The image of two loving souls who on ash-covered ground were laid low,
So that in the daughter they never could raise, they would finally know
Their eternal, undying refuge. And now, if somewhere there rings
Velaria's wordless song 'neath the moon, know that within her voice springs
Not the void of an orphan, but a chalice of love filled complete,
That no death can now crush or defeat, and which gives to the eternal, the living, a seat
For those who once bled out their life, so that emptiness might at long last
Find its primary, singular meaning: to be art, devotion, a heart that will steadfastly
Beat.
