rēḱs deiwos-kʷe

or

The King and the God

You should know but you do not know. The lines are scripted into one's body – one cannot simply forget the tales of one's birth, the progenitur tale seared into the baby's flesh through thin-beating walls. Here there are words. Let me read them for you.

Once there was a child, and before it had grown, the Kyuubi came.

I cannot describe it to you. We call it the Kyuubi, the Ninetails, because the words that actually describe it, not just the shape, that meager body you see outside every day on the way to market, are words that would hurt you. Would kill you, because you are soft yet, little thing.

And yet, I suppose not. You are who you are. Listen closely.

Eotcya.

Stand up now. Wipe that blood from your chin. You are not so weak as to be brought down by a single word, I suppose.

That word which I will not repeat summarizes one part of the Great Beast. It lays name to the connection between the natural world and the beating blood within the beast – the inevitable trail by which the Beast draws within all the hatred and bloodshed of the world, interring it within itself. That is the Wheel of Curs, which is the lesser name, the humanicized name, for the path I have just spoken for you. Do not speak that name either. It contains the same power, to a lesser extent.

What?

Yes. The Great Beast is the Ninetailed. Never say that word – Kyuubi – again. You have risen above the lesser utterings of the peasantry; if you are to name and to hear the Beast, you must do more than to whimper in the shadows of its reality.

Do you understand?

Good.

Continuing on. There are seven words for the Beast that have survived into the tongues of men. One I have just spoken for you – take care not to repeat it, the cost of speaking such a word is far more than that of hearing it. In its simplest, crudest form, it would mean Fur, or Skin. The membrane that seperates the Beast from the rude world about it. I will not teach you those things simple or crude, though I will tell you what they are. If I ever hear them from you, I will strip the skin from your head and leave you to lie in the sun for three days. You would survive it. You would not enjoy it.

I am here to teach you only those things precise and inviolable, in which nature resides in the syllables and the tone. I am here to teach you not words that boat meaning; but meaning borne into sound, which is not at all the same thing – it is the same difference between a man that wears a fox mask and the fox itself.

Do you not understand?

Then listen anyway. You will, one day, or I will kill you.

I return to my original course. There are seven words for the Beast – one which I have taught you. You will not have to concern yourself with remembering how to pronounce it, or the stresses, or the spelling – these are not concepts relevant to that word. You will remember it as it is. It will take no effort, I promise you.

The other six are also concerned with what, I suppose, might be described as the 'physical concepts' of the Great Beast. In their rudest forms, Claw, Fang, Eye, Heart, Bone, and Blood. They relate to each other intimately, as you might say they are all the same language. Each of them contains and enforces meaning upon the world.

Do you remember, how it felt when I released that word? How it felt like a blow upon your face, shoving you back, invading that space once occupied as yours?

That word, which may be translated as the Wheel of Curs, carves away a piece of the world to belong to the Beast. That territory becomes its own, a domain and territory we cannot intrude upon – and your flesh, weak and ignorant as it is, cannot ignore that marking. Even should you be bound, or asleep, or dead and broken – your flesh will flee that ground, as quickly as it can. I could speak that word and throw you into the sky, away from even the earth itself, because the Presence of the Beast is something much more intimately intwined with our natures than the base earth.

Yes, I see you understand. You see and and grasp it. Power, you are thinking. Power I can use.

Be very careful what powers you grip. They are not yours. You are intruding on the Presence of the Beast.

Well. I suppose not you, after all.

I want you to think about this word. Grasp it in your mind, shape it in your mouth. But allow no wind to pass by your mouth and your lungs, and thus pronounce the word itself. The making of it would hurt you, again, far worse than I have done.

You must tame your flesh to the Presence of the Beast before you can wield it against other men.

The other six words all contain meaning in much the same way; that which the broken peasantry call the Eye, which may be more correctly translated as The Eater of Light, or The Eating of Light – a difference that depends largely on personal comprehension, I suppose – will blind you.

I see you do not understand.

Imagine a word in which you do not have to see any man's face, or any man's mouth, to understand what he wished to say to you.

You would know this, child. What is the difference between what a man says, what his face says, and what his body says? Where does the lie begin, end, and the truth of his measly heart begin?

Ah, you do understand. I had thought you would. You see lies all the time, do you not.

The Eater of Light takes away the mouth, and the face, and the eyes, and the body. It takes away the page on which words may rest, the sign on which a picture resides, the sound of songbirds in the trees and the rushing of waters against their banks. The way is made clear, and for a time, you will not see the distances all worlds place between their meanings and themselves. You will only see the reality, hidden behind the sussurus of the realm.

Yes. It is a powerful tool.

My eyes?

Yes. I took them out so that I would always be Eating the Light. I can tell what fabric of clothing you wear, what color your skin is two fingernails beneath the surface, what color the back of your eyelids are. I know you drank spoiled milk this morning because your stomach is still growling and I can hear it cutting apart the milk to drink. I can see your sweat before it reaches your skin.

I am not fully perfect with the Word as yet. But I am very close.

No, I will not teach you it. You are not worthy. Not yet.

Ah, you wish to know the other two words? Wise child. They are the tale you must learn and hold close to your heart, if you are to speak the true names of the Beast.

There are seven words we know of the Beast, describing each of the Paths by which it intrudes onto the rude physical realm. The Beast itself is a world equal to our own, an existence of one, which we cannot comprehend. We have rocks and trees and animals and each other – but the Beast has only itself, can only percieve itself, does not recognize the existence of anything else. It is its own realm and I hardly believe that it recognizes there is another world outside of itself – or around itself – or poured around itself. The only bridges are the six words that we know, that invoke and invite a path to the Beast.

But, you see, they are no different than invoking a rock or a tree of our world – the landscape which we might occasionally see and interact with, but are not us, merely sharing our realm and shaping it through their being. We might notice a change, a perturbation, but it is not related to us, not truly.

The last two names invoke the Beast, that which thinks and percieves of that realm itself. It is God, but not our God. It is a thing which destroys that which it takes notice of only by the weight of its regard and existence.

I have not heard them spoken, although I know them myself by divining, in the silence of the night, in a windless, locked room without doors or openings, where no air would stir the word from within my gullet. To speak those words is death. The Beast will crush you simply by its notice, and the turning of its thought toward you will erase the very concept of your from our realm – as the sun erases snow or ice by its simple gaze.

One word is the mind of the Beast, another path, but one that invokes the conscious and the will, and its use will draw the notice of the Great Beast. I will not even speak the translation of the word as men know it. Even the shadow of the Beast's intent is a terrible thing.

The last is the name of the Great Beast itself, the Realm, its Paths, and all existence and potentiality therein. I do not know it. I do not know what Men would call it. I do not know if Men can call it at all.

But the Name is there, regardless. It is what called the Beast into – or beside – or through our world; no other power or conception could do such a thing. The Name has, thus, already been invoked once in the history of our world.

And all Namers seek that Name, the Great Beast's Name; to we who seek the truth of concepts in the world, it would be the ultimate power. It would be the ultimate grasp.

For, with the name of one Realm; why, wouldn't it be a simple thing to discover the name of another?

Our own?

But those are questions for a long time down the path of Namers, which you have only just begun upon. You will have years and blood and names to go before you may grasp that ultimate reality within your fingers, or even begin to whisper the translations of it within the depths of your mind.

But – I honestly think that you might have a gift, an edge for it we do not possess. I think you will be able to find that Name in the end.

Young Naruto.