Untold is the day, and unnamed is my spawn. I bore him as mother, silently tended to him as carer, and witnessed him become free as spirit. Our world is the greatest teacher of all. No scholar of medicine, stars or mind can grasp it; no subject or body of knowledge can describe, much less comprehend, such profoundness. Men grow tired whilst the world remains tireless, an ever-changing constant of observed paradoxes fully experienced when left to churn through its bittering and all-too-weary climb up the mountain of incomprehensible fathomability. As such, I have no choice but to set free that I believe will one day bloom into a well-taught, worldly son, a man who cannot say he has not accomplished the destiny conveyed by our teacher, our true, unfettered master.
I remember still the day of his birth, how the world made manifest his right to inhabit this plane, and to do so above all, as I believed the winds whispered. On that day, our village nestled in the East's reaches was forever changed. It is also the day I lost my life.
The village's elevation reached far beyond what most considered reasonable in the area, nonetheless, folks adamantly missioned harsh terrain and insisted on settling here. After all, our village proudly boasted the retention of certain significant resources. Another reason for the high footfall and a welcome assurance to residents, though concealing more avaricious motivations, was traders who brought wares, perishables and nondescript valuables, ordinarily unobtainable, in exchange for our unusual resources.
Fine was it, in its infancy at least, as before long the Winters turned harsher, snow stacked higher, the old withered away, and the young became idle. Sure and steady, the familiar footfalls became silent, the only movement that of the shuffling souls left to wander the near-dead dirt-trodden roads. Our resources now amassed in unattended storerooms as the gathering belts fell into disuse, accompanied by a sweeping spiritual malaise.
I, of course, had passed on and was physically incapable of influencing the events to come. My young son yet lived, accompanied by his father and his remaining kin. They too spoke of hope outside the village, of places far away from the East, closer to sane elevations, where the fetish demis who forsook them gather not, and the world seeks not to destroy them tediously and all the more irately.
Whilst they slept, I would go to my son and whisper words of nothingness in his sweet ear, of those who dwell high above, of the protectors of this heavenly plane, and the ones who seek to salvage it for their own benefit, to bereave the world of all the wonders it possesses and destroy those who may awaken to challenge them. But of destiny I did not speak. As the hands of the world, which cover us, do not take kindly to destinies spoken by beings who have no grasp on the archetypal rationale of existence. My time had passed, and the time of my son, a story told anew, birthed from an inept, haggard dolt, had begun.
When the fingers of our world began to unclasp, and the cold no longer bit so hard, my husband ordered a hasty departure from our beloved home. Our son had yet to see his seventh Spring. All he understood lay in the far East, atop a mountain of sorrow and greed.
On the day of anticipated abandonment, our son was nowhere to be found. Unsurprised, his father refused to call for sweeps of the area - all he uttered was, "He has made his choice, and we can help him no longer. He chose the East above us, his blood." The gaze, once directed to our formerly-happy abode, now turned to the endless venture lying in the dull without, as the towering East rumbled in acknowledgement of the avalanche of gaunt deserters.
Spring arrived in unison with the preceding full moon, companioned by warming gusts to melt stubborn snow clinging to Winter's magisterial robe. Birds of song and dance nested in hollow cavities and between branch forks, packed and adorned by remaining straw blown from storage. Fields glew as verglas faded in pools of blinking brilliance, softening frozen soil and inadvertently easing the labours of the farmers. Smells of wet shrubbery and aromatic plants and trees, brought by the sudden warm downpour, lay atop the village like a blanket of gratitude attesting to the village's survival. As it happened, quiet rumbles echoed the resumption of extraction from the gathering belt, as the angst soon drew back to an inconsequential murmur.
My son has seen seven Springs, and in due time, he will mature into a man, and I fear I will not see him before he does, but until then, I will continue to guide his dreams towards the deepest, highest peaks of the East, where he may find strength in suffering, and peace in strength, or join my side on the other side. But before that time comes, eight more Springs lie ahead, and if he is to be ready to leave the slopes of familiarity, he must make contact with the Lady of the Pass and shed his gay, interfering uselessness.