BOOK ONE - CHAPTER FOUR
 

I know the names my subjects use to describe me when no one else is listening. Many people hate me, and with good reason - I intended it that way. Even my most loyal Fish Speakers hate me on a subconscious level: they hate the power I have over them, and unwittingly bend that hate into complete and utter dedication to my cause, even if they don't understand exactly what it is they're building in my name. Simultaneously, I am the worst thing and the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. I am evil. My Golden Path demands it.
-Leto II, The God Emperor. From The Stolen Journals-
 

"I warned you about the dangers of your plan!", a voice bellowed. The authority that resided in those words made the screams of the legions subside. Even the light appeared to react, recoiling in terror, leaving him in deepest darkness.

The voice sounded familiar, and not dissimilar to his own. "Who is that?", he asked.

There was no audible reaction, but he sensed something stirring in the dark recesses of his mind. An image emerged, so vivid that the stark contrast with the complete lack of sensory input made it appear as if the depicted events were taking place around him at this very moment.

He was in a brightly lit room, dark red hangings covering the walls, and he was lying down. The air felt strange to him, and breathing was an odd sensation, almost painful - as if he had just learned how to do it. He saw a newborn girl next to him, and next to her a woman, her white robe stained with blood - she was dead. Standing in the distance were several people - one of them a strange-looking woman who was walking around, holding a knife. A great evil lurks behind that one's eyes, and it's about to manifest itself. Am I the only one who notices this?

A young girl was there, and two men. He felt a deep kinship with one of them, the one with the scarred face. He has no eyes! Does he sense the danger? He felt his mind reaching out to the blind man, sharing what he saw. He saw a change taking place in the man's demeanour, a controlled tension building in his muscles, and suddenly a knife flashing through the air into the right eye of the woman with the knife, the force of the blow throwing her against the wall. She collapsed forward onto the floor, the life having left her.

This is a memory, he realised. I lived that moment. I had just been born, and already I could understand what was happening. Memories of my life! And as memories are wont to do, the contemplation of one stimulated the rise of another, and another one after that. Brief flashes of the past assaulted him then, images replacing each other too fast for him to drink in their contents individually.

The many voices that had retreated to just beyond his sensory periphery moments before returned, whispering to him in many different languages, none of which he recognised. However, the voices did not appear to be hostile in intent, and their presence did not frighten him.

Another clear image emerged in his mind, and this appeared to excite the many voices. He saw a grossly obese man. There was a woman, seducing him, the man finally giving in to her demands but deriving more pleasure from the power game the merger of the flesh represented than the hormone-triggered aspects of it. The woman - she is more than she appears to be at first glance. A name ... Tanidia Nerus ... Who is she?

Many more women like her appeared, all of them in possession of highly developed abilities and much secret knowledge. They had been executing a plan, a project of crossbreeding certain bloodlines with the intent of one day producing a male with their abilities, and more. This organisation of women was very old, and their plan had taken many generations to reach its conclusion ... Was I somehow part of this plan?, he wondered.

More fragments of knowledge about this sisterhood surfaced. They appeared to focus on developing the abilities of the body and the mind, resonating along with and expanding upon a large-scale ideological paradigm shift.

What had caused this massive revolution?

He saw a sun dipping beneath the horizon, taking the light with it - an eerily lit landscape surrounded him now. Suddenly, at the edge of his universe, beyond the setting sun, small shapes appeared, which quickly grew larger as they approached his position.

The voices around him started shrieking loudly, the confusion this caused making him even more vulnerable to the shocking images that brutally invaded his consciousness at that moment. Millions of mechanical devices - some shaped like daggers zipping through the air, others humanoid in appearance, but armed with energy weapons and large swords with jagged edges - relentlessly hunting humans. Scared, huddling together in poorly hidden caverns and basements of buildings, they listened to the ominous whirring of servos approaching, realising their death was imminent.

When and where did this happen? Or is this still to take place? This should be prevented at all cost. He saw then that this terrible war had spread across an entire planet, giving rise to an even more apocalyptic weapon - a biological weapon robbing warriors of their cognitive functions! -, and eventually a series of nuclear explosions preventing it from escalating and migrating to the planet's colonies. An entire planet, uninhabitable for millennia. It had been left to rot, it's beauty now long forgotten ... An image of the planet formed in front of him: much blue interspersed with brownish green, with swirling white clouds. This is where human life began, he realised.

