Post by The Mouth on May 18, 2014 17:04:27 GMT -8
Mad Tom, the Shaman of Seattle hands him the otherwise normal seeming stick. It is surprisingly heavy, and its nature is revealed in the glint of street lights; minerals trapped in the fossilized wood glint and catch the eye sparking along the stone's length. Wrapped in leather fringe with carved bone beads and a few dangling feathers it looks like a shaman stick.
Tom's ease of handling the totem belies its weight and heft. He takes it and even with the prior experience of petrified wood it is heavy. It sparks, a part of his mind rattling off the properties of quartz embedded in the petrified remains...
The other part, the newer part, the awaking part grabs the sparks and uses them as the key to opening the totem. For the second time he forces his mind into opening the cracks of the world, to expose and observe the unobservable and feel the web of life and mind flow over him and into
It is dark. Beyond dark, past even that of the Abyss - It is an empty dark and then a spark. There is no sound but a cascade of light - Light beyond even the limits of his eyes. In wonder he realizes that he is seeing x-rays, gamma rays, electromagnetic forces, neutrinos, exotic particles go past and through him in a violent torrent. Where there was nothing now something as energies bounce and cascade and bang into each other.
He witnesses the birth of matter, gasses forming as lost particles find each other to make hydrogen, helium, lithium. He can see the protons and electrons joining together in the ancient dance of all things material. Quickly they draw to each others forming discs and swirling together to form the first stars...
And he is moved through space and time to a new place, a new sun, a new world. Trillions of stars exploding and reforming, compress and squeeze the hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. From these are born the sun, his sun, and the Earth, his earth.
Molten, fiery, angry, impacted with comets and and clouded with the fog of creation gravity forces silicon and iron and carbon and everything else into the ball that will be his home.
Seas form, pulled and twisted by the moon. Chemicals mix, combine, and form proteins that mix and combine and form life. That life grows, changes, adapts, feeds and starts to become distinct from its neighbors.
He sees the first predator, one organism that learns to envelope another for nutrients.
Soon there is algae, fungus, bacteria, viruses, and it all grows and moves and shifts in response to pressures from neighbors and the word itself.
Creatures with multiple cells emerge, then more complicated creatures, then worms, then fish, then they discover land and its relative emptiness. Sex becomes a byproduct, a mechanism of change itself to select and adapt even more rapidly. He is each of these creatures, predator, prey, plant and animal as they grow beyond their simple single celled life into a diverse and complicated array.
Plants arrive, grow, thrive, and die. Trees come into being and for an eye blink the world is buried in them before life learns to break down the lignin.
He is there as the world nearly dies; he sees the streaking, blinding, light and then the ground moves and then a hot wind of fire and ash as his giant lizard self looks up confused as death comes. He chokes on hydrogen sulfide gas, foods that was plentiful is just gone and a host of other little deaths that make a Great Dying.
And each time life comes back.
The world is one; then it is not. A single continent moves and shifts. Magnetic poles realign themselves. Climates change. And life moves, grows, adapts.
Soon he is a small mammal darting from a burrow, fearing predators. Then he is a mammal who preys up others, clever and skilled with his hands. Then the trees beckon with their safety and protection from the more dangerous predators; nuts and grubs and prey all need greater adaptation. Memory shifts to awareness to intelligence. He leaves the trees and walks upright and marvels at the stars.
He is born and dies, born and dies, born and dies. Each time a little taller, a little straighter, a little smarter. Those that can read the stars and tell the seasons find food more plentiful. Those who learn that a rock is harder than a fist and can be thrown drive off the tigers and bears and other dangerous creatures.
Soon he is settling down and building a hut, first from stick and grasses then stones. He gathers the grains sowed about the hut and now winter is more survivable as food storage allows for surpluses to keep instead of rotting in the ground. It means that seeds can be stocked and re-used.
War with weapons is brutal, brief, and bloody. The men are killed and the women taken into the victors tribe. Soon the storage of food allows for longer campaigns, more specialists emerge to live off the surpluses, and potters and metal works begin to mark their trades.
He sees the pictures painted on walls turn to smaller and smaller pictures, then words. He writes down the musing of an ancient king, those musings are copied onto clay tablets, fired, and sent to the furthest reaches of the kingdom as Law joins an ancient pantheon of the Elements, the Seasons, and the Skies.
Wars and conflict, disaster and migration, love and mischief and families and children and the world is shaped and changed by this young species in a profound way until we have today. Wars, inventions, science, philosophy, churches, priests, industry, all of it.
And he was all of those things. All of them. For a moment, he saw Creation, was Creation.
