The Full Moon sees All
With his children dressed only in animal hide,
Disheveled and pale, lost in the storm’s heart,
Gilliat’s Bane had fled from the Father’s judgement.
As evening fell, this shadow of a man, he crept.
To the foot of a mountain in a vast plain;
His weary companions and breathless heirs
said to him: "Let us lie down on this ground and rest."
Bane, unable to sleep, deliberated at the base of the mountains.
He raised his head and, in the deep folds of the ominous skies,
Saw a gaping eye, wide awake in the darkness,
Watching him in the shadows, a reckoning with no end.
"I am too close," he said, quivering.
He woke his sleeping sons and daughters,
And resumed his grim flight into the void.
He walked for thirty days; He walked for thirty nights.
He went on, mute, pale with fear, shuddering at every sound,
Not daring to look back, without respite,
Without rest, without sleep. They reached the shore
Of the seas in the land that later became a great city.
"Let us stop," he said, "for this refuge is safe.
Let us stay here. We have reached the limits of the world."
And, as they sat down, he saw in the gloomy skies
The watching eye, still in its place at the end of the far horizon.
Then he shivered, seized by a dark chill.
"Hide me!" he screamed; and, with his finger to his lips,
All his horde watched their wild Elder tremble.
Bane said to the Nomad, father of those who go
Under tents of hair in the deep desert:
"Spread out this side of the canvas."
And they unfurled the floating wall;
And, when they had secured it with lead weights,
"Can you see Nothing anymore?" asked the fair-haired child,
The daughter of his sons, gentle as the dawn;
And Bane replied: "I still see that eye!"
The Artisan, father of those who pass through the towns,
Blowing trumpets and beating drums,
Cried: "I know how to build a barrier."
He made a wall of bronze and put Bane behind it.
And Bane said: "That eye still watches me!"
The Architect said: "We must build a fortress with towers,
So terrible that nothing can approach it.
Let us build a city with its citadel.
Let us build a city, and we will close it off."
Then the Builder, father of the smiths,
Built an enormous, superhuman city.
While he worked, his brothers, in the plain,
Hunted all who would deny Bane’s dominion;
And they shut the eyes of every mortal witness;
And, in the evening, they shot arrows at the stars.
Granite replaced the tent with canvas walls.
They linked each block with iron knots,
And the city appeared a settlement of hell;
The shadow of the towers cast night upon the countryside;
They made the walls as thick as mountains;
And on the gate they engraved: 'Divine law forbidden.'
When they had finished enclosing and walling it up,
They placed the Elder in the center of a stone tower.
And he remained there, gloomy and haggard. —Oh, my father!
“Has the eye now disappeared at last?” asked the Fair Daughter, hesitantly.
And Bane answered: “No, it is still there, always.”
Then he said: “I want to dwell beneath the earth,
Like a solitary man in his tomb;
Nothing will see me anymore, and I will see Nothing more”.
— So they dug a pit, and Bane said: “That is good!”
Then he descended alone through the dark arch.
When he had sat on his chair in the shadows,
And they had sealed the underground chamber over his crown,
The eye was in the tomb, and it watched Bane still.
Deputy Gilliat
Legend of the Age
Vale