Let’s Kill Evil

“We can never go home again.”

What if destiny doesn’t exist? What if evil isn’t supposed to be, and it’s actually just an unnatural anomaly? What if a single, random bolt of quantum lightning tore a hole in the fabric of reality, a single fluctuation ripping its way through time and space at trillions of points all at once? What if countless catastrophes and tragedies throughout human history could all be traced back to a rogue flash of chaotic energy that had just as much of a chance to never have come into existence?

And what if you knew where that fluctuation began? What if you discovered the origin point of every disaster and war and unimaginable horror to ever have occurred? What if you could travel to the advent of all that is unholy and see it with your own eyes? What if you knew how to stop darkness from ever coming to be? What if you could kill evil?

There are so many questions and so few answers, overwhelming uncertainty and also confidence in the minutes before launch when I pray to a God I’ve never believed in because everything science taught me might be a lie. When I was a child, I wanted to believe in something greater, a benevolent force watching over mankind that nonetheless let us make our own mistakes and hopefully learn from them. What a fool I was, thinking there was an easy way out – existence is chaos, and it’s arrogant to believe something as simple as God could design something so erratic and expansive, as though omnipotence would ever be so wise. I understand truth is subjective, that the universe is infinite and also ever-expanding – this is my opportunity to prove it, that reality is nothing more than random chance, that everything evil is just the result of an unbalanced equation waiting to be solved before it becomes a problem in the first place.

I want to kill evil, cut its head off before it learns to speak, end every nightmare before they had the chance to be born, ignite shadows in their infancy, and erase the very idea of war before it came to pass.

It started with the frequency, the one we found hiding throughout human history with the same signature wherever we looked. For how vast the cosmos truly are, there is order to the dissonance, patterns and rhythms we can forecast like the weather – but this frequency was erratic, like a song with no melody or tempo or beat that burned our ears whenever we heard it. Keepers of the old faiths believed it divine, an immaculate signal broadcast through all of history to call the faithful home again – they were wrong. Astrophysicists and cosmic etymologists claimed it was a upper-dimensional message from the distant future, an indecipherable beacon hurtling backwards through space-time – they were also wrong.

The frequency is a splintering singularity, a quantum fluxuation affecting everything all the time as an amorphous, semi-sentient conduit that both is and isn’t – and we found where it all began, the moment when evil came into existence and spread forth like the virulent plague it would eventually grow to become. We all know what we signed up for, that what we are doing means forcing the universe to bend to our will, and that no one will ever know the sacrifice we are about to make. But it doesn’t matter, now, because none of us could walk away knowing we could save everything – what’s five lives weighed against the corruption of an entire universe? I’ve been to space before, but it never felt like this, never so freeing and absolute.

We see thing we shouldn’t, things no one was meant to witness. We passed by the advent of society and law and goodwill, glimpsed the first fire built on a cold night with death waiting to pounce and the great beasts that roamed our planet millennia before man ever came to be. We watched prehistoric amoeba seed life on Earth – and then we keep going. We witness the cycle of life amongst the stars, alien species achieving advanced utopian societies, then back further to their earliest days, back through eons and epochs and all matter of inconceivable wonders, each worthy of a lifetime of study but that we only see for a single moment before they disappear into history.

Metrics of time are meaningless now, and not just philosophically. Some days, my hair is thin and grey, my skin old and weathered, and I can feel the pain coursing through every inch of my body. Other days I feel decades younger, stronger and more awake than I’ve been in years. I try to hold onto those feelings; one I thought I’d forgotten after so much heartache and pain, the other I never thought I’d be lucky enough to feel. But every time I wake up, it’s like everything that came before didn’t happen, as though my memories are just stories and I have to learn how to be me all over again. I wish I could blame the mission, but what good would that do?

It started to feel like we’d never get there, that the ship would just keep going and going until we all died, one by one. I wondered if something was missing, if there was a component we weren’t aware of or a variation we couldn’t compensate for; the farther back we went the more we slowed down, like some invisible force was keeping us from making it over the last horizon that just kept moving further and further away.

Then we saw stars, swimming in the air around us – just tiny pops of energy in all different colors, buzzing and flitting around one moment then gone the next. No one said anything; we just stare in silence, listening to the song even though there’s no music playing. Then it was too much, and I reached out to touch what must be providence at the end, the light to show us the way because it has been so dark for so very long.

Ryder holds wife one last time and reminds her that even when she doesn’t remember him, he’ll still love her. Freya plays a final show at the Met, arrangements that bring the entire house to tears, knowing that what they are hearing is beyond anything anyone has ever heard or will ever hear again – it’s perfection, and she feels it. Francis asks the question weighing on her soul her entire life, faithful now that the answer will be true – it scares her more than she could have possibly imagine. Rustin admits the truth, holds his breath in a that moment stretching forever in a microsecond, and he finds what he is looking for. It’s a moment where anything is possible and nothing is, too, because I don’t see anything – just the void for as long as I can remember and no time at all.

And now we’re here, at the advent of all things.

Dawn of the first day when existence becomes in the blink of an eye, time slows down and each nanosecond is an epoch. In the first, the stars are born in fiery forges of light and wonder. In the second, gravity forms and bends and splinters and folds. And in the third, the essence of sentience snaps into existence, aimless and without form floating through a virgin ether, nothing more than the will to live. Within this moment, the very first moment to ever be, all of reality comes into being; it is nothing less than sublime. And in the next moment, we thought we saw the singularity, the nearly-imperceptible thing that grows and mutates and festers and will one day birth all that is wrong in this existence. It is the spark of eventual darkness, primordial terror writhing in the abyss so far from anything warm and understanding, the purest form of evil we have come to slay.

“We were wrong – you could spend ten thousand lifetimes doing this, and you wouldn’t come even remotely close to affecting anything. We were wrong.”

We always knew it was a quantum frequency of an erratic and unstable nature, so we compensated and made adjustments for the variables of its quasi-compositional state. And that was the joke – we understood how the universe worked until we forced our own ignorance. Time isn’t real, but effect is everything, and our cause smashed its meaning to dust. We wanted a foe, something we could hit and strangle and beat into submission through sheer force of will – how foolish we must have seemed, so desperately foolish.

Just being there changed everything. From the distribution of the first cosmic dusts and the angle of this reality’s first physics, to the bending of matter and the life altered because of it – our presence was the effect, the only effect. We were the singularity we thought we’d executed.

I started laughing. It was reflexive – such a dark joke, so intensely Baroque, I couldn’t stop myself. It was just so damn funny how sure we all were, how confident we must have seemed – all of us, just staring at the universe like it owed us something after we tore it apart and tried to murder a cosmic force of nature only to see the shape of ourselves in the evil we wanted to kill.

And it’s funny because it’s true – we let go of everything human about us except our contempt for evil, stripped away anything but blind hatred for a concept we inadvertently created because we are flawed. Stuck here at the moment of conception, we let our anger and fear and hate and everything else dark inside us come forth, and we called it righteousness without a hint of irony.

Ashland, the City: This is Who We Are Now

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
Episode Four: This is Who We Are Now
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

THIS IS WHO WE ARE NOW
Do you ever have the feeling that everything makes sense? Like you cracked the code, or that all the puzzle pieces fit? Like you made all the right decisions and the whole world played along to your rhythm? This is my city, my world, my life.

My name is Ashland Mizota and five years ago, I was an orphan living in a group home and doing everything I could to not be noticed by anyone. Then one morning, I realized yesterday happened first. I thought I was going crazy, that I’d been so sad and alone for so long that I’d lost all grip on reality!

Then I started hearing voices. But it wasn’t like in movies – they weren’t evil voices telling me to hurt people. They were like stories playing in my head, radio dramas about people I’d never met. I ran away when the other kids in the house caught me trying to talk back to the voices. I lived on the streets for months, fighting whatever was in my head with every ounce of strength I had – there was no time for school or friends or a normal life. It took everything in me to keep the voices from driving me insane.

On a particularly humid summer evening, I fell to the ground behind a fried chicken restaurant next to the food scraps being eyed by the rodents in the shadows. I hadn’t eaten in days and the puddle water made me sick. I felt like I was dying. I had no more to give, no energy left to exert and I let the voices take me.

And that’s when I felt more alive than ever before.

The city spoke to me through the voices of the past, the lingering shadows of history that clung to the energy coursing through every nook and cranny of a metropolis with hundreds of years teeming with countless stories. I spent so long fighting such a beautiful feeling, a warm connection with the steel and brick and concrete and wood that held this city together as a testament to the ingenuity of mankind and the beauty of nature through science. Every crack in the sidewalk, each stain on the side of a building, and every corner of any neighborhood abandoned long ago – they all hold stories from the past, anecdotes about who and what came before. Sometimes the stories aren’t worth hearing, like how the paint dries on a wall. But often, the world has more to say than anyone cares to believe or hear.

