“But you have the one,” Dark Belili said. She stood next to the old man with cold eyes. She reached up and stroked his hair. “But so do we.”
Dark Belili approached Patrick and Sarah. “We are seeking the same point in space and time. For different reasons. You could impede us. But the work we do…is good. The work we do is just. We seek to hasten what existence has already begun. We seek to hasten the death that is part of nature. You seek to do the opposite. You seek to prolong and make eternal the suffering of life. But…life was never meant to last forever. God wanted us to have a moment of breath…before we drown out of existence.”
“We have both sought the key. We sought the one…this one.” She pointed to Patrick again. He is the one to lead us to the Threshold. He is the one to save both our causes. There can only ever really be just the one isn’t that right?” Dark Belili asked Sarah.
Belili then turned to the old man with the cold eyes. He reached back and he took one of the large blades from Catalina.
“We have discovered…not this time,” Dark Belili said.
The old man moved with shocking speed. He moved so fast that it amazed Sarah. The man took the blade and he drove it up under Patrick’s jaw. It was done with force and precision. The knife was instantly driven up from Patrick’s jaw into his brain.
Patrick’s body shook and trembled. His eyes were wide as his body twitched
Sarah screamed and reached for Patrick. In an instant the insect creatures were upon her. They pulled her back. Sarah struggled to fight them away as the man with the cold eyes twisted his blade under Patrick’s jaw. This time he stared at Sarah as he did this.
When Patrick’s body stopped convulsing the old man pulled the blade from under Patrick’s skull. He held Patrick up by his shirt and he stared into Patrick’s dead eyes for a few moments. Sarah saw the old man smile. The old man then flung Patrick’s body with all his force into the flames of the bonfire.
Sarah was in shock but this did not stop the tears from flowing. He was gone. Just like that Patrick was gone. He was being consumed in flames.
Sarah saw tears fall from Dark Belili’s eyes also. She wiped them away and approached Sarah. She smiled at Sarah though she cried.
“We weep the same tears,” Dark Belili told Sarah. “We weep them for different reasons. You cry at the loss. I cry at the beauty. I cry at the beauty of his death. His beautiful mind is now gone. Or part of it.”
“There was always only meant to be just one right, Sarah? Or was there? Did you ever wonder if perhaps they were wrong?” Belili asked. She looked at the old man with the cold eyes. “That maybe those in your awful city of goodness were wrong?”
As Sarah watched the flames with her love in them it was almost easy to forget the greater horror of this moment. They had killed Patrick because they did not need him. These people sought the Threshold, but they did not need Patrick’s mind to lead them there.
Sarah stared at the old man who had killed Patrick. She knew…somehow…this man had that mind. This old man had a mind that was the same as Patrick’s. He was not just Patrick from a different Verse. He shared the same mind as the Patrick in the flames. This evil man had the same mind as the boy she had loved. He had the exact same mind as the boy who had just perished.
Now they didn’t need the Patrick that the people of the Sea of Glass had worked so hard to find. They had him. Sarah didn’t understand how this had happened but she knew it to be true.
Someway, somehow this man was Patrick. It was his mind. It was his mind but his mind filled with darkness. In his mind was the path to the Threshold. The Patrick she loved was starting to glimpse it. The monster who had killed him knew the way. Because of this they did not need this other version of Patrick. They had their perfect being.
Sarah felt despair wash over her. She realized they had lost. All was lost.
Suddenly there was another crack in the reality around them. A new tunnel appeared. What new horror is this? Sarah wondered.
A moment later Joshua stepped onto the beach.
The next few moments happened very fast. Joshua ran towards the creatures holding Sarah. He threw his large body at them and hit them full force. Their grip on Sarah loosened and then Sarah was free. Joshua had always been strong. He grabbed Sarah and threw her towards the crack he had created. Through the crack was freedom.
“Go,” Joshua said. Sarah was about to fall back to Verse Zero. As she began to do this she noted something. It terrified her most of all. The old man with the mind of Patrick was not surprised by any of what was occurring. He seemed to know all this was going to happen.
He simply observed and smiled.
Sarah let herself go. She let herself fall back through the crack in reality that Joshua had created. As she did so she saw the insect like creatures descend upon Joshua. Joshua looked to her as they cut into him. He looked at her with sad eyes.
He had done this to save her. He sacrificed himself to give her this one moment to fall backwards into who she was.
A moment later Sarah was staring at the great wall of infinity. She had returned to the world of the Sea of Glass. She had returned to her adopted home outside of space and time. Tears were pouring from her eyes. She knew that behind her in that Verse the dark ones were killing who she had been.
She knew in that Verse she had left behind the one she loved. She had lost Patrick. He had been the hero they had sought for generations. Now he was no more.
With this understanding Sarah knew the hope for the Multiverse was now lost.
***
The Philosophical Principles of Death. The Scripture of Farinata Uaegli Abertio.
Gospel 000013
We quantify much of who we are through the reciprocal relationships of objects to us.
