“This world here is one of countless,” Hermes said. “One no different from the world in which you necromanced me.”

“Right, it’s meaningless, it’s nothing, we get it.” Alexios sang: “‘Nothing really matters…to me!’ Thank you, Freddy Mercury, that’s really profound, bravo.”

“You only think in this manner because you despise the truth of your existence,” Hermes said. “You only see the material half. The spiritual half is only superstition—only the ideological expression of the material base—in your eyes.”

Miriai nodded knowingly. “Begging your pardon, my lord, but I have already told him just that!”

Alexios groaned. “Here we go.”

“I have the power to come here,” Hermes said. “I have the power to go anywhere—to any time. I can be anyone, or everyone—anything, or everything. I need not work to make imagination real; to think alone is enough. There is nothing I cannot do or be.”

“Go you,” Alexios said.

Hermes held out his arms, and a sleeping infant appeared there, one he clutched to his chest in a surprisingly motherly way.

What was that book called back in his library? Alexios thought. ‘The Unity of Masculine and Feminine Principles.’

As he was thinking this, the infant vanished inside Hermes. Somehow Alexios could see that a fetus was now curled inside Hermes’s womb, and visible beneath his large abdominal muscles.

Then the fetus disappeared, and the ground rumbled beneath their feet. Miriai and Alexios glanced at each other.

“Oh, shit,” Alexios said. “What’s happening now?”

Miriai was unable to answer. Outside, beyond the cars parked in the parking lot, the snowy lawn and pine trees, and above the mountains, the moon was growing larger. As the three travelers watched, it became so huge that they could discern the mountains poking up along its horizon, as its crescent filled the sky. When it struck the atmosphere, so much air was shoved away that the blackness of space became visible—almost like the moon was a huge rock thrown into a puddle of water, only here the water was air.

Then, just as the school building was collapsing, and the trees—which were already wreathed in flames—were being thrown into a colossal whirlwind along with the cars—which were flying up from the canyon in the parking lot—everything returned to normal.

“I will grant you the power to see the totality of all,” Hermes said. “Which means to be the totality of all. Otherwise life is meaningless confusion. It is nothing. Science—knowledge—gnōstos—is everything.”

Alexios turned to Miriai. “You were talking about this earlier, weren’t you? The universe is God’s self-help quest or something?”

“If everything is connected, dear,” Miriai said, “God cannot be God without the universe, nor can the universe be the universe without God, for nothing exists by itself. If creation lacks a creator, then the creator lacks a creation; only together do they make sense. For every negative, there is a positive, and for every positive, a negative.”

“I’ve heard this before,” Alexios said. “You’re telling me there’s a positive aspect to the Holocaust or the genocide of the Americas or the Nakba?”

“I don’t know what these things are,” she said. “Yet I may guess. I, too, have known tragedy in my life—and I have known that sometimes a broader perspective is needed to see the positive side to loss and disaster. History is not yet over. What if it is possible to truly rectify these wrongs?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Alexios scoffed. “There’s nothing positive about genocide.”

“A good man may die unjustly,” Miriai said. “But then a she-wolf may devour his flesh. If she then disgorges it for her pups, is that not a good thing? It is merely a matter of perspective.”

“You would either call it a cosmic perspective,” Hermes said, suddenly speaking in English rather than Roman. “Or a comic one. Just a single sibilant separates the terms in this your barbaric tongue, Alexios.”

Miriai stared, uncomprehending.

Alexios took a deep breath, but continued speaking in Roman for Miriai’s benefit. “So Hermes, what you’re basically telling me is that you can turn me into a god, but if that happens, I won’t care about all the people dying in pointless wars or being enslaved?”

“Do you shed a tear when an anthill is destroyed?” Hermes said.

“Then why do you care?” Alexios said. “Why are you even offering this to me? Why are you even here right now talking to us? We’re just ants!”

“With your left hand you called me from the deep,” Hermes said. “With your right hand you woke me up. You have made the logic—the logos—flesh, at least for now. Adam Kadmon has become Adam Ha-Rishon. Soon I shall return to that which I once was. I shall melt back into spacetime, as a raindrop melts into the sea.”

“But aren’t we,” Alexios began, “aren’t we already part of spacetime?”

“For the moment, I am subject,” Hermes said. “In another moment, I shall be object. I shall reverberate back and forth from subject to object and from object to subject again and again, as an echo reverberates along the walls of a ravine, merrily, eternally, fitfully.”

