You could not fail now and return to your old life even if you wanted to, Colt reminded him. It’s too late to turn back. You will either complete the transformation to become Hidria or you will die outright.
And go to Tscharia?
It’s not for me to say where your soul is bound when your time comes. A lesson the Duri Masters would do well to learn themselves.
He pulled his badly broken arm from the service tube wreckage, kicked aside the hatch (which was only held in place by the grace of God and a few mangled wires), and emerged in the upside-down bridge. All things considered, the interior had held together better than he’d expected, especially since the ship’s primary power cells had gone offline sometime during its rapid descent through the atmosphere. It was no small wonder that the shields had held together long enough to prevent the entire vessel from burning into oblivion before it reached the sand.
Climbing carefully through the mountain of hull and computer debris that had dislodged in the crash, he worked his way toward the bright blue sky until he found a hole in the side of the vessel wide enough to squeeze through, then pulled himself into the sunlight and dropped from the ship. He didn’t bother aiming for a proper landing spot to ensure he didn’t impale himself on the wreckage. His newfound invincibility had already spoiled him.
Don’t become too comfortable with it, Colt warned. Complacency makes you careless. There are still ways for you to be destroyed.
His back smacked against the hull and launched him forward. He landed with a jarring thud in the endless blanket of sand.
How? he asked. He shuddered to think what creative, macabre devices were necessary to end his life now that his body could take such a beating. Although he knew bullets wouldn’t kill him, total dismemberment would surely render him inert since his body simply wouldn’t be able to execute his brain’s commands. And while it wasn’t the same thing as death, being stuck in the desert for eons with only his brain and no functional movement sounded even less appealing than Tscharia. It was its own form of Tscharia, in fact. At least in Tscharia he would have company.
Your understanding of suffering is skewed by your lingering human perceptions, Colt gently scolded. She appeared beside him once again and helped him to his feet. “Those in Tscharia are not alone, that’s true enough. But the suffering of their companions makes the experience even worse because they are helpless to intervene on their behalf.”
Nuri spat out sand and futilely wiped his charred, bloody forehead with the dangling sleeve of his ruined suit. “Sinners condemned to Tscharia don’t strike me as the sort to suffer much over the fate of others.”
Colt turned away and looked out over the rolling dunes. “You shouldn’t speak of things you don’t understand,” she continued. “You once again presume to speak for those whose mind you do not know. Empathy and compassion are important steps to understanding the condition of your fellow people, but their judgment is not perfect. Only the judgment of the Divine Infinite is perfect, and He does not judge in the same manner as you would with your limited human understanding of the universe.”
She took his hand and led him onward. In the heat of the midday sun, her touch was so cold against his charred skin that it made him shiver even through the thick layer of numbness which had overtaken his nerves. He didn’t speak, though. He’d at last begun to understand that arguments were useless while the apparition was explaining the manifold aspects of God.
“Besides,” she continued, “the greatest suffering of Tscharia is its total separation from Omega and the prospect of rebirth when the Divine Infinite rejoins with His Alpha. All universes will be transformed at that moment. Perhaps even Tscharia itself.”
“Why would God transform the souls in Tscharia? Wouldn’t that make it pointless to create a separate universe in the first place?”
Colt shrugged—a startlingly human gesture—and led him forward. “I didn’t say it was a certainty. Unlike your teachers, I don’t attempt to guess the mind of God. I am only stating it is a possibility that, in His infinite wisdom and compassion, He would spare His creation out of love.”
They began to climb a dune that crested higher than the vertical spaceship. “Love,” Nuri croaked lamely.
“Love,” Colt nodded.
He shook his head. “It sounds too simplistic and sentimental to be Divine.”
“Perhaps,” she replied, releasing him momentarily to get a handhold on the cascading sand. “But how can He not love all of His creation? Could love exist if it were not part of God?”
“Evil exists. Is that, too, a part of God?” Nuri leapt up the dune, savoring the ease of passage during what would have been an arduous endeavor had he not begun the transformation. By the time he was halfway to the top, however, the thrill of metamorphosis had begun to fade. He glanced back towards the spaceship wreckage and realized just how much of his skin and armor had sloughed off on the way up. The sight further sobered him.
“So where are we heading now?” he asked. It seemed strange that Colt had assumed physical form to journey through the oppressive desert heat. The physical exertion alone weakened her more than he would have expected for a sacred emanation.
They call her the Sonic Prayer, he thought idly. The Earthless.
“We are going where you have always been destined to go,” she managed through graceful panting. “To find God.”
Nuri reached out to help but she either didn’t notice his outstretched hand or chose to ignore it.
“This doesn’t look like the place to find Him,” he remarked skeptically as he crested the dune on his own, searching the endless desert for obvious signs of divine influence.
“Again,” she sighed as she reached the overlook beside him, “you presume to know the heart and mind of God. Where would you expect to find Him? Without His guidance, you never would have gotten here in the first place.”
He shrugged. “The Duri say you can find Him anywhere.”
