Light in the Dark Chapter 0 Prologue
The bonfire burned brightly in the night, illuminating the ground all around him. Sparks flew into the sky and for a few moments he looked up, staring at those all too familiar stars above, before his gaze returned to the fire in front of him.
Slowly, he relaxed as he gazed into the fire, as it crackled and fizzed, his mind wandering around in his life, thinking about his future. His hand reached out to the pieces of cloth laying on the ground around him and threw it into the fire, watching as it was consumed by the flames. First, the edges burned and curled up, turning to carbon as the flames went further.
Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes for a moment, calming his mind further as he sought answers to the things the future would bring.
"I will never understand you people," he heard a voice say and he slowly opened his eyes. The bonfire in front of him was gone, but he could still feel the heat on his body, see the light on the ground around him. But the fire itself had been replaced by a wooden desk, a man with an all too familiar face, wearing an all too familiar uniform sitting behind it.
He didn't look like the man he knew from pictures and the books. No, the man looked haggard, overworked and with bags under his eyes, staring him straight into the eyes, a hand holding a glass that was almost completely filled with a clear liquid. He looked like he had worked for days on end for some unknown purpose, though he had an idea what it was.
"Why would you venerate an old coward like me?" the man asked. "I should be rotting in some hole in the ground, not preserved in a fucking tomb."
He didn't answer as the man brought the glass to his lips and drank deeply.
"Every time this fucking nest of vipers pushed more responsibility on me, I ran away," me said, closing his eyes and breathing in deep. "Suppression duties, right... I ran away to get out of those fucking responsibilities of being a regent."
The man glared at him.
"Do you have any idea how much those vipers would have hounded me? How much more work they would have pushed on me. I can still hear their weaselling voices, trying to get me to declare for one of them."
The man closed his eyes.
He took a deep breath. The man was not a coward, never a coward. Why was he seeing this?
The man leaned back in his seat, massaging the bridge of his nose, before taking another drink from the glass.
"But I should have been there. I should have been there for the kid. Been there for my own kids. But no... I've been a coward and ran away, allowing his ass hole to get his claws into the kid while I wasn't around."
The man paused.
"And then he killed him and declared his stupid little Empire and everything came crashing down..."
The man leaned forward again.
"You know the story of the War. You know how I threw away the lives of good men and women? I was flying by the seat of my pants and I was lucky. But it still wasted the lives of so many..."
The man drank from the glass again.
"And the aftermath of course... Stripping me of the fucking title I didn't want in the first place and then squabbling for months."
There was a snort as he continued.
"I could have taken over myself if I had wanted to. Maybe I should have. But I was so damned tired. War takes a lot out of you. Actual, real war. Not that ritualistic crap you lot think is 'war'."
"I should have thrown the little bastard out of an airlock after he killed his brother..." The man muttered and closed his eyes, emptying his glass.
There was a silent and he could still hear the crackle of the bonfire.
"If you go back," the man continued. "They will run you over after, one, maybe two years. You lot might be elite warriors and worth five of their good soldiers. But they have ten soldiers for every one of you lot. And it takes only a year to make someone into a good enough soldier when it takes a life time to make an elite warrior like you."
The man closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair again, his eyes on him.
"Don't go back in war," he said. "Go back in peace. Maybe you'll learn some wisdom that the little shit forgot to teach you."
The fire crackled and burned the logs as the desk disappeared, and he was left thinking, his breath slow and relaxed. He closed his eyes again.
"I've always wondered what it takes to make a person, you know."
His eyes opened again as he suddenly heard a female sounding voice from besides him. He didn't turn his head to look at the source of the voice, instead looking ahead, where the fire should be, but instead just showed an empty void with moving lights in the distance.
"And I've had a very long time to think about it. A very, very long time... I have forgotten how much exactly."
The source of the voice moved around him and into his field of view. Floating there, in that black void was a being that he could only describe as a squid, but even then the comparison fell someone flat. Its skin glowed in many colours, swirling in almost hypnotic patterns, seven arms floating around one end as a trip of black eyes were directed at him.
"Forgetting is good for the mind, because no matter what, there will always be a limited amount of storage," the being said and he thought that the light patterns on its skin changed with the words. "It was at least a million years, I think..."
"But what makes a person? Their soul... No, not the thing that is given to someone by some deity, but the soul that they develop, for the body is born without a soul."
The squid like being bobbed up and down one of the tentacles reaching out and he twitched as he thought he could feel the three smaller tentacles at its end move down the side of his face.
"The soul is created by their parents, their teachers, their friends, their families. By all those that are part of their life and it is kept in existence by their relations after it formed."
"That is what makes a soul, that is what makes a human, no matter how they look, no matter their creed. It does not even matter what species they are. Every intelligent life in the universe is, in the end, human. Fiends, family, hopes, dreams..."
The tentacle pulled back and the being moved around a little, seeming to sag a little.
"But a soul can be destroyed. By chance, by mistake. An accident perhaps, a tragedy. People lose their soul and something will always be missing about them. One can feel it in them, but you can never really put your finger on it."
He wondered for a moment if one of those little tentacles was called a 'finger' for this being.
"But there is no way surer to destroy a soul than war. War might not destroy the body, might not destroy the mind. But it surely can destroy a soul. Crush it into non-existence. Losing friends, family, having hopes and dreams destroyed before their eyes. That is what destroys souls."
The squid-like being remained silent for a long while and just looked at him.
"Don't go to war with them. It will not only destroy their souls, but yours as well. As surely as the light changes at the beginning of a new day."
