Onomasticon Of Void.part one

 Below is the prologue and the first five sonnets of an epic titled The Onomasticon of the Void, which follows a polymath-sorcerer named Xylophonus through a crumbling, hyper-articulated reality.

The Onomasticon of the Void

An Epic Cycle in 100 Sonnets

Sonnet I: The Ingress of Xylophonus

The tintinnabulating bells of dawnDispelled the crepuscule from marble halls,Where Xylophonus, pale and travel-drawn,Surveyed the glyphs upon the ziggurat walls.His mind, a thaumaturgic reliquary,Held polysyllabic enchantments tight;No sesquipedalian vagaryEscaped the lumen of his inner light.He sought the Arch-Logician’s hidden cell,A place of circumlocutory gloom,To break the silent, unpronounceable spellThat threatened every syllable with doom.With stertorous breath and grandiloquent pace,He stepped into the vacuum of that space.

Sonnet II: The Lexical Desiccator

The atmosphere was exsiccated, dry,As if the very air had lost its noun;A nullity beneath a verb-less sky,Where every adjective was weighted down.The Desiccator sat upon a throneOf calcined lexicons and burnt-out prose,A monarch of the monotone, alone,Who watched the end of every metaphoric rose."Why bringest thou thy magniloquence here?"The phantom hissed in sibilant disdain."Thy periphrastic pride and learned gearShall soon be liquidated in my reign."But Xylophonus, with a flocculent scowl,Prepared to launch a phonological howl.

Sonnet III: The Clash of Glossaries

A stratagem of syntax then began,A coruscating storm of tropes and rhymes;The wizard’s speech, a baroque caravan,Traversed the ruins of forgotten times.He cast an epizeuxis like a stone,Then followed with an anacoluthon,Till every syllable and every toneShone brighter than the chariot of the sun.The Desiccator tried to simplify,To reduce the world to monosyllabic dust,But Xylophonus gave a clarion cry,Restoring to the metal its golden rust.The air grew thick with pleonastic fog,As heavy as a swamp or peat-filled bog.

Sonnet IV: The Labyrinth of Litotes

They plunged into a maze of under-thought,Where every truth was framed in double-negatives;A place where meaning was but rarely caught,And ghosts were merely non-existent relatives."It is not un-impossible," he said,His voice a murmur of meiosis deep,While overhead the sky turned non-un-red,And shadows woke from their non-restless sleep.This litotes was a treacherous terrain,A landscape of the "not-entirely-wrong,"Where certainty was washed away by rain,And silence was the burden of the song.Yet Xylophonus, with ebullient grace,Found the non-hidden path through that dark place.

Sonnet V: The Apotheosis of the Adverb

By now the world was hyper-real and strange,Each action modified by endless flow;He did not simply move; he did arrangeHis limbs melodiously, fast, and slow.The onomatopoeic thrum of wings,The synecdoche of a part for whole,Revived the spirits of all dormant thingsAnd sparked the fire within his weary soul."Oh, mellifluous world!" the sorcerer cried,"Thy circumambient glory is restored!"The Desiccator, stripped of all his pride,Fell silent, for he could not find a word.The epic starts where silence meets the sound,In volumes where the lost verb can be found.