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[Learning Tree]; Battlelines II vs. Sahara
Topic Started: May 11 2016, 07:09 PM (54 Views)
Indrid Calder
EWA World Heavyweight Champion


We focus on an antiquated sepia tone photograph of a weeping willow tree. The branches hang healthy with leaves, the tree young, life just beginning to truly thrive behind the rough bark that serves as the tree’s skin.

A man stands in the foreground in front of the weeping willow. His eyes stare forward, hollow, craters to darkened nowhere places. He wears drab gray animal pelts and a vacant expression on his face.

The time lapse begins, photographs flashing by slowly.

The same weeping willow, growing, taller, the same man, unchanged except for his attire. Now he wears a silken Victorian era suit the color of charcoal.

Another photograph, the same tree, branches iced over and the ground covered in a heavy snowfall. The tree is much larger now, and the man is still there. He wears a stained gray Confederate soldier jacket with gleaming buttons.

The time lapse continues, the tree again, so much older now, standing tall and proud, and the man, not older, not anything, just the same. He wears a gunmetal gray vest and gray slacks and a 1920s Derby hat pulled down low across his head.

Another photograph, the weeping willow is growing slightly crooked, starting to bend, becoming an elder of the forest. Only the man’s clothes are different. Now he wears jeans grayed by rainwater and a loose-fitting gray cotton shirt, his hair shaggy and long, Charles Manson-esque, the timestamp in the corner of the photo reading “September 13th 1968”.

The photos flash by faster now, so much faster, the tree bending, breaking, the leaves slowly falling to the ground. Seasons change, the topography of the background changes, the tree changes, but the man doesn’t change.

Timestamp 1988. The weeping willow looks sickly, only a few leaves clinging to the branches. The man is still there.

Timestamp 1997. At some point lightning struck the old tree, scarring it and blackening one side to cinders. The man is still there.

A final photograph ends the time lapse. It’s crisp and in high definition, taken with an expensive digital camera. The timestamp reads “May 11th 2016.”

The tree is dead. A lifeless husk, long dead, the limbs like skeletal arms drooping towards the ground. The man is in the exact same spot in the foreground as he was in all previous photographs. The man wears a soot-gray hoodie and soot-gray jeans and boots that have walked so many nameless roads. There is not a single wrinkle or identifiable expression on the man’s face.

It is always the same tree.

It is always the same man.

A man with knife-blue eyes.


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You seem to like my tree, Sahara.

It’s a special tree, and I’ll tell you a secret about it. It’s a learning tree.

I don’t have a throne of bones or a crown of blood-stained gold because I am no king, kings are figureheads, kings are patsies, and it is those that whisper into the ears of kings that truly rule. That is the source of genuine power, Sahara.

Your first taste of fruit from the learning tree.

I don’t have a throne, but I have my tree, and won’t you sit beneath it with me?

Don’t undersell yourself, darling. You are a threat. Each day you grow in skill and experience—much like a tree sending questing roots down into the soil to suck up the nutrients of knowledge. It’s important for you to recognize your own worth. I see bottomless potential in you. Mister Mirage knows it’s there—and although Father Time chases him, as he chases all living, natural things—Mirage knows your growth in the EWA will turn heads.

I’ll do my part to facilitate that growth, Sahara.

You are the yearning masochist, begging for it, desperate for it, eager to have it all…and you’ve struck a chord with this particular sympathetic sadist. I’ll let you have it, Sahara. Everything. I’ll seal your wounds with hard kisses and then I’ll reopen them again, because every wound is a lesson, and every scar is a reminder, and I’d like for you to remember me.

You words seem to flow from an oasis in the heart of the desert of yourself, and the water is cool, the words are soothing, the words slake my thirst.

And since you’re sitting with me beneath this learning tree, I’ll share another secret with you, Sahara…because you know how to listen, and listening is a powerful trait in an EWA world filled with talkers that never have much to say.

There are allegiances coming, Sahara.

All the best allegiances happen behind closed doors in dark, secret rooms while the talkers talk and pursue their trivialities, and when those allegiances come, it would be wise for you to find yourself on the right side of them.

Just another apple from the learning tree, and I know the taste is sickly sweet at first, a little rotten on the inside, but all knowledge is bitter during the first swallow, you know? You’ll get used to it.

After awhile…you’ll start to love the taste.

Be with me under the learning tree.

We can sit here for lifetimes if you want, and the fruit is always ripe, it’s painful to pick, but nothing in this world is gained without a bit of agony to balance out the scales. A sapphire-eyed masochist like yourself knows that much already…

An apple a day keeps the devils at bay, Sahara.

And sometimes…that apple invites them in.

You’d be surprised at the red-smeared wonders they can show you…

Still want to learn?

The fruit is yours, the knowledge is yours, and the apple is already in your hand, a gift from a Stranger that knows all the oldest trees in the desert.

All you have to do…is take that first bite.
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