Aries 28. An artist’s studio. Many unfinished paintings everywhere.
All these unfinished paintings show that whatever is being born is in no hurry. These durations in which paintings wait, incomplete, sink into the canvases and become transparent layers of history themselves, like windows that reveal mysterious depths within the other colors.
Is anything ever really sure when it’s born? For birth is always continuing to happen. Now the outside petals are completely unfolded, but the inner ones still sleep, and are just now beginning to reach outward. And when they have all awakened, the center will be revealed.
The artist enters and looks around, deciding which canvas to take up. Or maybe he will begin a new one.
Azoth Oracle
In Trazad, a province of Aab, a most rare perfume is made of marigolds. The gardeners of Trazad are careful to protect their marigolds from any exposure whatsoever to the Sun, keeping them covered by day and then, when night falls exposing them to the light of the moon and stars. And though one would expect such marigolds to be small and frail due to their lack of the Sun’s rays, the gardeners feed them with elixirs of special herbs which causes them to wax large and full, and of a pale greenish-yellow tint.
The oil extracted from these marigolds is of a complex, unique fragrance that creates, in one exposed to its scent, a deep yearning, which seems at the same time to fulfill its own craving, a pleasure mixed with pain in which pleasure only slightly predominates, an experience which compels seekers of this perfume to pay great prices for it.