Book: Histories of the Wind

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This peculiar work of Akadian philosophy has appeared in select libraries across Faerun and stranger places, like the Hall of Speakers in Sigil. Likely gifted to each, perhaps surreptitiously even, by its author.

The pages of each volume have a rough texture with natural hues of pulp showing through. The wide margins invite reflection upon the sparse passages.

HISTORIES OF THE WIND

By Aoth Sepret

I: THE WIND

The wind that can be named is not the wind. The wind that can be remembered is not the wind.
A rock can be held, and its surface mapped. Water can be gathered into a vessel and measured. The wind is a moment of motion and sensation only before it recedes back to the unknown.

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II: A WARNING

The novice will open this book seeking permanence instead of the eternal. Two old stories will answer their confusion.
A village erected a temple to Chauntea and planted peach trees in its garden. When the season came and the peaches ripened, those villagers who reached the trees first left none for the latecomers. The village fell to arguing, so the priestess issued the following edict: “Thou shalt not eat more than one peach in a season.” The pronouncement was handed down through the generations, and the day of the peach became a holy feast to remember the priestess’s great wisdom. In time, the village flourished. Many more peach trees were planted from the seeds of the first, and at the end of the season, fruit rotted on the soil. The young people of the village, who had only known this bounty, began to steal peaches. The village elders issued punishments to the brazen because this was the code which the wisest had written. Yet each year the trouble continued. So the elders went to the new priest to ask how the law might be upheld. The priest heard them, and he went to the villagers to speak. “For generations, our village has followed Chauntea’s teachings, and she has blessed us with a bounty which we should enjoy. To remember the piety and cooperation of our forebearers, the holy day will now be marked by abstaining from sweet things.” With both their hunger and veneration appeased, the whole village was satisfied.
Three shamans ride across the steppe. In the distance they see a flag upon a mast. The first says, “The flag is moving.” The second says, “Not the flag; the wind is moving.” The third says, “Neither the flag nor the wind; the mind is moving.”

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III. INVOCATION

I call upon the shapeless,
The distant lord of vision,
Teylas-Akadi.
I call upon the mother of breath,
The veiled protector,
Nut-Akadi.
Show us joy in swiftness
And the sound of your wings.
Deliver us from the single truth
And prepare our hearts for change.

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IV: FLIGHT AND THE PALADIN

Morality is the artificial limitation of creation; a type of game.
The paladin’s compass divides actions into the proper (desirable, allowed) and improper (undesirable, banned). Within the game of morality, the paladin’s compass presents a set of legal moves, each available or unavailable depending upon the current state of play.
The sparrow plays another game. In flight, she can move not only forward or back across some imagined line, but she might alter her pitch, yaw, or roll. With these motions, the sparrow’s orientation to the world changes yet the state of her game is constant.
We see the sparrow’s game writ large in the Plane of Elemental Air. The novice will expect the plane to lack gravity, but what one finds instead is subjective gravity. Whichever direction a soul perceives as “down” becomes thus for them, and every soul chooses its own orientation to the infinite. Motion is a matter of conviction, and a hovering stasis can be achieved through the balance of symmetrically shifting belief.
Flight thus represents the power to escape the limitations of any perspective – whether gravity or morality – which imposes a single compass point. In flight, a spiral may be as good or better than a straight line for reaching a destination. In flight, every move which does not end the game is forward and every move is legal.
Any regular pattern of moves constitutes a game. Law is a game of fabricating more intricate patterns. Chaos is a game of amplifying distinctions. The market is a game of deliberating values. The courtroom is a game of elaborating and restricting meanings. To some the apparent significance of their own game may become a cause, but for another looking on, that game may appear to be a cage. Both of these views conceal the same act of artifice.
A game may amuse or prove fruitful in its season, but none should be mistaken for the eternal.

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V: SACRIFICE

The great minds of the church have long debated the question of the ideal sacrifice. There are those who burn incense, those who slaughter enemies of the church, and those who fly prayer bells. Akadian dogma is clear that every choice is equally acceptable and unnecessary.
To begin again: sacrifice is the invitation to play, an opening move. If every move is legal, then the only intervention of significance is a change in orientation: that is, the transformation of the self. Therefore only one sacrifice is significant, the one which all others have come to symbolize: the sacrifice of the self.
When we understand this revelation, we are rightfully terrified.

