She is His everything
“You are already dead,” I pant out with dark menace. With vicious
promise. “The second you touched her. The second you hurt Auren and my
mother, you were done.”
“No, son. You are.” He rolls up one of his sleeves and drags the
dagger down his own arm, opening a vein.
“Culls cull the weak,” he goes on. “I will be king of the skies. I will
be king of Annwyn.”
He crouches down in front of me then, his dark eye boring into mine
as my mind spins. “I will take your dragon the same way our ancestors did
when they knew another Cull didn’t deserve the manifestation. And by
doing so, I will finally divest you of your greatest weakness. Your heart.”
I try to surge up, to launch myself at him, but I can’t.
My dragon is dying, unable to even roar anymore. My mother
bleeding, Auren threatened.
And I’m trapped. Fucking trapped.
His soldiers wait around my tortured dragon, while my father
watches the blood seep from his arm before deigning to look back at me.
“Pour the heartblood of the ward and its dragon into the veins of the
victor…and the victor shall manifest anew,” he intones, his expression
eager. The words sound like he’s repeated them thousands of times to
himself.
Cold realization freezes me and makes my stomach roil.
This is what he’d always planned. This is why he pushed me so hard
as a boy. He wanted me to manifest a dragon…so that he could murder me
and take it for himself.
“You’ve finally fulfilled your purpose,” he tells me with a biting
edge.
From my peripheral, I see soldiers pinning down my dragon’s feet.
See one of them positioning a sword right in front of its pulsing heart, ready
to pierce it through.
‘The use of coarse language stresses that he is in tune with the man on the street. The debunking style, which often slides over the edge into insult, emphasizes his desire to distance himself from the political establishment.’
Although this description would fit Trump, Erdoğan, Wilders and any other populist leader, it actually refers to Beppe Grillo, former comedian and the leader of the Italian Five Star movement. He is just another example of how the populists politicise so-called everyday language in order to establish a direct line of communication to the real people. Once this line is established the leader has lift-off, enabling him to appear not only to fly above politics, but as high as he wants to go: the sky is the limit. The perceived sincerity, or genuineness, of direct communication with the masses, and the image of the leader merging to become one with them, is a common political ritual of populism. Hugo Chávez did it every week on his personal TV show Alo Presidente!, Erdoğan has done it through his own media, Grillo performed the same stunt through his website, and Trump uses his famous tweets to have a heart-to-heart with his people, unfiltered by the media elite. The one important trick the populist leader has to pull off is that of making his supporters believe he is rejecting the elitist snobs and their media. He does so by including the media in his definition of ‘the political elite’, positioning it as an opponent – despite the fact that it is through the media that his connection to those masses is enabled.
Fourth Estate
Reklam
To Annywyn
I feel the first piercings of the swords like a fingertip getting pricked
by a wayward sewing needle. Sharp. Small. Just the very tip biting through
my skin.
So I breathe. A single phrase caught in the exhale, joined with the
sorrow of my heart.
Find me in another life.
Find me in them all.
And then there is no room for words. None for coherent thought,
because the first of those swords sinks in deeper, and pain erases everything
else.
My body braces. My mind empties.
But then…the world erupts.
I don’t understand for a moment. When the ground shakes. When the
screams sound. I can’t grasp that the blades pressed into my body are no
longer firm or sharp. My numbed mind only registers something is off when
they fall away from me.
My eyes snap open to see dust as thick as fog crowding in the air.
Looking down, I see that the swords are no longer gleaming and silver, but
mottled with rust the color of amber stones and tangerines, and then they
suddenly disintegrate completely. I can feel them burst into powder where
they’ve sunk into my body.
And the guards...
I watch the man in front of me as his body morphs. Terrified eyes go
opaque, sinking down into their sockets. His jaw hangs open like his
muscles can no longer hold it. His lips peel, exposing a row of browning
teeth. His veins fester and burst, lesions peeling back up and down his neck.
He tries to grab hold of the pole, but his hands shrivel down to the bone.
When he falls, his body swells and twitches, bloating up
unfathomably large, before everything then seems to suck inward, shrinking
and shriveling until he’s just a husk of bones and dust.
Consider the mentality of surfers riding a wave. They fully enjoy this wave, with the wisdom and awareness that there are always more waves coming. They know they don’t have to ride every single wave that comes their way. They are aware that patience and proper positioning are all that matters for when the next wave inevitably comes. They know the only way to live is by putting themselves out there in the water, because they can’t catch any waves sitting on the shore. You need to adopt the surfers’ mentality with respect to the seasons of your life. There will be seasons of growth and seasons of maintenance for each type of wealth. Enjoy each season for its individual beauty, position yourself for future seasons according to your values and goals, and always place yourself in the water.
An intelligent life is all about such emotional positioning to eliminate the sting of harm, which as we saw is done by mentally writing off belongings so one does not feel any pain from losses. The volatility of the world no longer affects you negatively.
Örneğin, bir gökdelenin bodrum katında çalışanlar için zaman, en üst kattakilerden daha yavaş geçmekte. Eğer çok uzun süre
(yıllarca) bu şekilde çalışmaya devam ederlerse, bodrum kattakiler, üst kattakilerden frekans yerinin küçük bir kesri kadar daha uzun yaşamış olacaklar. Böyle bir deney her ne kadar insanlar üzerinde yapılmamış ise de; ilk kez 1960 yılında, Harvard Üniversitesi’nin bir kulesinin en üst katı ile en alt katında demirin (Fe) bir spektral çizgisinin frekansı kıyaslanarak, alt kattaki frekansın üst kata
göre daha düşük olduğu saptanmıştır. Bunlar, pratikte önemi olmayan kuramsal fanteziler gibi görülebilir, ancak çok önemli uygulama alanları vardır. Örneğin, uçakların, gemilerin ve hatta özel araçların bile faydalandığı, yer tayininde kullanılan sistem (GPS = Global Positioning System) çok duyarlı atom saatleri taşıyan bir dizi uydudan oluşur. Uyduların bulunduğu yükseklikte zamanın akışı
ile yeryüzündeki farklıdır.
Reklam
Reklam