Amanita's Memories.

## Description

To become one with the Network is to be forever changed. To flow like water through the veins of Stormbound and to walk amidst the memories of a million souls is to lose oneself. A person’s life becomes another voice in a song that is forever changing. Sporeseers never leave their sanctums, and for good reason: the memories are too much for a single mind. The Sporeseer is not a self; she is the past, she is the present, and she is the very earth beneath our feet.

These are the thoughts of a former Sporeseer.

## Session 03

### *Forgetting*

> I’m falling. Floating. Fading.
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> Roots ripped from the earth.
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> Trapped within a song that’s looping.
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> *Music, when soft voices die,*
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> *Vibrates in the memory.*
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> The words are not our own.
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> The Sisterhood is supposed to teach us to remember, not forget.
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> A child in the dark. Dark and alone and forgotten.
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> Steel against stone. Scraping. Blood mixes with ash. Forgotten.
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> Am I forgetting again?
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> A scholar’s memory becomes words, becomes dust.
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> Dirt beneath my nails, I pry the nettles from my skin.
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> Was I digging? Digging to find you, Mother?
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> Your veins are so fragile, so far away these days,
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> Those veins, those spider-silk veins.
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> I can’t hear your heart.
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> Am I forgetting again?
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## Session 04

### *Blackthorn*

> A grotto. My grotto.
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> Bathed in Celial light,
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> *Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.*
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> But the words were not there.
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> The memory is distant,
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> Black streaked with white.
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> *A rose is a rose is a rose.*
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> No! The rose is a man.
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> Time heals all wounds
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> But the pain lingers.
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> How can I heal when there’s a thorn in my side?
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## Session 05

### *Ashes*

> There was fire then.
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> *Burning bright,*
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> *In the forests of the night.*
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> Now the forests are gone. The spores departed.
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> There is only Iron.
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> The word stains my mouth. I can taste it still.
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> Iron. Blood.
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> The one brings the other.
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> The rodent brings fire.
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> *They always do.*
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> First, there is burning. Then, there is screaming.
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> Then, there is silence.
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> A caesura in my song.
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> There was meant to be music.
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> I was meant to be music.
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> Young one. Fear the silence.
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> The coda.
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> The song is ending.
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> We are just fragments
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> Fading
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> *Some say the world will end in fire.*
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> Some say with *a whimper*.
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> But we know
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> There is only the silence.
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## Session 07

### *Hysteria*

> The was a child. A strange child.
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> One day she started talking to the earth.
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> Couldn’t keep her there. She was for the Sisters.
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> Mother, mother, it was madness, they said.
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> Barely a child. Erina fell.
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> Our bleary-eyed child had barely begun
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> Opening her eyes. It was blind faith.
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> Mother, mother, it was madness, they said.
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> My eyes were open then. It was Man.
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> Man *ransacked the centre, and with impious hands*
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> *Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth.*
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> Mother, mother, it was madness, they said.
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> The thorns have wormed their way into our Heart!
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> Can’t you see? Look! Why aren’t you looking? Why –
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> Their lidless eyes turn inwards.
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> Mother, mother, it was madness, they said.
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## Session 08

### *Informational Necromancy*

> How did it feel
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> To bind with hide and spines of thread
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> The infinite beauty of lives lived and lost?
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> The dead tree shares no breath, no laughs, no groans.
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> No saplings grow from these inked bones.
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> You could have the past.
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> To see with a child’s eyes once more.
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> A first kiss.
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> To see your father’s face again.
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> You could hold eternity in your hands,
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> But reach for your pen instead.
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## Notes

1. ↑  Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Memory ('Rose leaves, when the rose is dead')." *Selected Poems and Prose*, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy, 2017, p. 60.
2. ↑  Blake, William. "The Lily." *Blake: Collected Poems*, edited by W. B. Yeats, Routledge, 1905, p. 73.
3. ↑  Stein, Gertrude. "Sacred Emily." *Geography and Plays*, by Gertrude Stein, Four Seas P, 1922, pp. 178.
4. ↑  Blake, William. "The Tiger." *Blake: Collected Poems*, edited by W. B. Yeats, Routledge, 1905, p. 75.
5. ↑ Frost, Robert. "Fire and Ice." *The Norton Anthology to Poetry*, edited by Margaret Ferguson et al., Norton, 5th ed., 2005, p. 1277.
6. ↑ Eliot, T. S. "The Hollow Men." *The Norton Anthology to Poetry*, edited by Margaret Ferguson et al., Norton, 5th ed., 2005, p. 1359.
7. ↑  Milton, John. *Paradise Lost.* Edited by Phillip Pullman, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 36.