What the Sphinx said of the Secret

I want to speak but I don't want to tell the story. When I move my lips the words turn to sand, like they were made to order in a stone grinding factory in my mind.

I think you're right when you say that you can't trust people to tell their own stories, that they'll give you a necessary fiction, tailored to suit your own. All the things you'd never share with a soul with a soul ...

So I'll skip to the part where I say that you'll never understand the depths my claws now reach -- where what cloaks you behind the world's curtain and your ashes turns to ash. No earth, no morning-star or stone-chat. No souls.

Then what silence will speak the language of alone? Then what fiction? Then what trust? The veil is thrown back as time roots out the festering unbidden and all is absolved.

To you I seem untelling silent: you simply do not hear. Each day I grin an earful at Ra for all fades away ... nothing will remain ... there is no secret worth keeping.