Transformation at the Boneyar

  • Linear Location

    Charleston Harbor, Charleston, South Carolina, US (32°45'53"N 79°54'19"W)

Overview

Access

You must approach the site by boat with an experienced boatsman.

Public Dedication

We had a great sunset cruise out to the plaque site, with much storytelling along the way–and then finally a song as the plaque was formally welcomed to the world–and the parallel world.

Text of the Marker

The part of the story installed here:

Transformation at the Boneyar

Even today, even at low tide, even with companions, the atmosphaere can feel ever further away down here—unsurprising when you recognize it as the xthaereal place called The Boneyar, where the combined forces of three rivers meeting were so fearsome they transcended erosion, becoming a kind of corrosion. Thus the surviving geologies of this place were rocky outcrops of itlik, stone so hard diamonds yielded like flesh. It was towards this spot that Nobunaga-Gaisen descended, intending utter self-obliteration; but just before the waters gave him silence, he looked towards Backwater Point and saw something that startled him: one of his men still following. But there was little time for thought as almost at once he found himself deep below the surface, pinned by powerful currents against the rocks.

All the rest of his life he would remember this time beneath the waters, when even his consciousness seemed to particulate into a liquid aether, seamlessly interleaving itself with other drifting matter. And each time he remembered it, a new memory would insert itself between two others, underscoring the diffusion of his very self—his last dream his only dream to become real: relentlessly obliterating into the silty slurry of the churning harbor.

Steadily, like a spreading cloud, the perimeter of himself getting slowly bigger, when another human form appeared: that other soldier’s shadow not yet in Brownian Motion gathered up Gaisen’s abraded self delicately—and then, not seeing, he finally saw that it was her, Nascyera, concealed, whom he thought he would never see again. She, of an underwater people, patiently took his ever yielding form up to the light—and then to the shore. She bathed him for days in these waters where still eddied the grains of his soul, reversing his tide, reaggregating him until he could be again.

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