There exists a place, a homeland, from which all outward-looking views cast into alignment the workings of things. It is a kingdom of understanding of sorts, the place to which all truly real beings rise when they are unfastened from the darker worlds of mundane arbitrament. This refuge is a loving one, but it is hidden from the direct view of the spirits whose roots reach to it, even those who know in their mind that it exists. All are relegated to merely see its shape beneath and within everything that is and can be, and they lie only to yearnfully recognize its shadow, cast in a countless thousand forms by the light of creation, and hope to somehow behold it therein.

Distant from this place, out in the Ni, a beast and man such as this sits pensively, preparing to leave the safety of his temporary sanctuary in what has become an unabandonable quest to find his home and peace. He stares blankly into the spaces before him, drawing the fluid around him into motion with his breath, trying to paint his thoughts into a picture that makes any sort of sense in the ways of thought into which he's grown. As with most of these creations, the painting is shallow and incomplete, and riddled with doubt, never wholly capturing the thought behind it, but never making clear what it lacks.

He is lost, despite knowing exactly where he is and how he got there. He is far from the lands of his birth, full of family and old friends who know him mostly as the man and child he used to be. He is ever still farther from his goal, or at least so he feels, and from gazing upon the pattern from which everything he has known and questioned was crafted. He is merely someplace in between, amidst the innumerable span of states wherein most creatures spend nearly all of their lives, perhaps never knowing more.

He is not in motion, but he knows he must become so come the new day. He is tired, but in his exhaustion is a rage that somewhere carries the essense of determination, and beneath that is the thought of sleep, and of dreams, and of death, wherein the image of the homeland lives and burns, pushing itself back toward the outside. Like a star this mind remains, a heavy shell of swirling mass relentlessly held aloft by an unendingly outpouring core, always shifting between release and collapse, never daring either.

Far above him, in a direction to which no one can point, is the force that calls deeply to him. It does so not invitingly or beconingly, but with a love, almost a longing, that he recognizes as pure and giving. It illuminates the path to itself, but it cannot clear his eyes for him to move aside the storm of material that clutters the view. As when he's travelled amidst torrential winter rains, he can only watch the ground before his feet, head down, and struggle to keep the whole of the route in mind.

He thinks upon his companions. He is greatful for them, despite the distance at which they often stand. He is quite different, as are they from one another, he supposes, and it is difficult not to feel alone amidst them. He considers almost with humor the irony in their inability to understand him: it is the reflection of his own. They are, after all, creatures like him, beings with desires and fears and angers and shortcomings all their own, and it is often all he can do not to ask them to rise above these things for the sake of his own, let alone endeavor the reverse. The common light that they and he together seek, each holding it to a different shape in their mind's eye, binds them, and it is to this he tries to turn in his thoughts of them, endeavoring to identify and forgive. Perhaps, in time, he will find in this the means of forgiving himself.

His mind returns to the darkened world around him. High overhead, above an unbroken rolling blanket of water, the evening sky is as blue as can be in this place. On its winds are the visions of all the places he has seen, and in those are the whispers, the tiny fragments of an eternal voice... "You are more."

"So are we all," he thinks, nearly aloud, "but who of us shall see it?"

Under a heavy world he sits, smashed under the weight of shadow, dragged to a crawl, slowly drowning. He searches for a resolution, a closing thought to restore his faith, but there is none. Only in losing himself to the narrow focus of the very next step is there the flicker of hope, only there, in that relinquishing of control.

He gives up, and prepares to rise from his meditation, hoping that somewhere his guidance is looking forward to where he cannot.