Those Who Teach

The Silborns arrived on the 31st of February, 5,078."Earthly years," they said.I knew immediately that couldn't be true-February doesn't have 31 days.When I corrected them, their response came as a song: "We believe you've been asleep for millennia, but based on what you just told us, perhaps longer... We're struggling to grasp your concept of time."It was oddly comforting that such an advanced species had doubts about something as fundamental as time.After all, I was just waking from the slumber that had saved me from The Disintegration.Time felt strange to me too.To wake me, the Silborns sang to me softly, their voices weaving a melody that felt both familiar and strange, a language best described as vibrations suspended between notes.At first, I hovered in that liminal space between waking and dreaming, the boundary between reality and illusion blurred by their song.But as the notes curled through the cave, so did my understanding of who they were, their existence in the spaces between the signs, coming and going from sense and nonsense.T