Prologue
“So begins the story of the cosmic hunt. Of how we tried to kill the beast and stop the sun from dying out, and of how we learned that those who wish to make light must accept burning things up.”
In all things I felt the passion for power and change, the drama of endless creation through destruction, a theatre of birth and renewal, of love and sacrifice, of death in the name of the perpetuation of life. I came to think of myself, not as a wind of atoms, chaotically whispering through time, but as an almost insignificant part of that majestic process we call existence. I experienced a sense of grief followed by overwhelming joy and felt reconciled with mortality knowing that whatever I am would survive enshrined in a better shape, a new body with a greater purpose, and that my little worth, trivial under the vastness of the sky, would somehow be preserved in the heritage of gods and men. In a real way, the sadness, sorrow and longing of life, the cycle of suffering that oppresses us all, was lifted from me and, where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the vast and glorious triumph of life.
I said yes. We said yes. Yes to life. Yes to a return to the moment of beginning and the dream of one day being as Gods. Yes to the vote of all life to remain living by dying.
This is the story of that vote. Of that choice, to endure and conquer time through the merits of death and the voices of all who live and have lived. And it begins in a simple house where three lived, sharing their memories and dreams. The father was the first to die. Then the mother. Their deaths were necessary. And the baby’s. But not yet. She should live. She had to, for a hundred years this baby should live. And while she remained safe in her palace above the clouds all would be good with the world.
The bloom of the winter rose grew especially bright that year and died as soon as its petals stared at the night sky. Soon after, snow started to fall and the winds of tempest whistled against the crowns of trees and the summits of great mountains. Their whispers spoke of the arrival of a hunter. He had come for her. He was driven by the great cosmic vote for another cycle before the end. One more instance of savage creation. Life through death. The hunter approached the little house and the beasts howled to the night and when he came inside the man fought and the woman ran.
Holding their baby in her arms and with a dream before her, she ran.
The forest surrounding the cabin was a maze, black and primal, untouched and unknown. It spoke in the tongues of the earth and said: I promise a return to the moment of beginning. In her agony she could not hear it. A gulf beat her to her knees, a prickling wind that took her, seized her to the earth. The snow at her feet was blown away and shards of ice levitated, shy of the ground and all around her. It stirred the creatures in the forest and a nearby wolf who, shrouded by its white mantle, watched from a hill, eyes on her and the baby in her arms. They looked at each other, stared into each other, the woman and the beast, and there was understanding and fear and all the feelings that can harm you and all that can set you at ease.
The wolf would not intervene.
This was man’s hunt on man, an untouchable rite, old as the stars and of such power nature could but witness and wait. Kneeling, the woman pressed close the gentle body of her child. Her gaze sharpened to a blend of anguish and resolve. Vibrant teary eyes settled between the gnarled forms of trees, like upturned roots, where a shadow cast the hunter’s sullen form. There, a man like winter, clad for silence and with clutches of steel, watched. He waited for the mother to understand that there was no other way. It was time. Time and the collective choices of a trillion trillion souls wanting to endure and doing so through her. She clung to hope even as the forest insisted with its subtle roar that death has small beginnings.
Her baby smiled from between thin shivering arms and it was enough for her to find respite and peace. Resigned to the great beauty and terror of life she returned the gesture. She would have given everything for her, the life therein and the world’s. She would break it all just for a small chance of seeing it happen, the birth and growth and joy of a full life lived. She would have, but the man was here and time grew thin. He stood over her, hands like claws, reaching, hoping, dreaming of the wondrous things that could be because of this sacrifice. There was great beauty in the mother’s resignation. A second wind blew between them, this one from the hollows of the mountain and the forest. It lifted the snow and made the branches crack. It drew the petals of the winter rose with which she had adorned her hair into the dark sky above. It whistled a soft song with a tender voice. The wind was a tune of loss and joy, of feeling and drowned emotion. With it the hunter’s intent weakened. Robbed of that precious indifference he had designed in careful memetic voyages for this moment alone, he waited. Human eyes, their shimmer dimming from behind a mask of peaceful terror, bent with shared agony. All life, all existence, relied on this. Still there was a drop of it that was wrong and for it he waited.
She saw him blink. She heard him breathe. He was alive.
He took another step, this one away from her, hands falling under the capes, like veils of white. There were only the noises of the world around them and the cold. A shivering cold that, given enough time, would dim the stars.
