Some time ago, Chris Gardiner wrote that each Correspondence sigil "has to be sound like it can refer to two different specific things, which I won’t elaborate on because spoilers."
The idea lodged at the back of my beak, and I am finally spitting it out. We could analyze and discuss candidates for these mysterious "things", or we could write poems. After all, if the sigils cannot fit in a poem, they must not refer to that poem’s topic.
Here is a poem, then, built from Correspondence around two themes. Each bolded phrase or word is a sigil found in Failbetter work.
Escape from Love and Gravity
hurtling forever toward the earth
around a slowly tilting planet
for a day that lasts ten thousand years
The mounting excitement when one’s beloved reaches the closest point of his orbit
and quickly swings past,
both of us bound to the earth,
Forever circling,
never drawing closer,
never drawing apart
from its own ancient love,
once bright creator,
now decomposing deity
swollen, red and belching
Vulnerable.
The Knotted Serpent,
snaring constellation,
slave master to comets
spun disintegrating at our god
The prize sought: the absorption of a Royal house,
Hydra’s teeth on Libra’s scales
fellow moon, beloved
rushes over the horizon
the wrong way, caught in the invisible drag
his new straight line an unmappable direction
curlicued from the passage of behemoths
one last hour with a friend
And the serpent pursues closer
and our cunning god
traps it.
[b]Revenge — a cataclysmic collision
unconstrained velocity
the absence of breath
an airless flight
tracks in the illimitable void
[/b]
[b]a span time of more than four million years
lost in a night which never sees starlight
almost never remembered[/b]
Posit your own alternative theories with new poems in this thread. (I know, I stole the easy ideas). Here is a list of all Correspondence Sigils meanings I am aware of. (Most of them are copied from someone else’s document — which I can’t find again, or I would give credit — so I cannot vouch for them firsthand.)
edited by TheThirdPolice on 5/18/2017