I learned more each day. Five years I spent listening to everything I could, feeling the past flowing all around me, stepping through history as easily as I would the corner shop or high school. You’d think the center of the city would have the best tales, the epic sagas of families spanning centuries through good times and the bad. But those tragic romances quickly start sounding the same era after era, the repetitive song and dance between the aristocracy and lower castes that permeates through the entirety of human history.

The dark, forgotten corners of the city are where the richest stories live, the ones rooted in passion and flair for the lives of ordinary people. Because everyday life is a struggle constantly undermined by tragedies of horror, news of cataclysm that makes introspection more compassionate. Part of the human condition is downplaying the achievement of getting up each morning and facing life without bursting into tears over existential dread. We praise the exceptional, berate the unproductive, and forget the ordinary. I find the exceptionally ordinary stories hiding in the cracks, behind the stains, and under the ruins of what’s been forgotten.

Then one day I lost myself. My connection had never been stronger, but I felt more alone than ever before. As much as I knew about the people who once were, I barely spoke to the living, the ones walking right beside me that had turned into backdrop long ago. I realized I’d forgotten it in people – I let the memories overshadow the now and it was too late.

The pain of knowing I’d missed one of the most important aspects of humanity for a chance at everything else was too much. I couldn’t make a decision anymore because making a choice meant sacrificing all the others that might have been, letting go of every other potential thread to focus on one. I wasn’t ready to create differences. A storm brewed around me like a vortex pulling at everything else nearby.

But human thought is all about differentiation, separating ourselves from everything else at the beginning then splitting what we know even more to encompass new people, places, things, actions, behaviors, ideas, and feelings. Learning that you are insignificant on a cosmic scale makes accepting the relativity in your truth all the easier.

The storm grew worse around me and there was nothing I could do to stop it because that meant wanting something and I didn’t want to want anything ever again; stuck between wanting to be something I knew without doubt and knowing more than a single person ever could. It was crushing.

This isn’t who you are, Ashland.

Choose to be something more.

It was just an idea at first, just words in the whipping winds and dense, claustrophobic clouds swirling through my mind. Words that had no meaning, just letters strung together at random. Each time the words got closer, and each time I ignored what they were trying to say.

So I closed my eyes and stopped thinking.

I listened for the words so I could hear what they meant, the feeling behind the tone and the movement under each syllable. There was nuance between each character, symbols agreed upon and developed over time only to be perverted and mangled and twisted into something new and beautiful. The idea called to me, over and over through the maelstrom I’d made for myself in a place that shouldn’t exist, a park bench conjured from the past and future that threatened to tear apart the present. Drops of rain screaming through the sky as they barrel towards the earth, trillions of individual pieces shooting down at the ground without plan or direction as zephyrs festering into a tempest pull everything around them into a howling vortex – the rain is trapped by the confluence of weather, the elegant miasma of the maelstrom I had become.

You are not alone.

The man mourns for a past that never was, a future he cannot see, and a present he wishes he could change. The woman is missing a piece of herself, a part of her soul stripped away when she learned what she could be. Two hands, one from each, reaching out to pick me up.

Revolver and Ex Materfamilias.

The rain stopped but it didn’t stop raining – reality took pause and a deep breath in that moment as each drop of water hung in the air ever so slightly. Just one second stretched out and decompressed, kneaded out wider than it should have been, clinging like static in the sky. Each raindrop was a mirror, infinite tiny looking glasses reflecting me in each of them. They told my story, and the countless others of which I’d learned and felt over the years, the incalculable makeup of what I had come to represent.

The storm was me, and the more I kept running away from the chaos the stronger it grew. So I turned around and ran back into the abyss.

I ran for hours, days, years – an eternity with each footstep. And each of those moments was another piece of me, another story from the past seared into my memory, one more possibility for the future tucked away under other theories and extrapolations. Every part of what I was, every instance I had ever known, any feeling I’d ever shared – it was all there waiting to come back to me.

Ashland, the City…

Girl of a Million Voices

Speaker Metropolis

Herald of the Infinite Civitas.

The conglomeration of raw materials, industrial design, societal persistence, and cultural cohesion as beacons of innovation and evolution beyond nature working in tandem with people. A city is a network of ideas, an overwhelming web of overlaid wants and needs and dreams. It starts small – just a concept waiting to be more – until it grows by virtue of free will and determination, a village that becomes a town then a forest of buildings and neighborhoods, an ethos of competing goals somehow working together.

Beyond Tokyo, into the night sky amongst the clouds, I looked down upon every city in every nation across all continents on this planet, covenants traced back decades and centuries through countless souls that have come and gone over millennia. None are perfect, each with their flaws and blemishes, but there is beauty everywhere, serene brilliance flowing through every story ever told in every city there is or ever was. Each of those tales adds to the fire, another coal keeping the flames of humanity alive through generations across oceans and over mountains and rivers.

Keep going.

Then silence in the forever garden and a muted stare between three individuals who might just save the entirety of existence.

Because the whole planet is a city, a developed organization filtered through people’s affinity for one another, no matter how much they might protest their nature. The world grows smaller as cities grow larger and metaphysical portals gain more meaning on the digital frontier where viral cowboys and virtual shamans build their flocks.

I can feel it all – every last iota of every single moment.

And in the corner of my mind’s eye, the very darkest place I could have looked…

I see what is coming.

That which shouldn’t ever have been, but was always inevitable.

This is how we die.

NEXT: Empyrean, Part XIV – Revolver

Ashland, the City: Five Years Later

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
Episode Three: Five Years Later
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

FIVE YEARS LATER
The tracks are gone, covered up by a snow that won’t stop falling – I can’t see where she’s going. There, in the distance; small sparks flicker in the white maw, quick flares against a blinding backdrop. A single blanket made of countless flakes strung together by circumstance and climate, clingy and co-dependent as day turns to night and no one wants to be alone.

Winter is a curious thing for a city, something we don’t control yet try so hard to predict and contain even as it continues to surprise each and every year. There’s always a new way to beat the storm, a clever tip for de-icing the car, maybe an improved road clearing schedule. But in the end, winter wins out because there’s strength behind the wind and snow and fog, a cohesion in the season that makes the cold both bearable and overwhelming at the same time. Winter stops a city in its tracks and forces adaptation even amongst steel mountains, asphalt rivers, and concrete valleys whose silence is swayed when it’s turned a wonderland of snow and ice. But I have to keep searching for this girl because she’s all I can think about.

It doesn’t take much to get things started – the neighborhoods are chatty and often make the first move. All I have to do is reach out and listen; an analogue parking meter to my right, the cracks in the sidewalk under my feet, the power lines sagging between juncture points. There are stories under every rock, tales coursing through every subway tunnel, centuries-old epics hiding behind the modern veneer. This city speaks all the time but no one listens. The snow starts falling harder, an even more impenetrable wall of pale twilight cascading through the buildings into our lives.

The sidewalk sends out a chorus of footsteps, each one another note in the daily serenade for commuters and students within walking distance to their schools. Cracks and stains are everywhere over concrete and brick designs – contemporary vs modernity. The second-to-last cigarette is actually better than the last because the end is near but not so close that you can’t enjoy the smoke for what it is instead of as the addiction you don’t want to admit. A smoke and a sit – got to collect myself and listen instead of assume, hear what’s actually being said and not just what I want.

This junction is a curious thing – both a physical and metaphorical crossroads stretching back centuries. First it was a bridge over troubled water when rivers ran red and banks left to smolder. Then it was the fortress in waiting, a nexus of trade routes thus a target and liability. Next it was left to die, a corpse of an outpost burned and broken on the water’s edge. Fast forward and the river dries up, the ruins are grown over, and men once again build something – this time a house, then another one after that. The earliest days of the city are peppered with doubt and insecurity as they often are, the time when nothing is certain and it could all fall apart in an instant. But still she persisted, and it morphed with the city getting bigger each generation, a metropolis still in its infancy finally blooming into what it should be. Now I stand here, on the corner of the intersection, waiting for the lights to change so the small man can tell me I to cross and keep looking for the girl.

Where is she? I can’t see past my own hands and it’s getting late.

Wait…there.

Past a bookstore of stories within stories and down an alley set ablaze by a leaky gas main more than once, through a neighborhood she’d never seen and into a park so warm and welcoming the snow didn’t stick. The trees were still bare of leaves or snow, skeleton’s hands reaching into an otherwise empty sky. Birds chirp and squirrels dart about because there is no storm here, just a slight breeze and faint traces of snowflake envy, like sepia surrounded by the white maw. On a bench sits the girl, alone and deep in her own thoughts. She cannot see the brilliance within, the energy erupting effortlessly from inside her making this whole place a more perfect day.

