When I met him he was already a haggard old man, carrying his body like a shell.  The body also would gradually diminish beneath those colorless robes, leaving finally nothing at all.  But his presence was not tied to his body; it was its own substance and it welled around him like a thick, massive light, projecting with force from his eyes.  I remember those eyes with great fascination and shuddering.  They were lit like lanterns, and they did not belong to the body they inhabited.

I have read histories of this man during my long sojourn in this dream world, the desert.  They tell of him as a young man.  I can hardly imagine that.  The soul was never young in that material vessel; it was ageless and it desired only release.

Release, not death.  Death did not appear relevant.  What the Nameless wanted was vastly different.

I will explain further.  Death was not relevant because life, in its physical sense, was not relevant.  So he called himself the Nameless.  Only the interior of the soul was made of divine substance, everything else was dead matter.  Upon release, the spark would rejoin the fire.

The Nameless strove ceaselessly for this release during life.  He turned his powers inward, peeling back layer after layer of clouded contaminate from his mind the way one washes the day's sweat from the body.  This introspection had a strange, emaciating effect upon him.  It was as if by distancing himself from the world, he became purer, but of thinner substance -- delicate and anxious.

I had the opportunity of speaking with him as I passed him in the cloisters one evening.  My own robes were heavy on me with the heat, for it was the dying of the day and all the hours of sun had baked into them.  I remember how he stopped and we faced each other, two black pillars standing like chess pieces on a floor of sunset gold.

"Brother Forlos."

I bowed deeply.

"You are tired."

"The heat weighs on me, Nameless."

The eyes stared unblinking from the shadows of the cowl.  "The earthly weighs on all of us."

I inclined my head to cede the point.  He stepped closer, then faltered.  At last he drew confidentially into whispering range.

"Forlos," he hissed, "beware the others -- all of the others.  They are the ballast that pulls the ship into the abyss.  You must fear them."

The old man clutched my arm, and I started.  This was not the great seer that I knew.  A dread began to well up deep in my gut; I wiped stray beads of sweat from my brow, and listened.

"Fear everything, Forlos.  I have seen the truth, and you should fear.  Do you feel the slow inexorable pressure of the world around you?  It has the great mass of dead matter, and it presses upon you like lead.  Everywhere you turn, is the reminder of decay -- our fate.  Fight it, and it will press harder.  A strangle-hold, ever tightening, around your throat."

The Nameless wrenched away suddenly, and leaned against a stone pillar.  Facing away from me, with that hypnotic gaze shuttered, I saw with some shock how wasted and feeble his form had become.  But surely the mind...

He groaned and the words were something unintelligible, no longer authoritarian, rising muffled from the arm of his robe where his face was buried.

"Father Nameless!"  I rushed to support him as he crumpled to the floor.  "Help!"

But no one was nearby.  I held the Nameless and he was light as dust.  The eyes flickered, and for a moment the awful lantern light left them, and they were just the eyes of an old man, broken and tired.

"Total death," he murmured.  "No spark, no fire.  The end of the Nameless."  A dry laugh.

A creeping horror seized me.  "But -- "

He shook his head.  "Flee this void," he whispered urgently.  "While you have time -- "

There is never any time, for any of us.  We live in a void and we must name ourselves from it, arbitrarily if necessary, or go into slow madness.  This was my lesson from the old man.  I pace the stone walkways of an empty monastery, and bite my nails, and see fleeting shapes in the darkness.  Examine your own mind before you judge mine -- or his.

Thanatos

In three month's time, the harvest goes.
The sun's aged gold heats the stone,
Radiating memory.

A canyon where I wheeled and soared
So long ago, in evening dreams,
Borne high aloft amidst the green,
With effortless ability.

Now comes great Death,
The sage.  He faces me
Beyond the blurred veil of my daily ease.
I see him on occasion, through the corner of my eye,
But walk past hurriedly.

Yet in the subterranean chambers, something rustles
Something restless.
Perhaps it will be stillborn in its shell.
Or perhaps it will rise up and destroy all:
The world, you, me, and our insipid hell.