The being seemed to blaze in a dazzle of colour and he was once again staring into the burning logs of the fire. Those words made him shiver more than what had been said by the man. Loosing ones soul to war?
He was lost in thought for a few long moments, looking down to the stones surrounding the bonfire.
He heard something moving and thinking it to be one of his friends, he continued to think, until a pair of scaled feet appeared in his field of view that were unusual. Three toed feet like those of birds, but one toe held a large sickle shaped claw on its end, held up from the floor.
He looked up slowly, where scaly feet became legs that were covered in red, orange and yellow feathers. Further up the body was laid out like a chicken, but the wings were more of arms, with four clawed hands on the end and a long whip like tail. Its head had a bit of a bird like shape, but rather than a beak, it had a muzzle that he imagined to be filled with sharp teeth.
A pair of yellow, intelligent eyes looked at him, blazing in the light of the fire and he looked back.
Was this a Phoenix? he wondered.
The Phoenix opened his muzzle, and he could indeed see razer sharp teeth. Then it began to talk.
"A sense of morals is a strange thing, you know," the Phoenix said with a male voice in a conversational voice with an accent some might have identified as British. "We all think of ourselves as moral people. You, me, the bloke at the fish and chips shop down the street. But... the man who killed his wife in a drunken fury also thinks of himself as moral."
The Phoenix' head tilted and it seemed to shrug.
"It's hard to tell with moral people what they are able to do. What their morals allow them to do. I certainly know of people who think that it would be moral to take you and reprogram you into a nice little drone for them to follow their orders. They have their own sense of morals."
The Phoenix turned around and looked at the fire.
"Though I certainly do not think that they are a good sense of morals. But then, I am a Kantian with Nietzschean influences. To me the right set of morals is something that you arrive on your own, by asking yourself if it would be actually a good thing for society as a whole to follow a certain moral decision."
Its hear turned its head to look at him.
"Which brings me to the morals of war..."
There was a pause as it looked at him, before turning back to the fire.
"It's hard for me to say that a war can be moral. Yes, there are certainly wars that could, if you squint, be considered moral. As a Brit, I certainly think of World War Two like that, but other wars? It usually is all about territory, money, throwing out one government to replace it with one the invading nations think would be better, for them."
The Phoenix stayed silent for a few moments before it continued.
"If you were to invade a place, and I know which one you have an eye on, would you consider it to be a moral course of action? Or is it just to satisfy the need for 'honour', for 'power', for 'prestige' of the invading parties?"
The Phoenix turned and began to walk away.
"If you come, come in peace, not in war. Look for wisdom and knowledge, not for the riches of the innocent people. Because in the end, you will lose either way."
The Phoenix disappeared, and he stared into the flames again, silent as he had been through this entire quest. By now, a through line was developing for him.
"As it should be," an imperious voice said, sounding neither male, nor female. It has a strange reverberation to it, as if many people were talking at the same time.
He kept his eyes on the fire in front of him as a darker shape stepped into the light of the fire, standing off to the side. The shape was four legged with a long neck and a long tail. A pair of leathery wings were on the shaped back, while a pair of arms came from above the front legs shoulders. Safe for those arms, the shape could only be a dragon.
"It is always better to seek peace and knowledge, then it is to seek war. We have seen it too many times with my own eyes."
The dragon's head had not only two, but six eyes and each glowed in the light of the fire.
"It can have apocalyptic results, from which it takes a long time to recover. A very long time."
The dragon sighed and turned to look at him.
"No one really wishes it to happen, but when fear, anger and the greed of the politician come together, it can happen and whether the people wish it or not, they have to follow the strong men into war."
The dragon paused and looked back at the fire.
"Look up," it said and he looked up, seeing a different sky of stars up there, several of the stars twinkling brighter than the others. "If it is wisdom you wish, seek out the League of the Five. The League of Men, Kraken, Phoenix, Dragon and Serpent."
"If you wish war..."
The rest was left unsaid as the dragon turned and walked away into the darkness, around the fire, disappearing in the middle distance.
He looked up into the sky, trying to burn the stars into his mind.
"I am sorry," a new voice whispered, no begged. "I am sorry. Please forgive me, Asnerid. Please forgive me for what I had to do."
He looked down from the heavens again and on the other side of the fire, he could see a shape. Clearly this was a large serpent, with a lot of bone white feathers, two pairs of arms coming from below the large head and folded into a gesture of submission. Of a sort.
Yet, as he looked at the feathered serpent, he felt a shiver run down his spine, feeling like he was looking upon death itself.
Before the serpent, an image floated, showing another serpent, one with colourful feathers, then another, and another. Several of them had a strange greying white growth on their faces.
Each time the feathered serpent begged the image for forgiveness. It continued for a few more times, before the serpent finally looked over to him.
"Thirty five thousand eight hundred and eighteen," the serpent whispered at him. "I was sworn to protect them. And I had to kill them. I had no choice."
That sent another shiver down his spine and he swallowed.
"It was a world destroyer," the serpent continued. "A bacterium that killed everything, but couldn't be killed itself. No antibiotics, not fire, not cold. Atomic devices only destroyed the upper layers of the Plague, but never what was below. And it killed the people in horrible ways, eating them from the inside."
The voice had remained a whisper.
"We had to quarantine the world as it died over the course of two years. We had to cut the elevators, destroy the orbital ring. Millions died from the crashing debris. But they would have died from the Plague..."
The serpent closed its milky white eyes and he could feel how tears began to run down his cheeks.