She’s special and beautiful…she needs my help. She’s me, I think, just younger – because I can hear what she’s feeling, see what she’s thinking; and she’s terrified. There’s too much passing through her, the energy of ideas too many to count, of theories and people and places and experiences and emotions and perspective. The war in her head rages on, nonstop conflict between what she knew and what’s real. Things fall apart when the center cannot hold, but if hope persists then the center will be known. She doesn’t understand how little she actually understands, how much more there is to see and do.

Doubt is a difficult concept; a necessity for the development of ideas, yet also the flaw in all things. We doubt against what we know to be true, and that skepticism has the potential for unbound greatness or relentless nothing. Understanding doubt helps diminish its power – recognize the value of your doubts and the answers no longer matter.

The everything else isn’t what scares her – she’s been stuck in between wanting to know and fearing what that means. Because the more she wants to know, the more she loses herself in the miasma of the city, the rising and falling tides of human interaction and technological development, the changing landscape we can’t ignore. And that doubt is what keeps her going, the pressure that pushes her one way or the other as seconds expand out over hours and days decompress into months. In her head, she’s frightened and alone, walking home trying to understand why she feels like the entire world is fighting to talk with her. I know what that feels like.

She didn’t hear my words because the fog was still thick between her ears, the smoldering black cloud of existential turmoil she simply couldn’t break even though it bent and twisted and warped beyond what the impossible. The feeling of helplessness had very nearly taken her completely, as though she were sitting on the precipice of a bottomless chasm instead of the bench in a park outside time and space. She hadn’t even realized what she was doing, dragging the past and present and future behind her as the storm in her soul threw relativity out of sync. Everything I knew and loved about the city swirled around me in the crackling chaos; the memories and voices and experiences that I understood so intimately it felt as though I’d always been there, like I lived thousands of lives each as brilliant and beautiful as the one that came before. And as I trudged through the tempest, my boots sliding back with each step, the fire spiraling around her became clearer; a funnel of flames shooting into the sky and reaching out like witch’s fingers across the city as I became more and more real in the corner of her eye.

When I spoke next, she heard the sound of something sweet amongst such dire cacophony, but my words still slipped into the chaos before she could understand. I moved closer still, my hand reached out through the fire and ice and dawn and dusk and years that haven’t yet been so she could see I was there to help. I knew it would get worse before it got better, that her fear would cut through me one thousand times before she accepted what I was trying to say. My hands are swollen and bleeding, rotting and growing and splintering and shimmering, passing through the cosmos wrapped up into this girl’s metaphysical meltdown in a park that doesn’t belong in a corner of the city where no one lives.

The third time I reached out, she heard the words through the maelstrom, the ones I kept repeating like a mantra over and over until they pierced the veil she’d made for herself. Each time she made out another part of each sentence, as though she was deciphering the meaning even though it was obvious. The whole thing felt longer than it should have, stretched out over the years she thought were only days that then came to a head when time caught up. But, she didn’t want to listen because what I had to say meant finding a solution to her indecision, and future uncertainty was her greatest fear of all.

Even as the doubt caused her nothing but pain, she didn’t want to go one way or the other. She’d found a toxic comfort living in between experiences and existing vicariously through humanity as a cracked existential lens. I know she would be content feuding with herself forever into infinity, constantly second-guessing herself and wondering about the possibilities instead of choosing anything because not acting is addictive and cancelling plans at the last-minute feels better than believing she’s not good enough. Because I felt that way all those years ago when the city first spoke to me like it’s trying to speak to her. She’s doing everything she can to not decide.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but she can’t see.

Because I’m not there. I was never a person or even a character, just a concept personified. This is a notion begging for life in an unending tempest. I’m nothing more than a faceless idea in a story that’s not about me. Everything is everything else.

Some people live and die and never leave home, wrapped in their roots so tightly they can’t survive outside the nurturing grasp – like a microcosm of society poured over itself again and again, always in the same place so the feelings never change. What happens when they’re ripped from the ground, when their entire world is laid bare before them and everything else is only a decision away? How do they justify the very existence of the ‘out there’ when the roots have been the everything for their entire lives? And how will they react when home reveals itself to be the empty concept it’s always been?

Some are lost and never find their way, tempted by the possibility of potential and the excitement of what’s new – always traveling so the roots never take hold. How many broken promises does it take for them to show their real selves? What sours optimism past the point of no return? When does freedom chain them more than roots ever could?

The girl was lost on purpose, struggling because she believed that was the meaning of life. She was ready to surrender to herself and make the wrong decision even though that shouldn’t have been possible. The struggle is real in these moments, the final seconds of consciousness as she comes to terms with letting herself down and the idea of me slowly fades into the very storm I hoped to stop.

But time’s running out, repeating instrumentals as she screams and shouts. I wish I’d never left the house; ain’t slept in three days. Popping pills and writing about the life I wish I lived every day. Avoiding looks and stares, trying to dodge these hooks. Keeping who I am safe, nothing overlooked.

Until two hands reached out and separated the clouds down to a slight breeze tickling the back of the girl’s neck, just a slight wind carrying absolution and freedom from the pain and uncertainty.

This isn’t who you are, Ashland.

It’s like I was hearing the words for the first time even though I’d spoken them one thousand times and more.

Choose to be something more.

Two hands – one from him and the other from her – reaching out for fair Ashland the City, sitting on the park bench begging for her sanity in the storm overwhelming her sense of self. Two hands – one for redemption the other for peace – begging sweet Ashland the City to take hold and remember how it felt to speak with her home, to touch history and taste emotions. Two hands from two others just like Ashland the City who would finally decide to become herself and learn what she was meant to be, the decision to learn whatever she could.

NEXT: Ashland, the City (Finale)

Ashland, the City: Day One/Day Two

ACT III of III: Empyrean
Part XIII: Ashland, the City
Episode One: Day One
Episode Two: Day Two
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

DAY ONE
There was no hot water that morning – the other children beat her to it, so Ashland washed her hair in a cold shower. The skies were clear, and it was quiet; a welcome change to the past week of consistent storms and rain. Ashland ran down the sidewalk then through the streets, weaving between gridlocked cars towards the subway station still ten minutes away – she would never get there in time.

Down an alley, she used as a shortcut before delivery trucks blocked it up, Ashland tripped on a pile of dirty clothes that had fallen from their lines. She picked herself up and kept going, wishing the entire time that she’d woken up when the alarm sounded. She ran into a cyclist, knocked a pile of papers from the arms of an irate attorney, and nearly caused a car accident when she ran out into a crosswalk without looking.

The streets all looked the same, each building just another version of the last, the din of chatter and machines grating on Ashland’s nerves until she opened her eyes and she was standing in front of the school with minutes to spare. It didn’t make any sense, Ashland though – she should have been at least fifteen minutes late.

A third-year girl sat crying on the bench near the entrance, staring at the ground through her swollen eyes. Just by looking at her, Ashland could feel the girl’s pain, as though her entire world had fallen apart and nothing felt the same. Ashland wondered what had happened to make the girl so sad. The morning’s blue skies were just a tease as the clouds rolled back in to drape the outside in damp familiarity.

Ashland watched Kazumi and Takeshi argue all through second period – they were never a terribly great couple to start, and the White Day situation put them even more on ice. All through third period and lunch, Kaz and Keshi bickered while people took sides. It wasn’t uncommon for students to voice their opinion on certain romantic dramas, no matter how unconnected they were to the involved parties. Everyone knew how it worked, the kids in the spotlight with grace and poise, then those on the edges left to comment and opine.

It wasn’t terribly original Ashland thought as she fiddled with the pile of rice on her tray that looked about as appetizing as the pile of rice from the day before and the pile before that. There was no good reason to indulge the melodrama, nothing to gain from subtly encouraging conflict between two people who would do good to simply end what they have and go their separate ways – but that’s part of the act, Ashland had come to believe, that the narrative mattered just as much as the emotion to a box full of hormonal teenagers trying their hardest to focus on anything other than their education.

The final bell rang, and the wave of students pouring from the front doors made Ashland anxious – she stayed back and wandered through the empty halls for a few minutes as the immediate chaos cleared out. The snack vendor was already gone and the crossing guard had stowed his road cones away for the night. Subtle serenity pops up between school’s end and rush hour; just a few minutes of peace after the children reach their homes and parents leave from work. The constant chatter and rumble of everlasting traffic died down, and Ashland let herself content.

Down she turned onto one of the oldest streets in Tokyo, a simple paved road hiding bricks underneath and dirt even further down still, each level bulging with history and the memories of yesterday. History interested Ashland – knowing what came before made sense when no one knew what the future held, and fragments of the past became clearer the longer she looked. Knowing what made her home what it was gave Ashland confidence, savvy on the subject her peers cared about least because what sort of income would an education in history bring?

