The stone, smooth. To look at. To touch. As though washed over by a thousand torrents, which it had been. Polished as though it had passed a thousand sculpting hands. In actuality though just one sculptor had lain hands upon the stone. A pearl, the likes of which had heretofore been rarely seen but oft spoken of. Even now the sculptor toiled away beside it, though the thing was discarded to his mind.
Well. He had been a sculptor once. In a sense he still was but what he shaped in this younger age had changed. As had how he shaped his new object and the tools he employed in its crafting.
He bristled as an accidental glance aside brought the smooth pearl to fresh attention. That response by now as automatic as it was cultivated. The stony pearl, that had been the object of eons of his attention, irritated him now. Once though it had been both his literal soul and the perfected fruits of its labour.
But in the age that followed his heart and mind became clear upon the fact that the shape of his soul was incongruous to the whole. An inert piece perfected far beyond its complementary parts. But there was no fashioning a like heart or mind, for such things were by-products only. No the only hope was to develop them in the process of crafting as he knew.
So he fostered imperfect impulses within himself now, so as to craft a lesser soul-form and in the doing craft a sharper heart and mind of a more approximate measure. And these impulses by design, namely: a reasonable impatience at the glacial ages that his craft took; a resentment and anger at the punitive nature of the way of things to his early attainment of a perfect form; a pre-emptive exiles, self-imposed and borne of feeling deserted by his kind; and an entitlement that such a master sculptor as he should ever be denied any fruits, even those not yet laboured towards.
He looked back now to his new incomplete soul-form: as yet a jagged dull knife, not reflective of the epochs spent upon it. They would not have his soul. Not the old or new. And he would have his bettered heart and mind one way or another.
In the throes of all his nurtured impure impulses, the once-sculptor angrily took into his hand the perfect smooth pearl. And as though it were a whetstone, he sharpened his new soul-form upon the old.
abdulj. 