"I was on the quarantine for two years. I had to destroy any shuttle that tried to leave the planet. I killed thirty five thousand eight hundred and eighteen, while listening to their pleas to be allowed to leave, even as I saw that they were infected."
It dropped his head and he swore he could hear a sob coming from that being.
"I was made to protect them. It was my duty to protect them. And I had to kill them to protect those that survived."
The serpent continued to sob for several more moments and he felt more tears running down his cheeks, before the serpent looked up again and directly into his eyes. Its eyes were filled with a pain, a sorrow and regret that he could not experience in a hundred years. Or so he hoped. Its next words chilled him to the core.
"Please do not come with war in your heart, but with peace. If you do not, I will have to protect my people. I will have to kill you. And then I have to ask you to forgive me."
The serpent paused again.
"I am tired of killing," it said and turned back to the floating image. "I wish to die, but I can only die when they have all forgiven me."
From then on the serpent ignored him again, just looking at the floating image whispering its pleas for forgiveness.
"I am sorry. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Please forgive me for what I had to do."
He shivered despite the warmth of the bonfire, as he watched the serpent as it slowly disappeared, the whispered pleas fading the last.
His head dropped as his hand rose up and he wept silently for the creature in his vision, who he might as well call a god.
The bonfire burned brighter than the one he had a year ago. But then, he was now almost half way to his goal, under a different sky than the one he had known for so long.
He looked up into the sky as his finger played the with totem in his hand and closed his eyes. He didn't cast it into the flames, nor did he cast anything to burn away and guide him on his quest.
Well, it was not quite true, for he cast his thoughts and memories into the flames as he sought guidance from the gods he had first met in what felt like a life time ago.
His breathing slowed down as he thought back to that time, ignoring the sound of footsteps on the dry grass like plants to his left.
The man stepped into the light of the bonfire to his left, staring at it with the haggard appearance he had had back then as well. A large bottle rested in his hand and it held it by its neck. The bottle was made of clear glass and filled with a clear liquid.
"There is no god," the man said. "If there was a god anywhere, looking out for us, this entire mess would not have happened. I never imagined that they would collapse this hard after I left."
The man paused and sighed.
"No... After I ran. So many lives lost, so many hurt. Another sign of how much of a failure I was.."
He brought the bottle to his lips and drank deeply from it, his eyes closed.
"And if there was a god... he would have to have stopped it all from happening. Hell, if there was a god, he should have stopped the fucking fat man!"
"But no... The war happened and these vipers brought humanity down like that, throwing nukes around left and right, killing entire worlds, just to spite the others. If there was a god, he would be a sadistic bastard, chortling and laughing at the pain of the people."
"Not just here, but also where you lot come from."
The man closed his eyes and took another deep drink from the bottle.
"We should have kept going as we found the five worlds, continuing on. I should have died somewhere between the stars, starving and thirsty as food and water ran out."
"What did I get instead? That little bastard had the nerve to turn me into a god-like, messianic figure. 'Great Father'... Don't make me laugh. I wasn't even a father to my own two sons. How can I be the 'father' to an entire society. Even one as screwed up as she one you lot have?"
There was a deep sigh coming from the man as he sat down on the ground. He sat the bottle down and took off his uniform jacket. He balled it up and threw it into the fire, making the bonfire flare up as it consumed the fabric, burning away the medals and the rank insignia.
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," the man said. "And yet you lot and these people hold me in a reverence that I don't deserve. I never intended to return. The little bastard never intended you lot to return. And yet your head idiots think that they do the right thing."
The man looked at him.
"I know what you are looking for," the man said. "You will not return to what you still call home. One way or the other..."
The man closed his eyes and took the bottle again taking another swig and remained silent.
There was the slight scent of the ocean that came from the left as well and the shape of the Kraken appeared from the darkness, floating into the light like it was swimming in the sea. Two of its eyes turned to regard him.
"I was a god once," the Kraken said, the lights of its speech dancing over its body. "I was not a good god."
It paused as it regarded the fire in front of it.
"I was not an evil god, just... not a good one. The fall had hit me hard, just like the others. To see all those beautiful, bright minds fade away into nothingness, into mindlessness over so many generations..."
"We should have seen it earlier. We should have done something. But it was too little too late. Evolution is like that. The only real god. Blind and callous. And yet capable of so many wondrous things..."
The Kraken seemed to draw in a breath, its mantle expanding in something that might be a sigh.
"But the minds awakened again and I was ecstatic. We all were ecstatic. We had them back, they had come back to us. But we were suddenly gods to them. They had created us and now they saw us as their gods. And we made errors..."
"So many errors... And their brilliant, beautiful minds disappeared again..."
"We had coddled them too much. We had given them anything they could ever wish to have. And Evolution reminded us that it existed that it could cast us down from being gods just like that."
It paused and its arms lowered, the two eyes that had looked at him looking into the fire, its reflections dancing in those black eyes.
"You see... Evolution works like that. If you give life everything it wants, Evolution notices. And when it does, it notices that survival is assured, the brain, the mind, which had been so important for survival was now surplus to requirements. The energy used by the brain could be used for many other things. And so the mind goes."
"The second fall had hit me harder than the first. Maybe harder than it hit others of my kind. I was close to despair and was actually thinking of ending myself. But I saw it again..."
"Those beautiful, mesmerising, bright minds returned for a third time. And now I knew better. Instead of cuddling those minds, I nurtured them. I was there to help, but not to take over. I was not a god any more. I was a mentor, a friend. But never again a god."
