622. All there is to know, 5
R - A long time ago, there was no volcano in these lands. Then one day, probably during the white day or soon after, the land of Gizah saw one rise suddenly.
It’s conjectures, from what we’ve seen. We can’t say whether the city was still inhabited or already abandoned to the desert by then.
We don’t know how nor why, but at some point, a volcano appeared, clouding the sky for years to come, and shrouding the city ruins along with the oldest set of wonders of the older world. The last one standing.
We’re still far away, but I’m sure Kheops’ pyramid albeit damaged, still stands. I already couldn’t find the other two pyramids when I first came here so they’ve probably been lost for ever now.
As we slowly make our way toward the river and distant volcano, I tell my daughter all that happened to us there, a decade ago.
We’ve put the volcano to sleep.
I faced one of my sins, and all that we could become, in more ways than one.
Blume grew to her real older self, and later to more personal human form around here as well.
This is where I, or my past self, made her wish to the daiûa to bring a dead loved one back to life.
Blume is about to say something about it, but ends up keeping it to herself, a little gloom over her.
This is where Licht made a choice we didn’t foresee, but which still echoes with me. Blume and her learnt how to create poisons through T.I. And Licht went to meet her fate over this crossed Rubicon.
I’ve followed Licht in my own way, along others, on the footsteps of the first godslayer rose.
Again Blume thinks of something sad to say she chooses not to share with Nokarlık.
R - What’s wrong Blume?
B - It’s a different opinion on this past. Bleue and Licht were...
R - Were?
Blume looks at Nokaranlık for a moment, and ends up refusing to finish saying her thought.
What on Earth was that? I will confront Blume at a later time when Nok isn’t around, since that seems to bother her.
I don’t understand what is going on inside her head sometimes.
We reach the top of a hill with clear view over the grey desert. In the distance, the volcano spreads its dark fumes endlessly.
Roots from the garden of Grape still spread across the land, like invisible underground rivers. Everywhere they spread, forests and fields have begun to grow discreetly. The Nilus river itself has deviated further away in this area, because of the volcano in the middle of its path.
Patches of greenery are still visible along the path of the roots, but they are in obvious decay and drought. Everything has begun to die in the area. It’s not obvious because of the desert also swallowing the land freely.
We can feel shivers, waves almost like sound, travelling in the air.
Something ominous lies in the direction of the volcano. It’s dreadful.
Is it a new Olympus that is being built on it?
We brought a scope we found to look in the distance, and investigate without getting dangerously closer.
~
Night has fallen. We can still see some stars, far away from the volcano.
Nokaranlık falls asleep. I made her promise again something sad. That whatever happens, I don’t want her to get rashly involved; and to save her life before mine.
It’s painful to hear your mother say such things. It was hard for me as well.
I quietly move to sit a little further by Blume’s side, gazing at the path ahead into the night.
I hold her gently before asking.
R - What’s in your mind little flower?
B - A tad of sad truth.
R - Something about mortality and vanity?
B - Not exactly my fairest. Not quite.
Something clicks. I already know her thoughts implied there. I was never able to voice them myself properly, but the thoughts have been lingering inside of me as well.
R - It’s about you and me, isn’t it? And what we really are.
B - I’ve always felt drawn to you. But I didn’t realise until recently that it wasn’t exactly the same thing as what the original Blume felt toward the original Rose.
I close my eyes and rest my head against hers.
I already knew the truth about Bleue, because even she was aware of it, and looked at it with honesty.
It wasn’t that big of a stretch to realise that both I and Blume, were the same.
It’s a topic we begun to realise when we were in Russia.
Ever since we joined one another, body and soul, we’ve lost a boundary between our identities. As individuals, we’ve ceased to be a long, long time ago. As far back as when the first Rose in this world, and the first consciousness of Blume, died together.
Ever since, we’ve been the so called Rose Blume, species, genre, or kind. No longer two clearly defined and separated individuals. As a species, every new born or resurrected Rose, or Blume, was akin to a new flower born from the same roots. And Bleue, and Licht, and even the subsequent Ogres, they were others.