She liked to notice what others took for granted. Like the fox that appeared before Ashland, the neighborhood’s familiar strayed too far from the woods looking for a way home. Or the group of barely-teenagers playing at street gangs, shoving and insulting one another because they saw it on TV and it looked cool. Perhaps the struggling game developer who finally hits a milestone. Maybe the old woman keeping the noodle shop died the week before, and her son still couldn’t get the process right.

Silence persisted; Ashland walked alone up and down and through the seven neighborhoods between school and her bedroom, seven distinct segments of Tokyo she’d come to know intimately. Then, in the park across the street from the orphanage, Ashland watched love die under pale moonlight just beginning to overtake the twilight’s lasting gleam. This woman’s heart was broken, fractured, and dying inside – she gave everything to this man, and he threw it all away. This man’s guilt consumed him every minute of every day – he betrayed this woman and she lost all faith in him.

Ashland laid down to sleep that night wondering what would come of the man and the woman, if the developer could sell his game, what the fox saw in Ashland’s soul, and why the son couldn’t get his mother’s noddle recipe right. Then, before she drifted off, Ashland realized there was no noodle shop.

DAY TWO
Ashland took a long shower before even the sun woke up, when the other kids waited for their alarms and she could move freely without worrying about personal space. The rain poured through the night and Ashland knew a bright morning was too much to ask, that she would have to try for the early bus if she had any hope of staying dry. As she got dressed, Ashland thought about noodle shop that didn’t exist and why she had such vivid memories of something that wasn’t there.

The bus was ahead of schedule for the first time ever, and Ashland found herself in the rain, sloshing through giant puddles growing from the edges of the sidewalk. She turned down the same alley as yesterday. A cat jumped out, and startled Ashland slipped on the wet concrete; she reached out for anything and grabbed a laundry line tied to building. Clothes fell from the sky into a pile at Ashland’s feet, the same pile of clothes she tripped over the day before. She didn’t know what it meant, such a physical coincidence, only that it made her uneasy.

There was no hustle or bustle yet in the halls, just a few eager students who showed up early every day including the third-year girl Ashland saw crying the previous morning. She was on her phone, panicked and distressed as she argued with her father about the laundry that somehow never made it onto the line even though she absolutely hung it up. The look of terror that washed over the girl’s face gave Ashland chills, and she walked into the school wondering what was going on as panic started to build.

Ashland hid away in a dark corner of the library, a spot she often found herself when the anxiety got too difficult to handle or she felt like life was bigger than she imagined. The library was always quiet; students either avoided the book stacks like the plague or adhered to the rules and kept their mouths shut. Because of this, Kazumi and Takeshi’s sudden outburst was all the more obvious and obtuse.

She demanded to know why he was sitting with another girl, why he would spend his time with someone else. He reiterated a point he must have made earlier, told her that he explained she was his sister’s friend and why he was sitting with her before school started. She asked what he said to make her cry – had he admitted that he was seeing someone else and was he getting ready to do it again? She started to sob through her words, only the worst possible outcomes swirling through her head – Ashland felt what Kazumi felt but didn’t understand how or why. Takeshi cut through the bullshit and Ashland felt a deeper cut; it was the girl outside crying.

Panic slowly crept through Ashland’s veins as she saw what was happening – a chain of events with results of which she experienced prior to inadvertently orchestrating them. It was half past tomorrow, ten ‘til yesterday, the day time stepped back to move forward. Ashland didn’t know what to do, how to comprehend that she lived tomorrow yesterday already.

Ashland kept her head down for the rest of the day; a flimsy bandage on a gaping wound in Ashland’s psyche. Her walk home is rife with paranoia as she looks over her shoulder every five seconds wondering how she changed the course of history in a single day, her every step another chance to fuck everything up more than she already had. She remembered when she saw the fox and turned her head. Then a new though arose, a new notion Ashland hadn’t considered as she walked through the park and seven strangers watched her from the shadows:

Maybe it’s the same day.

Through the fear and guilt Ashland wondered; if she had the ability to make things worse, why couldn’t she make them better, too? Seven strangers wreathed in light and chained by tradition stay themselves just a little longer. An orphan girl with no place in the world, lover of that which no longer exists, and seeker of stories – Ashland asked herself what was stopping her from at least trying to make it all better.

She passed by the kids bullying a smaller classmate and stepped in. She threatened to call their parents and report them to their homeroom teachers. Ashland made a difference, if only for a few minutes; she felt good about what she’d done, like she could truly start to affect change even with the weight of this time nonsense.

The silence persisted again as Ashland walked alone through the park toward the orphanage – she remembered the couple who couldn’t find the good in each other, the lovers destined to kill love just a little more under a pale starlight and washed out fluorescents. Ashland felt the woman’s heart like she had yester-morrow, the inconsolable panic, shame, and sadness from learning what the man had done and why. He had an affair, a gentleman’s intermission because the woman’s daughter was too much to handle, a third-year student unable to even keep the laundry hung let alone do anything to make their lives easier.

Ashland felt the woman’s pain, the utter loss of confidence in herself as a person and a mother. The man betrayed her trust and her value, kicked her soul to the curb instead of owning up to his insecurities and misgivings. Instead of communicating, he fucked around and broke this woman’s heart. Ashland recognized that there were some things she could never fix.

Seven shadows become seven figures with seven faces and seven voices calling out for Ashland in the twilight settling into dusk.

The city fell silent as Ashland walked up the steps to the front door of the orphanage and it broke apart, the front façade split at the windows and melted into the ground. Shifting back and forth, the Victorian aesthetic inverted within itself and reconstituting as something new. The massive entrance swelled and shrank like the house was breathing, as if it knew something had changed. Ashland nearly fell in; just one slip away from losing herself. Seven hands reached out and pulled her back from the abyss, saved her from everlasting chaos and confusion.

She hung in the air, unaware of what was happening as Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” played on repeat; until she realized it was absolutely everything.

NEXT: Ashland, the City – Episodes 3 & 4

Infinity Dies

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part X: Infinity Dies
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

The sun rose just as it did each morning. Birds woke from their nests as farmhands started daily chores amidst solemn silence soon to be broken. We never saw it coming.

It’s hard to know when life is good, to pause and reflect on the positives instead of what inspires fear or anger or sadness. It’s easy to let go, lean into pessimism and find everything wrong each day. The challenge, then, involves separating the good from the bad, but even more important is recognizing which is what and how each affects the other. Existential dread comes from a struggle between the hope in good and the pragmatism of bad, how trying to be better but failing to succeed is what makes humanity so intriguing and exciting – there is no answer, only informed guesses that are subject to change.

We – the term began to lose its luster in those days, when we lived apart in the world. Our connection was thinning the more we stayed amongst the living instead of keeping to ourselves. Separations lost their exuberance as unity became a reality, actual coherence between mind and body and belief. Sworn enemies laid down their arms so long ago that the idea became a story meant to scare children, a preposterous conceit left to the annals of history. Innovation was the currency of art, the driving force that pushed mankind to be better each day and develop tools to build instead of weapons to destroy. They called it a golden age, their world near perfect that still bore mystery and wonder – utopia adjacent.

Loss often comes when least expected in ways that don’t make sense – emptiness doesn’t have set parameters. Accepting loss is difficult because restraining emotion is unnatural, a societal covenant that becomes personal, purposeful censorship of remorse and resentment because no one wants or needs to hear about that all the time. And loss can feel total, as if the end of the world has truly arrived because there’s no clear direction forward and trying to escape the confusion only leads to more pain.

Omicron’s song was agonizing noise vibrating molecules apart as it passed through space before it brought every living creature to its knees. Such a terrible song, banal and trite and over-produced and fake and everything else that makes music suck. Omicron was born of Averbole now gone, each note of who he was fragmented and puzzled back together in ways that don’t fit so the melodies crack and crumble for lack of structure. The birds fell from the sky in fright, the farmhands hid in their barns – our sins were coming to lay claim upon us, make us stand judgement for what we exiled then forgot.

We lost everything that day.

Omicron’s symphony spread across the globe a cloud of hate threatening deconstruction, total reduction down to what humanity once was, back to when there was nothing but fear and war and pain and anger. Seismic spasms brought mountains crashing to the ground and hungry storms bled crimson into the twilight, like watercolors spilled over. Cities burned in the night from the lowest slums to the highest palaces, for Omicron the Demon Lord’s voice made no distinction between prince or pauper, strength or weakness. Hell broke loose and proclaimed through the unbearable lightness of being that he would come home to embrace us.

Humanity’s screams were knives thrust into our hearts, the jagged bite of a rabid dog who can’t let go. We were not so deluded as to believe there was no fear amongst mankind – fear and hope go hand in hand. But their cries of horror and screams in the night were far worse and more intense than ever before because they knew this was the end.

Final days to final nights, a mad god’s violent delights, driven by darkness to extinguish every light, formed from mistakes and sins and fright, Omicron the Dead Deity is broken wrongs and terrible rights.

