Similitudes

There is only the Wyvern and the glade, and the name of God.

The past is wrought of smoke, at best - though not for lack of memories. I’m almost certain I’ve my own name, but couldn’t tell you what it was. Likewise, I’m almost certain I wasn’t born here, but couldn’t describe my true home. I’ve often chased these names and these homes around my mind, but no sooner catch one than another beckons; I no sooner see the hearth-lights of a tranquil village, than the barrel-fires of a shantytown draw my sight away. What I can describe to you, however, are the things I recall with precision, of which the Wyvern’s approximate face is the very first. Consider this: where eyes or teeth or nostrils ought to have been, ephemeral smears of contrast vied for purchase, and yet I knew at once - by the occasional truce of its warring features, and the particular tilt of its head - that I was expected. The Wyvern stared through me and beyond me with an eerie, prescient indifference, until at length the average of its flickering eyes slowly shut, and most of it slept. Feeling a sudden sense of intrusion I cast my eyes about, but was quickly overwhelmed by the trees at the glade’s edge, which - more even than the Wyvern - seemed unwilling to resolve. All at once they were pines, and oaks, and kelp, and cacti, and beeches and birches, and they were lit by the phasing moon, and the wheeling sun, and the whipping aurora, and the air between them was thick with the crystals of winter, and the drifting jewels of autumn, and the whirling pollen of spring, and the lingering embers of a sated wildfire whose blackened empire flared yet with impossible heat. So I turned away to hide my sight in the beast’s heaving belly, but - being silver, gold, black, barnacled, iron-clad, jewel-encrusted, and just once, for an instant, wrought altogether of stars - it was no refuge, and I was forced to close my own eyes, and only when my ears could no longer distinguish between the wind in the leaves and the rain on the sand did I fall asleep.

The tangled past, we quickly discovered, is not without similitudes. The approximate Wyvern is one, of course, and I another, and we are at all times wreathed by this mercurial forest. Beyond those, however, are two other remarkable convergences: the first is a common tongue, and the second is a strange name that isn't our own.

‘What do you remember, child?’ the Wyvern once asked, ‘of your life before the glade?’

I said I remembered too many things, and so nothing.

‘And the future? What can you imagine of the future?’

I told it the future was beyond me to imagine, it being so full to the brim.

‘So it is for me,’ it said. ‘Neither preconception’s plummet, nor presumption’s probe yield more than clay notions - and mine seems a dark kiln.’

Being so young, I understood very little of what the Wyvern had said, and asked instead if we might play hide and seek.

‘No child,’ it said, ‘for you would have to choose somewhere to hide, and it is far better that we do nothing it all.’

‘Nothing at all?’ I asked with dismay.

‘Nothing at all, for I fear that choice of any kind will bind us to a path - to one of the many romantic iterations that so cloud things beyond the glade.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and picked my nose to better collect my thoughts.

‘Are you listening, child? I've another question.'

I nodded with enthusiasm, and then - suddenly fearful I'd bound myself to a romantic iteration - returned what I'd picked to its rightful nostril.

‘I was certain of your coming,' the Wyvern went on. 'Likewise, I am certain we are tethered - but know not how or why. Of what are you certain, child?’

'Certain?' I asked.

'Certain. What do you know beyond doubt? What can you see in every past and every future that isn't so much a memory or an outcome as it is a travelling truth?'

'I don't know,' I said, casting my mind about and scrunching up my face. 'I don't know.'

'Is there no name, child? Not yours, but that of another?'

'A name?'

'A name. Say, that of God?'

After a long silence, I shuffled excitedly on my feet. There was a name, of course - the only name I know but which I know is not my own.

‘The name of God!’ I declared.

At this, the Wyvern leaned forward, and its innumerable eyes united to narrow.

‘What is the name of God?’

The Wyvern and I have done nothing at all for a very long time now, though precisely how long is beyond us both to reckon. It may interest you to learn that the longer we did nothing at all, the more paths fell away and the more stable things became, and that the glade has since settled into boreal trees, and that I’ve seen no sudden kelp coliseums beneath skies of rippling glass, or looming stacks of sporing fungus twice-baked under binary suns…

But the Wyvern and I, and the glade, and "Christopher Paolini" remain - though we are yet to meet him.