Seeking the Nomad Francis

When Murmur sought an answer to a pitiable need, and dove the dark depths to find the pain of another - that he might carry it into that light - she [Hannah] suffered as he suffered, also.

He would often wear the disease or discomfort he divined, and transfuse it with the very charity lying deep within his being.

These things she came to know firsthand, and secondhand, through his experience - and for all of his strange ways, she loved him all the more.

And so Hannah also was to depart from the familiar, to go and find her brother, that she might live near him as before.

Yet he, unlike her, could never see the world through her eyes.

He did not comply with her thoughts or feelings, and although he did love her as a brother might, his view was always turned outward to others and beyond.

Finding him would be difficult. There were so many small communities in the state, and the people of her town perceived the far reaching Holy Orders to be one and the same wherever one travelled.

Every community was so similar to the local villagers, that when Hannah had asked their advice as to what direction to go, they had pointed to the woods to the south, where the pilgrims were seeking the nomad Francis.

However Murmur had settled far from this area; and was being cared for by the Brethren of the Bells - a farming community that lay west of the village.


-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Hannah

Hannah, Murmur's twin sister, was disconsolate that her sweet brother had abandoned their birth home, to now walk the holy path that led away from her and home.

She could not understand what grieved her the most: her brother abandoning her, or that she would be left behind.

Hannah did not feel Murmur’s authority of faith, and nor could she invoke his power of healing.

Yet now and then she could see through her twin’s eyes, as he would see … and during these times, it was almost as though she was actually in his body looking out.

Hannah had experienced the most poignant of moments, and had been witness to Murmur’s miraculous insights - the strength of which had forged his beliefs from deep deep within.

And often when his inner sight was lit with a holy vision, it illumined her mind too.

- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Gnomes- Earthbound Creatures

Alfred Schönian

Since gnomes and human beings are alike earthbound creatures, we will probably find gnomes—or cobolds, or goblins, as they are sometimes also called—the fairy race closest to our understanding. .

Their habitat is one few other forms of life would care for, for gnomes live down below the surface of our planet, where roots take an anchor-hold on earth. If you should chance to wonder how any creature other than a worm gets about through a medium so dense you need only consider how easily thoughts pass through the hard heads of human beings and
you will at once understand the matter. Thoughts are not of flesh, though they must live in it for us to know them, and neither are fairies.

Gnomes are immensely clever Little People, with large heads out of all proportion to their tiny bodies: Fairytales tell how they carry lamps to light them on their subterranean wanderings. This is, of course, just a way of speaking, for the light cast is not an outer brightness, but rather inner light, shed on the nature of what they find about them by their keen intelligence. They have what we might call a “knowing eye,” which understands at a glance everything it falls on: They do not need to go through a laborious process of “figuring things out.” To see a human being puzzling to solve a problem prompts them to make rather rude remarks, “What fools these mortals-be!” is, I'm afraid, only too typical of their attitude. They constantly admonish us, “O Human, awaken!” For to them anyone who has to think to get at facts is half asleep. Indeed, they consider thinking as we know it just a means of pulling oneself together from a bout of
dreaming. Since they are wide awake already, they perceive what is without having to mull it over in their heads.

Tradition has been inclined to picture gnomes as wizened, little old men with bent backs and knobby, spindly  limbs. There is more truth than fiction in this portraiture: gnomes are a very ancient race; they are tiny in comparison  with human beings (dozens can come packed in a rock like sardines in tins); and they do, indeed, gravitate to dryness,  both in their surroundings and their sense of humor. They shrink from the damp cold of the earth in which they work and from the chill creatures that inhabit it—most particularly frogs, which, being the antithesis of gnomes, fill them with loathing. Frogs are invariably pompous characters, which is something no gnome would ever let himself  become. Frogs are, moreover; rather formless creatures—soft, squashy, bulbous all over—whereas gnomes are  sharply distinct in form, and built in mind and body on the principle of spareness. This tends to make them beings "of few words," and those words pithy, frogs, quite the opposite, are garrulous and, like those with garrulous natures  wherever we find them, given to utterances of no startling significance. They drive gnomes to distraction with the endless repetition of their mindless chant. Isn't it sad that the cheery harrumphing which sounds from wet places on spring and summer nights should strike so disagreeably on the ears of gnomes that these otherwise sensible beings  shudder when they hear it! Even the thrilling note of the "spring peeper," Hylo crucifer, lacks the power to charm them.

Gnomes detest frogs for a further reason: they see in them creatures they might themselves become were they to fail even for a moment to maintain the sharp vigilance that belongs to gnomehood. Never yet has a gnome been transformed into a frog. But so neurotic are they on this subject that you could not persuade a single one of them that such a fate may not overhang him.

The tide-and-rain-related moon, is equally anathema to gnomes, who regard it as the creator and ruler of the watery element. They cannot bear its rays upon their bodies. When the moon fulls, flooding all the world with its soft light-ocean, gnomes so harden their exteriors against it that they go about on the surface of the earth looking like tiny knights in suits of armor.