And then he was Francis again.
Empty, hollowed out, shaken; and Francis.
This is what he saw, what he was, on the first night. And he wept. And he exulted.
No where did he see a Vampire who mattered.
Tom's ease of handling the totem belies its weight and heft. He takes it and even with the prior experience of petrified wood it is heavy. It sparks, a part of his mind rattling off the properties of quartz embedded in the petrified remains...
The other part, the newer part, the awaking part grabs the sparks and uses them as the key to opening the totem. For the second time he forces his mind into opening the cracks of the world, to expose and observe the unobservable and feel the web of life and mind flow over him and into
It is dark. Beyond dark, past even that of the Abyss - It is an empty dark and then a spark. There is no sound but a cascade of light - Light beyond even the limits of his eyes. In wonder he realizes that he is seeing x-rays, gamma rays, electromagnetic forces, neutrinos, exotic particles go past and through him in a violent torrent. Where there was nothing now something as energies bounce and cascade and bang into each other.
He witnesses the birth of matter, gasses forming as lost particles find each other to make hydrogen, helium, lithium. He can see the protons and electrons joining together in the ancient dance of all things material. Quickly they draw to each others forming discs and swirling together to form the first stars...
And he is moved through space and time to a new place, a new sun, a new world. Trillions of stars exploding and reforming, compress and squeeze the hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. From these are born the sun, his sun, and the Earth, his earth.
Molten, fiery, angry, impacted with comets and and clouded with the fog of creation gravity forces silicon and iron and carbon and everything else into the ball that will be his home.
Seas form, pulled and twisted by the moon. Chemicals mix, combine, and form proteins that mix and combine and form life. That life grows, changes, adapts, feeds and starts to become distinct from its neighbors.
He sees the first predator, one organism that learns to envelope another for nutrients.
Soon there is algae, fungus, bacteria, viruses, and it all grows and moves and shifts in response to pressures from neighbors and the word itself.
Creatures with multiple cells emerge, then more complicated creatures, then worms, then fish, then they discover land and its relative emptiness. Sex becomes a byproduct, a mechanism of change itself to select and adapt even more rapidly. He is each of these creatures, predator, prey, plant and animal as they grow beyond their simple single celled life into a diverse and complicated array.
Plants arrive, grow, thrive, and die. Trees come into being and for an eye blink the world is buried in them before life learns to break down the lignin.
He is there as the world nearly dies; he sees the streaking, blinding, light and then the ground moves and then a hot wind of fire and ash as his giant lizard self looks up confused as death comes. He chokes on hydrogen sulfide gas, foods that was plentiful is just gone and a host of other little deaths that make a Great Dying.
And each time life comes back.
The world is one; then it is not. A single continent moves and shifts. Magnetic poles realign themselves. Climates change. And life moves, grows, adapts.
Soon he is a small mammal darting from a burrow, fearing predators. Then he is a mammal who preys up others, clever and skilled with his hands. Then the trees beckon with their safety and protection from the more dangerous predators; nuts and grubs and prey all need greater adaptation. Memory shifts to awareness to intelligence. He leaves the trees and walks upright and marvels at the stars.
He is born and dies, born and dies, born and dies. Each time a little taller, a little straighter, a little smarter. Those that can read the stars and tell the seasons find food more plentiful. Those who learn that a rock is harder than a fist and can be thrown drive off the tigers and bears and other dangerous creatures.
Soon he is settling down and building a hut, first from stick and grasses then stones. He gathers the grains sowed about the hut and now winter is more survivable as food storage allows for surpluses to keep instead of rotting in the ground. It means that seeds can be stocked and re-used.
War with weapons is brutal, brief, and bloody. The men are killed and the women taken into the victors tribe. Soon the storage of food allows for longer campaigns, more specialists emerge to live off the surpluses, and potters and metal works begin to mark their trades.
He sees the pictures painted on walls turn to smaller and smaller pictures, then words. He writes down the musing of an ancient king, those musings are copied onto clay tablets, fired, and sent to the furthest reaches of the kingdom as Law joins an ancient pantheon of the Elements, the Seasons, and the Skies.
Wars and conflict, disaster and migration, love and mischief and families and children and the world is shaped and changed by this young species in a profound way until we have today. Wars, inventions, science, philosophy, churches, priests, industry, all of it.
And he was all of those things. All of them. For a moment, he saw Creation, was Creation.
And then he was Francis again.
Empty, hollowed out, shaken; and Francis.
This is what he saw, what he was, on the first night. And he wept. And he exulted.
No where did he see a Vampire who mattered.