Gatedust

Gatedust is the capital of Ronouse and I used to live there.

Yes, this story is another one with the *I* point of view. I can't be misleading you into believing it is something that is a fiction in which some hero gifted of special powers sets out for a quest. Sometimes, though, it will be easier to have people listening if I was covering my story under the pretense it is something that occurred in the legendary past or in a distant future where magic did not exist nor anything we can find next door. But no, this happen near by, perhaps even in your face.

Gatedust and its battered dirt paths, the white silt walls and the overpopulated borough that count as much Haleck as there are inhabitants for starting point only because fractions also occurred in the realms around its environs. Few Gatedust dwellers know about the others realms because we do not need them, we think. It lightens people conscience to believe written stories are just fictions meant to escape from reality. That said, though, Gatedust system made of me an exiled.

I grind no axe in this text, it's just the account of a humble quest I was set on inadvertently. The quest is not finished, but so far it alienated me from my ancestors, my roots and my comfort zone. I have neither home nor friends to share my burden, yet I am more satisfied and at peace than I was when I had it all. Not that I am isolated from everyone. I still do have contact and a few pretty intimate ones. I stand apart, still totally aware of my pairs struggles. I feel nothing but compassion for them. I backed most of the time as an observer because I am selfconscious of if it really matter whatever I would say or would act in a situation at hand. I still do mistakes and blunders, I'm Barrhub after all.
Like this book can be the biggest oversight. I got something my fellows had not. It was given to me without I asked for it or worked for it or even deserves it. I long wished I could share it with anyone I might be inclined to. It never worked. It just achieved robbing me of the little I had on every occasion I tried to. The only person that has it harbors it in oneself from a need they had.
See, due to some unknown reasons even of me, rest is impossible to get in Gatedust. Not only in Gatedust, but all around in the realms and boroughs. You can sleep all you want but you never gets rest. And no one miss rest because they never experienced it. It is how life should be. They confound rest with peace and sleep. You can find every thing else in Gatedust: leisure, sleep, distraction, way to escape reality by the tones. But you can hardly find rest and the right conditions that just make it happen. Rest is something estrange to the point of being feared and considered dangerous. The best life and model have a life that keep you on your toes constantly, alert, vigilant. One events after the others and a non-stoppable rocking of dramas. Thoughts are shallow as well as commitments and feelings. Everything changes, nothing rest either. Your life is roughly a mix of submissions to something you abdicated after finding out how useless it would be to even think you can change them and that frenetic need to stay occupied, to accomplish, to shine. If you ever sit to reflect, a benevolent companion will come to distract you away from your thought. Dreamers and thinkers tendency are shun and, yes, dreaded. You should not think too much. If you lack off activity, unless you find a way to hide, there will always be something attributed to you so you can be doing something more acceptable and productive.
It's not that you can't sleep, though one day it will come to that, it's just that with the trepidations and flow of the imposed lifestyle, the normal way to live, the word "rest" when yo live in this society is hollow of sense from most. Sleep serves its purpose to keep you functional. Peace must be maintained because it encourages commerce. Otherwise? I do not think they would make any sort of effort to keep it. You can't even have an argument in Gatedust or be emotional in public. But this peace is not rest.

The mills rythm our lives from craddles to tombs. I never heard their humming ceasing, neither were my parents or the elders.

Silence is something upsetting when it cames in someone that forever lived into a persitent noise they suddenly no more hear.

And it is what happenned to me, one night, when the mills grew silent and finally there was a silence onto Gatedust. I knew then, I experienced then what was silent, what was peace what was rest even if theminute it lenght sent a chaotic panic amongst the residents. They had for days recovering confused people and dead bodies to re-process them. Three hundred of them, after numerous unsuccessful attempt to re-process them where expulsed from the city and exiled. I was there. I saw them driven out to the desert without anything on them.

That was my first hint of rest, that night, when the mills grew silent. And oh that I craved it after. I sought for it. I, for a reason passing my understanding, experienced the truest rest there is available, but never since. Curiously enough, it's when things returned to normal that I realized I missed something, that something was odd with me. I sought for a time what it was, exploring all I knew could fill that unknown need I suddenly had and felt deprived of. I even went to practitioners, but to their theory and insistence to check myself into to re-process facility for it, willingly, I grew anxious. I just felt re-process was inappropriate. There was nothing wrong with me. Something in me was convinced that whatever I lacked by then needed to be filled up and not patched up with something else. That whatever I would be doing to chase it away, it will come back stronger and I wanted to get to the bottom of it while it was small, easy to hide and controllable. I never was re-processed or officially exiled from Gatedust. I left before I created too much clatters to justify them into putting me in the fret. But also, living there had become a hinder to my quest. I realised that I had to find a place where the mills were no more heard, be it the end of the known Universe. I would have jumped the edge if I would be sure that these damn mills will just be silent again.


I also discovered that no master would be able to teach me the way I should take. It was something I just had in me and that needed proper space to be used positively. It suffices me of one stint of rest to discern nothing can come close of replacing it in my life. It and the peace that comes with it. And after sometimes at it, I can truly say I attained that rest that nothing can perturbed from outside, not even my rippling emotion, by now, just create gentle waves on the surface of it, but hardly stir me to the deepness of myself like it was before. I gained depth and so I set out to find people like me, because I felt lonely on that road.

That for it I left Gatedust behind.

Now, anyone knowing of the rules of Ronouse realm knows that this decision only made of me now an official exiled. I can't enter into Gatedust anymore and I have bounty hunters on my trail. But what I lived since I left that secluded city worth it. It has to be known to everyone that you can be free and live outside of Ronouse. That the only reason no one came back was that the authority of the town made it so. How can you survived exposed to three sun without clothes or water supply after they failed to re-process you. Of course you wound up death. But if you leave fully clothed, with all your mind, you can survive very well.

I could now return to Gatedust if I was allowed because my journey is finish. I don't need anything from outside of me now to insure I'll rest. Once you know the way to the true rest and walked the way often enough, you can experience it even in the worst anxious situation. It lays inside and you don't have to give up life and become ascetic to take advantage of it.

Standing against the authority and the "normality" were, in my circumstances, key elements. I would sorrow that anyone believe it is the only way to get to experience rest. Not everyone is built for it. On my journey, I acquired knowledge and made friends of all frames and fames. What follow is my quest, but it can't be excluding what happenned around me. I am a part of this world and this world is a part of me. I made full circle, so now I can tell.