It was only a true ignoramus that claimed that it was merely another work of calligraphy, and I'll readily admit that I was once such a fool. When asked, I would obligingly answer that it was a thing of delicate beauty, and this was not a lie. They were mere words, words that I was not educated enough to understand, but the work transcended whatever mundane meaning was locked away in those symbols. Each stroke was made with well-engineered precision, leaving only those flaws that capture the subconscious mind and draw the eye with their indescribable beauty. They were as rivers of blackness, bounded by the laws of nature and yet refusing to be exactly measured by human science – true art by any standards.
In my very next breath, however, I would say “But why is it so special?” The Taiyang palace houses many works like it, meeting or exceeding it in aesthetic appeal and technical talent. There are still more housed in the museums beyond the palace walls, and still more kept locked away by old bureaucrats and peons with dreams of success. Granted, if one were to believe the provenance of Unbroken Waters – its voyage across some sixty billion miles, where it had been wrought by an artist who perished in the disaster that struck the homeland and whose name is now forever lost – then it deserves some special status for its rarity. One must have some skepticism, at least the same than one holds for other relics said to be from the source. How many of those bamboo scrolls and ancient blades and pieces of jade are simple replicas, reproduced to give us some tangible connection to an imagined glorious past?
Sometimes, my interlocutors would respond to my skepticism with the most amazing rumors. It was absurd to claim that Unbroken Waters was a replica, they would say, because the Taiyang had proven that it was impossible to replicate in any fashion. There was no need to shelter the work from photography because any picture taken of the thing was rendered with a gap, a smeary obscuring haze concealing the characters. Scanning it proved no better, and even efforts to replicate it on a molecular level proved futile – the machines simply refused to process it. When electronic means failed, the Taiyang elites turned to their finest traditional artists. A dozen of them tried, they said, each of them sitting in the sealed room with Unbroken Waters for weeks as they attempted to reproduce the feat of that unknown artist. It wasn't just that they failed, but that they failed even from the very first step. Most of them claimed that they had no sooner touched brush to paper then they forgot the nature of their task, a hole in their memories that returned only when they departed the room. There were those who struggled to complete the task anyway, using whatever chemical or ritual aid they needed to stay on task, only to be flooded with horrifying delusions of symbols and words and ideas beyond their reckoning. Each one of them, to a man, claimed that Unbroken Waters did not wish to be replicated. It wished to stand as a unique testament of what had once been.
The Imperial family obviously had doubts as to the story provided them by their artists, but more than that they had fears. Unbroken Waters was an important symbol but, as a unique object, it was also something that could easily be lost to the caprices of fate. It could be destroyed or stolen, and either would be a most grievous injury to the Empire. Could it be – they wondered – that this was some conspiracy? Perhaps those artists and engineers had failed in their tasks by willful intent, to prepare the Empire for a blow when their true allies disposed of the original work. There were enough sane voices to spare them the execution chamber, but the fears still held firm. Soon, Unbroken Waters was under a level of security unknown to most men, eventually exceeding that of all but the greatest of Emperors.
This was where I entered the story, and I did so under silent protest. Had I joined the honor guard to protect a bit of paper and ink, to see to it that one unexceptional calligraphy sample survived for another generation? My own superiors insisted that I view this as a special honor, as an elite post carrying status that few of my station would ever know. Some of the other guardsmen viewed me some level of envy, the same that they held for those brave souls who were the Emperor's personal escort. Personally, I saw no particular honor in standing before a glorified closet while researchers and bureaucrats prodded at the thing. However, a guardsman does not turn down a special post, even one that strikes him as foolish, so I swallowed back my frustration and consented to the post.
My main role was to ensure that those researchers and bureaucrats were who they claimed to be and were authorized to study Unbroken Waters. There were liars about – I met my fair share, people who came with forged permission documents in varying degrees of quality and some truly fantastic stories regarding their intent. Those lies were works of art in their own right, spun by poets of eloquent deception who clearly thought me an imbecile. “The palace is at risk of fire, so we are moving the work to a special fireproof vault located at the edge of the Taiyang Empire. Oh, don't fret over the Emperor's mark, he has been instructed that he suffers from an energy imbalance and might regain synthesis if he makes his mark with his other hand.” Truly. I became something of an expert in document analysis, hardly what I had imagined when I joined the honor guard. This was a task for some lowly outer-ring bureaucrat, not a trained warrior-poet, but out of propriety I kept my tongue in check and never spoke aloud any of the curses I wished on my superiors.
