Chapter 1: Introduction of the Condemned
Convergence Conclave Dispersion Log 2.0: Photonic Subject #733,682,111
WARPROUTE 37.6
“To be born a sorcerer is to be born blessed to the next world yet cursed to this one.” Or so my mother told me the day she wept bloody tears on the crystal cliffs of Nova Tarovia. I remember how much energy I spent in trying not to understand, the fog and friction of a mind old enough to understand resisting that cold light for abject fear of the reality of the moment. You don’t care to hear all about a child’s confusion. You have known it before, as all have. You came to hear, rather to read, confession.
An ancient text, lost to history or fiction, we do not know, says, “On the steps of the scaffold, death tears off the mask that has been worn through life, and the true visage is revealed.” Scholars have long tried to comprehend what precisely a “scaffold” was – and arguments about the varied uses of the term through pre-history, before the Departure, bound through the WARPROUTES from Ursa Minor to HD1.
It is strange that we still write, come to think of it. Auto-neural dictation is infinitely faster, by measure of infinities, than writing. Although, the record takes on a quality of specificity that is only really useful to the one who dictates. I’ve answered my own question then. If my last words are to be of any use to posterity or comprehensible to a fellow man (when is the last time I saw another human face?) they will need to be written in archaic language and to an archaic people.
Ah, but I am avoiding the point, dodging the subject of this confession. How many billions, trillions, quadrillions have died over the millennia of human history? How many of them felt like this, this insufferable weight of knowing it will end? Does a man wish to come clean at the end? Or does he wish to hold his secrets to the final dispersion? Ancient man could believe that something lived on from us, some life in the hereafter. The Luminance Party poured all the bastions of human wealth into the research of light in quantum mechanics and discovered there more than they ever told. I…
Apologies, my friend, if I may call you thus, though I have never known you, and the first to read will almost certainly be the one to witness my dispersion. My crime is to have been born a sorcerer in the time of the Luminaries, an unknown in a universe of radical knowingness. My kind are a remnant of something the Luminaries never quite managed to fit into their systems of being. They conquered death, after a fashion, and spread across the universe, crossed dimensions, journeyed to the wall of the universe and peered over its edge into impossible nothingness. They comprehended the atomic structures down to the smallest strings of music and erased from all the world the mysteries of being – every mystery but we – the sorcerers.
What has mankind ever done with that which he does not understand? I have been a student of history and literature and times of times before. I’m not surprised by the vitriol. Inquisitions of this kind have ever been rooted in the cruelty of ignorance. All cruelty derives from a fear of weakness. In the ancient wars it displayed itself in the fear of weak nations or people, the frail, the diseased, the elderly, the young, anything which threatened what was healthy and hale. After the Luminaries fixed all those bugs in their world system, creating deathless forms and eradicating disease and physical weakness of all kinds, the only weakness that remained was the weakness of not knowing. There is nothing the Luminaries fear more than that which is not known.
When they discovered sorcerers among the human population, curiosity was the first impulse. It was all very humane of course, at first. There were volunteers, an excitement overcame an almost century of strange malaise that ruled after the first Luminaries reached singularity. I suppose you can guess though what happened next – even without a background in history. Curiosity gave way to rampant experimentation; volunteers became draftees became slaves. It took some five hundred years, but the Luminaries had no need to hurry. Entire generations of sorcerers were experimented on so they could be studied in detail. They could not; however be bred properly. Sorcerers produced sorcerers almost invariably, but some condition of change occurred, often, though not always, with the breaking of families, and not all born sorcerers remained so for reasons the Luminaries could not comprehend.
Then, almost overnight, something changed. I won’t conjecture. I will state it plainly. The Luminaries’ failed experimentation turned to eradication. The paradigm of their power, their strength, their absolute mastery over the matter of the universe was challenged only by this strange and powerful subsection of the human race whose genealogy could not be properly traced, whose powers were familiar yet uncontrollable by the Luminaries. The choice became clear, admit the paradigm of the Luminaries was flawed, or eradicate the outliers.
I’ve become distracted yet again. Please, forgive me. Allow a late introduction. I am Lowan Darkseer, and I ask the favor of your indulgence. A man condemned to die has the propensity to wander, but perhaps, you will enjoy to wander along with me. I imagine the pleasure of your company, even distant as you are, will be a great balm prior to the final moments of my life. If you will bear alongside me, I will spin you a tale of the future history of mankind, and amid the madness and seeming disaster of it all, you may yet find something almost entirely unexpected, something the Luminaries missed, that we sorcerers never revealed through generations of torment, because we so often forgot it ourselves. I cannot tell you what it is directly, but I can say what it produces – Joy.
I can hear you laughing already, although I have heard no laughter but my own in a quarter century, still I imagine I can hear it clearly. It echoes off the thin golden walls of my convergence cage. How can such a dark vision of my people’s past produce joy? If you were here, you would see me extending my hand out to you, palm up, in invitation. Let me show you what cannot be seen.