“Exactly!” Colt suddenly exclaimed. The force of her exhalation nearly sent him tumbling back toward the wreckage. “You can find Him everywhere because He is everything.”
“There,” Nuri said, pointing to a distant speck on the horizon. “What is that?”
Colt smirked and took his hand. “We’re going to find out.”
She led him down the other side of the dune into the desert flatlands. Neither of them spoke until the dark speck gradually distinguished itself from the unchanging landscape.
“Odd,” Nuri remarked once he was close enough to identify the object.
Odd didn’t quite cover finding a giant, neon sign proclaiming PRIME in capital blue letters with bright pink outlines on an uninhabited desert world. An arrow at the top angled forward and slightly to the right, directing travelers the way adverts did in the wilderness of Earth colonies.
“Is this the first planet?” he asked, awestruck.
“There’s no way of knowing.”
“The sign says this is Prime.”
“No,” Colt corrected. “The sign indicates that Prime is up ahead. It’s only a reminder that we are on the right path. And anyway, Prime isn’t necessarily a planet.”
“That’s not what the Duri Masters say.”
Colt gave him a hard look and he reluctantly nodded.
“It exists, though. Whether it’s a planet or not,” he said.
“On what basis have you made that determination? A glowing sign in the middle of a desert? For all you know, that could be debris from a spaceship…”
“Unlikely.”
“…or a trap set by the Evil One to make you believe you are closer to the Apocalypse than you truly are.”
Nuri bowed his head in thought. He noticed the skin on his shins and feet had completely melted away. He was a walking skinless man, with muscles and throbbing veins and blood squelching in each step he took. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to for the sake of diversion. Or rather, distraction.”
“The Evil One will go to any length
to confuse and vilify the true followers of the Divine Infinite: the justice-bringers called Hidria.”
Nuri considered her assessment for a while, but still wasn’t convinced the sign was anything more than what it professed to be: an indication that Prime was up ahead, attainable to anyone willing to brave the insufferable desert cleansing to prepare themselves for the presence of Lord God. “You wouldn’t have brought me here if this wasn’t Prime,” he said. “Or at least the gateway to Prime.”
Colt turned and furrowed her brow. “I didn’t bring us here,” she said. “You brought us here. You, and Omega. I simply follow wherever you go. We both must trust your internal compass to find your Apocalypse Point. It is your great unveiling.”
“You told me we’d arrived at our destination,” he protested.
“I told you we’d arrived at a destination,” Colt corrected. “It’s between you and God where His nature is revealed.”
Once again, Nuri fell silent. Despite the continuing transformation of his brain and body, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Colt was deliberately confusing him, leading his thoughts into circular patterns to make him question every aspect of his reality rather than find any clarity. Surely, his body had changed and his mind had expanded, yet somehow he’d never felt further from his objective than he did right then. To top it off, he’d lost faith in the one part of his life that had provided him with comfort and identity. He no longer believed the teachings of the Duri Order, or the claim that they were God’s descendants in the galaxy with the authority to speak His will and decimate worlds based on arbitrary and constantly amended doctrine.
They keep it that way so they are never confronted with rebellion, Nuri decided.
Even as the thought entered his head, he realized with his newfound clarity that, in the end, the Duri could not escape Divine justice. Eventually, the colonies on the outer rim of Earth’s expansion wheel would tire of living in fear and devise a method of communication that would ultimately lead to unification against their communal oppression.
Or maybe the Crown government will finally acknowledge that the religious order has gotten far too big for its britches, he thought. Whether or not that happens before a great war between the two political powers, only God can know.
“There,” Colt said, jarring Nuri from his thoughts. “We’re close.”
He followed her gaze to a massive stone structure ahead of them. The landscape was too uniform for him to approximate how long it would take to reach it. Either way, he guessed the building was at least as tall as the highest skyscrapers in Juriaq, and just as wide. The black stones looked older than time, perhaps from another reality altogether. He saw no signs of footprints in the sand leading up to it, but they were still a way off. He figured any recent markings might have been covered by a sandstorm. Of course, it was also possible that no one had ever visited the site in the first place.
When he didn’t see any clear entrance or windows, he began to worry.
“What is it?” he asked, momentarily captivated by the contrast of Colt’s vibrancy against the clear blue sky and bright sand.
“It’s a temple,” she answered. “The temple. It existed long before humanity’s creation.”
“How can that be?” he asked.
She stopped walking and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Humans are very young,” she told him as though she were explaining the nature of Santa Claus to a child. “Billions of species of sentient life came and went before the first man and woman ever walked Earth.”
“So aliens built this temple?”
She shrugged noncommittally. “Aliens built many temples before humanity, but I do not mean to imply that this one was built with corporeal hands. I’m not saying that it was built at all.”
Nuri sighed and started walking again. “It’s true what the Duri say about you.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You don’t provide answers. Only questions.”
She emitted a low sound which might have been a groan or a sigh and turned her gaze back to the stone temple. “It depends on your interpretation.”
“Case in point.”
