Work Text:
Come. Listen. Here is a gift. It is the World.
( iamiamiam!!)
(yes– yes–yes. hereeveralways am/was/willbe. allchildren to homeseeking, heartknowing. homeBEING here inwith am.)
Hills roseate as the dawn crest up against a softly verdant sky, and watching allwith past the horizon is the Mountain, wrapped in a mantle of cloud. The dew of the nighttime has blossomed under the sun and risen into a cradle of mist that softens the edges of all things, a wash of colours bleeding into each other at their edges. The land wakes slowly; the dunes yawn under the warm breeze before settling back into sleepy mounds and coils.
And then: a note! A chime, distant and curious, ringing golden over the hills, and following it as a glede on the wind is a stroke of red. It is one of the Children-who-Sing, small and new: the only bright, vivid thing for leagues amidst the age-washed pinks and fawns of the land. It inscribes a warbling and much-broken line in the dust behind itself as it skips and leaps, tumbling down slopes and twirling in the air as it sings to the empty desert.
! flightjoy! forTHIS was i cametobe!
Other Children hear its happy shouts, roused by the power of its innocent joy in its own being, and one of the Children-who-Plays is broken out of its long torpor. Beneath the soft pink sands, it shudders free of the rust of unbeing and bursts out with a melodious pop and chatter, hale and as bright a crimson as the Child-who-Sings, glowing golden with life. And then another is waked, and another, until they have amassed into a fizzing, frolicking pod, diving into the sand and then bursting out, 
!
The Child-who-Sings is here, gambolling with the Children-who-Play; at the same time, it is shuddering in the chthonic shadows of old catacombs as it hides from one of the Devourers, the No-Longer-Children; then, too, it is a lump in the snow, rimed with cruel frost on the slopes of the Mountain; it is a flame of undiluted, joyous creation as it takes to the sky. It is all of these at once, and to perceive its ludic delight in its own small leaps and hops here is to perceive every other moment that might yet follow them. How marvellous, then, to know it now, before it is anything else than it is.
The greatest city of the Children-who-Sing in this part of the World stands as a monument to one of their proud and illustrious nations. There are grand spires and pinnacles ever climbing, buttresses sprung from golden stone, grander and yet more beautiful arches and colonnades built atop the splendour of those spires. The land here is splintered with the gentle delta of a mighty river, trembling liquid copper as an inland sea under the kindly sunlight, little tributaries splitting and sparkling around reeds and hummocks of earth. But the true glory is neither the river nor the heaven-seeking spires. In these days, the whole city was a song. It pulsed and shone with the thousand thousand harmonies of habitation, and the dales and valleys echoed ever with a faint and beautiful hum.
It was not until later days that the song grew sour, and the clamour of it razed the gently echoing valleys to rubble.
And yet, long ages after the river dries and the rubble in the canyons is worn to sand, this place is again as a luminous sea. The sand heaps and humps in shifting waves, and though the sun is older now, and tired, still it lights the dunes to deliquescent copper. One day, the Mountain's creatures will sing and dance here again. The beauty waits ready for them until they do.
The souring of the Children’s song is a perplexment. That there might be fighting amongst the Mountain’s creatures is simply part of the being of the World; discord is native to the song, and not the imposition of some interloper. That they should fight, though, for the sake of coveting that of which there is no lack is incomprehensible. And yet, one nation jealously guards captive schools of the Children-who-Dance-Together, leashing them to power mighty engines, while another builds terrible stone armour to gird and fetter the Children-who-Guide and sends them out as fearful sentinels and war-heralds. Then the Children-who-Guide are children no longer; they are Those-who-Devour, and the Children-who-Sing scatter before them, torn up into stone jaws as their cities are broken upon like the tide.
But they are well-named, being children in deed as well as substance, and the folly of children is ever small, and limited in its harm. After their little war, there is quiet for a time, and the upper slopes of the Mountain glow with motes of significance, formless voices singing softly, 
. When they were people, it might have been regret, or fear, or fury, but up among the bare, fierce scarps of rock and the kind and careless clarity of clean snow, it is merely meaning, waiting to belong to something again.
