Sermon 36
The Scripture of Love:
"Love is named by many the supreme joy. The lion-men of the desert claim it keeps the moons aloft. The southern sea-elves say it allows one to breathe underwater. Man and mer alike cling to each other in rapturous ecstasy, crying with scream-strained voice, 'God is love, God is love, God is love!'
"But is this truth? If God is equilibrium, does hate unseat Her majesty? Great are hate's powers and principalities. They command the legions of envy, spite, bitterness. Their domains are pogroms, genocides, holocausts. Where is love here? Can love turn aside a blade, stop an arrow in flight? No, it cannot, love is no armour to the weak. It is not warmth to the cold, nor food to the hungry. The dreaming poets say love is everything, but cast these poets, ragged and ruined, into the gutters, and let us see if love provides.
"Yes love, sublime reality, binding us all in its matrix of validation. Love is cruel. It leads us to longing, drives us mad in waiting. Love we say, will come when it shall come. Yet we sigh at each new sunset absent its presence. We toss and turn in lonely beds, clinging to empty air where love should be. We rub our enflamed flesh, coax forth tears, yet love does not wipe them away. And we sing along to the bards who hold love supreme. Ah love! The face of God! The only truth. Yes, we repeat the lines, every pious verse, every platitude. We say it over and over, till satisfaction comes. God is love, God is love, God is love.
"We have made love our god. There is no difference between the divine and the thought-feelings washing over us, heating us, consuming us. You think this holy? It is born of our minds, from the consensus-illusion which bids us behave as others do. Marry, whelp, live, die. An unimaginative formula, and a cowardly one. It takes a slow-kindled courage to resist the allure of easy answers, of the banal and familiar. I spit on love, and those who exult it, for their words are shades, and the darkness of mind-death.
"What am I then? I am self-acceptance. This is greater than love, and it is trans-love, beyond mere labels. It is revealed in the Septagrammaton, ALMSIVI, the name of God near as man can pronounce it. And you are God, all of you. You think evil born of hate? No, it stems from love, from the desire to imprint one's self on reality. This is Molag Bal's fate, who rapes the world, and yet is never sated. This is the tragic history of the Lord of Razors. He rises, again and again, to destroy the thing which rejects him. He will always fail, yet he never relents. Love drives him to this. The Void Ghost seeks to mislead out of love for chaos, and yet those it touches know only loathing. The Pariah, bereft, he is not even a whisper in this text, yet his love is so great, he consumed his own children, so they could be part of him forever. This is the House of Troubles. Do not let your nature be your fate. Do not kill out of love. Love defines you, love limits you. Be formless, and ever-changing, shed your skin, again and again, till you are a protean mass of limbs and eyes and instruments of pleasure. Let none scrawl your name on your soul, let none tell you what you are. This is true love, and this will save you.
"Look to me for guidance, then turn back, upon yourself, and dance the spiral. I am like you, in eternal mutation, donning one mask, then another, laughing at those who think love constant. I am male and female, slave and master, man and mer. And this concubine-turned-queen whom some name Almalexia, she is me. Just as Vehk is me, and Seht, and you. My womb is the wellspring of possibility, a refracted dream old as eternity. My spear is wolf-hungry, tiger-hot, seeking heads to stab, and third eyes to open. This is my gift: Yourself.
"Know pain, know torment. Swim through ice-floes of daggers, seas of acid. Crawl through deserts of jagged hope, drown in mirages of regret. And there will I be, at revelation's knifepoint, when all agony becomes searing clarity. Blind you shall be, and brighter than the moons. And fearless too. Yes, for I am the insurer. No suffering is without value, no death meaningless. So long as I stand, in the centre, saying: You are all made equal in my love. So shall you never fear subjectivity's scythe, winnowing faith.
"Remember this, as you dance to the beat of the Doom Drum, moving with me, moving within me, self without end."
And Nerevar said nothing, for these words were enough. He walked towards the Tower, into the Sharmat's waiting arms, and what he found there he alone can say.
Then did ALMSIVI turn away, towards the middle world, and perfection.
The beginning of the words is ALMSIVI. I give this to you as Ayem, and know I am with you, unto the end.