It’s a narcissist view of my life story. But that is something that has been lingering all along.
It’s why Ogre was obsessed with me. And why all of us have shared memories and other thoughts as if they were our own.
Because a long time ago, a Rose and a Blume died, whilst giving birth to something new from themselves both. An abstract concept rather than a descendant, fit to this world but hard to conceive with human perspective.
A shared mind and history, with easier paths to reincarnation and divisions, more or less close to the previous boundaries between the identities of the past. But forever bound, and gradually merging.
R - Ogre was one of us?
B - In a way. The one we first met and defeated, she was then reborn bound to us.
All of my memories get a weird stain and glaze under that new scope. That perspective that all of them, down to every roses, but also Ogre, Blume and Bleue, were essentially expressions or flowers from the same root trees.
It’s more as if we were all children of the same ancestors, always inheriting their memories and personalities instead of genetic memories.
It gives an unpleasant reading of fate to most of the things I’ve been through along with them.
The Lichts and freed mindless roses are of the same species, but born from a different tree.
R - It’s as if most of my life, lives, had been an hallucination of freedom when we put thing like that.
B - They weren’t all you and only you. But you were along with them and me, expressions of a wider concept. It’s not that the others were all your dreams and nightmares come to life only, though it is a reality of our time. It’s more that... You’re not Rose, and I’m not Blume.
R - Yet here we are, their promise true?
B - No. Their dream come true.
They wanted to live on, and see the world together. And thus we have.
The only difference, akin to a resurrection, was the limits between our identities and personalities began to blur into each other, softening and merging gradually.
When we defeated Ogre for the first time, we intoxicated it with that reality unwillingly.
And what came after us later, was as much its inheritance, as it was ours.
Bleue was born from us, the same. And each Rose, and Blume, as well.
Encoding memories into T.I. until a personality can be copied and transmitted, but still able to change and evolve, it’s akin to create a mnemonic species. A form of information that defines a life but unbound by biology of the old world. It’s a daiûa... It’s a different way of reproduction we’ve intuitively built from what was available to us, to overcome mortality.
And we’ve recently contaminated Nightmare in the same manner...
R - Does that mean...
B - Nightmare as your sister is akin to you in more ways than one now... But, no. Perhaps because she was also aware of that unification of identities occurring around you, she didn’t create Nokarlık as another direct bud of Rose Blume. She made her free. She shares none of our brains and past memories, real nor imaginary.
R - Nokarlık is free...
That’s good to hear... I might have dreamt of a flowery world. A world where roses would bloom along all other kinds of flowers. But not the narcissus way. I don’t want to mother a new species, or even humanity.
So it’s good to hear that Nok isn’t a Rose Blume infused with our past memories...
She only is my child. That’s all I wanted.
It feels weird talking about that. We sound insane. Selfish. But we know that deep down, nothing truly is solid.
Our personalities neither anymore. They evolve.
B - Look... The magenta light is appearing.
In the distance, a lone glow breaks dimly through the night and volcanic fumes. We look at it through the scope. Blume brushes a tear away. I also feel sad soon after, seeing the real face of our enemy.
R - Magenta didn’t come back to life... That’s not it.
B - I thought it was odd, after the nuclear fire out there, that it would manage to come back regardless. But in a way, it still is Magenta’s spirit.
What I gaze at in the sky out there isn’t Magenta strictly speaking. The glow is pink, but the shape that sleeps in the air, surrounded by four gigantic wings, it’s just...
R - Another me... It’s not Magenta; it’s me. With a different past, and a different mind, but it’s another Rose...
She looks like me or Licht. Perhaps she merely is the Licht of Magenta; the one they called Calamity.
I contaminated Magenta as well with the dream of Rose Blume before it died. And what has returned from the dead, is another Rose... She has likely similar heritance to all of us other Rose Blumen, but sees things differently.
A different individual, with similar roots. With only very slightly different variables of values to differentiate her out in the beginning. At the end of the day, chaos brought this distant sistren to become a monster.
From the grave of Magenta, a rose that wished to become god has risen...
And we have to stop her.
~