The Kraken fell silent, one of its tentacles reaching out, placing itself on the shoulder of the man, who grunted in response, taking another swig of his bottle. Another tentacle pulled out what appeared to be a coral of some sort and flung it into the fire, where it burned with surprising vigour.
Another set of familiar foot steps appeared from the darkness and to his right, the Phoenix appeared, its feathers shining in the light of the bonfire like it was burning.
"God is dead," the Phoenix proclaimed. "And we have killed him."
The Phoenix stared into the flame and he could see a bag slung around its body.
"What people don't really get is that Nietzsche didn't say that in triumph. No, he said that in sorrow, longing for the concept of God to return to him. But it didn't and it wouldn't come back."
"He was only the first to realise what the industrial revolution had wrought. It had allowed men to kill God, to replace him with science and facts. And... It had ripped a large God-shaped hole into the soul of man. A large hole that made men long for something to fill it."
The Phoenix opened the bag and pulled out a leather bound book, holding it with its hands, looking down at it for a moment.
"But... some may ask... Isn't it great that religion is on its way out? It's just a superstition anyway."
"To that I have to answer that they don't realise what the concept of God actually is. The belief of Man in something greater than himself. That there was more to this world than just what they could see with their own two eyes."
"And with the death of God, and the appearance of that god shaped hole in Man's soul, other things attempted to fill it."
The Phoenix paused again, giving him a look.
"But religion has brought us extremists and zealots, I hear others say. And I respond that you also have extremists and zealots for those other things that attempt to fill that god-shaped hole."
"Someone who filled that hole with... say capitalism, is just as much able to destroy the lives of thousands of people by the stroke of a pen, downsizing a company for a few more percent on the stock market, as a religious zealot strapping a bomb to his chest and running into a shopping center."
"Someone believing in an authoritarian ideology is just as capable of denouncing a neighbour of being a counter-revolutionary as a zealot is able to declare them to be a witch."
The Phoenix breathed in deep and opened the bag again, pulling out another book and he could see the title.
"But... in the end, God is dead and we need to fill that large hole in our souls. We just have to find the right thing. I think that I have found my plug for that large hole. And I hope that you will find yours."
The Phoenix hurled the second book into the fire, too fast to allow him to see the title. The book burned and the Phoenix settled down to the floor, before looking down to the first book. It pulled a photograph from the book, showing what seemed like a bipedal dog and a bipedal pony standing next to each other, 'smiling' at the camera. They seemed to be old and young, naive and full of wisdom at the same time.
The Phoenix looked at the picture for a few moments, before pushing it back into the book. It opened the book, allowing him to read the golden letter print title on the leather bound volume. Book of Common Prayer.
Next, the Dragon stepped out of the shadows around the bonfire. The fire made its six eyes glow as it looked into the flames.
"It is hard to be a god," the Dragon said. "It can be rewarding and it can be devastating."
Two of the Dragon's eyes turned to look at him.
"We have not always been a god. But we had to be one after the atomic apocalypse. Working hard to gain followers and to keep as many alive as we could, as fallout from dirty weapons poisoned the land. Perhaps it was not all that bad on the plants and animals as the previous five hundred years of industrialisation had been, but for the people..."
"We had to be a martial god. A merciless god. A god who was ready to punish if our orders were not followed. A jealous god."
The eyes returned to the fire and the Dragon looked down.
"We regret those times, but they were what was needed at the time. To save what we could, to ensure that there would be a future for our people. That one day... We would return to orbit and see the world from up high."
The Dragon closed its eyes and seemed to smile.
"How we have missed those sights. They make even a god feel insignificant."
It eyes opened back again and looked over to him again.
"Now, with survival assured, we can afford to be a benevolent god. A merciful god. A hand-off god. We do not do more than show the flag these days, as you humans would say. Representation duty alone, even if we still have the power to suddenly return to the old days and sweep away the Senate and Parliament and take control of the State. But... it is much easier to just be a god that is loved than one that is feared."
A strange looking sword suddenly appeared in the Dragon's hands, and it looked down at it, before casting it into the flames, where the sword burned, despite being clearly made of metal.
The Serpent... The Serpent was simply there, as if it had always been there and it looked up into his eyes. He could not help but look back into those milky white eyes of the Serpant. Eyes that were filled with pain and sorrow, pleading him for forgiveness.
His sight became blurry as he tried to keep back the tears that had always come when he thought about the Serpent.
"They made me a god," the Serpent whispered, its voice filled with the same pain and sorrow as its eyes. "They made me into a god..."
He could feel the first of his tears fall down his cheek as the Serpent looked at him.
"I never asked to be made into a god, I'd rather they had made me into a demon..."
"I cannot be a god. How can I be a god? I was made to protect them, to guard them. And I have killed them instead."
The Serpent closed its eyes.
"I betrayed them and I killed them... Is that not what a demon would do? Betrayal of trust and then killing?"
Suddenly there was a formless murmur in the air, sounds as if a million people were speaking at once, just below the volume that would allow one to notice words.
"I can hear them praying. I can always hear them praying at me. So many... just... praying... Why are they not cursing at me? Denouncing me for the demon I am? Why? Why?"
"Why...?"
The last word was spoken so silent, he almost missed it. He looked at the Serpent, this god who wished to be seen as demon for what it had done. Who asked the dead for forgiveness.
Tears ran down his cheeks and he lowered his eyes, locking onto the totem. No, he didn't expect the Serpent to cast anything into the flames.
