Something desperately tried to break into the light of day somewhere in the darkness. Something terrible was locked in the darkness of ignorance and was banging with all its might on the locked door, looking for a way out so that people could finally see.

           But even if that door were to be opened wide, for people as they are, there would be a gap behind the door that would stretch to the last line that could be reached by sight. Even then, people would need some man in a long white or black dress to point his finger at what is hidden in the endless void.

          You are welcome to stay here forever. Consider my house yours in the absolute sense - Klaus remembered his employer's words spoken less than thirty-five years ago when he started working for him.

           Klaus was a man of large build who, despite his age, looked very good and with accentuated muscles that he regularly maintained from a young age. In addition, he seemed tough and durable. He was diligent, conscientious, and determined in his intentions, which radiated from him. He had a clean-lined face that showed calm composure and benevolence at the same time. Piercing blue eyes stood out on that face under a regular and proportionate nose. He had light and short-cut hair and equally light eyebrows. When performing for someone, he would approach them warmly and with a cheerful tone.

          He had just returned from the basement, where he had cleaned the floor of the rooms for meetings and rituals. He paid particular attention to the triangular stone plateau raised above the floor in the middle of the basement. He specifically wiped it with a damp cloth, and only when he was sure there was not even a speck of dust on it did he smile with satisfaction, letting himself know that his today's work in the basement was successfully done.

           Klaus's birth was planned as rarely in human life. But that plan was not made so that he does what he is doing now; he was supposed to be born to make a warrior out of him. Since the war had ended when he was only three years old, and his creators had almost disappeared with the war, it was not possible to continue with this program of creating warriors. In addition, it was evident that such a program in those times would have been an unnecessary waste of time and the lives of the surviving children from the original schedule.

         A few people familiar with the program decided to save the lives of the children who belonged to the program at any cost. They only succeeded to some extent in their intention, and the children they kept were raised for something far from what their lives were planned for.

           So Klaus was part of that program, but he never learned about the original purpose of its existence. All the children from that program were born by mixing genes that were considered pure genes at the time. The program was organized so that the children did not have known biological parents, and the parents did not know about their existence either. So, Klaus has never seen what his parents looked like; he was told several times during his upbringing that they died in the war and that everything that was related to them disappeared in the whirlwind of war. The only thing he had from them were the numbers that indicated the dates of birth, places of birth, and names and surnames taken from people who died who, in reality, never had any real connection to him.

          He never suspected all of this because his guardians never gave him any reason for it, and all the time he was growing up, they were very attentive to him. They tried in every way to compensate him for his biological parents. They, too, were long dead now, and Klaus had no other living relatives, and he was left alone.

           Now he sat in the silence of a lavishly furnished living room, the floor covered with bluish marble into which small gilded triangles had been inserted. On the walls hung numerous paintings of monasteries, hills, and beautiful landscapes, with flowers on the table and others, of which four oil paintings with impressive sizes and vibrant frames stood out.

          In one of these paintings, two black swans were painted touching each other with their black heads, golden eyes, and beaks. Behind them was a sky with clouds from which two young girls in white dresses were blowing golden trumpets, and below the swans in the middle, a white-gray horse with a naked rider on it was showing. The rider seemed lost.

           On the other, a woman was painted wearing a short, colorful vest that constricted her breasts and shoulders, leaving bare arms and an exposed waist. The skirt, also of bright colors, split on both sides, covered her from the hips to the knees. She was barefoot but had many rings on her toes. Several wide metal rings adorned her ankles. Her neck and bare arms were decorated with bracelets and necklaces, and numerous rings hung from her earlobes. Her hair was studded with richly crafted diamond barrettes, and a thin gold link was threaded through her nasal septum. The expression on her face was so painted that she seemed to know where she was going.

          On the third screen was a devil standing in a multitude of flames with wild eyes fixed on a few of his victims, naked human beings whom he was roasting on the embers. A man with a bird's beak on his face watched all this from the side, sitting on a bare gray rock. It was also the scariest picture in that room. And on the fourth canvas was painted a man under a clear sky at night, with a long wooden spoon in one hand and a horse's shoe in the other. He was standing over a black cauldron on a tripod under a fire. The sky above the man was sprinkled with countless stars, and the full moon reflected in the pot's water, so one could think that the man in the picture was cooking the moon and was about to stir it. In addition to cooking and mixing the moon, the question of what he intended to do with the horseshoe inevitably arose. Will she use it to season the moon stew, or is she there for mysterious and unknown reasons? It could have been anything.

          That room looked like a large gallery with exhibited works of art and not like a central room from which you could move to all the other parts of the house. Four characteristic oils on canvas as if someone had chosen them with special care and intention. It was as if the pictures were placed to show and remind us of human nature and its sometimes understandable, sometimes incomprehensible diversity. As if those canvases wanted to tell what the human race is like.

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           Klaus was reclining in a comfortable armchair facing the sizeable glazed area through which there was a fantastic view of the tastefully and carefully arranged park in front of the house. The house and its surroundings were in a distinctive combination that, without false modesty, can be freely called a beauty that took your breath away.

