Diary of S.V.Rook Dated 21st May 1893
Real progress at last!
I am reluctant to commit this to paper for fear that, in doing so, I might render it smaller than it felt. But I believe I have stumbled upon something that has, quite deliberately, remained concealed for longer than most things have any right to.
With so few sources of any reliability, I returned, yet again, to The Bells Before the World, reading it with the stubbornness of a man who suspects the truth is not absent, merely unwilling. It must have been the thousandth such reading, though the jungle offered little encouragement; the evening air had turned cool in that damp, insinuating way of this place, and my thoughts, no less humid, began to drift.
I found myself, somewhat against intention, imagining the cloak made of the Pure Light itself, Myrth’s own mantle of balanced Lumyn. Not as intangible, but as something… worn. Held. Felt.
It is an absurd indulgence, of course, and yet I imagined myself within it, wrapped in its warmth, its colour, and I must have slipped, without ceremony, into sleep under that thought.
And the dreams. Good Lord, the dreams.
There was nothing vague or symbolic about them. They were immediate. Saturated. Alive in a manner that makes waking seem, by comparison, a kind of polite dimness.
I hesitate to describe what I saw, not from modesty, but from inadequacy; still, I shall attempt it. It was as though I beheld a vastness. No, not merely vast, but arranged, like a galaxy perceived from some impossible height, as if I were borne aloft on the back of some divine creature that required neither wing nor effort. Worlds, countless worlds turned below, each steeped in colour so vivid that the ordinary spectrum felt, in retrospect, like a mere suggestion.
Not only the familiar triad: red, blue, green, but purples of unsettling depth, yellows that sung of adventure, oranges that carried a bubble of warmth I could feel even within the dream; and beyond these, hues for which I possess no language, though I suspect language itself might be at fault.
And yet, this is the part that clings most stubbornly; they were not without order.
Seven.
I am certain of it.
Seven divisions, or currents, or perhaps… presences. The structure of it resists me now, slipping away like water through careless fingers, but I recall the sensation of recognition more than the details themselves, as though I had not discovered, but remembered.
Seven… spirits? No, that is not right.
Muses.
Yes. Muses.
The Seven Muses of Play.
Even as I write it, the certainty feels both absurd and unshakeable. It occurs to me somewhat inconveniently that I may not be learning anything at all, but rather uncovering something that was, for reasons I cannot yet justify, already within me.
If that is true, then the question becomes not what I must find, but why I ever forgot, and whether, in remembering, I might become something closer to the man I once assured myself I would be. The sort of man who might return to England not merely with stories, but with something resembling substance. Something Elizabeth might recognise as… sufficient.
I find, however, that the jungle has little patience for revelation. It presses in as ever, damp and unromantic, and I cannot help but resent it slightly for intruding upon what felt, however briefly, like clarity.
Still... if there are indeed seven Muses, and if they are fragments of that lost balance, then I have, at last, something resembling a direction.
Which is more than I had yesterday, and perhaps, even under this torrid and dank canopy, enough to continue.
S.V.Rook