July 20, 2019 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Great sky river floods,
Entices our flimsy craft,
Cataract of stars ...

—David Lunde

{x} {xx}


Traveller Returning.

August 15, 2018 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Alexandria.  Alhaerie.  Atlantis.
Byzantium.
Ctesiphon.  Chang'an.
Damascus.
El Dorado.  Ecbatana.
Firenze.  Ferghana.
Gehenna.  Garternay.  Golconda.
Heliopolis.  Hy Bresail.  Hiigara.  Hyperborea.
Illyria.  Ilos.  Ithaca.  Irian Jaya.
Jerusalem.  Jindabyne.
Khartoum.  Khatovar.  Karakorum.
Lhasa.
Manzikert.  Marrakech.  Meridian.  Massassauga.
Narayan. Neverwinter.
Obernewtyn.
Persepolis.
Qumran.
Roma.  Riga.
Samarkand.  Sarnath.  Saqqara.
Tashkent.  Tripoli.  Timbuktu.
Urumqi.  Undrentide.
Varanasi.
Wichita.  Whampoa.
Xanadu.
Ys. Yerevan.
Zerzura.  Zion.  Ziguinchor.


anywhere is

March 21, 2018 - Reading time: ~1 minute

The land of the summer stars… the winter garden…that way…the land of paradoxes…the city of angels…aigle… anywhere is…roma…the island of ebony….

persia…the island of the four precious walls…the willows on the water… the land of three winters…ole inigo…thoraigh… wood of dreams…the plain of the winds…

anywhere is…gaothdobhair…this way… a whispering world…orinoco… lothlorien….the palace of solitude…. the garden of the singing-ringing tree…

the land of illusion…cuyahoga… the painted ball…the crystal sea… lake disappointment….aldebaran…life… my way home…anywhere is…

—Roma Ryan, on “Anywhere Is”;
performed by Enya in The Memory of Trees (1995)
{x}


April 19, 2015 - Reading time: ~1 minute
Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted mirror sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that goes racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind…

—Hethor, in Severian’s fever dream;
The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter IV,
Gene Wolfe


July 10, 2014 - Reading time: ~1 minute
After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, I will return to where I began.

—Tali,
Mass Effect 2


September 25, 2012 - Reading time: ~1 minute
…For everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world…

Tigana, chapter 8,
Guy Gavriel Kay