The vision took him deeper, showing him some of the people that had lived on the planet. Terrible brutality had dominated some of their minds - eating and sacrificing one's own children was an image that returned several times. Perhaps these barbarians deserved to die ... This thought brought back the horrible machines, the overwhelming shock causing him to collapse in fear.

When he looked up again, the nightmareish vision was suddenly torn aside as if it had been a mere projection on a screen, and replaced with an image of a road, glistening in the sunlight, meandering through a desert with many dangers surrounding it but leading away from the terrible events he had witnessed. He walked along that path for a while, and noticed a change in himself - he was unable to determine what was happening exactly, but he felt different.

After a while, he encountered a man on that road, dressed in a black uniform. He recognised him. He was present in my earlier vision - this is not the blind man, but the other one. The man said nothing, but walked with him for a while, occasionally looking at him, a mischievous grin forming on the man's face.

Suddenly, the man stopped. "I have pledged my allegiance to your family, but I will not be your stud!", the man said.

He noticed a reflection in the man's eye. Looking more closely, he saw another image of the same man, whose eyes revealed yet another image of that man, and another, and another ad infinitum. The endless row of reflections, one following the other at an increasing rate, produced a hazy patch of black.

The blackness grew, surrounding him, once again depriving his senses of all input, until a new object appeared in front of him. A large jar, filled with a clear liquid, possibly water. There was a inscription on its side, and he leaned towards the jar to read it.

The water is the ultimate essence,
a source of outward streaming creativity.
Though motionless, this water is the means of all movement.

Water as the unmoved mover.

A crack appeared in the jar, spreading swiftly until the water broke free, surging outward and engulfing him. The water felt like acid on his skin and caused him terrible pain, clouds of blue smoke rising from the wounds. The flow of water stopped, and as he lay there, the pain forced his attention inward.

He was falling through the air, his consciousness copied several dozen times and spread out over just as many bodies, a single mind emerging from the mental echoes. There was another mind there, ancient and strong, controlling him, but it could not prevent him from seeing. Spinning around, he saw a green and blue planet approaching, two moons accompanying it in its procession around a single star. Canopus, he sensed the dominant mind thought.

He saw he was falling towards one of the planet's many seas, the deep blue approaching faster and faster. When the salt water engulfed him, he once again experienced terrible pain, his body being torn apart. Mechanical devices surrounded him in the water, but they quickly sank away in the currents. He felt the singular consciousnesses of his many bodies disengaging, the loss of coherence destroying all but the most basic capability of thought, nothing but animal instinct remaining.

He emerged from this vision, seeing long corridors of personae, generation upon generation stretching into the future. He gazed into the distance, past countless personae, and saw a lone figure standing there with its back turned to him. He raised his hand to his forehead to shield the light from his eyes, and saw the man in the distance do the same. He started running towards the man, but the man started running as well at the exact same pace.

He suddenly realised the structure he was caught in, and immediately felt trapped. A parallel structure emerged, of a lesser scope but equally harrowing in its implications. A god saw his progeny being born from his brain, but suddenly the perspective shifted, the child now giving birth to its father.

The voices returned, screaming, but the powerful voice that had initiated his string of visions intervened. "Silence!"

The screams ceased, and he felt millions upon millions of minds moving, rearranging and opening up to him, focused by a single persona. He realised now who this focal point had to be.

"Thank you ... father", he said.

In a flash, his memories returned to him, and with them the specifics of the plan he had set in motion while he was still alive. Ascension? Of course!

He fully realised what he needed to do now - find her. The red sand and the dark sky that had formed his world for such a long time returned, but this time he knew how to get out. He started walking towards where he knew she would be.

Yes, there she is.

"You understand me, don't you?", he said to her. "For such a long time, you were the only one who could talk to me, and now you will be the first to do so again. You're finally ready."

She didn't move, but continued to stare at him. She was guarded by a moat of water, but this time that didn't scare him. He waded through, and simply ignored the pain shooting up through his legs. He walked up to her, and took her hand.

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