III. Within the vanished margin
In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

A small force of besieged soldiers,
Sent into the midst of a storm of clamor,
Intervenes too late on behalf of the depraved ones;
Marking the empty doors with charcoal and chalk
Within the vanished margin
Of the four-volume epidemic.

A radiant wheel formed by the league of the frostborn
Is offered in wrath against the king
Of unblemished reputation.
A celebrant raven in a false costume
Feeds his infants and usurps his wives

Upon the date of execution, the outland nations
Stand with the obscure youth rising
Against thirty-five years of wickedness.

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II. The mountains feel the accumulation of the whole
In the gyre eclipsed of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

Cities of grandeur, ruins sculptured by water, gouged
By ice,
Are made plentiful along the streams and rivers
Of the throne plateau.
While two companies are disputing a hill folded in gold,
An auspicious voice fades in the brigade of wax.
Northwest of the Dragon Aspect the volcano expells
Fire and rock.

The mountains feel the accumulation of the whole in
The days of the ungrown castles.
Liddewsinough goes searching in the corners of
The planet;
A cup of wine is balanced on a branch over his head.
Courage, vision, cruelty and pain are the force of four.

Two dead nightingales dream among
The Temple's brown liquor;
Seven Hundred of the canyon owners drink deeply
Of both vials of blood
In the cisterns of the crossed village and go mad
With greed and riot.

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The phinnaftu of the Lorwolm
Each of the Lorwolm appears as a different phinnaft, a smallform, a form that is unlike their true form. A diminishment. Ga-ukogomen, who sometimes shows signs of vanity, says if he showed me his true form and then left me, I would kill myself with longing and loneliness. His most common smallform is a little gray bird, smaller than a sparrow, a kinglet. Other times he is a crow, but in miniature, no bigger than a finch. His vanity shows itself in the brilliant black perfection of his feathers; his claws, beak and eyes shine like onyx jewels.

Nihr Avna-attu's phinnaft is a warm, white mist which sometimes fills the whole room and her/his voice wanders within the mist. The voice is both feminine and masculine, or neither.

The smallform of Tsitao-utna is invisible, but her herald, her sigil, is a small blue bowl. When she wishes to speak to me, I take the bowl from its place in the cupboard and set it on the table and put a pencil beside it. Her voice comes from a place 14 diumalks above the bowl. A diumalk is approximately a half-inch, according to Tsitao-utna. She was about to tell me what a gyre is but Ga-ukogomen told her to shut up, in an angelic kind of way, with a very loud sound like glass breaking, like a thousand windows breaking. I had a ringing in my ears all day afterwards.

Tsitao-utna can remember the name of her last mortal life: Claudia. Ga-ukogomen and Nihr Avna-attu are much older and say they do not remember their mortal lives. Ga-ukogomen once told me there are tasks angels cannot do if they have not forgotten their mortal lives. Yes, angels have tasks: they are always learning something new. Ga-ukogomen told me that the learning never ends. Tsitao-utna said she thinks the learning will end but it will take a very long time.

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The Elder
Ga-ukogomen is the oldest of the Lorwolm, called the na-awult, which means the elder. I once asked him how old he was. He said he is forty thousand hundred gyres younger than the Arc of Lauma-athorin. I asked him what is the Arc of Lauma-athorin? He said it is a galaxy whose light will not yet reach the earth for three hundred gyres. I told him I do not know what a gyre is. I told him that his answer did not help me understand. He spoke a sound that was not a word, not a sound a body can make, an angel-sound. It was like a shrug. It meant, "So what? Not my problem."

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I. When the noble tribe goes to war
In the second gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

When the noble tribe goes to war in a holocaust
Of law,
A true choice can become round and bloody.
When they touch death, those choosing the right hand
Of life,
Decorated by any distinction, by any ornament,
Order silence and denunciation with false songs
Of mourning.

A small kingfisher with a long curved beak,
Her two hands under her chin, she will design
A woman dressed in black, open-headed with
Clean hands; her sister is closed with bittersweet.

Shadows opened up by the eyes and feet of a child:
White, gold and green lose one hundred killed in
This battle,
Four thousand wounded and taken by the black and red.

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