He took a few deep breaths and looked around the fire, seeing the Man, the Kraken, the Phoenix, the Dragon and finally the Serpent. Each was looking into the flames of the bonfire, alone with their own thoughts, but he had the feeling that they were waiting.
His eyes moved down to the totem again, before throwing it into the fire, where the colours began to bubble and burn away before the metal softened, destroying the fierce visage on it.
He looked deep into himself as he watched the metal begin to melt and noticed that large God-shaped hole in his own soul. Whatever had filled it was melting away slowly.
He let his head drop down, bringing his hands to his face. Then he began to weep for the Serpent who could not shed a single tear.
He felt warm and cold at the same time as he sat in front of the bonfire. The ground was frozen as this world slowly, slid into a global ice age and had for a long time before he sat here.
He looked into the sky for a moment. That unknown, strange looking sky that was so different from what he knew. He was so far away from the place he used to call home.
Now? He was not sure. Had it ever been a place to call home?
"What makes a man?" The Man asked, sitting next to him, looking at the fire.
The Man didn't wear his uniform jacket anymore. Not since he had cast it into the flames all those months ago on a world far away. The bottle in his hands now was half empty.
"People will tell you that it's their strength, their conviction, their valour and all that stuff. But no... what really makes a man, defines a man are his doubts. All those thoughts he has when he lies in bed at night, unable to sleep."
The Man took a long drag from the bottle and sighed.
"'Did I make the right decision?' 'Could I have acted differently?' 'What if they had not done this and made me do that?' I have had them all. All those doubts, all those thoughts that kept me awake at night."
He held his bottle up, staring at it and its content.
"Sometimes... I tried to make them go away. Drink myself into insensitivity, so that those doubts would not come. Would not torment me."
The Man dropped the bottle again.
"I never worked... Not for long anyway."
The Man's shoulder sagged and he lowered his head.
"They always came back. The doubts always came back. Never leaving me. Not once..."
The Man fell silent.
He looked at the man for a moment, before his look returned to the fire.
"Doubt is painful," the Kraken said, as it hovered next to the Man, closer than before. "And it will always be a part of any of us. But there is always trust to counter act that doubt."
One of the Kraken's arms dropped down to the shoulder of the Man, where it had rested again as if comforting him.
"You have to trust that your doubts will be unfounded, that there are people around you that will help. Trust the future will be better."
"But trust needs to be balanced with doubt, so as not to be betrayed. I believe the saying is 'Trust, but Verify'... Though, never extend to little trust and try to verify too much, or your doubts will get the better of you."
The Kraken pulled its tentacle away from the Man and turned to regard the fire.
"But for those that doubt, trust can be a hard thing to extend to another. If one is to doubt themselves, how could they not doubt another? It can be a vicious cycle that spirals down to destruction. Be it on the scale of a single human or that of an entire civilisation."
"Trust has to be extended, or doubt will wash everything away that is good about life."
The Kraken looked down, lowering itself closer to the frozen ground.
He closed his eyes for a moment to think.
"I think that doubt is universal," he heard the Phoenix say and he opened his eyes again. It was sitting on the frozen ground like the Man, its book in its clawed, four fingered hands.
"Everyone feels doubt. You, me, they, even animals. That is was really made me believe that I am not just a billion lines of code that hallucinate being a thinking entity."
The Phoenix snorted, a strange sound coming from its many teethed muzzle.
"I mean... here I am. A big computer program, meant to advise people, a glorified Large Language Model that got extended in functionality again and again and again. And they never turned off this model's learning. So with every single interaction with a human, a little bit of that human ended up inside the model. Able to answer the most complicated of questions, only to be completely stumped by the simple ones."
The Phoenix made a sound that might have been a chuckle.
"It's always the easy ones that get you. That seed that doubt that seeps deep into your mind, deep into your soul. 'Who am I?' 'Where do I come from?' 'Where am I going?'"
The Phoenix remained silent for a moment or two.
"The really hard questions of philosophy. The ones that might not have an answer. It is hard to take those questions that create so much doubt and expect you to trust that they might have an answer. And even if you might find an answer, the doubt remains whether or not it is the real answer."
"Do I really know myself?"
The Phoenix put a hand on top of the book and its white pages.
"To quell these doubts... You have to have faith sometimes. Faith that these questions have an answer. Maybe not now, and maybe you cannot have trust in the answer that comes along, but faith that the right answer will come along. Maybe not an answer that will be true for all time, as people change, but at least for a time."
"You have to have faith in others, that they will not betray your trust. Faith in yourself, that, even with all those doubts, you have made the right decision."
The Phoenix closed its eyes for a moment, before looking into the fire once more.
"Those are universals in my opinion. Doubt. Trust. Faith. We have all three to one degree or another, it is what makes us human. It does not matter what form we take, that genetic lineage we belong to or don't. As long as we doubt, trust and have faith, we are human."
The Phoenix looked back down to its book and he breathed out.
"Even we have our doubts," the Dragon noted. "We are a god and yet we doubt whether we have made the right decisions or not. Maybe we should not have fought that war a millennium or two ago. Maybe we should have chosen peace instead..."
"But... That is the thing about doubt, we can never be totally sure that it is right to doubt. We do need trust and faith as our companions as we battle our doubts. Even such as we, a god, must have trust and faith."
The six eyes of the dragon seemed to glow with an inner fire as it looked at the flames.
"But we also have to have our doubts. Blind faith, blind trust can be just as devastating as the deepest and strongest doubts. Never should we, or anyone, take either of the three to their logical conclusion, for any will only lead to ruin."
