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)

Ziggurat

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

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, there was everything all the time. And we are here to watch. A water balloon of a new reality, from a center point of impact instantly spread across the vacuum where we once existed, the space our universe used to fill.

Chaos reigns supreme with pure Potential his bride, new physics take shape and variances begin, decisions made for the first time when life springs from a confluence of metallic dust and single-cell bacterium flung together in the cosmic storm. Divergence is too pale a definition, expanse yet too narrow, for this new universe brimmed with unending possibilities and for a fraction of a second, we thought it would be good.

Before the first supernova, we forget our names. Any memory that we were once something great are slipping away. We have become the epitome of an artifact, a lost piece of a civilization long dead now existing where it doesn’t belong. As life evolves, we lose our sight – all we have left is our connection with the fabric of reality. When the stars begin to settle and planets take shape, the horror sets in and we devolve.

The new structure is change and balance and liberty as foundations instead of precious gifts – verisimilitude is prayer and inclusiveness if inherent. This new mountain (what other word is there…) is a beacon, the breaking dawn of new semantics for consciousness yet to lay claim in this aether swirling and roaring into something that will eventually hold strong. These pages are blank because the story is unwritten. This is the beginning of time begging to be set free, the start of space racing against itself to find the edge it will never reach.

Their first constellation is named Ziggurat, seven stars that represent the image of a mighty palace in the sky, a heavenly fixture so righteous and pure. To them, it is a hypothetical, immovable, incomprehensibly divine object at the center of all things. And then it became clear, so terrifyingly obvious. We will not find peace. This is survival, but as a blemish on this reality.

We are a flaw in creation, a single imperfection in a perfect new cosmos destined to re-live the worst of our sins through billions of millennia because we no longer have a purpose. We don’t belong here – it doesn’t work. It is not for us because we are a blight, a fragment of corrupt data that threatens the entire system, leftover code exploited as a virus.

I was once a god, an angel on high or serenity personified. And before that, I was a man. Now, we are all less than nothing, merely a piece of an inconceivable insignificance without concept, far buried under delusional hope simply waiting for the end that will never come.

COMING SOON: Empyrean

Never More

ACT II of III: Behemoth in Exalt
Part XI: Never More
(From Look At What You’ve Done)

We can’t protect them anymore because all that power we used to have turned into all the things we can’t afford. There is no more everything, and what should have grown and expanded forever until the end of time dwindled down to a fraction of a segment of a micron. And when space retracts, time grows long and slows to a crawl hoping to stave off death for just a bit more.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Ten thousand voices speaking as one, choir of judgement filling the last remnants of the universe we called home. Up in what used to be the sky, legion of voices become clearer still unto faces watching. After so long upon immaculate thrones, we were humbled in the presence of what we knew was something even bigger than ourselves, power greater than anything we could possibly know because even breaking through the walls of perception into divine territory did not give clairvoyance to what we couldn’t conceive – we were too ignorant to know just how ignorant we were.

You made so many mistakes.

There are so many, countless ideas and dreams and concepts and truths churning in this ambient void, arguing over what comes next. Goliath is a dynamic duo, innovators through detail and symbolic horror – they are not bound by genre or label or morality because they breed antithesis. There’s a cynical Bastard there too, once a man now a fossil to his own insanity which sometimes blooms creative thunder; he’s one cantankerous fuck. The next one’s head gleams like the mirror upon which he does rails of antimatter and quarks, a mind Manipulator who sets his own rules so others can follow, whose work takes effort because that’s kind of the point. Frustration vexes the Experimentalist, too, a constant nagging to stuff puzzle within puzzle, enigma within metafiction, symbolism within the audience. Existence is the stage for a Multi-Phased Progeny, he who delights in the art of schadenfreude on a multiversal scale, tempting emotions of every kind and stealing the sentiment just as easily. Away from the rest is a Starman defeated, who finds his magnum opus through insecurity in the winter of his tenure – so many love what he creates even though he cannot bring himself to care the same. Some Four-Faced Analog dances around between the others a representation of collaboration, the connections that spark when they create something greater than the sum of its parts. We…I wish I could have kept counting, learning the lessons these architects and designers had to teach from wisdom beyond infinity, but they reached a decision.

This is how it must be.

So, the end is coming, a final goodnight into a sweet abyss of nonexistence. Never more will the throes of this life be known, an entire universe snuffed out and with it unending stories and peoples and things now lost forever.

ZOT OBLIVION comes for one and all.

We were no longer gods and they were no longer human – the final sentence of the last chapter brought everything together as one, not a singular mindscape like before, but a hive of ideas and souls and relationships coalesced into a single bit of matter, just one drop of cosmic material. It felt like a warm bath with a glass of wine, dozens of puppies all sleeping in a pile, a pipe packed with incredible weed, getting to the front row at your favorite band’s show, telling someone “I love you”, reaching the top of a mountain, holding your newborn child for the first time…all of it at once. Through the clutter of faces and voices and ideas and values, the true author comes into light. And he is frustrated.

Never more had we experienced together, never higher did we feel as gods or men or whatever we have become. Because this is who we are now – little more than a figment in the mind of a possibly unhinged, probably obtuse, absolutely eccentric writer attempting to create something, some things…anything worth meaning in this world that might last.

Whoever he is intends for the story to end with our destruction, some wanton dissolution into the recesses of his memory because he never finishes what he starts: he revises and reworks when he can’t find satisfaction then throws the bulging binders into a drawer where incomplete tales go to die. He sees in us an opportunity to say something, a message that brings seemingly disparate ideas together in an effort to make some sort of impression, to divine a meaning that speaks across boundaries and makes sense in a variety of contexts.

He struggles and yearns to find a way to show impressive dimension and universality of interest against a tidal wave of misunderstanding, ill-gotten criticism, and the very conceited nature of his own words to craft a steel-hard frame that lives up to his own standards and inspires those who read it without frustration.

Yes – the shores of our reality rest upon the vocational limits of a college graduate with delusions of grandeur and a directionless path. And here we sit, when he gets writers block at the end of all things; a black hole of creativity swirling at the end of this sentence for months and years.

End and beginning, death and creation…look at what you’ve done.

It’s a metaphor, just a simple device. But the story is bigger, a force against the tides of time that shall forever persist through the new cosmic chain that goes unbroken. The story is abundant, even in the cascading moment of entropy absolute. Even here and now as we stir with the knowledge of our own nonexistence, the story must proceed to the end.

There’s nothing left…

It goes out like a puff of smoke.

NEXT: Behemoth in Exalt, Part XII: Ziggurat

Advice You Shouldn’t Take

Bootleg movies, cheap smokes, pass the joint.
Make up new rules; the old ones are useless.
Pretend you’re not scared, always.

Destiny’s not a thing; never has been.
No one knows what comes next.
Turn off the bright light, stop the water, smell flowers.

Seek clarity even though you’ll never find it.
Some things are worth dying for;
But we can’t really understand why, until the end.

Dirty sex, casual drugs, make bad choices.
Never see the same thing twice; make it different.
Test what you know, because it’s probably wrong.

Everything lives and everything dies.
Time should mean something, but doesn’t.
Remember it’s a lie; everything.

Biased perception, stuck under doubt.
Because we think we can’t know more than we do.
The greatest lie humanity ever told: we are not good enough.

When good is just a word, and so is bad;
Nothing feels like everything, and the opposite just the same.
Do a line, eat that pill, quantum breakdown.

Separate from life to see if more clearly.
Moderation in everything, even moderation.
Lose control; you never had it anyway.

Original Draft: January 29, 2018

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.