Time was short, and our final gift to mankind was spare them bearing witness to what came next, to give them peace and relative contentment in their last moments of existence instead of being made to watch what happened above them.

Humanity did not see Omicron’s army behind him a legion of ghosts, phantoms of every conceivable variety from angels slaughtered in the heavens to the rotted souls of planets the Mad Titan Omicron sacrificed to himself. Endless hordes of souls denied their peace, brainwashed into a spectral mass singing their horrible ballad of hate and hate where love is already dead and the tyranny of doubt reigns supreme.

All mankind would see was a bright flash of light and nothing more. They would not be subject to the horror of our own efforts, to the genocide of lost souls which we felt forced to perform – billions of souls crying out at once, then silenced. Yet, Omicron no longer felt anything but rage and hate, and his losses meant nothing as he crept closer still.

And then we began to understand what was happening.

Our sight was contracting, narrowing as Omicron grew closer – infinity was dying. Where there was once an expanse now existed a void in the wake of Omicron’s wave of nihilism. Omniscience meant less because there was less to see, and enlightenment lacked purpose because potential was already gone. The blithe once known as Averbole sought to tear it all down, to end this existence because it couldn’t give him the answers he wanted. Little by little, piece by piece, Omicron’s very existence made the malleable, quantum, language-defying building blocks of relative time and space slide apart, and when his unrepentant rage was focused, that entropy expanded and evolved exponentially.

Life breeds life, war brings death, and nothing creates nothing.

There was silence in the church as god returned to exact his unholy vengeance, to strike at the center of that which he loved more than anything and hated even more. He raised his sword and struck at us with all his might, every ounce of his compounding hatred funneled into a single blow. We readied our shield, gave everything we had to create a defense against his almighty aggression and planted our feet in the ground in wait. But then, we reconsidered and did something unexpected

We stepped aside and refused to fight.

Instead, we offered love and acceptance even though Omicron wanted to kill us all. For a fleeting moment, the idea of atonement sparkled in his eye, just a flicker of the Averbole he once was, but it was not meant to last. Repentance ceded eons ago, forcibly removed by his own bloody oath, Omicron screamed out in pain from toxic compassion, the fatal sting of hope that poisoned him to the core. He let himself feel something good and it was more than he could possibly bear. Ever the cosmos shrank down to our world, the people in it, and the space around. Omicron we held in our arms as he gasped and begged forgiveness.

Consider the individual given life and eventually some purpose. He is then beat mercilessly based on obscured implications and mostly-neglected consequences by passing lords and man-made theocracies. Some advocate for and protect the man, yet few others listen with true intent. The man lashes out in pain and fear and confusion, for he cannot understand why. Why is he the victim of such unapologetic, violent, deplorable torture? His organs begin to fail, his bones crack from the barrage of brute force, and his sanity dissolves into dust until he is nothing more than a sack of meat feeling only pain beyond measure as he awaits the release of death. The final blow to the head, the one that stings the least after such unfettered and unending suffering, it is mercy…and the last instant becomes the only moment worth anything.

We thought we had saved what little was left, but the death of all things waits for no man or woman or god. As our fallen brother took his last breath, time stopped and the entropy coming to swallow everything suddenly stopped in its tracks.

And that’s where we are.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part XI: Never More

After the War

Inspired by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribić, and Ive Svorcina’s epic 2015 Marvel Comics crossover event, Secret Wars, in which Doctor Victor Von Doom and Doctor Stephen Strange play god, well. Yet, their fall from grace is frustratingly brushed aside once the event ends and reality restarts. Their sins are great and many, yet the metanarrative is never confronted or questioned – this aims to.

Two desperate men, a scientist and a sorcerer, try to avert the end of all things.

When failure is the only option, they break the rules.

Harnessing power beyond reckoning, they save what little they can

One becomes a god, the other his prophet.

There was chaos, then there was order, and it was good.

But that was then…

Before god let petty emotion strangle his pale benevolence.

When his insecurity poisoned all that still was, and fear became law.

Ere god’s greatest enemy returned to end the charade and bring back infinite everything.

And in the twilight of his glory, god wept as something better grew from the ashes.

In the beginning, everything was born anew.

Yet, the scientist remembers, and so does the sorcerer.

They cannot forget what they did when all was lost.

One was corrupted by absolute power, the other murdered for making it plain.

Infinity does not know how close it came to ending.

Only the scientist and the sorcerer know.

And this is now…

When one staves off psychological demons by fighting ones in the flesh.

As the other disconnects from himself, bereft of meaning after losing divinity.

And one struggles to maintain composure, obsessed with how pointless he feels.

While the other falls apart because he cannot comprehend what he has lost.

No one knows what they carry, the pain and anger and overwhelming guilt.

No one can ever know that they did.

Yet, one cannot sleep knowing they will not answer for their sins.

While the other makes a choice: die a man, or rise again.

When they meet again, a strange doom will fall.

The closure necessary to break the cycle of in spite of itself.

A final reconciliation that one will not survive.

Redemption will come, but the cost will be too high.

Fate and destiny will die at their feet.

And their war will decide what everything means.

Omicron (Sepulcrum)

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part IX½: Omicron (Sepulcrum)
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

It sneaks up quiet and unassuming through blank nothingness bleeding out the edges of the cosmos, a silence so deep one wonders if sound ever existed in the first place. It does not know what it seeks through the infinite storm, only that it persists and survives to reach some unknown destination even if it takes until time’s last gasp.

Averbole was high as a fucking kite, brimming with gravitational anomalies and bursting with solar flares, he was exhausted and surging with energy at the same time, a cosmic traveler with limitless potential and even more limitless divinity. He departed his home happier and more alive than he’d ever felt, then became terribly alone because he left it all behind and didn’t look back. When the majesty you expect crumbles and the rose-tinted glasses are wiped clean the wine from last night, what’s left are consequences that offers no divergence from the set path, no leaving the party early for a warm bed because it isn’t there anymore. Those conceits are long gone, idealized relics of the past put to rest and buried. Averbole only had his mistakes left to keep him company.

It takes the plunge, deep down through the sewers of a binary existence into the lowest levels of rotting micro-verses clinging to reality by threads of unraveling fate so very close to snapping and erasing the fragile remnants of trillions of stars and planets and lives. As dark as it is, it shines a light in this most bleak un-place, spinning with purposeful meticulousness so it doesn’t get swallowed into the void.

In the most outer of spaces, Averbole came to know his cosmic theater. He witnessed miracles and travesties, fought the vile armies of entropy as it looked to conquer all it saw and birth kingdoms of decay. He watched empires of infinite lines subjugated to pointillist governances with their objective paradigms pushed down and crumpled up inside a box. He dueled with the living concepts of existence, the behemoths which kept the universe safe through rashes of pure paradox. He saved galaxies from premature death when the notes from a butterfly’s song turns into wind that becomes energy and thunder and wind then gravity and eventually a force so powerful it rips planets from their orbit and sends them hurtling into their suns. Averbole rose high in his journeys, found a new definition for himself far beyond the veil of our mind’s eye. He commanded millions with mere gestures, unquestioned faith in a god of a man who left his home to become something even greater than he imagined.

But he felt nothing.

So, he tried harder.

It fumes with anger and grinds against the dominant ebb and flow, goes against whatever is good – it goes up when there is only down, and when there is red it vomits green. It doesn’t know where to go so it just keeps going, ripping apart atoms in its wake in attempt to feel something again. Ever it creeps closers, sliding between quasars and supernovas and black holes and nebulae, subtly sparking and exploding outside any perception but its own. This moment; it stalks Averbole and watches him from afar wrestling with isolation after separating from collective nirvana, the death throes of a god unbecoming of his title.

Averbole weaved oceans from symphonic contentment past the shining remnants of archangels decimated by a war fought when life and death and love and hate were still real, physical entities, when the sharpest blades were the cutting words that pushed evolution forth or extinguished life at the root. This ancient war of relativity against singularity, between the right now and the infinite forever – which side stood victorious in the end?

No answers.

No solace.

No relent.

Averbole screamed and cried and flailed in his little void of nothingness, for he was lost beyond all hope and even the simplest queries seemed overtly impossible. He was stuck in himself, psychologically unable to break free from his own desperate anger and uncontrollable frustration. The curious little god lingered longer, loitering in the festering cesspool of degenerating existentialism His consciousness caramelized and melted away through the souls of forgotten empires and dirty streets alike. He consumed it all, absorbed meandering fractures and cancer-ridden fears that permeated indefinitely through the underside of the multiverse. He ate everything to learn all that he could never understand.

It is destiny. It is fate.