She smiled and he laughed in turn with maniacal exhilaration. By then, he could feel the temple reaching out to them and the prospect of being so close to the ultimate answer for every question in the universe was finally beginning to register. He could barely hold onto his sanity in the face of such utter knowing.
“This would have been a lot easier if the ship had crashed closer to the temple,” he remarked, more from the crazed good-nature that had overcome him than in the interest of lodging a true complaint. His body no longer felt exhaustion, after all, even as more and more of his armor and skin dropped off behind him. It didn’t truly matter how far they traveled now.
“It wasn’t meant to be easy,” she said. “That’s why they’re called trials.”
“Fair enough,” he replied with sudden solemnity. He pulled a long strip of skin from his stomach, exposing his ribcage down to his abdomen. “I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, though. I’ve given up everything to get to this point. My entire family was killed so I’d one day experience this sacred awakening. I’ve forsaken every aspect of myself to be here, and even if I am granted the knowledge of God and the universes, I will not be able to choose ignorance again. This journey will be the end of me one way or the other.”
Colt nodded and bowed her head. “You’re correct, and there’s no clearer evidence of your shedding of self than the skin you’ve left in your wake. We crashed precisely where we did for a reason. You must be purified by the desert just as Omega Incarnate was purified on Earth for forty days thousands of years ago. You must leave all aspects of your old self behind and be reborn before you are revealed.”
“Then the temple must not be a fixed point. It must be relative to my spiritual perception. I can’t see God or the temple until my soul is deemed worthy.”
“It’s not a question of worthiness. As you said, it’s a question of perception.”
“Interesting,” Nuri muttered. He was trying to take in every aspect of the astonishing world as well as the peculiar dissolution of his physical body, but the simultaneous experience of hyper-reality in proximity to the first temple and his perception of both the transformation and Colt as surreal events was tearing his soul in opposite directions. One path led to doubt and incomprehension, the other to wonder and complete surrender.
“That is the essence of sin,” Colt continued. “It is the limit of human perception and comprehension. Literally, sin means ‘missing the mark’ or ‘falling short,’ meaning sin is a lack of understanding of God and the universe.”
“So then you can argue that all humans are sinning all the time, since their understanding perpetually falls short of the perfect context?”
“In a way, I suppose. But in that sense, you’re sinning right now by limiting the issue to absolutes. ‘All or nothing’ is not an imperative driving God’s view of creation. None of us can know His mind.”
They both fell silent for a while. Nuri focused on his footsteps and the unsettling lack of Time which hung heavily over the planet.
“Will my whole body decompose?” he asked. He thought seeing his heart wilt and cease to beat before his eyes might be the very thing that pushed him over the edge of insanity for good. He was teetering on the brink as it was.
Perhaps this is what the failed Called experience when they return from the trials, he thought. Except he knew it couldn’t be. Colt had told him there was no turning back now that he had begun the transformation. How can that be true if there’s still a chance I will not experience the Divine Revelation? He frowned and another toxic thought emerged. What if my personal apocalypse means I will simply cease to exist in this world or Tscharia or any other reality?
“Again, your idea of an apocalypse is too deeply rooted in faulty human understanding. An apocalypse is a great unveiling. I can think of no greater apocalypse, personal or otherwise, than enteri
ng the center point of the universe at the first temple and seeing everything through the eyes of God.”
“Have you experienced this unveiling?” he asked. “Is that why you exist in an ethereal realm as well as a physical one?”
Colt nodded. “I am in between. Like the Hidria, but different. I am an emanation.”
Nuri frowned again with what little remained of his face and bowed his head. The longer and deeper his body steeped in the transformation, the more he recognized connections that had formed subtly throughout his life. Every waking moment had been a precursor to something else, and every moment was likewise a consequence. It was a dizzying form of hindsight; the ultimate perspective and regret for a life which could have been fundamentally altered by even the smallest occurrence. To point, he was able to trace all his brainwashing at the hands of the Duri to one specific moment on Dublokee when he’d narrowly avoided a Psyanec Cobra bite prior to the arrival of the Called soldiers. The bite would have required his entire family to vacate the planet immediately for medical attention. In the short term, he had avoided a possibly fatal blow. Yet, if he hadn’t instinctively lurched to his right just before the cobra struck, his whole family might have survived and he never would have been kidnapped.
Which means I also would never have made it here, he thought. I would never have been given the chance to know Omega. The Divine Infinite. The Highest.
Did that make his parents and brother martyrs for his holy cause, then? Were their deaths worth the highest level of consciousness and communion with the Creator God?
“There’s no way to tell how their lives would have played out,” Colt offered, sensing his thoughts. She read him easily now. He supposed it had something to do with his transfiguration from a physical being to another form of entity altogether, though he didn’t dare venture a guess yet as to what, exactly, he was. It was too close to guessing God’s mind, and he made a solemn vow on the spot not to contemplate the past or future any more than absolutely necessary. Regardless, it seemed Colt had tapped into a shared consciousness between them. Perhaps all similar creatures were linked that way. The idea opened up a whole new concept of knowledge and communication he’d never dreamed of realizing.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 21