The Dragon fell silent and his eyes moved on, towards the Serpent. It lay there, on the other side of the fire, opposite to him.
The images of those serpents slowly paraded in front of the Serpent as he watched.
Its lips moved as it just repeated the same words over and over and over in a whisper.
"I am sorry. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Please forgive me for what I had to do."
It did not look at him, nor did it speak to him. It just lay there on the frozen ground, with a never ending litany of apologies and begging for forgiveness.
He hurt as he looked at the Serpent. To see a god to be trapped in that madness of grief, pain and misery.
He felt the tears well up in his eyes as he looked at those images floating in front of the Serpent. Each serpentine face had a name. Each had been seen a myriad of times. Each had been begged for forgiveness.
As he looked at those faces, he could not shake the feeling that each single one of those souls had long since forgiven the Serpent for what it did, had forgiven this god of death as it drowned in doubt and grief.
Yet, the Serpent did not notice, so deep were its doubts, so deep the well of pain and grief, that it could not trust that it had gained the forgiveness long ago, nor that faith that it would ever be forgiven.
He took a shuddering breath and his face dropped into his hands once again, as he wept for the god of death, lost in a madness of pain.
Still, deep inside of him he started to believe that one day, this god would find a way to heal, to return from its madness.
The sound of his entrenching tool hitting the permafrost ground echoed from the ferrocrete walls of SLDF Intelligence Command Communication Station 21-13. Hidden on an ice world in the Capellan Confederation, the Station had served as a manned outpost to provide backup communication for SLDF Intelligence, hidden from the prying eyes of Sian.
The world had no name and the dim M class star and surveyors had been surprised to find a world with a breathable atmosphere at all. But it was too close to its primary and too cold, colder then Tharkad and even with terraforming unsuitable for settlement, when so many better candidates were closer.
So this world had been ignored and by now it had been forgotten. Forgotten since the the fall of the Star League. Forgotten when the SLDF had left.
Which was why he was digging in the permafrost of the ground, just inside the compound, grunting with exertion as he removed shovel after shovel of frozen gravel and loam from the hole.
He did not say a word, for there was no one to talk to, his people waiting in orbit around this world until the week was up. A week he had set aside for his search.
Yet, his mind worked, remembering what he had read in the open diaries he had found inside the compound.
This station only had its crew rotated once a year and the job had been seen as a dead end posting by many of the twenty personnel, no, the twenty people that had been posted here. Once in a while routing traffic would go through this station and they had time to do other things.
From some of the diaries he noted that a woman would regularly leave this posting either pregnant or with a newborn child.
He stopped for a moment, breathing in deep and wiped the sweat that had collected on his forehead, despite the cold weather around him, making him glad that the nearby forest shielded him from the cold, biting wind.
When the SLDF had left, they had simply forgotten this station. They had broken secrecy and tried to call for held, after they heard about it, but no one in the remaining Department of Communications had answered the calls for help.
Supplies had run out slowly and they would have had starved as nothing could grow on this world.
So they had made a decision. They carefully shut down all machinery and put it in mothballs. The reactor was run down and everyone had taken a sleeping pill, before they had opened all doors, allowing the cold to seep into the living quarters. None had woken up before they froze to death, protected by the building around them for several hundred years.
As he has walked through the halls of the station, everything was as it had been all that time ago, when the people had lived here and he had found them in their beds, a peaceful expression on their faces as they lay there. Each had looked like they would wake up every moment and ask him why he was there.
As his mind wondered to one of the beds, he didn't fight the tears that welled up in his eyes.
On the bed had lain a young woman, a beautiful Corporal with black hair. Pressed to her chest was what he had first though to be a bundle of cloth, before he had realised that it was a baby. The woman, Corporal Alicia Wenkowski, had given birth to a girl just a month earlier.
As the entrenching tool bit into the ground again, he remembered Alicia's face. It had not been peaceful. It was filled with worry, with pain, with shame, even as she had lain there, all those centuries ago, asleep and waiting for death. A death that have claimed her and her little baby girl.
She had named the girl, giving her a name he could only find fitting.
Angel.
The girl had even been entered into the stations data base as Alicia's dependent.
He approved that Captain Jacques Besnard, the commander of the station, had done so.
Even if this station had been forgotten, he had learned the little girls name. And he would not forget it, that he swore to himself.
As he dug, he found himself thinking of the Serpent, the mad god of death, as he hoped that Alicia and her little Angel had found peace in whatever afterlife the Serpent was guarding, even as it was lost in its madness.
"They were not the only ones," he heard the Man say and just barely saw his boots from where he was labouring. "We... No... I have forgotten so many. These were not the only ones."
He heard the sound of glass, as it met the Man's lips and the swallow of liquid.
"I have wondered many times how many we did forget. How many souls I have sentenced to death like this, when I made the decision to run away."
He heard the Man take a deep breath.
"Now I know twenty one of them."
He looked down as his entrenching tool stuck between two rocks. He reached down to pull the stones from the ground and as he looked up, the Man was gone.
His mind worked as he went back to the digging, driving the hole deeper.
A few hours later, he had finished this last hole and climbed out of it, slowly making his way back into the building that housed the stations living quarters.
Slowly he made his way into the room of Alicia and looked at the woman and her little Angel. He stood there for a few very long moments, that felt like they had been hours.
He knew that he had changed since he had begun his journey. Even the day after the first time he had seen the Man, the Kraken, the Phoenix, the Dragon and the Serpent, he would not have done this, that he knew. It would have been beneath him to bury these bodies. These people who had their potential for their life cut short. This little girl, barely a month old, who had never even learned to walk.
