the fossil of a define sight
After the missing eyes were lost to the Shadow, humanity was given two faces: one to measure the visible, and one to listen inward. But the visible was seductive. A grid of names began to settle over the inward face like fine ash, threatening to smother the invisibility of things.
Grief, Alba’s teacher, spoke not of loss but of alchemy. She taught that fire is the language of remembrance: it consumes the definition of a form to release its true substance.
Alba did not fight the Shadow. Instead, she took the most refined clay—the bone of the word and formed a mask that was a prayer for the first definition: the word "to be."
The fire did not destroy the clay face. The very edge of the defined world caught a light that was not a sun, and began to ignite not outward into destruction, but upward into possibility.
As the flesh-toned flames consumed the boundaries of the face, all names were burned away.
By looking through the center of its own burning, it no longer measured the stone; it inhabited the mountain. It did not define the scar; it realized the map. The view became whole because it was willing to burn away its own definition.
To know the truth is to look through the center of your own unmaking.