Synarchy Book 1: The Awakening

by DCS

  “It’s called a Holon, or Octahedron,” Rosa explained in a conversational tone. She left them gawking and walked briskly across the stone floor to some point in the shadows.

  The triplets didn’t notice when she left them, their full attention focused on the three pyramids suspended in mid air. Each square-based pyramid was a pair and appeared to be made of solid gold, one pointing up towards the ceiling, the other reversed, the pointed tip somehow balanced on the stone floor. A slab of dull frosted crystal existed between the pyramids.

  “What the fuck are those?” Lucien finally broke the silence and like his siblings dropped his bags, stepping closer to the strange structures.

  “They’re Holons,” Vasco replied in a quiet matter-of-fact tone, walking past his brother to examine the pyramids. “How are they standing like that?”

  “What are they for?” Simone wondered aloud in a tiny awe-filled voice.

  “Magnets. You Terenzio. You.” Rosa returned without her bucket, answering two of the three questions.

  “What are we going to do with them?” Simone asked, looking over at their eccentric host.

  Rosa stared inquisitively at the three of them in silence for a full moment. Then the expression dissolved off her face in a fit of childlike giggles. “Balance Terenzio’s. Above. Below. Balance. You go in the center, and Lemurian crystal will help you remember.”

  “What’s a Lemurian crystal?” Lucien asked raising a brow.

  “Help us remember what exactly?” Vasco shot off after his brother’s question, casting another glance back at the Holons.

  Rosa giggled again, walking over to Simone and Lucien. She took their hands and began dragging them over to the pyramids. “Remember who you were, Terenzio’s. Go on, get up. Get in. Go. Go.” Releasing their hands she shoved Simone towards the one on the left and Lucien at the one to the far right.

  “What are the chances the magnet thing you’ve got holding these up stops working and I get smooshed?” Lucien’s mouth twisted wryly as he reached out and set his hands on the slab of crystal. As soon as he touched it, an odd tingling sensation shot up his arms and he drew his hands back. He hesitated then shook his head and hoisted himself up, ducking down so he was lying on his back. The sensation continued and he wondered if it was because of the magnets.

  “All right, all right, I’m going.” Simone shrugged off the woman’s push and climbed up carefully between the pyramids. “Shut up, Lucien,” she called over her shoulder, hearing him talk about getting smooshed; however, she cast her own apprehensive glance at the solid gold hovering above her.

  Rosa backed up as the two climbed onto the Holons, patted Lucien reassuringly on his arm then walked over to Vasco. She looked up at him in silent contemplation for a few seconds, her face twisting in thought then simply took his hand and led him over to the one in the center.

  It was rare for Vasco to openly show his reluctance about anything. But as he got closer to the pyramids he couldn’t shake whatever was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Something profound was going to happen and it was literally terrifying him. He could feel his heart beat speeding up in his chest, a cold sweat clutching at his body.

  Rosa grinned at the look on his face, pulling him a little harder the rest of the way. “Don’t be scared. Fear will block you. It won’t hurt.”

  “Yeah, c’mon, you pussy,” Lucien called out even though his own voice didn’t sound as confident and playful as it normally did.

  Vasco shot his brother a dirty look then forced himself to hop up onto the crystal slab. “Now what?”

  That “I know something you don’t know” expression was plastered over Rosa's face. She literally scampered away from them into the shadows and returned several minutes later with three diamond shaped sparkling crystals in her hand. “These are yours. Made for you so put them on your foreheads. Go on, put them on now.” She stepped up to each of them, handed over the crystal and waited for them all to place the stones on their foreheads before she walked away.

  “This is crazy cult shit right here,” Lucien said.

  “You better be extra careful, Lucien, all this magnetism might reduce your penis size.” Simone snickered at him, though the playful jabbing was just a distraction and not a very good one. She didn’t understand what it was they were supposed to remember, and she had this weird knotting sensation in her gut that was heightening her fear of the unknown.

  “Ha, ha, ha.” Lucien stuck his tongue out from the side of his mouth, not moving his head so he didn’t drop the crystal and get scolded by their loopy host.

  When Vasco took the crystal from Rosa he didn’t place it on his forehead right away, instead examining it curiously. The piece of rock felt incredibly warm in his hand, as if some energy source existed in its center.

  “Wrong eyes, arrogant Terenzio. Look here. Here where your memories are. Here.” Nearly every syllable was punctuated with the stab of her index finger into the center of his forehead.

  He twitched every time he was poked, finally reaching up and catching her wrist firmly. “Enough. I get your point.”

  When he grabbed her she canted her head, looking at him like he was a bug that both amused and frightened her. It ended in her own deep laughter as she stepped away, nodding her head vigorously. “Mmm hmm. Yes, she will see you now.” She moved away from them and over to the wall next to the elevator, pressing a button to plu­nge the room into darkness. “Close your eyes, Tere­nzio’s. Deep breaths now. Slow. Back you go, back to where you remember.”

  Vasco frowned as the lights cut off, but he made a few passing attempts to relax the tension in his shoulders. Seconds passed, then minutes and it felt like the crystal on his fore­head was getting warmer. It brought a steady sense of relaxation that covered him like a blanket. He realized at some point he had begun zoning in and out.