I stare at the clock. I watch as the seconds tick away. I watch as those seconds become minutes. An hour of my life has passed. How many hours of my life have I lived? How many minutes? How many hours of my life remain. I stare at the clock and I feel the weight of time upon me.
But it is nothing. It is just a clock. It does not feel my fear as the moments tick away bringing me closer to death. It has no understanding. A clock has no true concept of the present. Or the past. Or the future.
However, we let that clock define much of our existence. We stare at it and we fight time.
How much time from the beginning to the end of me. Was it ever real? Was there a time before me? Will there be a time after? Did I dream who I am?
I stare at the clock and it mocks me. Because I realize it is nothing.
I must become as fearless as the clock which counts down to the end of my life. I must become fearless of time.
The chosen people of God must move beyond the barriers of time…
Verse Sixteen: The City in the Dark
Rahim had not slept for several days. He had lost track of how many. He had been awake at least a week. Possibly longer. He was living on a diet composed purely of his tea. Before he had taken the tea to push himself further. Now he was taking massive quantities to keep himself going. The methamphetamine was the only thing that was sustaining him.
He was somewhat aware that outside his chamber was chaos. There were rumors of panic amongst the council of Adar. Some unexpected calamity had occurred and the very endeavor Verse Zero had been created for might be in jeopardy. However, Rahim was distant from this information. His mind was locked on to one problem and only one problem. His mind was locked on finding a unique derivative. He knew it existed. He just needed to find it.
In his room in the Hall of the Scholars he was staring at the ceiling. He had been laying on his back staring at the ceiling for several hours now. However, in truth he was not staring at the ceiling. He was staring into his mind. He was walking down a specific line of logic. He knew the answers he sought lay within the foundations of the creation of Verse Zero and the Sea of Glass.
As he stared at the ceiling a tangent began to appear. In the dancing lights dripping u
pwards from the Prism he began to see a narrative unfold. A sequence of events began to fall into place in his mind. It was the history of Verse Zero. However, it was a different history. It was an alternate path the city had taken. It was a derivative of the path he had read about in the Chronicles of Verse Zero.
Suddenly Rahim began to see it clearly. He began to see what he had been looking so long for. It started forming in his mind’s eye. He sat up. He was still staring into his thoughts.
He began to write very quickly in his Kirjal script. He needed to write as each thought occurred to him.
Rahim began his new chronicle.
The Chronicles of the Sea of Ice – the History of Null Verse
Long ago there was a great civilization that existed. It reached the pinnacle of achievement. It was a society of thinkers and scholars. It was a society of artists and scientists. All worked together to move society forward. There was no hunger and no poverty. There was no prejudice and there was no war.
This civilization had many great cities. These cities existed on land. They existed in the sky. Some of these cities existed deep under the ocean and drew energy from thermal vents that released heat from the planet’s core.
This civilization lived for the advancement of knowledge. All strived towards the one goal of expanding the wisdom of society.
This place, this diamond world, grew more advanced than worlds in 99.999 percent of all the other Universes in existence. In this great world reality was only limited by what could be imagined.
Then something occurred. It was something unforeseen. It was something only a few would have ever predicted. A crack in the structure of the Multiverse appeared in this universe. It was a crack from the great unraveling. The Multiverse was beginning to suffer from a cancer of undoing. As this cancer spread the crack that appeared in this Universe sent shockwaves through the Verse. Eventually this shockwave reached the solar system where this world of scholars resided.
The sun of the solar system took the brunt of the impact. The world was at such an angle that it was not completely impacted by this wave of undoing. However, the star, the sun of the world was destroyed. The planet missed complete and utter destruction, but it was sent hurtling through the cosmos. It was a rouge planet now. It was a planet flying through the darkness of space orbiting no star.
Within hours a mass level extinction occurred. Billions died in minutes, and within hours almost no life existed on the planet at all.
The planet froze and everything died. Everything died on the surface that is. Deep beneath the thick layer of ice that had once been an ocean, heat from the planet’s molten core still kept some of the deepest depths of the ocean liquid. In this dark, almost frozen world, one city still existed. It still had power.
In this underwater city cut off from light, food resources were drained within weeks. Then this place that was once a city of scholars turned into a city of cannibals. Under the frozen ocean these once wise men hunted and killed each other. The strongest took hold. They were geniuses spurned on by the all-important desire to survive at all costs. Genius and death create cruelty. The geniuses of this city in the dark slipped into madness and the madness became sadism.
Of these geniuses one emerged. He was wise above all others. He had once been a great scientist. His name was Farinata Uaegli Abertio. Those in power took a liking to him because there was something in his eyes that spoke of a world beyond. In his eyes was the genesis of undreamt possibilities. Farinata saw the chaos and the insanity around him. He saw a truth in the nature of the human condition.
He locked himself in a room for weeks. He ingested large amounts of an industrial waste product known as Chromistical Lead. This became the drug of choice to help the powerful in this dark place escape the reality of misery and death that was now their existence. Farinata starved himself for fifty days in his dark room ingesting only Chromistical. When he emerged he had with him something special. He had with him a scripture.
