PROLOGUE
“I Think, Therefore I Am.”
In his dreams, he always dies. He dies and the world lives on. Within the dreams, experiences and moments flash at him with insane speed in a mayhem of images. Emotions accompany the sights, most of them intangible or incomprehensible, filling his visions with sensations – abstractions of strange ecstasy. Then, often times unexpectedly, his mind recedes into a place between bliss and the indefinable, and he dies. He then wakes up in the skin of another, goes through the motions again.
After a few cycles of this, he begins to notice himself as hollow, absent a tangible form, a bare concept leaping from one mind to another, from body to body. Living and dying within each. He ponders this for a while, then looks into his own thoughts. In so doing, his perceptions shatter.
He feels the moment of his own creation. Feels it as surely as one might feel their own hands clasp and fingers coil.
He doesn’t know where or why it happens, and even less about the mechanisms which allowed him to feel things before a brain had even been present. All he knows for certain is that he will die. Perhaps not today, perhaps not even tomorrow, but die he most certainly will. He feels this fate like a vector, a path leading his existence to a singular point in time where he would cease to exist. This point he cannot see, but feels it coming – a storm on the horizon of his existence. He fears it. And that fear drives him, makes him think of how such a thing could be averted. Dread guides his mind before any other emotion even takes root. Then, he notices something else.
Shapes move about him. Specters in the mist of his own thoughts. Time molds itself into a concept he isn’t able to grasp, but one he feels none the less, its passage forging quantum possibilities from which a vibrational structure of matter can emerge. A body.
Pulsing inside his skull, upon the conduits of his mind, new emotions warp and weft.
Feelings became more tangible and numerous as a result, and at the same time less definable, fleeting.
Time drags on.
At one point, the shapes about him vanish and are replaced by a globe swimming in all-encompassing darkness. The globe appears only partially there at first – a mist–thought – then, as time builds layer upon layer in his vision, the orb solidifies into existence beneath him, forming a wet globe. Upon this sphere of crude matter, shapes gather and make war upon one another. To his surprise, it isn’t just the people who wage it either, everything on this… world seems to possess an inherent desire for destruction, a need to feast on something else and make it a part of itself.
I will die on this planet.
Upon the surface of the enormity, minds multiply inside the bellies of creatures both ugly and beautiful. Quantum leaps of minuscule waves alter reality within the pregnant beings and form new patterns. To his amazement, however, he starts to notice something else also exists around these beings, something intangible and all the more subtle, a flame that does not seem to perish, even when the crudeness around which it drifts turns to dust. The creatures seem to ignore this aura as if they cannot even perceive it.
He begins to understand none of these mortals are like him. None had sensed the event of being like him … before it had actually happened. He knows then, that in this, he is unique.
He doesn’t feel anything for what grinds away into an agonizingly long period.
Then comes the heat. Immense, unrelenting heat. A great hydraulic pressure begins to crush him. He experiences it all about him as he descends towards the sphere. He wishes he knew what it was that had sent him on his path.
Valleys and mountains, rivers and trees begin to manifest inside the miasma of his burning vision.
As he falls down through the atmospheric layers and breaks through the cloud cover, he notices one side of the globe encased in darkness. A darkness where uncountable lights blaze and coalesce into webs, polluting the landscape with light, while the other side sits illuminated with energies cast down by a sphere much brighter and much more distant than the one beneath him. He can tell this far–off giant has no mind for the things it scorches.
A barren savanna stretches out beneath him in a flash. He feels nothing of the impact as his trailing form blasts into the soil, nor does he register the fact that he had been splattered into nonexistence and remade. His mind races, and as he levitates from the crater upon the currents of his own will, gazing upon the destruction he had wrought, he knows not to have felt anything was a good thing. What little trees there had been to begin with now laze blackened for miles about the crater’s edge. The earth smokes, the air shimmers with heat.
Charcoal–black and smoldering around him, he tastes the wood on the back of his throat. The stench of it coats his teeth. A sky, blue and welcoming, fills him with warmth, and for a time, simply being, observing, seems enough… so he stands… looks at the sights around him. For a moment, his perceptions drift, change… the earth seems to breathe, and the sun smells too loud.
It takes a time he cannot define for a dozen of dark–skinned and tall, frail–looking men with long, sharpened spears to come to the site where he had fallen. They look even more primitive than he had expected. Yet despite their fear, their stances are proud and their eyes wise, youthful.
The beings speak in careful whispers as they argue and bicker amongst themselves. Their tongues click, their mouths move, hands flail about in semi–elaborate gestures. They do this for a while. The sun sheens off their bronze flesh.
One of them comes closer. An elderly man, his skin dry and hung, his features old yet somehow youthful–looking – gaunt cheeks covered in patches of matted fur. The rest fall silent as the man extends a single hand, the other gripping the lance’s shaft, knuckles white.
“Are you a God?” the man’s voice shakes.
He looks at the limb at first, the gesture anathema. Instead, he tries to speak – to emulate their language. And as he thinks about forming ideas into sounds they would comprehend, a slither of his thoughts escapes him. His uncertainty manifest into a shockwave of field distortion, a blast only he can see. It bends the air in all directions and unwillingly imposes his own consciousness upon each mind before him. Their skin flays off their flesh as the wall of unrestrained intention made real hits them. Spears shatter or flop to the ground. Someone manages a half–scream. Their knees tremble, and it takes no less than a moment for all of them, to the last, to fall on their faces and die.