Icarus's blog: "Augurs, Martyrs, and Agnostics"

The baffling magnitude of this chamber, these tightly locked totems, and pictograms must have been here for centuries, perhaps centuries before the construction of the tower. The problem of how he was here, and inside the tower at the same time continued to grind painfully in his mind with dull creaking frustration.

"Magic" he muttered in contemptuous surrender to the absurd, as he stepped further into the hall of columns. He felt certain that the corridor would come to an end soon, afterall, there were no more records inscribed on the walls, they couldn't have foresaw the need for chroniciling every insignificant moment of every primitive illiterate day, there had to be an end in site to their society, and if not- they always could've built another temple and scribbled simplistic notes to travellers there as well.

With his disdain for this place peaked, he found that his lamp's reach was getting shorter as he neared the end of the tunnel. A great stone altar carved in the same fashion as the pillars around him sat in the middle of a half circle of grand, high-backed chairs. Upon the altar rested a curiously dry, and fuzzy brown knot about the size of his fist. He placed his lamp on the edge of the altar, and kneeled down to get a closer look at the knot, and with a very careful brush of his fingers, he determined that the fuzz wasn't going to set him on fire, or shoot poisonous barbs into his skin, so he began to part it and get a closer look, as some of the fuzz broke away from his touch.

"A seed?"

He began to scrape the fuzz and dirt off of the seed to reveal a lustery chestnut hull still lush and shimmering with health in the light.

His first impulse was to take a bite of it, he wondered if it tasted of almonds or bitter and awful like most seeds, but that was quelled by the nagging memory of a day he had spent swimming in a lake.

Why that had entered his mind, at a time and in a place like this almost made him wish he had something long and narrow to jam into his ear to correct the phenomenon.

But there it was again.

Rapids.

Babbling rivers.

Canyons carved by gushing waterfalls.

Thunderstorms.

Water.

He wasn't particularly thirsty. He tried shaking his head- and batting at his ears as if to get a clog unstuck, but nothing seemed to get the thoughts, sites, and smells of a very vivid spring rain out of his mind's eye.

He decided to set the seed down, closed his eyes, held his breath and plugged his ears, to deaden every sense. But the picture of a knee-deep glade he had once bathed in after a long battle had not been expelled.

"Alright quit it!" He said to the quiet ceiling.

But the images did not relent.

"I said enough! What do you want!"

Now his head began to throb with the sound of waterfalls thundering over a cliff.

"STOP! STOP! Just tell me what you-" the rest of his plea was drowned out as the vision of being plunged underwater became so clear, so real to him that he stopped breathing for a moment. He sputtered, gasped

"water! You need water! Where- on the altar?" He began fumbling for his waterskin and managed to get the stopper out with fingers as steady as an epilleptic earthquake.

He started to dump the water onto the altar, but visions of blossoms, forests, and green life ripped through his mind.

The seed.

With an exhausted gasp, he felt the thundering, migraine, drowning, and cluster of mirages subside. He poured a copious amount of water directly onto the seed before stopping to take a swig for himself. Still breathing greedily from the rush and the sensation of lungs half drowned, he turned to the seed and said

"My name's Byron. What's yours?"

An image of a single blossoming flower amid a blizzard entered his mind, followed shortly by a branch stretching with all its infinitesimal might toward the stars.

"Your name is futility?" He asked the seed.

The images repeated, as if frustrated by Byron's lack of understanding.

"You were what drew me here?"

No perceptible response was given.

Byron gathered that there were some things it could not express, and perhaps others the seed could not grasp whatsoever.

"What happens if I eat you?" Byron asked earnestly, he was quite tired of trail tack and water.

He was shown a tree withering and rotting at the core, but more importantly, the grass and trees surrounding it drooped, wilted, festered.

"You're that important?" It suddenly dawned on Byron that he was now talking to a highly significant

plant.

And that somehow wasn't even the strangest part of his day.