The Sowing of the Silver Tongue

Mythology

(Transcription: Field Recording 88-B. Speaker: Elder Maros. Location: The Silt Plains. Background noise: Wind, distant livestock.) "Now, settle in. Stop fidgeting. I will tell it once, and if you miss a part, you can ask the wind for the rest. (pause) Before the first word was spoken, the world was... well, it was a wash of light and smell. You didn't have a name for your mother; you simply recognized the scent of warm milk and crushed mint that followed her. We didn't talk; we shifted. If a man was grieving, his skin turned the grey of a rain-slicked stone. Everyone felt the grey. There was no distance between the heart of one and the eye of another." "Wait, no. (Coughs) I am skipping the beginning. The Sun. The Sun was the only thing that possessed a Voice, though it wasn't a voice like ours. It was a Great Resonance. A single, eternal note that kept the stars from drifting away from each other; it was the glue of the firmament." "Then there was this one man. Let us call him Elu. Elu was... ambitious. That is the word for it now, is it not? He decided that feeling the grey of grief was not enough. He wanted to own the grief. He wanted to put a fence around it. So he climbed the Pillar of Salt, the one that reaches the solar rim. He did not go with a prayer. He went with a knife made of frozen shadow." "He did not steal a song. No, that would have been too much. He stole a single syllable. A tiny, jagged piece of the Sun's Resonance. Just one sound: *Ssh*." "The moment Elu spoke that sound back on earth, the world broke. (long pause) Do you understand? It did not just start a conversation; it severed the connection. Suddenly, the grey skin of the grieving man was not shared anymore. Elu looked at him and said, 'You are sad.' And in saying it, Elu stepped outside the sadness. He created a gap. A distance between the observer and the observed." "That was the first lie. The lie that we are separate things." "The syllable grew. It sowed itself into the soil, and from it grew the Silver Tongue. We started naming things: 'tree,' 'stone,' 'blood.' But every time we named a thing, we killed the scent of it. We traded the truth of the experience for the convenience of the label. We stopped being the world, and we started describing it." "So, when you speak, remember. You are not sharing a thought. You are using a stolen shard of the sun to cut yourself away from everything else."