KNOW & KNOWN

Leto walked toward the lights. He Was again, even if just as this hollow mist, and could muster up the will and strength to step. His hoof raised up and then lowered onto the stone. In the next second his chest began to hurt. A small ache at the very center of his self. He looked down but didn't see anything past the faint light his misty body seemed to give off and one of the thin wisp tendrils of ink floating out from the book. Leto took another step and the pain grew worse. Each step forward made the pain more real until it almost felt like it would crack open his chest. When he looked down again expecting no wound he saw something. Small and solid in the middle of his chest, curled up on itself all pink and wet. He was unsure what it was but the thing was only big enough to fit in his free hand. He reached for it but his misty hand couldn't enter through the mist of his chest. So the thing just sat there, floating inside of him like a parasite. The low thrumming whispers of the dark came again and Leto looked up in answer to their call.

- walk -

So he took another step near without even considering it. The pain grew more intense but he paid it little mind since it seemed he couldn't do anything about it. He did keep looking at it however, and with each step he took it seemed to grow bigger and bigger. After a while he realized what it was. Each time he moved it grew more defined, more whole, more alive. It was a fetus. A tiny satyr coming to life in his chest. It moved slightly now, its hands just starting to form fingers and its tiny hooves jerking on occasion. Leto walked again and watched as it grew and grew until it was a small boy.

It was him.

The pain he felt was that of a body growing years in a few moments. The little satyr inside him matched his movements, looking down at itself as if trying to gaze inside its chest. It wiggled its fingers like Leto and moved as if walking on solid ground. Only it was trapped inside his mist form. The steps were still painful but less so. The pain wasn't his chest anymore but his legs and arms which grew longer. His muscles that expanded and became more solid. Once the young kid was born the growth seemed more rapid yet stable. Leto kept on toward the lights with the book in hand as the young goatman grew into adulthood. Soon the creature that was him grew to match the shape and size of the mist he had been. Leto kept walking and looked down pleased to see his body once more. Then the pain continued. His joints began to ache, his skin crawled and wrinkled. His antlers became heavier and heavier as they grew too fast. The pressure on his head forced his back to hunch and bow. Walking became harder and he thanked whatever this place was that he still seemed to require no breath or else he would be wheezing under the effort of aging so quickly.

Not long after the body died. The feeling of it was odd. All the weight of the muscles and bones simply became more. They weighted the same but not longer supported themselves. It almost felt like the body was literally dragging itself by Leto's spirit and with each step that became oh so much more true. The flesh met rot, then the bones became dust, then he was just a white faintly glowing mist once more. It didn't hurt, once the body died it was more a labor of will than of perseverance as moving through his life had been. Once the last bits of bone were swept away as dust on his trail he took another step, and felt that terrible first pain in his chest again. He knew what it was this time.

His body was just formed again.

This began a new cycle for him. Birth. Life. Death. Dust. Repeat. Ad infinitum. Leto walked to the lights which loomed over him now in a great towering mass. As he approached he cursed his old eyes that strained so hard to see what the lights were made of. In the end he paced around a bit, letting the old body die and fade to dust and a new one form so he could look at the lights with his eyes at the peak of his life. It was foolish and painful but after so many repetitions a few more cycles in what Leto had accepted as his fate was hardly that terrible. Once he could see he observed the lights as great bubbling masses of... it seemed silly to just call them light because they were clearly so much more than that yet he didn't have the words to describe it. As he neared one he caught the faintest whispers floating around it in the water. Most of the words were too quiet or just too old for him to understand but he thought he caught the word burn repeated a time or two. He considered it and decided that if a fire could burn underwater that perhaps this light was what it would look like. Round and boiling all about itself. It was beautiful and he wondered if it would go on burning forever or if it would one day burn out and be smothered by the dark waters it lived in.

The building drew his focus next, for that was indeed what it was. A tall stone building built in a kind of decadent church. The walls were high and the roof sloped like the houses of prayer Leto had seen human's worshiping at, yet the statues that faced him at the temple's front were of no gods he knew. They weren't of anything he knew. They were just random shapes with no rhyme reason or symmetry. If this was a temple to anything Leto did not think it would be to a god. The word didn't feel right in his brain. An Entity. A Will. Maybe even just a Something. But not a god. Leto always imagined that if he were to meet a god, it would be some grand figure. This church did not make him think whatever took prayers here was grand. Just Vast and Patient.