As the days wore on, however, I found myself drawn into a subtle form of intrigue surrounding the work. The little-trafficked nook that was my daily charge was always a dull place, but what transpired within was more dramatic than I could have anticipated. The researchers who studied Unbroken Waters were an eclectic group, drawn from increasingly arcane specialties within the legendary Taiyang scientific society. Their tools of research were similarly odd, with some carrying in small kits containing simple, primitive tools – knives, scissors, magnifiers – and others bearing exotic gadgets whose functions elude me to this day. On occasion, we would even accept delivery of some bulky piece of machinery, moved from its lab due to the Imperial decree denying anyone the right to remove Unbroken Waters from its resting place. Even now, I struggle to explain what knowledge they intended to extract, but it hardly matters as none of them succeeded. Seconds after closing the door behind the researcher, we were broken free of our monotonous tasks by horrific screams. Inevitably, we would find the researcher lying on the floor clutching at invisible wounds, his tools lying where he had dropped them. None were capable of explaining what had happened in any detail, only telling us that they deserved their fate for failing to embrace the mystery. We gleaned that whatever had transpired started swiftly, often as soon as the researcher brushed his hand against the paper. The court interrogated a few of them but this proved a useless exercise. These men were not traitors or malingerers or thieves, but men stricken by something that they had no true power to express.
Then came the day that we faced down a genuine traitor, which is to say a man whose purposes were contrary to my own. Rumors held that he was an archivist, weary of working in obscurity, who wished to destroy Unbroken Waters in some desperate attempt to secure personal infamy. It always seemed unlikely – his forged papers were top-notch fabrications likely created by someone within the palace, and such corruption does not come cheap. Laying aside the issue of where he received the money, it seemed a high price for cheap fame, but no matter. On that day, the screams began before the door closed as the incendiary device he had concealed in his robes activated without warning as he neared the work. We ran to extinguish the flames but the madman rolled away and resisted our efforts, screaming that he deserved death for his crimes. He achieved his wishes, burning entirely to ash along with his true intentions. Unbroken Waters was undamaged, with not even a smudge of soot to tell the tale of its brush with annihilation.
Something new had caught my eye that day, a novel sight that I had glimpsed through the flames that consumed the madman archivist. It was not a hallucination – nothing so coarse, no matter how it sounds. Unbroken Waters was as it had always been, elegant yet unexceptional, yet I beheld it as though with new eyes. The black rivers still ran as they always had, except now they ran through me, past my flesh and into the core of my being. That night, I dreamed of Unbroken Waters – not the work, but the notion bound up in those flowing strokes. The words moved through me, and though I could not understand their literal meaning, I knew what the artist had intended.
I've seen the artist in my mind's eye, or rather I've been linked to him in a manner that is a challenge to express in words. I can tell you only what I know of the man and what he wished to express. He was an oddity for his time, a man of another age, of another culture. He was a subtle man and that subtlety was bound up in his work, each stroke of his brush an expression of some sunken emotion, each line a spiritual statement. He was the kind of patient soul who would sit in silence for hours a day, days on end, waiting for that transcendent flicker to make his next addition – not forcing anything, not planning anything, letting the art pour out through him.
Ah, but what was a subtle man in that age? The world was changing, the old traditions withdrawing before something foreign and far more powerful. Art fell before economics, the craftsman's tools swallowed by the machines, the poet's voice lost in the buzz of electronic entertainment. The world had become a loud place, louder by the day, and that loudness had affected the minds of those around him. The delicate, the quiet, the reserved – these were lost, destroyed beneath the willful din of the new elites as they sought to fill the world with their own presence. That noise came to infiltrate even his studio – such was the nature of the loud that it always must seek to eliminate the subtle. Subtle words are terrifying and alien to the loud voice, and the artist found himself losing to this aggressive new culture.
The artist could have acted in retribution – he was not a normal man, and I fully believe that he had the means to silence the world if he so desired. Such conquest, though, is the domain of the loud, and he opted for a more subtle path. He created his final work, an homage to the waters not yet broken by the chaos of the modern world. It was a thing of gentle beauty, truly his masterpiece, a work in which one might be lost for a day or more. He produced it to remind the world of subtle beauty and to force them to appreciate it, for it held a secret that made itself known only to those who attempted to force their presence upon it in the manner of the loud. A revelation would meet those people, a revelation on the power of the subtle that for many would be more than their noisy minds could comprehend.
This is the magic of Unbroken Waters, that it permits us to appreciate it only on its own terms. It will not be analyzed and it will not be duplicated, and those who make such attempts will always pay for their loudness. It needs no protector, because it has an existence beyond the material that comprises it. It is transcendence, it is art, it is heaven, it is nature, it is time. I will stay here as long as they permit me and I will beg to stay after, not to stop thieves and saboteurs – they will stop themselves – but to be in its presence for as long as it permits me. I will stand here quietly, and listen for its whispers, and if I am blessed it will speak to me again.