sparks


Fionnabhair Nichneven and Erin Sparkenbane
Slane house, Snotra, 31 Winterfyllith, -23
from the Eachdraidh nan fylgjic

Erin: I'm chary to scatter the dreams some of you may have about me, indeed after all I've put into growing them... [laughter] but as my sisters'll tell you I'm a slacker at reckoning strings and I wouldn't know a cast from an echo if they both tapped me on the shoulder and said foo! I'll also spill... this witness and I fuck, hence I'm thoroughly bent so if anyone wants to jump in and puzzle, please do!

Fionnabhair: Ok, starting about 1400 years ago when they began spinning motes, some thought of sniffing out self-aware beings on planets lapping other stars in the galaxy. Guesses at how many there might be split wide, from ten to ten thousand but they knew their spells had dodgy pulls. With snaps of millions of planets since then, along with more heedful casts, most glark tens or hundreds. So in billions of galaxies across the universe there could be millions but we're teased by a spell called the Fen Glioon sou-cheeayll, k≈cxp(T/þ). Starkly put, where T runes time gone by since the big bang and thorn's a tool maker growing by notches of ten, say every thousand years... log₁₀k is forty-two million, which roughly tells us what its size would be by now.

Erin: That's a docking big heap, Fionnabhair.

Fionnabhair: For starters it's so far beyond anyone's guess as to the utmost of motes anywhere, which by the bye wontedly puts log₁₀u at all of eighty, tops, hinting that even at slivers of the speed of light the whole universe should have been sopped over by self-aware tool makers or whatever, long before the first shreds of ash twained here on earth.

Erin: So how do we know it wasn't?

Fionnabhair: Hast thou seen like, any little green girls lurkin' by the henge lately or what...?

Erin: We flurt upon the skies and eat snow.

Fionnabhair: Yeah. Anyway the first spells to fallainly cast this kind of thing were pulled from the paths of bugs. As with any ashes these are likely to braid in jerks, up towards thrift and out in sweeps from muddle. A skein based on the growth spell y'=ky(m-y) throws two slopes that log steeply, then tumble back into the noise floor. Likewise the fylgjic bound of a buoyant craft is set by the upended output of its muddle and the steadfastness of spacetime. What we get's a bubble, the bound's rune, fixed to the speed of light. Early on some were nettled by this tarish clip but we owe our being to it. Cradled as we are by the bane's four sways, strong, weak, stir and trimmid, the sweepable, tidy bound of a mote spinner isn't much more than an earth's breadth but who cares? Ashen braids are wee, sundered and unbent by anything faster than a moonbeam. It's the same cast in all bearings out to at least fourteen billion light years with nary a middle, beyond which anyone's only ever seen a fast fleeing wall of mote smoke. Here we are then, in the dwellable grain of an earthly bound that took as many billions to cozily tuck us in and there's the pith of it. We get snow since dishing at stars is the chavel of anyone rash enough to try.

Erin: Any dish means a gollop first so...

Fionnabhair: ...we can glide to the stars and shuffle dust, pulling nothing but spotty blowbacks upon wretched trillions. The afliae wept, then came to ways thrilling and kind to our awareness and this entwining earth. Do we luzz it back to storms? Must our dreams be harrowed? Not if we're whist, in stern grok of these haunted strings, the sparks of being and the bane of the game.