  It started with sounds. There was significance in that. The sound of glass hitting a solid surface, shattering from the impact. Voices gradually bled into his mind, strangely familiar to him. He recognized a woman’s voice first. As he strained to hear the words he realized the second raised tone was his own, shouting at the woman. Wait. No, he was wrong. That wasn’t his voice…

  “Why?”

  “To feel something…other than….”

  “What are we doing?”

  “I don’t…I don’t know.”

  The answer came to him in a moment of hazy awareness. He was listening to an argument between Stefano Vasco Terenzio and his second wife, the one who had really mattered. They were saying things that neither one of them should have said, things that shouldn’t matter to people like them. There had been an indiscretion, first him, then her. Both done to protect the secret of their relationship even though in the end it had been too big to keep.

  But what Vasco could not understand was what the memories had to do with him….

  Conversations from different moments suddenly became muddled together, and the faint whisper of images swirled around in his head until he could willfully take hold of one and focus in on it. A man was tied to a chair, blood and sweat dripping down his face, staining his shirt. Pitiful whimpers pressed apart his lips, fear glazing the eye that was not swollen shut. Two men stood in front of their captive, one taking his time loading bullets into a revolver, the other rolling up his shirt sleeves.

  As if he were viewing it all from a place of the dead his vision rippled across the gloomy scene, showing Vasco the door to the room as it cracked open and a child poked his head through. He teeter-tottered between prudent patience and reeling disbelief as the memory unfolded with undeniable familiarity. Again this was not his lifetime.

  Vasco watched as confusion marked the child’s gray eyes when his father reared back his massive fist and struck the man in the chair. Disgust and fear soon spilled across the child’s face as the captive’s head snapped to the side, the sound of a bone cracking drowned out by the hoarse shout of pain.

  Swallowing hard, the little boy
walked farther into the room and up to his father, tugging on his pant leg. “Daddy?”

  His father’s eyes jerked downwards then narrowed cruelly. “What’d I tell you, boy?” The sentence ended with the back of a fist striking the child’s cheek, sending him to the floor and pulling tears out of his eyes. “Get back in bed! Now!”

  The brief solidity caved away and left Vasco falling through his own mind as the blanks were magically filled in. He had witnessed the first and last time Stefano Vasco Terenzio had ever gone into his father’s office without permission. But he inti­mately knew it hadn’t been long before Stefano’s father started inviting him, and by the time he was seventeen those instances were no longer uncommon in Stefano’s life.

  Vasco struggled to make sense of it all, locked in his own mind. He thought he would drown in the memories that poured into his head, but his fear was left to hang in the air with no climax. Instead, abandoned corridors were being unlocked and suddenly filled with life, and as he roamed around inside them he felt he was both trespasser and gatekeeper.

  The scene faded into another and shadows rose against the darkness, light skittering around the edges, teasing him with something he couldn’t yet see. But he could smell it; the sweat, the hunger. There was suddenly so much of it he could barely breathe. A moan reverberated in his ears, wavering, husky, and he knew it instantly. He knew what it felt like to be the cause of it, to control it, wait for it, tame it, then wring it out of her again and again.

  Her. The cut of her nails, the grip of her thighs. He wasn’t the only one who knew her so intimately; but he was. A veil lifted, pushing away the last of the darkness and surrounding him with the illusory effects of this moment. He could see oil lamps on stone walls, could feel the humid air inside the tribute to the dead. A mausoleum. It was either morbid or just the right atmosphere for these creatures. Vasco watched someone else’s big hands on her tiny waist. Then realized with brutal clarity he was watching through Stefano’s eyes. Watching the illuminated depth of her emerald gaze as it urg­ently begged him, just a moment before another man drove inside of her. There was such beauty in being undermined by the primal need to be used, to be fucked, to give over all the violent lust bred within us all.

  Erotic, the small tinges of jealously mixing with pure arousal at the sight of her taking pleasure in someone else’s arms. Watching her love it, openly, guilty, unable to look at him and unable to look away. It was all consuming, feeding his basic instinct to dominate her. To take her used, to reprint his own scent on her skin, the marks from his grip on her hips. To show her again and again, over and over, why a woman like her had chosen a man like him.

  The views faded, then shifted back into focus so that he was facing her as if he were there again reliving a moment long past. He felt himself, Ste­fano, leaning forward, the sensation of his cheek brushing over hers before he smothered her mouth with his own. Her eyes rolled back a brief moment as the suction of her breath quickened. If it could ever be said about her that she was someone’s, she was his. Utterly his whore.

  How foul the truth. But there was so much more.

  The images came crashing to the surface of Vasco’s consciousness and brought with them the vortex of two powerful emotions. They welled up in his chest, slamming into his gut, his groin, a raging heat spreading through his limbs like a wildfire.

  But there was so much more.

  Something else controlled it; jealousy, lust. Something else surrounded the light and dark and used them as they were meant to.