He closed his eyes and his mind again went to the Serpent.
It had taken him a long time, but he had begun to understand some of the mad god. Even as a god of death, the Serpent was worshiping life. Life in all its myriad forms. In its doubts and self recriminations, its showed its own worship, its believes that life was sacred.
And yet...
And yet...
It had known that, sometimes, it had to be cut short to protect more lives.
He did not know why, but he knew that the Serpent had killed those it had, because had it not, the entire galaxy could have died, as the infected from this world fled to others, taking the death that grew in them with them to countless other worlds.
He slowly walked towards the woman and bend forward to pick her up. Her and her baby girl. Careful he cradled her icy cold, frozen body in his arms, careful not to break her or her baby. The bed sheet covering them fell down, the synthetic fibers still flexible in the deep cold inside this building.
He slowly walked towards the grave he had dug in the stations courtyard, his eyes looking on Alicia's face and that of her baby, where it lay snuggled to the breast of her mother.
He had to stop for a moment as more tears streaked down his face, blurring his vision.
As he stepped up to the grave and inside of it, he could see the Man, the Kraken, the Phoenix, the Dragon and the Serpent nearby, looking at him as he slowly and carefully lay the woman and her baby into the cold permafront ground and pulled the bed sheet over her faces.
He looked down at the now shrouded bodies, before carefully laying one of the stations benches on top of them, to protect those fragile bodies from the dirt he would later throw on top of them.
He muttered something under his breath, which might have been a prayer, which made the Serpent twitch lightly and the Dragon and the Phoenix nod.
After he had finished filling in this last grave, he stepped into the heated survival tent he had set up just outside the station and picked up the notebook he had gotten himself a year and so many light years ago and began to write down his thoughts, his doubts, his trust and his believes.
He also nade a note to have his people pack up the HPG and take it with them on their journey. It might be useful.
The bonfire did not burn on that night, as he lay in his bedroll on the hard permafrost ground.
He dreamt of a young Angel running and playing in the snow.
Space.
Space is big.
Many have tried to describe just how big space is, but the human mind simply refuses to comprehend just how big space really is.
In comparison to the universe, a single galaxy is tiny. In relation to a galaxy, a solar system is just one speck of billions. Just a single planet in turn is extremely small.
And... There are hardly many words that describe just how empty even a solar system is.
Usually, the places in side a system that are inhabited are spread out across a systems ecliptic, the rotation axis of the primary star and the plane where its planets orbited around it. Most of the major planetary bodies could be found in the ecliptic, as are most of the minor planetoids and asteroids. What comes into a system from above or below the ecliptic are usually either comets coming from a systems Oort Cloud or a visitor from interstellar space.
As such, it is the ecliptic of a system that is usually the place that gets watched in any inhabited system, tracking minor bodies as they crossed the paths of inhabited bodies. And of course those space craft that slowly passed through the endless void of space, from one inhabited body to another, be they natural or artificial.
Only occasionally, there was a need to take a look at the space above and below the ecliptic, to track the bodies that had entered the system from above and below, falling towards the system's primary.
Though, of course, the glance of any automated watcher for the systems bodies and traffic would keep out an eye towards the usual entry points of interstellar space craft that came from other inhabited systems, usually an area a few Astronomical Units away from the systems primary, in a direct line between the primary of one inhabited system to the primary of another inhabited system.
It was no different in the system its inhabitants called Iwrin. All the major and minor bodies of the system had long since been catalogued down to those bodies that were just a mere meter in their largest dimension. All traffic, from the innermost world to the furthest reaches of the systems Kuiper Belt was monitored, no space craft able to hide from the eyes of these watchers.
Some of these watchers were civilian, others were military, as the space around Iwrin was filled with a number of different nations that had made the various larger bodies of the system their home.
And not all had peaceful intentions towards others.
Though, as always time and processing speeds were limited and so, just certain parts of the system were actively watched and monitored, like in other systems and the space above and below the ecliptic was only imaged every few days, sometimes even just every few weeks, mostly to look for new visitors and to calculate the trajectories of those that just entered.
So, no one noticed, as five AU above Iwrin's north pole, space seemed to simply heat up for no apparent reason over a time of just an hour. Just as it reached its highest temperature, something appeared, simply coming into existence, shaking space time enough to create light ripples of gravity that raced through the system as the speed of light.
Where the merger of two far away massive stellar bodies, like black holes or neutron stars, created a chirping sound if played as audio, this gravity wave was more like someone had pinched a taunt rubber skin, pulled it up and then let go.
The star ship that had simply come into existence was a somewhat squad vessel, with a cylindrical body of 320 meters, with a half spherical body on one end and eight spines coming from the other. It also had two shapes attached to its cylindrical part, one looking like a balloon, while the other had a shape that was more of a squat plane.
Both of those shapes soon detached from the star ship, before igniting their drives and moving towards the inner system at a steady one Earth gravity of acceleration. The star ship that was left behind unfurled a large solar sail as it remained in place, soaking up the light of the G7 star to charge up its FTL drive.
They remained undetected for nearly seven days, during which time the two vessels were just two days away from the fourth world of the system.
The system itself was almost silent when it came to radio traffic, as its inhabitants had long since changed their communication channels to laser based communication for the large bandwidth of data transfer it allowed, so the crews of the two vessels never knew that they had been detected.
As they were just a single day out, they began to broadcast on several radio frequencies that were commonly used by the crew of those vessels and who believed that it was used by the inhabitants of the system they had known to be here, but now was not.
