preface to 'Linea'

I am Ioni.
That is all you need to know.
But I am bored, and restless, and want you to know more.
I have hidden myself in my Mountain. I have seen everything, over and over, changed things, re arranged things, over and over and over. And now I am bored of it. There is only so much you can change, dealing with living things. They have their own minds, their own will and want and need for survival. They are not fully my puppets and over the years, decades and every thing else, this has annoyed me the most.
You can not train them, you can not change them, all you can do is change the direction, change the things around them and hope they ricochet off them and into the path you wanted. They are like children, and you have to let them go.
But that had always been my problem - I do not want to let them go. I like them. I like how they look, and smell and sound and move and hate one another even though I am the enemy. They are funny things, people. Which ever world I have gone to they have amused me.
I have gone too quickly, have I not? Straight into my ramblings and no background to this volume.
I am Ioni, and the Mountain loves me.
It sits in all Worlds, in any place I wish. It links all Worlds with its corridors and passage ways. The Mountain is endless, it stretches as far as I would ever need to go, dives as deep as I would ever want to bury a thing.
The Mountain changes, re-arranges itself, when ever I ask. You could wander in to the Mountain caves on your little World and be lost, locked in time to keep you moving if I wish, or aged with in a second if I choose. Or you could be moved, directed, into a whole new World, one alien to you, or so similar it would take years of odd feelings and giddy stomachs before you realised that you are lost.
Am I evil? Are you thinking that I am cruel? Maybe. But what would you do? Be benevolent, I bet.
Sometimes I help, I do. Sometimes I try to help. I plant crops in desolate lands so to feed the starving the starving children. All that. But it goes wrong, when you try to help, it goes so wrong. Worse than if I stood back and did nothing. Worse than if I meddle. So I do not try anymore. I amuse myself instead.
It is not all me. Sometimes they ask me to intervene, sometimes they bag me, bring offerings, bring blood. Split the throats of screaming babies, defile animals in my name - what ever they consider my name to be for that millennia - starve themselves for my honour, bury their own bodies alive to feed my soil.
It is not all me.
They ask, they kill, they are the gods of each other, if the other is weaker.
Who am I to judge?
Who are you?
I have lived through life in so many way in so many Worlds so, so many times. I have lived forever a countless times already, and I will continue.
And I am bored.
So I am here, in my Mountain, looked inside the deepest part, hiding from it all.
We have fashioned a library. I stood in my mountains chasm and looked around its walls. I asked, told, thought, of what I wanted, and it appeared.
Shelf after shelf, reaching further than I could see, and higher than I could climb.
Book after book, filling shelf after shelf, multiplying, growing, deeper, longer, further than any library in any World.
Each book empty.
Each waiting.
In the middle of this new, tiny World, a World just for me inside the Mountain that loves me, a table. Small, simple, with a lamp for light I do not need, and a quill resting in a well of ink it does not need to continue. The quill, like me, will last forever a thousand fold and on. But I enjoy the feel of it, the tradition, the look.
I could, of course, have anything. The best technology that will ever be invented, the most incredible computer that will sense my thoughts and write them for me. But I like to feel the solid mass in my hand, to see the words form on the parchment pages below me, to take a book form the shelf, feel its weight in my hand, carry it over slowly to the table and place it on the wooden surface. I like to look at it a moment, to look at it, to glance at its cousins lining the shelves all around me, to see the meagre lamp light play across its deep red leather cover; nameless until I have begun. I like to wonder what will appear inside, what each individual page will feel like when I run my hand gently over it. I like to open the book at the first page, and breath in the airless room, pretend as I have for eternity to need to suck in life through my mouth. I take the quill in my hand, and begin.
Would you like to know what I look like?
Have you imagined me as you read this?
Am I ugly? Old? Deformed through my evil boredom?
I am much as I began. A few changes, but in essence, the same.
I am thirty in body and face, a young thirty I was always told, I could pass for twenty five if viewed quickly. But my body is aged thirty.