  They were in the back of a car. This transition of time revealed itself in clarity. Snow fell around them, lightly coating the private runway. Vasco could hear her asking Stefano about his first wife. And then she had said something Vasco knew Stefano had never expected to hear. But even caught off guard, the response had come naturally.

  “Would yah want to marry me one day?”

  “I already would.”

  “Then do it.”

  “Marry me.”

  It had been the one thing everyone envied, yet never truly understood about these two; how they could possibly love one another so much.

  After a moment of lingering in the aftertaste Vasco recoiled. Suddenly and violently he was yanked from that memory and shoved into the next, some unseen force propelling him further into his mind. It grinded to a halt just as a jagged blade sliced open the skin on Stefano’s back. Blood oozed from the wound, staining his dirty sweat-laden flesh. His torturer picked up a bottle cap and shoved it into the open wound, twisting and digging the surprisingly ragged sharp edges into the soft tissue. Vasco realized once more he had slipped into the role of Stefano Terenzio because it felt like it would never stop. He was both participant and viewer as fists clenched and strained against the metal chains that kept him prisoner. Another cut, another shove and it kept going until his entire back was aflame, his nerve endings writhing in agony as he struggled to bear it in silence.

  The torture had lasted for days. They tossed Stefano into a burlap bag at the end. The scene almost faded, but came back into focus when an Asian-accented voice spoke. “Can you hear me in there? I hope you can breathe, will make it easer for the bag to fill with water.” His body was feverish, his mind a thin line bordering on insanity and his struggle to stay coherent. There were no smart ass words to say to his torturer. He heard their laughter from inside the bag a moment before he was kicked into the freezing waters of the Hudson River.

  Nausea spilled into Vasco’s gut as the memory was yanked from him, replaced by sudden streams of information that shot into his mind. Stefano had not died that day. He had been saved, though not without a price and not without vengeance. The moment had come when Stefano stood face to face with his attacker again. And that day, he bashed the opium drug lord’s head in with the cane he would be forced to use the rest of his life. The disfigured head had been kept in a jar, both memento and warning.

  Fuck, it was like he was tied to the back of a roller coaster, the way he was dragged through me­m­­ories. He crashed into one unprepared, and just as he found something to hold onto the earth drop­ped out below him and he fell screaming into the next. Darkness faded to light, back to darkness and at times a cacophony of sound drummed between his ears. Everything a person remembered over a lifetime all came exploding back into his mind, exposing itself.

  When it finally stopped Vasco’s eyes shot open. He was trembling, sweating profusely and had never been so confused and shaken in his life. He yanked the crystal from his forehead and pushed off the Holon, stumbling, calling out loudly, “Lights!! Lights!!”

  A moment later the overheads came back on. As they did Lucien and Simone opened their own eyes with mirrored expressions of disbelief and shock.

  What the hell was this? This was a trick, some grand twist on subliminal messaging. He suddenly remembered to breathe. Vasco was not a big believer in past lives; in fact, he hadn’t given such a thing thirty seconds of thought, ever. But now he felt certifiably insane. How was it possible that he could carry the memories of his current life and those of Stefano Vasco Terenzio? S.V.T.? The legend, the one who had started all of it? Vasco bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to fight off the fit of nausea, trying to slow his heart rate. He jerked his eyes over to Rosa when she appeared, twirling a piece of her hair around her fingers. “What the fuck just happened?” He demanded.

  Rosa smiled intently at him. “You know.”

  “This is some cult shit,” Lucien said quietly then shook his head laughing nervously. “Can someone explain to me how I have Julian Terenzio’s memories in my head? Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  “Understatement,” Simone said to Lucien then lapsed into silence. This was off the charts. What had their grandfather gotten them into? She had never given serious thought to the idea of rein­carnation but without question the memories from the life of Liliana Terenzio sat in her mind as if she lived them herself. But how? Why?

  Glancing over at Vasco she realized in thirty-some-odd
years she had never seen him look so, off balance. And then she realized that the expr­ession on his face was one she had seen before, when looking at Stefano. She cleared her throat and said gently to him, “At least now you know why you’ve always had arthritis in your left leg.”

  Vasco blinked at her, and then glanced down at the limb. “I’ll be damned.” The drug lord. The bottle caps. The damage done to his spine that had nearly left him crippled. A century ago, S.V.T. had walked with a slight limp. He straightened and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes as if he could force the memories out of his mind. They stayed and his grip on reality loosened, leaving him lost.

  “Hey Rosa, I know we’ve probably got other strange things to do down here but right now, I need a drink.” Lucien smirked. “A really stiff one.”

  Chapter 10

  "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

  We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

  -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  June 7th, 2012

  S.V.T. Think Tank

  Alexandria, VA 11:11 PM

  The purpose of the accumulator is simple, a magnet for orgone energy. It only sounds like a strange word. In reality, orgone energy is the left-brained word for chi, prana or life force energy. Energy that is already around you. It is made up of you and connected to everything else. You don’t need an orgone accumulator to be able to harness this force and draw it into you. It is you. It is your very breath.

  But, to speed up this process I have sent you one. The healing effects of this machine are very real, for the obvious reasons explained above. If you need a little assistance and of course you do, use this machine and do your meditations.