Still her baby laughed and smiled and she thought her beauty had given them mercy. Hope. Looking up, all she could see was the hunter’s mask, looming over them; a Persona of all things grim. It was a gaunt metallic thing, demonic and calm, as if all forms of terror, fear and anguish, all feelings of hate, wrath and powerlessness, all faces of one who stares at death under defeat, torture, famine, and time, had grown serene after the storm.
“My love,” the mother whispered looking at her baby. “My everything.”
Having the choice to keep running, to escape and perhaps to live, she chose instead to look at her one last time in the comfort of peace. “Time,” she pleaded, staring at the earthly-coloured eyes of her child. “Give us time.”
The mask turned darker still as the man retreated, the eyes behind it void but for a single teary bead. He nodded and remained still, all sins forgiven.
Time is the ever-recurring atlas of dreams. I give you time.
His voice, deep and warm, brushed against the part of her that wanted to believe. She pressed her baby close with a quiet smile, whispering the words of her failing heart. A single tear rolled down her cheek, turning solid and cold near her lips. She kissed the baby girl with a final farewell and looked at the man.
“Sara,” she said with a fierce mother’s gaze, the word steaming out of her like a ghost. “Her name is–”
*
“Sara, the Thirty-fourth incarnation of God!” the Archbishop Speaker of the Imperium screamed to a crowd, a cheerful audience of hundreds of thousands who stood under the searing light of a warm summer day. When the man raised the baby for all to see the people roared in elation, their eyes bent with mournful happiness, as if they wanted to cry and scream and laugh all at once. Knights knelt swearing allegiance, kings and emperors bowed, and the people prayed, their hands and their hopes united at last with a single echoing soliloquy.
“May she live a hundred years!”
Chapter 1 – God
The body is but one of the things we inhabit, an object in our field of thought. Like we move the world we move this vessel and through the power of the engine we call ourselves. It is distinct against the dark of ignorance and yet entwined into it to cohesion by the soul.
As written in the Seed of Foundation–
Phase 3, Chapter (300,036); On Our Distinct Origin
3400 AT
A starlit sky welcomed God in her cradle for a first night in the royal palace of Araboth. Already her Knights of Sil waited outside donning their Armoria under grey ruanas, holding their Bastions in hand. It was their duty and honour to guard her now and to the moment of her parting. They had seen her predecessor and guarded her till her hundredth year and cried with joy at her parting with the eagerness to see her reborn, remade in form and soul, as if time had begun all over again.
“Memory is past,” each man had sworn, “Thought is present,” they had whispered in the great halls of churches and temples, of Forests and deserts, “Dream is future,” they had spoken with a brave heart and the empathy of their kind. “I learn of the past in order to love truly, I love in the present in order to protect the living, I protect the living in order to safeguard the future. Even in death I am as God intended.”
“Thought without Memory is instinct,” one of them said aloud.
“Thought without Dream is Obedience,” the rest responded.
But even as her holy knights stood guard beyond the closed doors to her quarters, one next to the other, their weapons unhooked, they could not notice the visitor when he came in to stare at the restless baby in the cradle. Sara’s eyes fixed on him as if to something entirely new. It was a White Wolf and it had come with the wind. The beast looked down at the baby but it was without hunger. Its eyes blinked, satisfied, and when the girl extended her hand it pressed its forehead onto her palm.
She smiled and laughed.
Sara would never recall the tender warmth that passed through her, like a current, when she touched the White Wolf, but the world remembers what we cannot and truth can wait forever. A thin white ring was drawn in her palm, like a most peculiar birthmark, and a beat, the kind that makes a world tremble, moved through the cosmos. It was a subtle wind, a magnificent touch of consciousness and desire. Of nature and its wisdom. Of life and death.
No one could sense it, for there was none but her who had awakened, yet the world started to change and the galaxy of Solaria would once again whisper, like the forest and the earth, I promise a return to the moment of beginning.
With that the White Wolf vanished, as silently as it had come, and so Sara closed her eyes and slept her first night as the Thirty-fourth incarnation of God.
*
Beyond, in the sands of a world usurped by the dying light of elder stars, an ember burned to existence and a small glass seed appeared, a heart beating in its interior and roots of crystal taking conquest of the earth.