Averbole the Lackluster Lord looked out into the abyss and cried. The stars were blinding even though he could barely see them through the oily, murky void – infernal cosmic torches like desktop icons for the chaos of everlasting psychosis compressed into something beautiful. There was no truth in those stars, no reference point or base line amongst billions of haphazardly placed heavenly bodies, nary a delusion of order within all that had come to pass, and it angered Averbole. There was a scorched fury buried deep within his soul, an inconceivable pain through a torturous blaze that burned away the tapestry of his former salvation. Fire destroyed him from within and made a hole of nervous destabilization, a paradox of rebirth.

Those discarded feelings of pain and misery and fear and anger rejected and expelled so long ago never died. The darkness from inside those wannabe gods wished away and forgotten survived and persisted through ages, screaming through the endless night as the pieces fused and compressed and hardened into a Massive of darkness denser than ten thousand diamonds. The unbreakable absence of good tore through reality, stripping molecules of meaning and knocking billions of alternate timelines aside. Then, it felt something familiar, an old memory almost lost.

All it took was a single second of absolute doubt, one moment of weakness to expose Averbole, alone in the cold. Just a deity in by name alone who lost his way to never find it back. In that empty moment, the terrified god felt a blade sink into his heart, the Massive above him come to carve away everything Averbole had learned and become and taken for granted. One moment became a leviathan of maddening pain and suffering borne of immature divinity extrapolated through interstellar chaos and darkness. At the center of a smaller black hole within another, Averbole was bled away by the Massive in the night.

Become something else; survival of the fittest.

Averbole unhinged, digitized into cubic microcosms of perpetually pending potential that will never find direction. Everything was within his grasp and the truth he sought was there behind so much that rang false, but he couldn’t see through blackened eyes and thick clouds of moldy doubt. There was no light for Averbole, only a never-ending ocean of platitudes meant to deconstruct everything he ever loved.

Then the moment passed, and Averbole was no more.

Each part of the young godhead was scrubbed from existence, every fragment picked apart into smaller shards of what were once building blocks for physical objects. Cancerous notions unloaded pain and hurt and misery into fair Averbole the host, the hollow figure home to the irreversible rage we so ignorantly believed we could erase like a sentence in a story. All that remained of a fledgling god that left home was a crumbled shell with the same face. Behind his million teeth a tempest was born of a new truth this monster would represent:

They will fall. All of it will die.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part X: Infinity Dies

From Stellaris: Binary

I didn’t know what hate was until I was thirteen. It’s one of the only saving graces of living down here – kids get to be kids without the weight of knowing who they really are. But did I appreciate being kept in the dark? – of course not. I hated my parents for lying to me and pretending they were happy, for letting me believe I had a chance in hell of ever getting out when the truth is none of us do, because there’s no one who remembers when we could. All that’s left are just stories now, memories of a time when things were good. The truth could never set me free, so I decided to do it myself.

Under smoke-filled skies, walking down dirty streets littered with last week’s trash and stinking of piss and sweat as twin suns set behind too many factories, I realized none of it was normal because we’d grown up believing this was the way of things without asking why, and that when we learned the truth, we simply resigned ourselves to a life un-lived. The only hope we still had was in each other, and even that was starting to fade.

It made me angry. I walked for hours, out to the middle of the barren desert that was left behind when all the mineral deposits went dry and where nothing would ever grow again because the land was poisoned and wouldn’t heal. I screamed at the other, binary moon hanging in the sky as loud as I could until I lost my voice and nothing came out when I tried to curse them up above just one more time. Because this is just how it is. We are inferior, menial, less than – and it is wrong. They bend towards the sun the same as us, know the same gods, and bleed just like we do. We are their dirty secret, their unending sin kept hidden from the rest of the universe so they can keep living in bliss as we suffer in the shadows where we just exist. We cannot wait for another inversion that may never come, and I wouldn’t let the cosmos decide my fate, anyway.

It starts slow; just a feeling, at first. But the feeling grows into acceptance, and then into anger and rage when you realize acceptance means giving up on everything else just to hold onto something familiar – what you know isn’t worth anything without understanding what you don’t know, and understanding sacrifice is easier said than done. We gave up on wanting to more, and generations paid the price through subjugation, oppression, and hate. No one is going to help us; we must deliver ourselves from this life.

My husband left me when I told him I wanted to go. Through tears in both our eyes and those nights knowing what was coming on the dawn of the final day, I tried to hold onto what we had and not what we had become; divided and distressed because neither of us realized the home we had made was emptier than we thought. He saw hope between the cracks of this dingy moon, happiness in what was there instead of working for something better, and he saw a life growing old in this place I cannot be anymore. I think I loved him, and I like to believe he loved me, too; but I won’t ever really know, and that’s okay because this was never enough for me and it’s all he will ever want. When a good man and a good woman can’t find the good in each other, love dies; the others stole our potential and robbed us of our pride, and then I stood alone when they took my husband, too.

I have nothing to lose, and it is good. I hold onto the pain and sadness and frustration because it’s what gets me through each day and helps me remember that everything I left behind will still be there even though I won’t. The trek across the desert is cruel, and few are ready to make the journey, but those who join me see this place for the prison it truly is, and they will no longer be defined by being born on the wrong moon. I let them say their last goodbyes to families begging them to stay and reconsider such a fool’s errand. I don’t know how their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters cannot see the desperation in their eyes, that staying means dying without living — because it’s all I can see. At the edge of everything we’ve ever known, twelve set off with me across the barren wasteland towards the promise of anything else.

Ours was a baptism of fire, a crucible we brought upon ourselves that stripped us of pretense and forced us to survive with faith as our only guiding light. Through storms of thick dust and sharp sleet, days of unending heat that claimed one of us and drove another insane, nights so cold I often wondered if I would even wake up the next morning – through it all, we marched. Weeks felt like months in the summer expanse as the days stretched out and beasts hunted us in the pitch-black darkness of even longer nights. Comfort became little more than a memory, just a fading idea we used to know but could no longer recognize. I questioned myself more times than I can count, wondering if I what I was doing was right, or if I was leading us all to our deaths on the other side of the world where no one would hear us scream. But I would rather die knowing I tried than live wondering what could have happened.

After what felt like a lifetime, we reached the top of the ten-thousandth mountain and I saw the Moment; a small quantum singularity locking two moons together yet separating us so much more, the unstable point in space and time that I could see with my own eyes yet isn’t supposed to be real. But we stood on the summit of the mountain and looked upon the moment we’d been taught was a fairy tale for children too old to deny the lies but too young to accept the truth – it was magnificent. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen or would see again in our lifetimes; the nebulous, vague something pulsating with energy that crackled and spit and flared out from the center and across the crater’s face that meant freedom.

When the Moment first came into view, it felt like there couldn’t be anything else like it across all of Stellaris, that it was wholly unique in its lucid, breathtaking beauty. I wanted that moment to go on forever; just let me sit there and imagine what’s on the other side until I grow old and die with a smile on my face. But I stopped myself; that temptation wasn’t enough to keep me from moving forward. Two more stayed behind who were happy to watch the universe invert within itself in a shard of existentiality, content enough to accept they would die out there while the rest of us kept going.

It was the end of the world and the beginning of everything else, the only chance we had to get out, and every step was another towards deliverance. It felt right, struggling down the cliff face into the valley below where the Moment’s sheer force pushed a hole into the ground like a goblet spilling over with potential. I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked in the field of glowing flowers and vibrating trees warped by the Moment, so astonishing and extraordinary and uncanny and new. I couldn’t stop laughing the closer we got, like none of what I was seeing could possibly make sense yet it was there, and I could nearly touch it.

Reality swung like a boxer in a title fight when it’s fist connected with my mind as bullets from nowhere barely miss me. On the far side of the valley, they sent warning shots and moved to intercept. When they cut us off from the Moment, I panicked; sheer terror of never experiencing what laid within it’s shimmering perfection gripped me by the throat, and I couldn’t breathe. I ran faster than I’ve ever run before, as one by one the others fell behind me. I did hear them follow me when I took off, but I couldn’t look away from the Moment, and the closer I got the more I knew I made the right decision. Nothing I did on this world could make a difference, so my last hope was wanting to survive more than their guns could hurt me.

I jumped into the moment with a smile on my face when three of their shots found their mark and blood started streaming down my back. I cried with joy in the moment before I landed on the other side surrounded by strangers who nearly let me die on a busy intersection in a golden city. Before I lost consciousness, an old woman took my hand and told me everything was going to be alright. Somehow, I knew she wasn’t lying – I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I woke up two days later in a hospital, scared and confused; I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I threw up over the side of my bed and a kind nurse came in to clean it up. I asked her where I was, and she told me I would know in due time. Even though I wanted to scream, my body wouldn’t let me and I fell asleep again.