I am slim, vaguely muscular in a half hearted gym visit way.
I am beautiful, I came to terms with that. Not showy, not that you would notice. But my features are well proportioned, my eyes large ,and deep brown not too long ago, mouth full enough and easy to smile with.
My voice, though I haven’t spoken in a while, is soft, slightly accented when animated, and kind.
I was kind.
And now the changes.
My hair has grown to pass my thighs, certain lifetimes chosen to stay within the Mountain have caused it to loose its gentle brown colouring, and it fades to… caramel? Taupe? Beige? It is light, almost white, but it still clings to its colour, has yet to give up on the outside sunshine and being alive.
I am, I supposed, classed as dead.
My hair twists into large ringlets, about five of them in all, that seem to hold their shape regardless of what I do and how I move. It is elegant hair, and it does not suit who I was, but I play on it now, the look, the appearance, like the quill and the leather bound books, and the lamp whose light I do not need.
My clothes. Now this is one I enjoy.
I like history, as you can guess, I like the different ways that have changed with which to cover your skin. I did not grow up wearing the clothes I choose to wear now. But like the quill and the light and the well I used to use to fetch water in a pail at the top of the Mountain where I keep my house, I do enjoy the costume.
My dress is long, you would describe it as flowy, and it is something a novice costume designer would draw when asked to cloth actors in a regency play. I do not need to stick strictly to histories truth, I have my own. It is long but not binding. It is patterned thickly with golden thread. It dips at my chest and pushes upwards. It is green today, tomorrow I may change it, if I wish.
Tomorrow I may wear a length of silk to tumble around me and sweep the floor. I like sweeping, slowly in and out of a room, glancing back at those who would see me, and those who would not.
I do enjoy the drama.
Right now I sit, in my room, my World, alone but for my Mountain that always surrounds me, since the day it found me.
It created me because it loves me, but also because I created it.
I am still confused over that too.
It wants to live, and even after all this time, so do I.
But back to this.
I sit at this table, watching the light play with my letters, forming its own words and phrases that I had not intended, but like all the same.
My dress drapes over the chair and to the floor, pooling its material at my feet.
I minor detail I know, but whether you are interested or not, I do enjoy the drama.
This is, I have lost count. I have not even come close to filling even one shelf with books but I have lost count of the books I have filled.
Have I told you what I am doing?
How remise of me.
I am writing the stories I have created and watched.
All the plots I have seen unfold.
All the plots I have set in motion.
I am writing a history of what I have done and been witness to.
I am bored, and so I write.
I have written of many Worlds, different people. But I realized at the end of the last story that I had neglected myself. My experiments. My medalling, let us admit the word, face it and move on. I meddle.
I have conducted several experiments on varying Worlds. My experiments created me, in a way. A confusing, let us not discuss it right now way.
My Mountain bleeds. Its blood can do many things. It bleeds chemicals from its walls, from its streams and wells and pockets of plants and flowers.
These chemicals can make things. Change people. I could give you one, or a selection, they could make you strong or wither away, they could make you fast or glued to the spot. The proper selection, mixed appropriately, could make a god or kill you. Yes, kill you fast or slow or keep you alive or make you crave flesh, blood, kidneys; what ever I wish really.
The experiments were, in part, in these chemicals and which to use and mix and use. And which to leave alone.
There has only be one person ever to take all the chemicals.
Can you guess who that was?
As I said before, I can not control you properly. You have minds and will and it is very annoying.
But I can bend you, hurt you, force you, make you love me and obey me, but in every way you are choosing to obey - you are choosing to stop the hurt by doing what I say, you are choosing to obey for the woman, god, monster you love. You choose, every time.
But then I thought, in passing, nothing more than I wonder at the time - what if I made someone? I do not mean have a child; children are notoriously free willed. I mean make someone. Lots of someone’s who would have no mind to think and decide.
It was, of course, only in passing. At the time.