Prayer to His Eternal Warmth, Written Approximately 01/02, Recreated Here

Metadata

Reference Number: BICI/SSP/CRJ0102/002

Title: Prayer to His Eternal Warmth, Written Approximately 01/02, Recreated Here

Author: Spica

Date: Written approximately 01/02, Year 5607 A.o.W.

Extent: One letter, two pages long

Transcript

To His Eternal Warmth, The God-King of All Eternity, He Who Sparked Flame Into Being, The Keeper of the Forge, Commander of All the World:

I write this prayer in your name, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to send it. You see everything the flames touch. You hear every word swallowed by the blaze. You have heard my prayers, yet I am still not an Undying Ember.

I know I shouldn’t keep asking to be made one. My time has long since passed. Twenty-one is too old for a trainee Ember. I know that You have given me a different path in life. It is my own incompetence creating the false fog that obscures my path forward.

A part of me knew that my dream of becoming an Ember died with Jasmine’s parents. She wanted to see the rest of the island, not me. I just wanted to see her happy. She was rarely  happy back then, and her happiness is rarer still now.

O, my god-king. She smiled at me a few weeks ago, and I have spent every day since turning that memory over in my mind with a reverent touch. Her mouth has remained in the same flat line since that day. The parts of her that once resonated with me have crumbled into the sea, and neither she nor I know what to do with the pieces that remain. 

As a girl, I dedicated my life to You, and to her. She shaped this village from something strange and empty into a home. She gave me a dream to chase after. Now, I am stuck in place, looking at her silhouette up on the cliffside and wondering when she became a distant figure to admire on the horizon. My life is not something she wants now. I fear that You do not want it either. 

Am I meant to stay in Seabreeze Shoal for the rest of my life? To keep my father company in his final days and tend to the lighthouse with Jasmine? She’s never accepted my offers to help before, always insisting that I should focus on conditioning myself for the day when You send me my Spark. If she knew every strike of my spear was a pointless endeavor, would she finally accept my aid?

Father wishes for me to go to the Hall of Kindling and Charcoal. To become a scholar like he and Mother were. He says I have Mother’s mind and a fervent devotion that would make that hall home. Am I meant to go there? If I did, would they even accept me? I’ve seen the books he and Mother wrote about you. I could spend my life immersed in every text exalting Your glory and yet I would never write a sentence half as eloquent as they did. 

I worry that the scholars wouldn’t accept me, but equal is my worry for Jasmine. If I were to leave, she would have no one left but Blossom. The villagers have wearily accepted my father and I, but her lighthouse is a prison and a sickhouse. If she exists mostly in my horizon, then to the other villagers she is nothing more than a shape in the fog. 

I ask that You give me just a fragment of Your wisdom, Your foresight, Your steadfast resolve — anything that would make me feel less like I could crumble at any moment. You see the sword that can be forged from molten metal. You can hone a blade fine enough to split a hair in two. 

I no longer pray for a Spark. I just pray for a heart more discerning than my own.

-Spica

Artistic Rendition of Spica

Metadata

Reference Number: BICI/SSP/CRJ0102/007

Title: Artistic Rendition of Spica

Artist: Aimi

Extent: One illustration

Description: An artistic rendition of Spica, as we commonly understand her to have looked like roughly around the time of the exhibition’s records. This is not necessarily accurate to what she looked like at this exact time.

“I do not have the strength to fight for myself. But if allowing myself to be someone else’s pawn means protecting you, then a pawn I shall be.”
-Spica, in an unsent letter addressed to Jasmine

Introducing Spica. Jasmine’s childhood friend, and His Eternal Warmth’s newest Undying Ember.

Translated Origin Myth of His Eternal Warmth

Metadata

Reference Number: BICI/SSP/CRJ0102/003

Title: Translated Origin Myth of His Eternal Warmth

Author: P. I. Inkwell

Date: Written approx. year 5606 A.o.W.

Extent: One chapter, one page long

Transcript

CHAPTER 2: The Legend of His Eternal Warmth

[…]

Translation by P. I. Inkwell

In the beginning, there was only the cold of Nothingness. Light and life could not be. The white of death blanketed anything and everything.

Then, standing against Nothingness, was His Eternal Warmth. He opposed its bleakness. With a clap of His mighty hands, He created the beauty of sound. He flung Nothingness into the vast void, and filled the void with frigid water. From the space left behind, He pulled his steadfast anvil and mighty hammer. With His tools in place, He set to work.

From the dust of His hammer He forged a blazing sun which He placed in the sky, giving the world warmth. From the clash of His metal tools, He created fire and spread it throughout the void. Lush soil arose from every lick of the flames. He rooted trees in this new soil, and shaped craggy mountains with His careful hands. But He was not satisfied with only trees and mountains, and so He built a mighty forge, and within the forge He formed the world. Once the world was settled, He let creatures fill the land, deers and cows and wolves alike. Insects found homes in the flowers that bloomed. Birds took to the skies, and fish swam in the sea. 

But the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea and the cattle on the land could not use the gifts of His forge. They could not hold His tools. They could not wear His metals. They feared His mighty fire. And so He created humans. He taught them how to tame His flame and use it to better their lives.

As metal rusts and as a sword’s sharp edge will one day grow dull, so do the lives of His creations. His Eternal Warmth saw that His creations were unlike him, and that they could not last forever. At the end of their existence laid Nothingness, eager and willing to reclaim what He had taken from it. 

His Eternal Warmth would not let Nothingness take what He loved so. He shaped His forge into a place not only of refuge, but of transformation. He took every soul that brushed against death and cast it back into the forge, carving them all a body anew with each ringing strike of His hammer.

And so His creations, plant and animal and human alike, are forever reforged into new shapes, given life after life.