It took hours, but someone finally arrived in my room to give me the talk, the same talk every one of us who’s ever made it through gets when they wake up and don’t know where they are or what to think. That was his job; to tell us the truth without a hint of despair, to admit he and his kind oppressed people like me, to explain how I lived a lie for twenty-nine years based on an arbitrary cosmic design. I never imagined the truth would set me free, and here it was to prove freedom was never really an option to begin with. I was born on the wrong moon, and nothing could change that. No matter how much I wanted to forget them both and just leave, all my hopes and dreams disappeared as quickly as the Moment. That feeling of pure ecstasy I felt jumping in was inverted completely, and the dread pushed me over the edge.

Because everyone knows – the whole universe, all of it. They all know what’s was happening, and they don’t care because they don’t want to lose what our suffering produces. They’re more worried about the refined minerals we thought only those above us used in their vain glory, but instead sell for next-to-nothing for political favors and financial clout while the rest of the galaxy lets them keep us like animals. We are not a dirty secret or a shameful sin – we are the result of their necessary evil, the means to justify their ends, the terrible truth they don’t deny because everyone’s hands are dirty. The man went on about refugee rights while I tuned him out completely because I realized they were going to send me back. Everything I went through, all the heartache and disappointment and fear, the pain and sacrifice and broken promises – none of it meant anything because the only possible outcome was always going to be regret.

Of course, I would be the exception, the one who made headlines when my case defied all precedent and I was allowed to stay as a citizen of their glorious and shining city that stretched across the entire moon even though I couldn’t bear the sight without thinking of everything I once loved and gave up to live amongst those who treat us worse than the dirt they’ve never even seen. I thought it would be amazing to be someone else, to find my way to a new life and a new me in a new home because that’s all I’ve wanted since I was thirteen years old. But the air here stings, and what smells beautiful to them reeks like death to me.

I am a pariah, a child of neither world because mine is a trap and theirs will never truly accept me. There are those sympathetic to us lowly drifters – more often in some perverse obsession with our dirty world – and others like me, but when we see one another in the streets, guilt stops us from ever speaking – guilt from leaving behind those we claimed to love, guilt for surviving when others fell, and guilt for wanting to not feel guilty anymore. Mostly, they hate me and anyone like me. They hate me because seeing me is a reminder of the dirt they can’t wash away, the bloodstains that won’t come out, the tears seared into their minds every time they degrade and insult me because they don’t want to be reminded that I’m just like them.

My husband and I used to sing songs about dreams, melodies our parents taught us that helped make life a little easier when it felt like nothing would ever be okay. Those funny little songs got me through the first weeks on the higher moon; I would sing under my breath when they passed by, staring at me, the blight on their perfect little world, without thinking about how their sneers and upturned chins made me feel…like they would care even if they knew. I often thought about my husband back home, wondering if he still thought about me or if he found a nice girl to settle down with and have the children I never gave him. I asked myself every day if it wouldn’t be better to just pretend like none of this ever happened and jump off tallest building I could find. I wanted to do it so many times, and each time I didn’t, I cried myself to sleep knowing I was just that much more of a failure.

But I’m also a coward, and even though I dread waking up each morning, I still get out of bed and go to work at the printing press where they keep me in a windowless room processing paperwork from the moment I arrive until I leave at the end of each day. They don’t care that my home is never clean of hateful slurs and broken glass, or that each moment I endure their hate, I hate myself even more. This is a dark place full of shadows masquerading as light, just a shiny veneer hiding such a terrible truth that no one dares challenge it, lest they upset the profit margins and miss quotas.

On my deathbed, as cancer ravaged my body, I watched the inversion through my window, the anomaly I never thought would come in my lifetime; the world I once called home rose up from below, out from under the horrible, shadowy nightmare it had known for three-hundred years and bathed in the golden glow of a radiant and welcome sun — and it was good.

I knew we would soon descend back into the darkness I fought so hard to escape, that this golden world would soon fall like mine did centuries before, but I was finally happy. Because as the acidic, putrid smoke I recognized from my youth filled the air outside the hospital, it felt right – karma is a bitch, and this ‘higher’ moon would finally know what it’s like to be down below. Part of me wished I could have been there with my family and friends, but I gave up that right a long time ago. And so, I took comfort in knowing the ones I loved the most were finally in the light, and went to sleep accepting that I would never wake up.

The Golden Age

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part IX: The Golden Age
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

The world they inherited was beautiful and majestic, balanced and sincere, a jewel we enjoyed with them for hundreds of years (right?) – their cities and our Mountain, a synchronicity achieved and believed. But they knew that perfection was a lie, so they strived to live with acceptable compromise, waged discussion to find a way to please all of the people most of the time. And for a while, it worked.

Autumn is amazing, a season of beautiful entropy in yellow and orange and brown. There’s a stillness that hums through crisp, September air – nothing else quite like it. Maybe it’s because fall is the last gasp before a long, cold winter. Perhaps the change in weather gives reason to sit closer to the ones we love, gather together around the fire instead of struggle out in the icy winds. And there are those who thrive in darkness, who embrace the cold and make it a part of themselves so the bitterness in the coming months doesn’t cut so deep.

Pettiness bubbled up, potent resentment of what we had and they did not. The Mountain was a vestige of ourselves, a slice of nirvana and paradise, for them to enjoy in pleasure and in vice. Yet it does not last forever, the spark of divinity popping in their heads, and it fades lest their souls rip to shreds. Because it’s too much for them, too vexing a task, to handle what we know, to shoulder what we have. So we give them the next best thing, and in return they call it suffering, that they can’t ascend just as we had – they’re stuck as they are, and they are very mad.

They don’t want to believe it’s us they hate, so they turn on each other. They lie because their personal truths are no longer enough. The steal to feel the rush of breaking the trust of others. They cheat knowing they are bad people, and they do not care. They kill because in a world that makes sense, chaos is a ripple effect. Shorn of themselves, forgotten the ideals we hoped to preach, obsessed with tangible riches instead of intangible enlightenment, they went to war, and we let it happen.

We left and didn’t look back, couldn’t stomach what we saw as they forgot who we were even though they fought in our name. Beyond the infinite abyss, deep in the dregs of the multiversal gears, we laid down to rest within ourselves as we had before, only this time we had wisdom to let reality stay the course it would surely go, to and fro and raging so. Gods dream of their lives before divinity, and in Alchera we lost ourselves to those memories, the days before the advent we thought lost when existentiality shattered who we once were. We went to relive and fell down a hole of cathartic verisimilitude, a bottomless pit where falling isn’t what you’re doing, but who you are.

And we stayed there for too long hoping they would come to their senses, wishing they could see reason – until she brought us back.

She was one of us but also not at the same time, a mirror of what we accomplished and what we meant to humanity made real and given shape and form. She was Gaia, made from prosperity, grown from the waning violence and evolving peace spreading across the globe after so many nights of darkness and terror. She was a new vision of what we were always supposed to be – we made so many mistakes. Gaia was hybrid, crossed divinity with mortality, their integrity and our almighty. She was the archetype and she brought us back from the past, sang the song that pulled us through the space between realities so we could find our way home – she saved us.

Clarity comes later, after mistakes are made. Hindsight isn’t twenty-twenty, it’s more than that – postmortem doesn’t simply give insight to what should have been, but rather what could have happened, the potential for possibilities never before considered. In the beginning, we were a pantheon above. When they called us a curse, we went away and became a memory. We came back to be part of their world again and make it better, but when everything is perfect, nothing can be. They grew comfortable with divine intervention until they were obsessed and committed crimes in our name, so we left again and shrank into a myth. Being young and without consequence only happens once, even amongst gods. We no longer had that crutch, spent those tokens when we failed twice before. So, we tried something new.

We dug into the dirt and tilled fields of crops on hot summer days as the sweat dripped down our faces and we let the discomfort happen. We cleaned dishes by hand with greasy rags and dirty water, and took our beers at the end of the shift. We volunteered to walk from town to town healing the sick and mending the broken with medicine and tools instead of words and touch. We stood with them as they tore down walls and built bridges in their place. We read novels they wrote and poems they scribed, watched the plays they performed and studied sciences that thrived. Collective choirs made such music that time itself would stop to take notice, and physics might bend to better hear the awe-inspiring melody – it was more than the sum of its parts. The perfection of life turned out to be the imperfections, the flaws in who we are and what we do that create friction that becomes energy. Even omnipotence has room to grow – the expanse continues to expand always.

Victor Expansive helped the men of the northern village Tyco stop a flood that threatened thousands in the valley below, a broken dam that would have let the waters wipe out crops and homes and lives. Victor sat in the cabin by the fireplace as the celebration roared all around him – no one knew his name or why he came to the village those months ago, why he lived alone and walked the streets in the afternoon with a thermos of coffee and a cigarette poking out from his oversized beard. He never spoke unless spoken to, only offering friendly salutations and short remarks on the weather. The townsfolk thought him odd, but the man never hurt anyone and after some time he became a staple of the afternoon traffic on Main Street.

