Moonshine and monsters.

Glance at the sky,
overcast, cloudy,
as the moon tries
with its feeble light
to pierce the veils
and gaze back at you.

A thousand stars shrouded,
blinded by your luminiscence,
shine back at each other,
in ignorance of your darkness.

You look, and wonder, and imagine,
starry skies, clear and bright,
whether the little ones above notice,

the twinkle in your eye.

Majick lock-opening-thingamajigs

'Sure', he said.

'Freilich', he said.

'Of course it has to be magic. What else can it be?'

The mysterious customer, still standing in front of the counter, unaffected by the heat that aided his melting into an unsightly pile of cheese in front of her, turned the 'it' over in her hands. Her face was hidden, but her nimble fingers seemed bemused.

'Reallye?', she said.

'Da, really.', he replied. He didn't quite know what tone to take with her. In his line of work, he had had to deal with a number of women before. That number being five. Okay, fine, three. But he had gotten through those without being slapped, stolen from, spit upon, set on fire, or turned into a frog waiting for a kiss from a true love that didn't exist. Surviving, while not exactly the best recipe for boosting confidence, did help kick it up the hill a bit.

He wondered, looking at her well woven cloak, with its discreet golden threading, and the impressively elegant wooden cane she used, but didn't seem to need, what their origins were. Wooden sticks, he knew, were rather hard objects to impart a refined air to. She should, by all intents and purposes, be ridiculously rich. But the unfettered wealthy did not impart such intense scrutiny to trinkets. Heck, it should've been his lucky day. She should've just purchased, nay, appropriated a quarter of his shop. It was all junk anyway. But instead, she seemed to have no eye for aught but the mangled key that she kept turning over and over, as if she expected it to jump up and do a trick for her.

He was wondering if he should break the silence with yet another discreet reminder of their mortality, and that they should probably complete their transaction before they died of starvation, or the plague, or yet another publicity scheme thought of by their increasingly erratic liege-lord. But she looked up, and he caught his first glimpse of her eyes, framed by locks of her dark hair.

They were brown. Not the brown, though, that most normal folks had, but an intelligent brown, one that weighed, calculated, and gave off a hundred different meanings with a hundred different hues, with a twinkle of hidden merriment that lurked beneath. He decided that whatever he wanted to say, was not worth it. She spoke, in a low, lilting voice that would have been a song were it not for the words,

'Hwa bealucræft, galdorcwide, wiccecræeft, or dreócræft numol, þéos keye?'

He struggled with that. He hadn't heard the old tongue being spoken so fluently in a while, perhaps it was just the new tongue being murdered. Perhaps not. He shook his head, trying to clear the bells and chimes of wonder and alarm ringing in them, and concentrated on the words instead.

'O' scínlæ', he said, for he was now sure that was what she was, a sorceress. A real live one, apparently not on the run either, for she seemed not in any kind of hurry. 'The drýlác, the sorcery on this key I know not, it came into my hands through a quirk of fate, nothing more, and all I knew of it, you now do. If you want it, take it. There ain't no instruction manual included, I'm afraid. Not a lock that I could find to fit it into.'

Slightly mollified by his own diatribe, he continued, 'It does seem to be a rather odd key, though. I couldn't straighten it out, nor melt it down into slag, and that alone is enough to confirm that it has to be magical, and a strong one at that. That alone prompted me to not mess around with it anymore. Well, that, and the inscription near the top.'

She listened patiently, the ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She glanced at the inscription, and told him, in perfectly good lower tongue, 'I'll take it. How much would you like for it?'

He grinned back, now this, he could work with. 'Whatever you feel like giving, m'lady', he said.

'Well then, this should serve you well, should you figure out how to use it', she said, dropping a pouch on the counter, and smoothly scooping up the key. By the time he yelled that he didn't accept barter, she was no longer there, her swooshing skirts but a memory, were it not for the dull leather pouch on the countertop.

He opened it and looked inside, and removed an egg. An effing egg. Well, looked like he'd be having an omelette for breakfast tomorrow, he mused, thinking of that saying, how'd it go, 'when life gives you eggs...'

Outside, much farther away from the shop than a normal person would've been able to walk, or even run, she sat under the shade of an old tree, a gentle breeze ruffling the grass, and looked at the key, and smiled. The inscription read,
                                                        
'dréam on oþ dréams cymst sóþ.'

of blind men and monks.

It takes a lot out of people. Life does. There're all these ups, and downs, and at the end of a long dusty road, paved with the sweat and blood of years of toil, the next day is still as unpredictable as the very first. It's frustrating, sometimes. But that inherent, inexplicable uncertainty is what makes it fun, as well.

People talk about petty struggles, about great loves, about causes and passions. About the importance of conquest, and the journey being more important than the destination. About seizing the day, and living every day as if it were your last. About it being better than to have loved and lost than having been sued for sexual harassment. About contributing to society, and being punctual, and listening while other people talk. About what's for dinner, and did-you-see-what-she-was-wearing? About books, and film, and sport, and how the collatz conjecture can be proved. All right, maybe not the last.

Some, they say, are significant, and life-altering. Others, trivial. Though very few agree on which falls under what category. Johann Friedrich Herbart, while at Gottingen university, had outlined philosophy as the process of developing concepts. 'Partly as a consequence of the practical necessity to eliminate a contradiction or explain some matter, partly as a result of purely theoretical interest, a desire arises in him [man? dolphins? mice?] to correct, to amplify, to tie together - in general to put his concepts into good order. In other words, he begins to feel an urge to philosophise.'

I often wonder, though, considering that the majority of humankind tends to go through life without indulging in much of what is perceived in today's world as a waste of time, or a rich lad's passing fancy, whether these questions that we wonder about, are clear as day to the rest of us. Are we as blind men, trying to listen in vain for the colour blue?

A small clan of monks in the Himalayas presumably set out to find the meaning of life, the universe and everything. They hadn't had the opportunity to peruse Douglas Adam's monogram on the topic, and didn't realise they could have saved themselves a lot of time and instead have a snowball fight, and perhaps some tea afterwards.

Regardless, some meditated, standing on one leg for weeks on end while abstaining from food, and drink, and the passionate, lingering glances of the goats grazing on the hillside. Others read ancient texts on philosophy, and religion, and politics, and social constructs, and eventually went completely bonkers, renounced the ascetic lifestyle, sold their little mud pot, and went to work at wall street. I'm told they now drive ferraris, having found inner peace.

A particularly wise monk, driven to the edge in his pursuit for ultimate knowledge, literally, took it one step further, and jumped off a cliff. He may have found the answer he was looking for. Unfortunately, we'll never know.

 A wiser monk, looking at the unappetizing mess at the bottom of the cliff, concluded, with the brevity that is characteristic of the monks who speak, on average, about sixteen words a lifetime.

 'Life', he said, 'is not being dead.'