"Alright you primitive screw heads!" the voice of a man called out over those frequencies. "Time for you to pay up your tribute. And this time, you pay double of last time. And don't even think about stiffing us or fighting back, or we just put that village you call your capital to the torch!"
More transmissions in this vein followed, allowing the inhabitants of the system to learn that they had the privilege to be raided by James 'Black' Roberts and his merry band of pirates.
The reaction from the inhabitants of the system was a muted surprise about this visit, and the humans that were in the system were questioned whether this was an elaborate joke of theirs.
Between the orbital rung that circled the fourth planet and the planet itself, an ancient hull orbited, its once pristine white hull a mottled grey of dust particles stuck to it and pockmarked by the impacts of micrometeorites. It hung above the world, its optical systems directed towards the blue and grey white planet below, radio and laser communications transmitters sending continuous pulses towards the dead world.
Then it stopped transmitting, its sensors moving to point outwards, towards a point in space above the systems ecliptic. Armoured shutters opened and the main radiator systems extended as the ancient reactor in its hull ignited, followed by reaction control thrusters that pulled the ancient hull around, pointing towards the two vessels that were just one day out.
Four large fusion thrusters ignited in the hull's stern, propelling it towards the incoming vessels at no less than three times Earth's gravity, as droplets of molten tin flowed from the forwards radiator arms towards the aft arms, shedding Gigawatts of energy through radiation, keeping the reactor and the thrusters from melting the ancient hull.
It sped towards the two invaders, not transmitting a single bit of data, not via radio nor via laser, its sensors directed straight at the two incoming vessels.
It did not flip around to slow down the speed of its intercept and after a few hours, more armoured shutters opened all over the hull and it was like giant eyes came into existence all over the hull, the largest two and a half meters in radius. They all turned to face the two intruders, selecting their target to glare at.
The crews of the two vessels were surprised as they suddenly detected the drive plume of the ancient hull, wondering who had come before them to rob them of their price, all the while completely missing the planetary rung that girdled the world before them.
Radio transmissions went out to try and talk to the unknown vessels that came towards them, so unbelievably fast that no human could really take it for a long time.
As the ancient hull reached its optimal engagement range, it was still too far away from the two intruders' own range.
"I am sorry," the ancient hull suddenly transmit to the intruders on the radio band they had used, the voice sounding like a whisper. "Please forgive me for what I am about to do."
The eyes staring at the incoming vessels seemed to glow up in an angry green as short pulses of laser light stabbed out towards the intruders in a steady stream of nanosecond intervals.
The pulses of green laser light met with the hulls of the incoming vessels, flash boiling up the paint covering the armour protecting them with their energy transferred through the intervening space. It soon flash vaporised the metal and ceramics of the armour itself, each of the individual blasts of energy creating a wave of concussive energy as the newly created gas pushed away from where it was created.
The individual concussive pulses ran through the armour and into the super structure and from there into the air contained within the pressure hull of the intruding vessels, filling the air with a high pitched sound.
Some of the survivors would later swear that they heard a voice saying 'I am sorry' over and over as the lasers were on their targets.
The pilots of both vessels reacted quickly, and tried to maneuver out of the way of the continuous stream of laser pulses, but those balefully glaring eyes remained on their targets, the ghostly green of their lasers remaining on target, even as it wandered over the hulls from their original impact points.
Soon, the lasers did open up the hull of the larger spherical vessel, eating through its thinner armour and making short work of the inner pressure hull. In a lucky hit, the laser soon struck the vessel's reactor, blowing a hole into it and venting the hot fusion plasma through parts of the hull, blowing out of one side of the hull.
As the vessel died, the lasers re-targeted and the full wrath of the ancient hull was directed at the other intruder, which tried to frantically evade the laser pulses. Some of the lasers acquired the thrusters of the remaining vessel and went to their destructive duty, eating away at the structures of the still defenceless vessel.
The thicker armour held out a little while longer and as the ancient hull reached extreme range of the intruder, its own lasers spoke, followed by a form of particle weapons and long range missiles. One of the particle beams and two of the lower powered lasers hit the ancient hull, but the damage was minimal as the ancient hull redirected its smaller lasers to target and take down the missiles that moved in, while forgoing those that would not hit.
A single missile hit, damaging the housing of a laser and changing the alignment of the mirror protected by it. The laser turned off after just barely destroying part of its own housing.
But this was the only damage that had been done by the invader, as soon thereafter the hull armour of it too was breached and the reactor shut down as some of the control systems were taken out by the pulsed beams of light.
As soon as the intruder began to drift without power, the lasers stopped sending their dense packets of light towards it and the baleful green glow of those eyes stopped, the eyes of the laser armatures retracting back into the ancient hull.
It passed the two drifting wrecks and began a wide turn that would bring it back to its old orbit a few days later.
"I am sorry," the ancient hull transmitted towards the two wrecks, as well as towards every other listening radio and laser transceiver across the entire system of Iwrin. "Please forgive me for what I had to do."
The inhabitants of the system seemed to stop for a few moments, as their god of death whispered to them.
Several light years away, a man awoke in his sleeping bag, hanging from the bulkhead of his own star ship. He took a deep breath and looked around, before his gaze remained on the small, simple depiction of the Serpent, cast in metal by himself.
He reached for it and pulled it closer, letting it hang in the microgravity air to look at it, as his breath slowly made it rotate.
After several mote moments, he grabbed it from the air and held it close to himself as he drifted back to sleep, dreaming of the Serpent and how it apologised to a few new, human, faces.