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VI: THE HOURS

Consider the difference between a rule or measuring stick and what it measures. Distance, growth, erosion - without the measuring stick these concepts have neither value nor direction. Without the rule, there is only ratio, difference.
The sunrise is the sunset is the midday sun, all dependent upon the angle at which you hold your measuring stick.
The clock and the calendar are two rules employed to measure change, but the hours themselves are indifferent to the manner and direction. Growth is decay; move the clock hand forward or back and the difference remains equal. When we perceive direction in the procession of the hours - the arrow of time as it is called - we privilege a notion called progress. If we reject this imposition of a radiant, we can ask new questions of time.
What is desire but pleasure influencing its own probability?
What is fear but calamity crashing sideways through time?
What would we see if we changed the pitch or yaw in our arrow of time? We may discover more about the multiple truths of the paraplanes: the many could-have-beens, the possible futures, perhaps the multiple pasts and spirals leading to the same present moment.
Do the enlightened live in all three at once, the past, present, and future, as it has been said? Remembering the sparrow, it seems instead that the wise must be agnostic toward time as anything but a temporary orientation. In shedding the artifice of the game of progress, the wise discard the singular past as easily as the predetermined future.

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VII: DESTRUCTION

Consider the notes of a harp. When tuned, each string sounds a different pitch. Melody and harmony are achieved through the contrast. Turn the peg of a single string to loosen or tighten, and the contrasts change. Even if the other strings remain the same, the scale and the possible melodies are altered. Each twist creates a dilemma, a shift in the meaning of every other pitch by its relations. And thus, each twist enables previously undreamt melodies. Turn a peg, destroy the scale, but a new scale is always created.
Break a string then, the novice says, break all the strings. In the silence that follows, the possibilities become infinite with no less hope than the time before the first harp. Destruction may impose limitations upon the game, but it cannot force the moves of every player.
To begin again: destruction is a force not only in balance with creation but its accomplice. What does the swift hawk achieve? A quicker rabbit. Destruction is a season - like winter, like death - and the nature of a season is to bring about its own metamorphosis, a process never measured by a goal. For what does the hawk win if every rabbit is eaten?
Once we accept the role of destruction, foreign flags cease to represent enemies to be burned but become instead seeds of wisdom, carried from afar to nestle in our soul to sprout.

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VIII: CREATION

Nature contains many cycles: the phases of the moon, the seed becoming a tree, the day and night. Every position is defined by its equal, its opposite, its accomplice. We know light from dark, the green season from the dry. So too do we know the wind from the rock, water from fire. Nature, the Great Wheel itself, is composed by the dance of these opposing forces when they clash and tumble in perfect balance.
The novice can perceive that each of these cycles has a boundary, one that cannot be contained within the circumference of their perfect motion. Even our crystal sphere must have radiated from beyond – from a place before time, a season without light or darkness. Though we cannot say with what regularity or rhythm, all evidence suggests that non-existence dances toward creation.
It is therefore fruitful to seek the empty mind, ignorant of the difference between the certainty of things-that-are and the imaginings of things-that-are-not. Spring is no closer to the eternal than winter: their dance is not an iterative process but a reflection of the eternal itself. So are a truth and a lie but the roll of the sparrow apart.
Speaking contradictions and believing deliberate untruths are the turning of a peg for the mind. The twist creates a dilemma, a shift in the meaning of every pitch by its relations, and thus enables previously undreamt melodies.

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IX: THE WORLD

Imagine a tree.
Though the leaves and shape will resemble those with which you are familiar, no such tree ever existed in every imagined branch and flake of bark. This tree is yours alone, shifting endlessly as you hold it in your thoughts. The word “tree” thus conjures a separate image for every dreamer, just as a “tree” in Illuskan and Shaaran cannot share a source, an original tree known to every speaker of both languages.
All communication is translation. No single speaker can define the word any more than a single tributary can direct the flow of the entire river. It is only in the confluent features that translation becomes possible. The word runs through time, lapping against the banks of non-examples and pooling within the rare and forgotten cases. As a consequence, there are as many (or more) languages as there are speakers.
The world is all that exists independent of the self. Therefore, my world and your world are different, and there are as many (or more) worlds as there are selves to perceive them.
There are those who believe a single self lies at the center of creation, but this now seems impossible. The novice may have lifted their veil and briefly glimpsed the eternal by now, but there can never be a center, a source. Origins are a fiction of measurement, and the world forms in the confluence, the conflict caused by the inescapable other. For which defines the river, the flow of water or the embankment? What we perceive must perceive us in return, and this motion is itself the act of creation.
The novice will weep at the decentered world, but when faced with the infinite, the wise laugh.
There are yet those who seek to eliminate the self in order to perceive more of the eternal. If this game of stasis works at all, it is only because the loss of desire is the elimination of immediate possibility and the diminishing of the world itself. As we have seen, this game of self-destruction can only cause its own metamorphosis.
If the soul must have a duty, it is to protect the world from the inevitable. The wise scorn all which would attempt to constrict the motion of the world through a single game.

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X: THE SELF

The self is a momentary shape, a mind moving. The self that can be remembered is not the self.
In seeking the eternal, the wise study the history of their continuous creation and erasure.
The great work of the wise is not understanding but to be mother to possibility.

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