the whisper
#thoughts
In the first tongue, at the beginning of human language, we had a five-word palindrome, a whisper, a hard-wiring hidden in every person. Speak it forward, and the person who hears it will find themselves abandoning their consciousness, speak it backward, and you will be in control of them.
You may seek these words of power, yet you shall ever know only half of the whisper.
The first word is the colour of the air that you gasp in as you relinquish your self and jolt on the threshold of dream. In its brevity, the air enters your body, yet it never reaches your lungs.
The second, the memory of the next name you will forget, of a sibling that could have been, but that never will. The meshing of being into existence, of destructive creation, of genesis unmade.
The third, the insight that lies in the breaking///formation of a new///ancient synapse. A dry glacial fractal; ephemeral, eternal.
With these three words, you would expect to be able to reconstruct the palindrome. You would expect to grasp both abandon and control, yet know that you won't. The palindrome shall stay a fragment of a breath away from your consciousness: we have made sure of that. On some nights, you will find yourself inspired with the grasp of one of its words; you will whisper it in your sleep, yet to anyone else, it shall sound like the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. Try remembering and, when day comes, you will have forgotten. Try recording or writing it, and you fill find that recall is insufficient.
But you are not the only one seeking the words. Many others are, more than you imagine, and they too know what they are seeking. You will know them because, when you talk with them, buried in the undertones of their speech, you will hear the faint resonance of the whisper. Each dialogue will be a dance on a spiderweb, a game of gentle tugging of thin silk strings. You will each feel the vibrations of the web, the anticipation of pouncing on prey, and the trepidation of power that will be exercised. When you speak with your fellow seeker, you will feel the seduction of the ancient words finding each other, yet piece them together you will not. Part of what stops you will be fear. Part of it will be you questioning your own perception: are you really hearing the echoes of the whisper, or are you just imagining it?
In acknowledging each other's presence, you will forget your quest for power. From that moment, the words of the first tongue will be lost to you once more until, with the birth of a new consciousness, the cycle will begin anew.