Photosynthetic's Re-Imagining

Threads to Pull:

  • A lighthouse built from ancient granite in the very core of a craton.
  • This is an ancient and holy place. Step lightly.
  • The space between sunfire and outer void.
  • Badly-translated instruction manuals, things intended for a wide world but made by too narrow a perspective.

A lighthouse built from ancient granite, risen from the core of a craton (Siberian? Antarctic? Laurentian?), the heart of a continent. The sea was never here and never will be: the lighthouse wards it off, warns away the continent-wide mantle-deep concept of sinking. It warns the sea away from the shore as it would warn a ship off the rocks: if the water swallows land, there will be nothing else to define itself against.

The lighthouse is a guardian of boundaries, maintaining and defining them. It's the avatar of the universe's intertidal zones, those places where extremes meet and life flourishes between them. Extremes themselves are hostile to change, to the fractal turbulence that brings the universe to life. Right now, the pelagic extreme is more powerful than the lithic, so the lighthouse stands guard near the lithic extreme to warn away the sea. It's far from its borders; duty pulls it farther away than it would like. At least it gets to stay in the habitable zone between sunfire and interstellar void — it's got that much.

It is the boundary and the guardian of the boundary in one, the gate and the gatekeeper. It's not sapient in any way we'd understand. Maybe sentient — a slow, dreaming consciousness like places have — maybe.

Boundaries: tides, equinoxes, the heliopause, birth and death, the lines between What Lies Before and What Lies After, puberty, event horizons, half-moons.

Bright longs to visit this place: it is the antithesis of both lifelessness and immortality. 963 cannot approach it. If he came here he would rest at last.