Rage and Reverie of an Astrologer

Friends! Friends! We are out at sea, but do not worry, for we are on a pleasure yacht a number of years ago. How nice is the silent sea air! Behold the gentle music of the waves as they dance in the pale moonlight! Look now at the shoreline there in the distance under the nighttime sky. Can you see it? Can you see that the burning countenance behind a thousand hellish flames lords over the steel skeletons which writhe from out the darkest depths of the earth? I have seen it. Do you hear also the death agonies of the lonely souls within, crying out hither even unto yon? Only every day to these frightful screeches seep through the walls and windows. At sea these at least are gone. Far enough at sea, so too are the flames, but there we must face the black countenances of the Old gods forgotten in the deep and dark places of the earth.

Yet seas of flame will not do. Looking downward, I wish for naught but the gentle flicker of a fire lovingly built, neither the illusion of day blazing without end nor the nebulous night in all its obscurity. You my friends and I, come to a field among the forest with just such a light, and I render my eyes unto the cloudless heavens. This happens some fewer years ago. The Queen has retired on this blackest of nights, and so the great multitude of the Spheres creep forth from their hiding places behind both the earthly and celestial lights to themselves shine instead. The Queen is kind in this way; she, with perfect regularity, gifts us all with such a display of her domain. The flames from out the Stygian crevices of the earth will do no such thing lest they be themselves closed once and for all.

We travel alone some weeks ago, standing in a glistening, frozen field at midnight. The infernal lights clawing mercilessly at the skies and many a Bean-Sídhe (but shadows of dreams upon a darker night!) haunting the roads and sidewalks, I await a moment's peace. Alas, all around is not stricken with dead silence, and the towering flames yet rage. The kindly Queen sends her regal glow through an icy grove of now luminescent trees, which in turn reflects off the glass landscape itself. Admiring these things, I wander into blacker regions beneath the hill by the hedgerow, where I stand a bit longer before walking slowly back to the warm glow of the ever-burning, delusional daylight. There is no reason to build ourselves a friendly fire tonight.