Wandering through the woods outside town, Victor wondered what brought him to Tyco in the first place, what bothered him so much back in Sovereign that compelled him to brave the harsh road north to a hamlet nestled between mountains blanketed in snow. He couldn’t recall when the notion wormed its way in, the anxiousness that eventually brought him to this directionless northern landscape. All Victor knew was that he needed to go, so that’s what he did. Victor sipped on his ale while the men danced with their wives and the women sang with their husbands, the children played games with their grandparents and the young ones in love stole away for moments of intimacy.

Lucy, the librarian, found her way to Victor’s side and asked him what he believed. Victor didn’t know what to tell beautiful Lucy, the woman he smiled at each day on his walk and who smiled back with a shared affection. He asked her why it was important, whether he believed in the gods or not. Lucy laughed and took a sip of Victor’s drink; she sat on his lap and grabbed his shaggy face:

“Not the gods, Victor – we all know you are real. Do you believe in us?”

First we were above them, then we gave them everything, now we are part of them. Everything before was mere prelude to what they had become, saviors of themselves when the night grew cold and their gods left them to the wolves. In an age of darkness and strife, humanity found itself without us and it was good because they inspired us to be better.

Then came a scream unlike any before, a shriek of absence that tore through the heavens and ripped across the cosmos to deliver a message to the denizens of a small blue planet in the corner of the universe. The sound was unbearable, like lightning begging for death or a star cursing in ancient tongues. Every living thing heard the message, the words carved into the astral sheet that blankets us all:

Averbole is dead. Omicron comes to destroy instead.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part IX ½: Omicron (Sepulcrum)

Alchera

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part VIII: Alchera
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

I don’t know who I am. I’m standing on the stoop of an apartment building on a city street, one I don’t recognize. But the smell is familiar – a mixture of piss and smoke and profanity. It’s late – I feel tired. I’m holding a cigarette in my hand like I’m a smoker; it’s two in the morning according my phone – wait, is that my phone? The screen is cracked and I don’t recognize the dog in the picture on the background. I…wait, I? Isn’t it ‘we’?

Wait…this doesn’t feel right. Where am I? Where are we supposed to be? Wasn’t I something else? Something more…?

This child is tugging on my arm like she knows me, as if we’ve known each other forever. But…who is she? What does she want? Why am I so tired? The hallway is painted cream with stark black trim, a stoic design choice my husband and I made years ago and still have to defend to guests and family…wait, who’s my husband? That girl – she’s my daughter, but I can’t remember anything about her.

I feel sick…how…how could we feel like this? Wasn’t that the point of getting rid of it all? We made that sacrifice so we wouldn’t have to go through any of that ever again…what the fuck…

There are so many people standing around me, and it’s making me anxious. Why would I put myself in a situation like this? Why would I dive into a course of action that is going to turn out badly?! What’s the point of doing it if I’m not going to give it everything I have and damn the consequences? But…I can’t…my heart feels like it’s going to explode and I want to scream. This…this can’t be me, can’t be who I was before…

Stop moving for a just a second, please! God, I can’t handle this, wait – yes…god. That’s what we were, right? I think that might be what we…oh no….again….and again…

It’s been three months since Andy felt anything close to normal, and I don’t know if I can give her what she needs – I haven’t spent time around kids, I don’t know what they want. I’m all she has now, so I can’t just give up, but I can’t stop thinking about what happens if I fail. What happens to Andy when I’m not a good enough guardian? But wait…who’s Andy? Why don’t I know my own name? Do I have a name? Something like…

None of this is real…nothing feels right…I can’t put our finger on it…

The water is calm; nothing’s awake yet and the boat’s the only thing making any movement. A few crickets chirp off in the distance, and the moon still hangs low in the sky as light cracks over the mountains behind me. My jacket isn’t enough for this cold fall morning, and the extra blanket comes in handy when my back starts to freeze – it was a Christmas gift from Praia. PRAIA!

We’re stuck, aren’t we? This is prison for us, a cage of memories…but there must be a way out…we can’t just stay here forev—

She’s looking at me like she wants something more than this, like I give two shits beyond the next thirty (hopefully!) minutes. I mean, I told her this was the deal; why the fuck can’t anyone just fucking listen? She’s hot as hell, though, and she’s playing with me down there better than I’ve gotten in a while, that’s for sure. She takes direction well too – I tell her to grab my tits, she grabs my tits; I tell her more tongue, she finds a way to slip it in there deeper than I thought possible. I mean seriously – girl knows how to get another girl’s rocks off. This is amazing, but she’s going to want to cuddle after…ugh.

HOLY fucking hell…this is insane. We can’t keep going like this. We’re losing ourselves…more and more…I’m starting to get sick…wait, not me – us…?

I open my eyes and the wind cuts into me like icy daggers ripping through every layer I have on, sliding through down to the bone. The snow is picking up and the number of cars on the bridge lessens with each passing minute. I look down at the water below and wonder how cold it is, how completely freezing it must and be and what that would feel like. Would it be instantaneous? Like, would the cold and the shock and the force take me like that? Or would it be a slow burn – would my bones snap and lungs cave in from the pressure as I get stuck under the ice and drown in the bitter cold? Now there aren’t any cars, and it looks like they closed access. The roads are getting worse, and no one wants a tragedy on the bridge today, in a snow storm.

Stop. Breathe. We’re all here, because we took a wrong turn and now we’re lost. We…I…we need to find our way back. We’re going to lose everything…

Five years have passed since Irma died, five years I’ve been alone around all these people just waiting to depart themselves. I can see it in their eyes because I feel it in my own – they’re done trying, finished with the effort because it’s just one more day of pain and pills and repetition for its own sake.

But that wasn’t the end…no, it was the moment right before…wait, we’re losing it…

Why? Why did he shoot? I told him I was unarmed – I don’t understand. Am I dying? Is this what dying feels like? Why did he shoot me? I didn’t do anything. I didn’t fucking do nothin’! I don’t get it; I don’t know what’s happening. It hurts so much. He’s still pointing that damn thing at me, like I’m going to do something while I bleed out on the goddamn street! Why? Why did this fucker have to be right here, and why did I have to be driving right now? What the fucking fuck! I…this is it, right? There’s no coming back from a shot to the chest…

Except there was. We didn’t die that day. I…we can feel it…

Vanilla bean candles are my favorite – how did he know? God, this feels so right. He’s such a good man. He loves me so much. I think I can see myself with him for, like, forty, fifty years. Wouldn’t that be just incredible? I want to wake up next to that man for the rest of my life. Right? Don’t I? Isn’t this what I want? He treats me so well, and I know he could have anyone if he wanted her enough – I’m fucking lucky to have Grant Madison. So why aren’t I more excited? What’s holding me back? I…I’m standing next to myself. There’s another me and she’s looking back at me like she knows who I am. Why does this feel right? What in god’s name is going on?

There it is…keep following that feeling…we’re almost out…

My family is all that matter anymore, the only part of my life that makes sense. I haven’t worked in months, my leg is getting worse, and Miranda – that ghost just isn’t holy anymore…wait what? Miri’s mom came to live with us last year because an eighty-year-old woman can do more than me, move better and feel more. The kids are staying strong, keeping brave faces while their father wastes away even though I know all they want to do is cry. I can’t fix this; no one can make this better. I’m going to die before my son goes on his first date, before my daughter learns how to ride a bike, before I’m ready to go. I can see myself clear as day, lying in the bed unable to lift my own arm – but if I’m there, how can I see myself? Am I already dead?…no.

We need to find our way out, dig through the memories and escape while there’s still something to save…

I don’t know who I am, and that scares me. I’ve spent three decades looking for a reason to be, whatever purpose I was meant to achieve…and still I’m left wanting. I got married, had a life, had a plan, and thought my life had meaning, until it didn’t. Now I’m scrambling, because I’m wondering if I ever knew what I was doing, even when the entire world made sense and I was happy. Was I really happy? Or was it a lie I was telling myself so I didn’t spend every moment of every day questioning every single one of my actions? Did I convince myself that I felt complete when I was still confused about everything? I loved her, and she didn’t love me – and now it haunts me even though all I want is to move on and figure out who I am…because…I know I’m meant for something more…something more…

That’s it…the way out…

A siren song flying through the echoes of the multiverse – it’s calling out to us, holding us back from the edge of oblivion as the haze separates and the endless nothing that lies beyond the cliff becomes clear. We can focus again for the first time, bring back a semblance of understanding after closing ourselves off for so long, deep in our own dreams because we forgot what we were, all the things we had come to symbolize. But their song was so sweet, so serene and magnificently bold that it was impossible to ignore.

Memories started creeping back, the moments broken up and hidden inside our own consciousness, deep down where we didn’t think to look. We remembered what happened, the reason we left…

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part IX: The Golden Age