But gnomes have their pleasures, too, incomparable ones, which certainly outweigh any suffering they may have to endure from moisture. These little beings, from tip-to-toe a tingling sensor, have as their own special part of fairyland the subterranean realm of metals and crystals through which they wander, tasting all manner of delights. Mortals see this realm only as a finished world—still, hard, and unchanging—hence possessing a deathlike quality. But to the subtle sensing of gnomes it is all alive, a world of moving forces, rather than of rigid matter, and still endowed with the music and colorfulness of is cosmic origin, We mortals can share this experience in part if we are fortunate enough to witness the melting down or, more accurately put the melting-up of metals. For this process wherein he frees metals from the solid state returning them to he flowing and then aeriform condition in which they existed when the world was young and they had but lately issued from primeval fire. Crystals have kept material reminiscence of their primal color. And to guess at the music imprisoned in them we have only to see the crystal-like figures produced by musical vibrations, first discovered by Ernst Chladni. Geometric form is always frozen music!

But gnomes have still more incomparable joys. They are the “knowers” among the elementals. As such, they possess a strong affinity to inner light (indeed, their very bodies are formed of the light-stuff of intelligence). So it has naturally fallen to their lot to receive a special gift of insight: the ability to see ideas as we see objects. The whole world of creative thought lies open to their observation: They behold the working of the mind of God bringing into being some new form of life—whether it takes shape as a spiral nebula or a new species of plant or animal—and they behold the working of the human mind—whether it be creating the geodesic dome, Shelley's Ode to a Skylark, Brahms's Lullaby, a philosophic insight, or countless other inspirations fully as worthy of being mentioned. Nor do gnomes fritter away this endowment, only “putting two and two together” to come out with trivial bits of understanding. Rather, they use their love of knowing as a magnet to draw down to themselves, and thus ground in our planet, the shaping thoughts that flow into evolution from the mind of God. It can scarcely be a negligible
experience to be made thus privy to divine imagining!

And how are these visions carried to their destination in the souls of gnomes? Why, they are conveyed to plants in the rays of light, and plants serve as their further conduits into earth.

-Marjorie Spock 

A Keen & Concerting Empathy for All

Francis truly felt responsible for the salvation of the material world - as if its feeble axis rested on his character solely - that it was as his Lord before him had done, that he might transmute all sin, and bulk load Humanity onto the path of virtue's eternity.

Small animals would often congregate in his camp, drawn to this saint in the making.

Francis had no knowledge of his true parentage, as Pica subscribed to secrets. She had feared that because the Fey were outcasts from normal society he would be even more misunderstood if it were known. And so Francesco thought himself to be a mortal as any other.

Yet he never saw things as other boys or men did see: colors and shapes revealed their auras of longing; everything he saw he perceived to have a soul. Creatures could speak to him; visions would appear in the water and the air; and worldly concerns were quick to evaporate when he watched a flower open, or the sun reveal its morning face.

It could not be said that Francesco was a dreamer - for the marvels he fathomed were all very very real.

He was however, a Fey-man dislocated from his own, interpreting the manly sorrows with a keen and concerting empathy for all.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

The Advances of Grace

[ c. 13th Century ~ ]

Francis had two goals before him: one was to stay alive long enough to please God and prove his life's worth; and the other, was to die piously, that he may be blessed with the providence of his Heavenly Father thereafter eternally.

His reform was entirely personal. Francesco was not ambitious for the souls of other men, as he did not trust in their ability to hold onto them.

Although he considered men’s fate to be of their own deciding, he also recognized that only by the advances of Grace does any man really continue his existence.

His faith embraced the flowers at his feet; it would celebrate the twig-legged sparrows as they pecked the dew from their engorged bulbs.

In a green glade sanctuary Francis committed his soul for the good of all, and with the self-centred confidence of a holy-man, he completely believed that he alone could lift up the hearts of men and save them from themselves.

- Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Pietro/Peter

Masaccio 

Murmur observed that Pietro now was wearing the countenance of an apostle. One could have said, that his features were more in likeness to his soul, rather than to his forebears.

Murmur led the newly formed man back to the Brothers' camp and introduced him as Peter.

Simple as he was, Murmur had learned that the world of men had little capacity to comprehend the workings of heavenly miracles - and that being so, providence was always best un-talked about.

In the meanwhile, a travelling merchant of the Cloth imparted the solemn news to the cloister at Marseilles, telling of Pietro's demise, and of the bronze plaque that had replaced him.

Pica took herself into the heart of the monastery to the halls of silence, where in a solitary cell, she wept quietly to herself for many months to follow.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances

Pietro's Death

[ c. 13th Century ~ ]

Pietro got stuck by a hunter's arrow.

It was on the third day of his expedition into the countryside when the random missile had caught Pietro in the back, causing him to collapse, fever, and die.

The Society of Weavers awarded him an epitaph on a public plaque.

However it also had happened that Murmur, the saintly monk, had found Pietro laid out in a shallow grave that was covered only by forest refuse.

There had been no one, and no money, available to afford the proper funerary, and thus he had been left there for the sake of posterity, and convenience.

Although without breath, the soul has a constant heartbeat all of its own - and Murmur could hear this subtle life coming from the wasted man.

Murmur held unusual perceptions about the world, and he believed categorically in resurrection: that it could occur in every place and plane of being.

His experience saw resurrection to be a possibility everywhere, rather than belonging only to a distant hope in yet another time and realm to come.

Once again his faith was proved, and from a touch and a prayer Pietro mysteriously sat up awake to the world again.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances