The Rainbow Bridge and the Shadow of the Serpent: The Rainbow Bridge and the Shadow of the Serpent

by Sergio Pereira

  To partially understand her voyage, it must be stated that in sidereal space, or any dimension, “above” or “below” are very relative, if not inexistent. Thus, going up or down only refers to some planetary or solar surface. The course taken by the Tyrant Fairy Queen was a long descent and can only be described in imprecise words. After all, they are almost the same words already transformed into myths that human beings, in the most diverse worlds and cultures, always used in their reports, intuitively or inspired by dreams.

  In the archaic period of Greek mythology, Hades was the son of Cronos and Rhea, brother of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia. After the victory of Zeus and his siblings over the generation of their parents, it fell to Hades, in the division of the world, to control the underworld and the dead. His kingdom bore his name, Hades. At the entrance there was a monumental gate guarded by a three-headed monstrous dog with a serpent’s tail, named Cerebrus. In the myths, very few heroes penetrated that kingdom and came out alive. The demi-god Hercules was one of the few. The poet and musician Orpheus, son of the god Apollo and the muse Calliope, was another who, when alive, managed to pass through the gates of hell and return. In the later versions of Greek mythology, the details of Hades, such as the Elysian Fields destined for good souls, of the saints and heroes, are even richer.

  In Nordic, Aztec, Mayan mythologies and in all religions, the idea of metaphysical worlds, of justice and heavens and hells are always present, in concrete or aleatory form.

  In the Kingdom of the Blue Earth, on June 1st, 1265, the beautiful city of Florence witnessed the birth of the greatest of the Italian poets: Dante Alighieri. Besides being a poet, he was a writer and politician. The work of genius “The Divine Comedy” was his, in which he himself made the crossing into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, all described in detail through unimaginable, brilliant allegories.

  In “The Divine Comedy”, Hell comprises Nine Circles, Three Valleys and Four Spheres, where each condemned soul is a prisoner, inhabiting the level proportionate to their sins. The deeper the level, the more distant the poor spirit is from God. Dante’s Inferno follows the Judeo-Christian tradition, according to which hell was created after the fall of Lucifer, for having challenged God.

  In this fantastic, inspired work, Dante is led on his voyage in Hell by the Roman poet Virgil. The gateway has no padlocks, locks, doors or monstrous creatures; however, a great arch bears the following warning:

  “Abandon hope all you who enter here, once inside you must abandon all hope of seeing heaven again, for one cannot return from there. The soul only has free will while it is alive, therefore, while alive, it decides on heaven or hell. After death, it loses the ability to reason and make decisions.”

  Although descriptions of the underworld can diverge in form or in details between religions, mythologies and literature, in content and in relation to the justice between good and evil, they nearly always have an essence in common.

  The voyage undertaken by the Fairy Queen of the Oppressive Forces was through paths between dimensions and also through a long, indescribable void where nothing, not even the vacuum existed. Since not even time takes place on this route, the time spent on the journey cannot be measured.

  As already mentioned in this story, there is no “above” or “below” in the universe. However, the sensation that the Fairy Queen had was that she was going down constantly until she reached the Portal of the Sub-Kingdom of the Infernal Darkness. This portal never had the same configuration or position.

  Before the eyes of the Tyrant Fairy Queen, a gigantic, terrifying ocean was floating in the void between two dark universes. The entire ocean was spinning, as if its waters were about to disappear into a constellation-devouring black hole. In the centre of the whirlpool, dividing the angry waters, two mountains higher even than the peak of Everest stood firm and solid. The ocean waters did not penetrate these formidable barriers and crashed against the hard rock in fury. Between the two mountains, a Roman arch about half the size of the mountains was guarded by two equally imposing sphinxes. At the top of the arch, huge letters bore a message that altered according to the language of whoever entered. The message was similar to that written in the “Divine Comedy”. However, there was no mention of eternal penances, because they don’t really exist.

  The Tyrant Fairy Queen crossed the Portal. The agonising cries and grinding of teeth were enough to frighten any warrior. In a journey more or less similar to that of Dante, she went though valleys and crossed thresholds meant for all types of condemned spirits. Thieves, suicides, murderers, paedophiles, corrupt genocidal beings, tyrants, slanderers, and every type of deviator from the divine light were crammed together in horde after horde.

  The torments that she witnessed once more were almost indescribable. But she remained completely unshaken and felt not one iota of compassion. She knew that this was not the only underworld, but it was one of the worst because of the suffering there. And she always relished the cruel fate reserved for many eras for perverse souls.

  She crossed mountains of fire and ice. She went through putrefied swamps, in which worms swallowed condemned spirits whole, without eating them. After much progress she arrived at an immense hall. Similar in size and form to the theatre constructed from mist in the forest for the performance of the Danse Macabre, it had walls made from faecal bricks in a permanent state of decomposition. The heat generated by the fermentation of the walls was scorching, though it was still more pleasant than that outside. She was once again welcomed by the Infernal Tyrants. They seemed gigantic even to her. Their faces were consumed by millennia of evil. They were seated on thrones where bones and tortured souls were mixed together. A rotten stench burned the nostrils. The weight of torments inhaled the air.

  Then the Fairy Queen blasphemed against creation. Once more she gained the sympathy of the almost indescribable entities that tyrannised the condemned, without being fully aware that deep down they too were enslaved by themselves.

  While trying to decide whether to a listen to her or not, the Infernal Tyrants, with their perverted science and magic, put giant trolls to work, along with a species of perfidious beings unknown to us. They, always at the almost eternal service of evil, began to collect every type of pernicious ectoplasm exhaled by the punished souls.

  This, hatred, depression, jealousy, envy, desperation, anger, despair, hurt, egoism, sadness and much pain were manipulated uninterruptedly for seven days to feed a giant serpent. This was its main source of food because the flesh, musculature and skin of its body were constructed not of living material, but of the worst types of condensed sentiments.

  With a black back and totally white belly, it filled any living being with terror. Its mouth and eyes were red and its scales could tear even the most solid steel. Its prominent white fangs would perforate any armour or even the walls of an anti-nuclear shelter. Swords, bullets or fire did not affect it because, since it was built of sentiments, no weapon known on Earth, even a nuclear bomb, could wound it.

  However, its greatest power lay not in its dimensions, strength or almost total invulnerability, but in its digestive system. The gastric juices that ran into its long stomach and flowed to its intestines, like everything else about the snake, were not physical but a malevolent psychic energy in sticky, liquid form. In contact with any mind, they corroded every good memory. Poor swallowed victim: they would have their will to live and own conscience digested in the serpent’s stomach. Thus, when a poor eaten soul went from the snake`s entrails to be expelled from the anus, it was transformed into a form of ovoid.

  But the torture did not end in the long-suffering process of transmutation of the spirit now humanized in a primitive ovoid. The worst was yet to come. The unfortunate transformed being, in more than a thousand years of a deep, desperate nightmare, stayed thus until a painful, slow process of awakening began.

  The serpent’s name was the same as that which inspired Nordic mythology for generations and generations of Germanic peoples and pr
e-Christian Vikings in the Kingdom of the Blue Earth: It was the Serpent Jormungandr, also known as the Midgard Serpent.

  It was not a serpent with its own life and conscience. Its will and life were the result of the frightening sentiments that fed it. It existed as the personification of evil, feeding itself. And, from time to time, even some Tyrant of the Darkness was food for it to begin the almost eternal process of expiation for their sins. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how strongly any being communes with evil, because one day even the most diabolical of beings will have to redeem itself.

  But love, forgiveness, redemption and evolution were not up to that moment mantras for the Fairy Queen of the Oppressive Forces of Music. Very much to the contrary. Through her will, the Kingdom of the Seven Moons and everything good and inspiring that existed there would live its final Ragnarok or Ragnarokkr. If it were up to her, even if it meant her own epilogue, this would be the end of times or the Twilight of the Fairy Queens.

  She was so angry that she wanted, just as in Nordic mythology, the end of times to happen and all fairies, magicians and music operators who were not in her service to disappear from all the universes. She yearned for Chaos and was under the illusion that, once it was installed, she would be the new supreme governor.

  It was thus that in the heinous audience with the cupola of evil she presented her plans. When her explanation was over, the Infernal Tyrants of Darkness analysed the consequences of her acts and what they might lose if they disrespected certain laws. They concluded that they had never witnessed so much hatred in just one Fairy Queen. In their view it seemed worth the extension of pain with which they would be agreeing and for which they would be co-responsible. After all, the Tyrant Fairy Queen said she would take all the blame. They washed their hands. They handed her a sarcophagus of dark stone, two metres high and allowed the Midgard Serpent to be fed continuously until it reached planetary proportions.

  Once free, the serpent quickly slithered into the void between the dimensions, as only a snake can. It emerged from the underworld by means of an interdimensional crack in an external orbit one hundred million kilometres from the Kingdom of the Seven Moons. Aware of its objective, it accelerated until it reached the awesome speed of thirty million kilometres an hour. Head first, with its tail snaking, it was a new heavenly body whose tail did not shine like a comet in the direction of the Sun in that Solar System.

  The only reason it did not go faster was because the attrition with the solar wind, instead of lighting it up, as is usual with comets, consumed its existence. This was the speed limit for it not to be quickly consumed. In a little over two hours it could already spot its target. It gradually reduced speed. As it was not made of matter, its density and gravitational attraction did not follow the same physical laws as those which regulate the attractions of heavenly bodies. If it had not been so, its mere presence would already have caused a collapse in the planetary system it was entering. Less than one and a half million kilometres from its target, it almost stopped. It monitored and studied the orbit of the Seven Moons in minute detail. It traced an approach route so as not to collide with or bump against any of them. But for this skilful manoeuvre, it would have been the end for snake and the Moon itself.

  The Seven Moons orbited that Kingdom on seven distinct planes and with angles symmetrical to each other. They thus traced, in complete harmony in heavenly mechanics, partially elliptical trajectories, as our Moon does. The distances between its orbits and the planet obeyed the same relative distance that the intervals between the notes of a major scale possess.

  The Seven Moons balanced their gravitational effects and interactions between themselves and with the Kingdom in such a way that the angle formed between the axis of rotation and the plane of the orbit of the planet in relation to the Sun had an inclination of twenty degrees. Consequently, the seasons were very similar to those in the Kingdom of the Blue Earth, which has an angle of approximately twenty-three degrees. But the most impressive thing was that the sizes and relative densities between each Moon also obeyed, mathematically, the relation discovered in the monochord by Pythagoras. Thus, all of them, when observed from the surface had the same magnitude and influence.

  As recorded in Tale One of our story, “The Seven Moons”, each Moon was the patron and protector of an occidental musical note. The Kingdom of the Seven Moons was protected from any external heavenly threat. However, the Midgrade Serpent was not just any threat. Slowly, and with much perverse skill, it had penetrated the magic barrier of the Moons and opened its huge mouth. Now it was beginning to swallow the Kingdom of the Seven Moons. This was why night had arrived six hours earlier than it should. Thus, the recently composed sad symphony, The Twilight of the Fairy Queens, was beginning.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE TWILIGHT SYMPHONY

  Because of the darkness, the seven towers of the Castle of Occidental Music lit their beacons and the vast green field in front of the Castle and the surrounding area received the benefit of their blueish light.

  The twenty-four Guardians of the Castle Towers were at their posts and, from time to time, in their particular way, they hammered the giant tuning forks. This time, all of them vibrated in the note G from the central scale on the piano. Balls of yellow light rose to the skies from them. When the lights reached ten thousand metres in altitude, they intensified their brightness and brought a little daylight.

  However, they lasted just a few minutes. Something extremely perfidious was draining their energies, because they were being sucked up to well above the stratosphere. There they vanished, going out like new-born supernova stars. Once consumed, they transformed into pale, white dwarf stars and then succumbed entirely to the darkness.

  Seen from a distance, the Castle was like a lighthouse of many lights, fighting against the sombre, violent darkness.

  Those present could see a terrible army marching. The Tyrant Fairy Queen and the Fairy Queen of Easy Fame were in the front column, each with her own style. One was riding the largest of all the dragons. The other, standing on the first of her two circular rat-borne beds, was more beautiful than ever. She had had seven days to get ready, after all.

  A thousand pianolas spewing out toxic, dark smoke made up part of the heavy artillery of the army of more than one million enslaved notes. A new generation of worms was also approaching. Along with them, two hundred lizards the size of elephants carried coorraína sprayers on their backs, attached by two strong leather straps. A hundred baboons held huge torches of flame. Another hundred brought with them portable sound systems with powerful amplifiers and loud-speakers.

  Just behind, in the second line of combat, came a convoy of forty wagons pulled by a dozen angry bulls. Each wagon had six wheels similar to those on Earth. However, each wheel had a radius of two metres. They had to be very resistant to support the movable structure that was more than twenty metres in height and bore eighty-two tons of sound equipment. Self-sufficient in electrical energy, it also had long-life batteries. Baboons were doing small tests and tweaking the controls of the sound decks in the electronic equipment. The wagons were bizarre versions of the sound trucks used in Brazilian street carnival, but a thousand times more powerful. Once functioning, they emitted more than two hundred decibels of sound power. The army was advancing in Roman Legion style. Both the Tyrant Fairy Queen and the Fairy Queen of Easy Fame and the first two battle lines stopped more or less three thousand, two hundred metres from the Castle walls. At the Tyrant Fairy Queen’s command, the sound wagons were positioned two hundred metres in front of the first battle line. The baboon operators merely waited for the order to begin. Some of them had almost human faces. Others, however, looked like lizards, with a permanent smile. Their unusual forked tongues gave them an even greater advantage in absorbing the coorraína spayed every half an hour into the air by the pianolas, whose function was to drug the army.

  Drums and more drums began to beat. The attacking army went into ecstasy. Pushed by ten giants and pull
ed by one hundred enslaved notes for each one, siege towers were now visible, arriving from the depths of the valley. They were almost two hundred meters tall and therefore almost as high as the Castle walls. The tower bases measured forty metres. They would have been identical to the siege towers used in Mediaeval wars in the Kingdom of the Blue Earth, had they not been made of the purest, most resistant brushed steel and not had ten gigantic loudspeakers occupying an entire corner,

  The towers were transporting not soldiers to attack the Castle but very powerful amplifiers and every type of sound reproduction system to be controlled by the baboon sound operators. Each one could convert eight hundred and twenty thousand watts of electric power into sound power. One single baboon at the top of each tower controlled the volume and the music performed. They were positioned just one hundred metres in front of the wagons.

  There was absolute silence. It lasted for minutes, until the metallic sounds of a thousand war tank tracks crushing flowers and trees in their way filled the air. The tanks were similar in style to the last generation of Nazi war tanks, the feared Panzer IV. However, they were three times the size and boasted 240-mm calibre cannon. Packed with cannon balls (which when exploded released very violent waves of sound shock), they arrived divided into equal numbers on all sides of the Castle adjacent to the front. With their huge beacons turned on, they were also lined up, and in a position to attack the walls.

  In the final battle line, the Tyrant Fairy’s orchestra, composed of two thousand musicians, victims of her seduction, got into formation.

  The Castle defences were in position and on maximum alert. No corner was left unprotected. The defenders were impressed by the extension and the might of the attacking army. But they showed no fear. What worried them most was the darkening of the sky.