We never got a clear idea of what’s up ahead. But that never was much of a barrier. At first it was only the Gods and Spirits, but we derived from nowhere, and made use of the land neither ever thought trouble enough to conquer.

Then we built a kingdom. Out of it. David taught us to think and to see, to create and to imagine, until his mastery of knowledge blurred his very eyes. And he began to show signs of defection, unconsciously, or mayhaps even more likely, consciously, slipping into the thinking patterns of either God or Spirit. And both the past and the future dragged his footsteps. Or mayhaps he just lived too long. Not every God can reach maturity. There must be something likewise. Time itself does the killing.

Either way he went.

Into a shape and form transformed so thoroughly that he was either three of these combined, or none at all. He couldn’t be called a ‘creature’ in any sense he taught us to describe in, styling himself ‘the first true liability ever born of the Mortal race’. He was a dying Spirit stalking the sunlit terrace of Mortals, with the liveliness frozen inside his soul the way of a God, holy yet stripped of humanity. He came, and he went. When he felt like it. And when he didn’t. Or maybe he had ceased to feel anything at all. There was no knowing. Helen thought she could no longer understand him, and feeling that she failed to ease his sorrows, drowned herself in the Lake shortly afterward.

Life wants sparks and race. A steady flow of stagnation will set it on a course of self-destruction. That was the core value, the one and most essential lesson he tried to awaken us to.

We live in the Common Palace. And that is a place filled with more earthly, pressing matters that could be explained by virtue of his teaching. We seldom trouble our heads with such ancient history any longer. As we could hardly draw anything more of significance from this underdeveloped and overly probed phase of Mortals in retrospect, the act proves pointless. That was Dellanniieb.

There goes the last passage ever recorded in the library hall. She shut the heavy covers, and laid it back on the colossal stone bookcases. She thought of whether to seek after Helen, of the bones in the chilly, primordial cemetery deep in the waters, lying there for millenniums and whether her fate would be this just overwritten once more.

And would it? She does not know.

As David did a 4 thousand years before.

He would wait that long to see the world smoldering out of wood crumbs and ash, and that long to numb everything until they turn back to ash in his eyes.

But she? She doesn’t know. Not ‘she won’t know’.

‘Will’ never counts as ‘is’. Just as ‘did’ remains ‘did’. You only grasp the present. She just doesn’t know.

And for that much she was grateful.

She wouldn’t in this second.

And now, again. She wouldn’t in this second.

高二10班 Unknown

责任编辑：古雨