Pushing open the doors while he still had the body of a healthy satyr in his prime, Leto saw that the inside was remarkably well lit. Warm yellow lights marked the space every fifteen to twenty feet and made the place seem oddly inviting. Each light seemed to be balanced on a thin black pole that ran straight down into a floor of equally pitch black. What was most surprising though was that instead of the long benches, pews he recalled them as, that he had expected he faced rows and rows of black bookshelves. Each full to bursting with books. Leto walked into the temple and noted that as he did the floor shifted at his steps, it was not that the floor was solid black but rather that it was coated in ink. The same type of ink that seemed to snake out from the book he still held. His very steps disturbed the natural stillness in the place and the ink curled at his passing as if it took offense. He noticed that one of the poles that held a yellow lantern wavered a bit as he passed it as well. Out of curiosity Leto reached out an aged and wrinkled hand toward it.

With a swipe of his hand he set the pole into cascading patterns of stringy ink that splayed out and then began slowly drifting down to the ground. The lantern however stayed perfectly in place. Upon closer inspection Leto saw that the lantern was not perched on the ink but produced it. The ink flowed from the base of the lantern and poured down into the ground coating the floor. The satyr looked from the flowing ink to the black bookshelf of tomes. He walked over to it, feeling his body die just as he reached the line of colorful book spines. He reached out the limp hand that was quickly losing all of it colors and tried to grab a book from the shelf. But as he did so the ink swirled from his motions in the water and as it did the books swirled as well. Rather than ink the books seemed to turn into colorful smoke that slipped the fingers of his decaying hand. Leto waved his hand through the books and they evaded his dead fingers that were quickly turning to bones. He took a few steps back and watched as the bookshelves slowly settled back into place and then the books themselves reformed, as if all the smoke that made them had been sucked back in with a powerful breath.

Leto repeated his experiment a time or two but no matter how he tried, as mist or a child or corpse, his every motion sent the books and their shelves splayed in the surrounding water. This place was one of stillness and it rejected him as he violated its one truth with every movement. Leto looked at the book he held with its twisting tentacles of ink matching the shelves and light poles. Holding very very still he waited and watched as the ink slowly dipped, drooped, and dropped from the book. It pooled out and joined the ink layering the floor. Looking at the bookshelves, Leto started to raise his arm up but as he did so the ripples sent the ink from his book waving in place. Unsure how he knew the answer to this puzzle, Leto simply did as his instincts told him.

He moved slowly. So slow that the effort was almost greater than if he were to try and rush. Hours to raise an arm. Days to reach a tome. Being born only to age and die all in the time it took to stretch out his hand and press them firmly against the spine of a deep red book. It was solid beneath his touch. He continued to move with such care that it was near maddening to put enough pressure to pull the red book from the shelf and place it on top of the black leather book he had already been holding. Once he had the thing a smile broke across his young boyish face and he quickly flipped open the page to see the contents. Yet his joy turned to despair as the act turned the book to a line of red smoke that swirled in the water before being sucked back onto the shelf where it originally sat.

It wasn't enough to just take the books in stillness. They had to be read as such as well. They had to be opened in such a way that the water barely stirred. Pages had to be turned with care as not to disturb the waves. Leto felt like, if the walk up here had been rushing through the stages of life and death then this grand archive of tomes stood in stark contrast. To exist as slowly as possible, even as his body aged and died with every twitch of a finger and turn of his gaze.

How long he was there Leto could not say. To experience life and death so frequently that they could be compared to taking and releasing breaths. To adjust the very concept of time in a place that laughed in the face of time itself. Leto read many books in that place. He learned to accept the pace of life in that library so that he wouldn't go mad trying. Or maybe he went mad and that allowed him to accept the pace of life there. It didn't matter which it was.

Leto read over a thousand books in that place.

Over tens of thousands of pages.

What he learned from those pages seeped into him. Each time he red a book a bit of the ink from it would stain his fingers be he a child, an elder, or a misty phantom. Each small stain joined another and another until he was as covered in ink as the floor of that place.

Over a thousand books stained his soul and he knew that he had barely learned a thing.