It is in the release of certain macroscopic concerns that many find peace. Some believe this lies merely in the distraction, the turning of attention to issues that are limited in scope, and therefore capable of carrying some perceived meaning. Others view this truth in the light of service; only in departing from our own burdens and troubles and in giving to others can some sort of purpose be found. Still others refrain from a set outlook, and maintain that the details of absolution are moot, and that experience and achievement are themselves the purpose, regardless of how arbitrary the framework wherein they are gained.

For some creatures of the Ni, however, the greater picture is always unavoidably in mind, albeit it only in bewildering and hopelessly incomplete shreads. Often these strips of insight twist whimsically in and out of the light like a torn tapestry hung in a bright and windblown threshold, each turn yielding a tiny flash of recognition before falling back into darkness. Nearly always, their thoughts are drawn against a background noise of cognition upon the tapestry's complete content, and a portion of their energies is devoted always to surmising the portions of the image that remain in silhouetted shadow.

Shadow. It seems an appropriate name for the worlds wherein these souls awaken. They are thin and, in analog, two-dimentional places, and while each bears the signature of its progenitor at each and every turn of view, no sum of them could ever begin to reconstruct it. Each singular vector outward from it, every distinct direction and distance, indicates a unique and sacred projection, but one that leaves the true shape of the whole well obscured from mundane understanding.

The inhabitants of these slices of reality are fragments of this whole temporarily defined as seperate, as are waves to their ocean. These spirits move about in forms borrowed from their realms, squashed into an unnatural space like microbes slowed between two plates of wet glass. A rare few retain with them their totality; the rest seem often to forget their extra dimensions, and spend their existance all but oblivious to their true extent. Of these, however, there come occasionally those for whom the tie to the center is stronger.

These are those beings that ponder long on the weave in the window, and who must somehow allay their questions and quench the doubts that, perhaps in trade for their link, threaten to smoulder and blacken their hearts with nihilistic apathy. They are the children who straddle worlds, struggling to justify their places in a bigger structure that hints at itself, but pragmatically eludes them.

The beast who sits now and takes a moment to contemplate all that is happening is one such child. In the goings on, in the tasks given him, in the undertaking that has presented itself in the shape of his dreams, he finds release. He prays it is not a distraction from the futility that is somehow inescapable, or from some greater cause from which he has strayed. He seeks within it the path that illuminates itself as the clear direction, but fears not finding it. He turns to it to exhaust him, and provide for his work a sense of accomplishment and at least the illusion of progress.

Some would say the truth remains to be seen. Others, that it has been seen, and lies in the simple realization of what has been done and not in the why.

Good has come of what has passed since his arrival in this new place. Much that is fearsome has come of it as well. Whether the future lies in the balance of these or in the stitchings of a tapestry already wrought by loving hands is uncertain, but that it has gifted to him tired eyes and the willingness to surrender his concerns to unconsciousness is not.

In this place that is both home and foreign, both redemption and despair, both palace and prison, he slips away to sleep.