          The entire house was furnished with carefully selected pieces of furniture that perfectly suited the architecture of the building. The rooms exuded taste, refined simplicity, and richness without excessive ostentatiousness. However, something was wrong there. As if there was a regret in the air for something that could have been but never will be. It was as if she felt some emptiness that life leaves where some inexpressible and permanent inner pain resides.

           The moment he sat down, it was a clear May day without a breath of wind. The sun warmed and illuminated the park's splendor, full of vivid colors on a human scale, like in a children's picture book. It was a very intoxicating and colorful place, a natural paradise for the eyes and a rest for the soul. And already, after half an hour, dark clouds started to roll in from the south. It became sultry, still windless, and almost completely quiet, like the calm before the storm.

          Klaus' thoughts focused on his world and his understanding of it. Lately, he no longer understood the world he once knew or thought he knew. What used to make sense no longer makes sense today. Today's world seemed to him more and more like it was in some strange time that appeared to be hidden behind shadows. A world in a time where some dark, incomprehensible, and strange events took place and are taking place.

           He knew about that ancient saying of Herodotus when he said that the gods destroy the most significant houses and the tallest trees with lightning and thunder because they like to trample everything more important than the rest. They suffer no one's pride but their own. Maybe even people, created in the image of God, forget themselves and behave like those ancient gods, destroying around them what holds them back, or they think it could prevent them from becoming or remaining the main, significant, and best.

          Is our world a moralistic creation or something else? Does God settle all accounts, and does anything go unnoticed? Have people always been this stupid?

           The answer to the latter, he thought definitively, was yes. As soon as you look into history, you find many stupid things people did to each other and themselves.

           Do people know what nonsense is? He thought they knew. So why do they do them? The logical answer would be that they are stupid. But we know that people are not stupid.

           Then comes the question again - why do they do what they do to each other? No one knows this; if they do, they keep it hidden as the most significant secret no one has yet discovered.

          What will happen, where did he go, and where will this fallen world arrive? These were the questions and thoughts Klaus was preoccupied with that morning.

           Right next to the living room where he was, there was a room where an electric lamp in the form of a candlestick with four candles covered with a dark glass cap stood on a wooden, massive writing desk and illuminated the work area of the desk. At the front of the table was a chair with a leather-covered seat. It was placed right next to the table, and it was as if the chair was waiting for a guest who would complete the perfect ambiance of the room by sitting on it; the walls from floor to ceiling were lined with shelves in which books of all genres were neatly arranged. Their owner had finished collecting all the literary works he had been searching for all his life and thus filled even the smallest gap on all those vast shelves surrounding the desk. In addition to the books, in specific places on those shelves, various little things particularly characteristic of particular cultures or areas of the world were brought from multiple trips from almost all corners.

          The shelves were interrupted in two places by two tall windows decorated on the inside with hanging transparent and lace curtains and with another, indigo blue and opaque, which was gathered along the edges of the window and tied with a white silk ribbon down the middle of its length.

           High above the writing desk, a massive chandelier hung from the ceiling, from which no light came except as a reflection from its decorative parts. The whole room radiated a kind of warmth in which they could stay for eternity or all the time needed to read and study that mountain of books until they looked at the chandelier above the desk. At that moment, your gaze would be fixed on something that did not belong in such a beautiful and warm environment, and you would feel the chills.

          A brown braided rope about the thumb's thickness was tied to the chandelier, ending under the chandelier as a massive and robust noose. Directly below that noose, on the floor, was a wooden bench that would allow an adult man of average height to be at the level of the loop with his neck. Gallows...?

           There was almost perfect silence in the room. Virtually because the silence was disturbed by the only sound inside her, in case you are hard of hearing, you wouldn't hear anything.

          That very low-intensity sound came straight from the middle of the desk where a man in his late sixties was sitting. His face reflected the unique seriousness of the moment he was in, and it was as white as without a drop of blood. If it were just a little redder, no one would have been able to give him fifty years, let alone sixty-something. He had luxuriant gray hair neatly combed towards the top of his head. He was sitting with his legs spread wide and his feet tucked into slippers of outstanding quality. He kept his feet fully supported on the floor, covered with the finest red carpet with tastefully infused black details. He wore a knee-length red and black shiny robe like a bathrobe. A gray cravat with an impeccable knot could be seen under his neck, which closed the middle at the split of the collar of his dark blue shirt.

          Even seated, his body exuded the elegance and grandeur of a man who sat with his back straight and his head slightly bent forward and to one side in a substantial wooden chair upholstered in brown burnished leather fastened with shiny round buttons to its wooden supports. Above the height of the head, the back of the chair had a semicircular extension in which a triangle, pyramid, or something similar was placed.

           In that space, it was impossible not to feel some kind of remarkable strength that the old man radiated. It was as if the entire room was besieged and attacked by the cosmic responsibility and conscience of the human race, which was fighting something terrible in a decisive battle.

          There were no shelves or books on the wall behind him, but a vast topographical map of Europe covered the wall.

           The old man was writing a letter, and the strokes of the pen over the paper were the only thing disturbing that silence.

           If the world was born in silence, then it was such silence.

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