He told those in power that he had communed with God in the darkness. He had talked with the one true God. He was not a God of creation but a God of death. He told those in power that they just needed to look to their city of madness to see the true nature of things.
He told them that they had been blessed. They were the ones shown the truth in a multiverse of the uninitiated. They were the ones who were unique among all the Verses.
In his weeks locked away in seclusion Farinata had formed a religious doctrine. When the insane and broken masses heard his scripture it took hold of the people of this lost society. The desperate give way to faith the easiest. In the darkness it becomes the only light. It becomes the only goal. It is the only thing to focus on and to move forward with.
Hope given to the hopeless is a powerful thing. For those who live in despair purpose is profound. A mission to the lost can be everything. It is worth the price of an already withered soul.
One could wonder if perhaps this is why the genius that was Farinata created his religion. Perhaps he knew it would be a tool and vehicle to move his world forward past this darkness of extinction. Perhaps he consciously created a religious framework as a means to try to save his society. Perhaps he did it subconsciously. Perhaps he believed every word he wrote was given to him by God. It is hard to know what pushes people most in times of darkness. Are they pushed most by wisdom or desperation? However, one thing is clear. The desire to kill can push one beyond the desire to lay down and die.
In many ways the religious doctrine Farinata created was an equation. It used in it the components of all the resources currently available to a society, a people on the verge of utter extinction. If one was to step away from the callousness of Farinata’s writings they would realize in truth that it was quite a practical course of action for the situation. However, when a person who did not understand this time or this world saw the framework of it all they would have been revolted by the horror of those very same details.
Farinata structured the unfolding of his gospel numerically. Broken down the numeric pattern of his scripture was also the result of an equation. In a different Verse scholars would notice it was a pattern of numbers that had been discovered by a man named Leonardo Pisano Bigollo whose number sequence was known as the Fibonacci Sequence. The Fibonacci Sequence has many unique properties. One of those properties is it reflects the structure of a spiral. Farinata used the sequence in reverse to number his scriptures. If it was mapped out it would have reflected numerically the downward movement of a spiral.
Farinata told the people of the things he had learned in the dark. The darkness was pure he told them. That is why they had been chosen. They were selected by God to understand the dark. God had first come into a universe of darkness and created light. In truth though time and the universe was a circle. The natural state was eventually to be returned to darkness. The people of the city in the dark where the blessed and chosen people to help hasten the death of creation.
Commandments were put into place. The ritual hunting and eating of the weak was to continue. However, the weak were sacred. They could only be harvested during certain periods and in certain numbers. It was the duty of the weak to sacrifice themselves to the strong.
A cast system was created. In the streets of the city the weak lived and from the temples high above the strong would come down and hunt them. Some of the weak were to farm. These were the most sacred in society. They could not be hunted. Others were to understand their place was to work for the strong until the strong blessed them with selecting them as sustenance.
A careful pattern of rationing the harvesting of the living was devised. If this pattern was analyzed closely it would be understood that it was a table based on birth rates that could feed the society for one thousand years.
However, Farinata said, all this was just a step. It was a step to move the chosen people of God closer to their next great step. In the darkness righteous evil’s mission became to erase all light. The purpose was to erase the life that w
as taken from them. The people of this City in the Dark were chosen first to witness the end of all there is so they could take this truth and spread it more quickly through creation as it died.
In this society of cannibals, that had once been a society of scholars, it was determined that murder was the ultimate virtue. To murder, to stop a life, was to complete the will of what God had deemed. Therefore, the greatest act that could be achieved, the act that the people of the dark built their society to work towards, was to end all life. They sought to hasten the destruction of the universe.
Generations passed. They passed using the foundation built by the scripture of Farinata Uaegli Abertio.
In the cast system there were a select few who understood the roles of probability in the foundations of the universe. They understood that circumstance and action could serve as a map. They began to trace the course of what ifs. They began to understand the importance of traveling to these different places in probability and in obtaining things to aid their cause.
Eventually one amongst them was found to have the ability to physically move into other Verses. He was a boy named Johannes Fischer who could fold points between different Verses and step through them. He was the first Prekoraciti in Null Verse. He was sent into the Multiverse to collect others. The feat tore the boy’s mind in half in a matter of years but the dark society had what it needed. The gathering of Prekoraciti and prodigies had begun in the city in the dark.
The people of Null Verse in this manner worked towards their goal to find the one who they knew would exist as a unique singularity. They sought the one who could lead them to that one point in space and time where the ultimate death was born and spreading. They sought the one who could reach the Threshold of Degradative Concurrence.
In that place where all things met they knew they could hasten the speed of death. The one who could lead them there would be their messiah. He would be the one that their entire society and existence worked to find. He would be cold and evil. He would have the brilliant mind of the perfect killer.
Prisons of Stolen Dreams Page 24