Other Children will arise (do arise, have arisen) and build their own great habitations, their own temples and tunnels and small cramped undercities. The effulgent, aeneous sands that buried the sublime minarets and causeways of that city are one day themselves to be the bed of a vast lake, cradled in the gentle slope of hills long ago worn into the perfect shape by the ever-shifting dunes. The shores grow to a glorious excess of verdency, and the surface of the lake glisters with a thousand reflected flakes of light. It is a kindly lake, deep enough to be blue as a lapis but no deeper, with neither treacherous currents nor great waves to drown ship or city, and its deeps glitter faintly with small, glowing motes.
And indeed, the Children-who-Sing who live there say that the lake is kindly in truth. It is the belief of the Children, in these days, that those motes of light are the song of a being’s self, the endlessly generative power of the created World, of a loved child. How might their great lake, their home, sparkle with that energy and not itself be a creature, a child of the World? They build their city on the surface of the lake itself; its feet are great stone platforms aglow with runes that sing of intention, meant never to sink. Harbours are cut into its borders, and there are moored many wondrous ships, their bellies and fine high prows as smooth as a brushstroke through the water, with sails of crimson or alabaster.
The children of the Children-who-Sing sport in the shallows, darting amongst lances of sunlight and through unfurling ribbons of the Children-who-Grow, chirping and laughing as their chatter transforms them into thickets of living gold. Around them, the lake thrums with its own deep, slow song, keeping watch over the children, keeping them safe in its care.
The World is ever changeful, but since the first of the Children came into being, there has been journeying back to the Mountain. The sky about the summit of the Mountain is thick with the flap and crack of cloth in the wind, the purl of beatific song half-muffled by clouds, the gentle tintinnabulation of the motes that rise from the Mountaintop and fall back like snowflakes. Nor is it a pilgrimage merely for times of lack, although more may make the journey in such times; it is the tilt of the axis of the World, the natural direction in which all the Mountain’s children are pulled, eventually.
It is a homeleaving, and a homecoming. A million-million journeys made for a million-million different causes, and each one welcome. The World was made to be its own joy, and for some, the journey is the culmination of that joy, the greatest and strongest expression of it. For others, the call is not felt until the World feels dark all about them; then, the Mountain rings out like a knell, beckoning: come, fly, sing, bewith . The Children begin their journeys in curiosity, in despair, in the desire to worship, in determination, in hope; they all end in the same place.
It is one of the Children-who-Guide– a great, gentle behemoth– swimming over forests and through treacherously narrow gullies, struggling through heavy, saturating rain that would beat it down over the rocks of the salt plains on the edge of the World.
It is the Children-who-Glow, drifting like lanterns ever up, ever towards. They have feeling, but not thought, and their journeys are as the tide. They become places of rest and refuge for other Children on their own journeys; they might rest atop their bells or sing amongst them, empowering them and drawing power in turn.
It is a whole group of the Children-who-Sing, those who refused to fight or die in some small war, fleeing instead to the Mountain, thinking to find answers, or an escape, or peace once they arrive. The first part of their journey is made in terror and secrecy, and then in surprise and delight once they depart the territory of their warring nations and find that they still have in them the capacity for small joys.
It is many individual Children of all kinds, in the quiet years after a war, in a World that seems to them empty of life. It is not, but it is in how the Children are made that the scope of their sight is limited. In these years, the Mountain stands as a beacon of life, and the Children make their journeys in the hope of renewal.
All of them make their homecoming to the Mountain, and all of them return to the World, eventually, and that is the way of things. Before they were Children, they were fragments of the Mountain’s thought, and the Mountain is forever calling pieces of itself back to itself. But to be homecalled does not mean they are kept from the rest of the World.
The Children come in the wake of calamity and ruin; they fall upon the Mountain’s slopes; they fail in their journeys in a hundred ways, and still the call is heard. They are the loved Children of the Mountain, but it is not a tragedy that their little lives are fleeting; a return is a return, howsoever it might end. There is no catastrophe so great that it denies the Being of Creation.
Creation is its own joy. It is generative and boundless. The first impulse of the Created is to Create, and every act of subcreation redounds upon itself. The World in itself is a song, and a note sung is not lost– given away but not taken from the singer. The great caverns in the heart of the Mountain ring with music and with light; they have reverberated with the melody since its beginning, and they will never cease. The Mountain’s Children are forever finding their way back to its heart, and every one brings with itself a new-old note to add to the theme.