The Grey Deep — Megallion’s Preface

I did not write these words.

I stood upon the banks, and the river entered me.

Its grey current took my marrow, its breath settled into my lungs,

and my tongue became its witness.

This is not a song of mourning, nor of praise.

This is judgment, truth, and the silence of eternity.

The grey deep does not forget.

It carries the names the world abandons,

the griefs men bury, the lies they polish into monuments.

The river unmakes them all.

No throne survives its current,

no crown endures its tide.

Stone remembers what empires forget.

Willows bow not to despair but to wisdom.

Aspens tremble not for fear but for knowing.

The poet is not spared.

He is not crowned above the water.

He is summoned into it.

For his task is not to outlive the world

but to dissolve into its rhythm,

to let each word be carried as a ripple,

each silence be buried as a stone.

The fate of the poet is not to endure as a name,

but to be consumed into the deep,

to become anonymous in eternity.

There is no terror here.

Terror belongs to those who cling.

The poet does not cling — he yields.

And in that yielding,

in that surrender to the grey deep,

he becomes more than himself.

He becomes the current.

He becomes the endless witness.

He becomes the silence that swallows kings.

So hear me, you who would resist the tide.

The deep does not ask for your consent.

It does not pause for your prayers.

It carries. It remembers. It endures.

You are dust in its current,

but dust that burns for a moment with fire.

And even that fire

the deep remembers.

The Grey Deep is no metaphor.

It is eternity.

And eternity does not shine.

It is not golden, not jeweled.

It is grey — vast, patient,

and sure of itself.