Axiomata
A Codex of Becoming
The gentlest lie is the one that holds you from your own becoming.
They called you glass, so you would never meet the hammer. But something in you has always known that you were not made to be preserved. You were made to be struck. Metal learns its nature in fire. So do you. This is the codex of that fire.
Dedicated to my mother, Eleni, who taught me you can hold your shape while the fire still burns.
Mneme
You wake beneath rubble. Stone meant to crush you is shelter now. Dust coats your tongue. Your hands don't know whether to dig or claw up.
You stayed – pressed your spine against the stone and let the darkness learn your shape. Years passed before you knew they were years. You cradle your wounds like relics, afraid that if you looked away, they would heal without you. Then, through a crack in the masonry, a single star. Then another. Soon, the whole sky follows, patient as what refuses to be undone. Something in you answers. Your hands move before thought. Your fingers find the edge of the wound, close around it, and refuse to let go.
Harmonia
An arch is a conspiracy of falling stones. Each one leans towards ruin – and in leaning, holds the others up.
You emerged from the rubble alone. You were not meant to stay that way. But leaning felt like falling, and you had already fallen once. So you taught yourself to stand alone – spine true, surfaces smooth, nothing for another stone to catch. Now you lean. For one breath, there's only falling. Then the other stone catches you – and you catch it. What should have fallen becomes passage.
Arete
You arrive unfinished – uncast bronze, unbent wood, a string that has never known tension.
Bronze stays cold until fire finds it. Wood stays straight until the string draws its curve. You have feared the heat, resisted the bend. But metal that never melts never knows its edge. The bow that stays straight sends no arrow. The string that never trembles has no voice. The hammer falls. The string tightens. You do not break – you sing. The edge was always in the ore. The flight was always in the wood. You were always the voice, waiting for a fire you couldn't refuse.
Telos
The shape waits inside the stone. You are what the marble hides – born an answer, waiting for the chisel brave enough to cut everything else away.
You arrive as raw marble, every form sleeping in your veins. The chisel terrifies you: each strike is irrevocable, each cut the death of some self you might have become. The first strike is always loss. A wound that will not close. Chips fall. Dust blooms on your tongue. The smooth surface is gone. But deep in the pale wound, a line appears – one that was always there. Strike again. Line becomes limb, limb becomes stance, stance becomes gaze. You stop. The gaze finds yours. You cut away the stone to find what was standing there all along – waiting, as you were, to meet you.
Metanoia
My iron was not my stain.
It was the blade
that cut my pattern free.
My grit was not my grief.
It was the pearl
the wound became.
My lean was not my fall.
It was the bridge
two falling stones became.
My string was not my noose.
It was the tension
that shot the arrow true.
My stone was not my tomb.
It was the arch–
and I, the weight that held.
The last grain falls
as simply as the first.
The glass stands whole.
What I carried carries on.
Epilogue
You have reached the end of this codex – the edge of this map, where the ink gives way to open water.
These axioms speak in metal and scar, in arch and ocean.
They were shaped by Greek stone and a mother's endurance, forged in a fire not everyone survives. They offer one angle of seeing. Not the only one.
If you walked these pages honestly, they asked something of you: to see your own story without flinching, to hold still while the truth did its work. That seeing has a cost.
But understand this: no one owes this book their pain. These principles assume you have ground to stand on, space to choose, margin to begin again. Where your body, your history, or the world itself holds you pinned, answer first to that weight – not to any ideal on a page.
The measure of these pages is simple: do they leave you more solid at the foundation, more able to bear your load without breaking yourself or those you hold?
If so, use them. Argue with them. Let them become tools in your hands.
If some never fit, trust that instinct. Not every blade belongs to every hand. And if you outgrow this framework entirely, set it down the way you set down a tool that has finished its work: with gratitude, not guilt.
These pages have succeeded if they helped you stand more truly in your own life. They have failed if they became another prison. The moment this codex feels less like a doorway and more like a locked room, do not make peace with the walls. Break them.
Beyond these pages waits the reality this ink can only point towards. The great unfinished arch. The stone only you can set.
The rest is not written. It is built.
— Vitali Liouti