Alexios crossed his arms. “Here we go with the hippy taoism again. I traveled all this way just for The Tao of Pooh.” He looked around. “And to enjoy a fabulous laser light show.”

“As I already told you, it is more than that by far,” Hermes said. “And you shall gain far more—if you come with me.”

Alexios could not deny that he was tempted by the idea of becoming a god. Who wouldn’t be? With a snap of his fingers, he could make the whole world exactly the way he wanted. Imprison the slave owners, and free the slaves.

Yet as Hermes had repeatedly said, the Earth meant nothing to him. He could make it vanish—make it so that it had never existed—and it would be like scratching an itch out of boredom.

But then maybe it would be different with Alexios. He might have time to change things before he stopped caring. He could sacrifice himself to save the world. There was a chance.

Maybe this whole trip here wasn’t a waste after all.

Kassia and Basil appeared in Alexios’s mind. If he failed, and they got left behind…

The idea felt like someone was twisting a knife in his gut.

“I would have to abandon my kids,” Alexios said. “Abandon the struggle.”

“These struggles of yours would no longer matter,” Hermes said. “For as you can clearly plainly see, they no longer matter much to me.”

“Forget it,” Alexios said. “I’ll take fighting for what’s right—over sitting around and pretending I know everything there is to know and thinking that everything good is impossible—any day. An insect might seem like nothing to you, but there’s a whole universe contained inside it. Each of us is an entire world.”

Hermes looked to Miriai. “You may join me, if you like. Why stop at mere bodhisattva—why not become a Buddha? You need not turn away from blowing out the threefold fire, in order to help other beings find their way along the path to moksha.”

Miriai looked to Alexios, then turned back to Hermes. “Alexios asked me earlier if this happens when we die, my lord. I couldn’t answer.”

Hermes nodded. “You become everything that was, everything that is, and everything that shall be—for that is what I am.”

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“What’s the rush?” Alexios said.

“I remember I only wished to know for certain,” Hermes said. “I learned the ways of alchemy because I feared to die—so much now that I shall never cease to live.”

“As for the rest of us,” Alexios said, “until we either die or get killed, we’ve got some work to do. There isn’t any chance you could help out, is there? Maybe you could grant us some wishes while you’re at it? You could make the Latin army that’s occupying Trebizond disappear, for instance?”

“What difference would that make?” Hermes said.

“It would make a difference for us,” Alexios said.

Hermes looked at him in silence.

“Will you at least send us back,” Miriai said to Hermes, “back to where you took us? To Tibil, Earth?”

“That is the one thing I shall do,” Hermes said.

Alexios and Miriai found themselves standing in the tomb again, but everything was cold and dark. Hermes was gone, and his bones had separated themselves into their various sarcophagi again.

“Bastard,” Alexios said. “We really did come all this way for nothing.”

“Am I nothing, dear?” Miriai said.

Alexios looked in the direction the voice had come from. “No, of course not—”

“Then be silent,” she said. “Ach, let’s get out of here.”

By touch Miriai guided Alexios outside—bringing him through rock once more, which he barely noticed—and soon they had returned to their camp. The sun was rising and the people and animals were getting up.

Quest completed, the game voice said. The Journey to Harran.

I don’t get any reward?

Just wait.

Alexios felt strange to see the sun again. Only a moment ago, it had vanished into a blizzard made of stars.

Miriai greeted everyone and left to rest inside her tent. Alexios, on the other hand, was so embarrassed by what had happened with Hermes Trismegistos that he tried to hide in Miriai’s tent so that he wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. He needed time to figure out how to make sense of his encounter with a divinity as well as what to do about Trebizond. Basil spotted him, however, and asked what had happened. Kassia soon joined them—as did Isato, Za-Ilmaknun, and even Amina and Jafer El-Hadi, who had brought their fat baby Ibrahim. By then, Alexios was lying on a blanket on the tent floor and staring up at the black canvas. Despite his sullen mood, he looked at all the people gathered outside his tent entrance and thought of how lucky he was to have such friends. All of them wanted to know what had happened in the Sabians’s old star temple.

“It’s hard to explain,” Alexios said. “But it was pretty fucked up. Long story short, I’m still screwed. Trebizond is still screwed.”

“Did you meet the god?” Kassia said.

Alexios nodded. “As it turned out, the problem wasn’t finding him. It was convincing him to be something other than a philosophical douchebag.”

“What do you mean?” Basil said.

“Imagine a guy,” Alexios said, “who’s in the middle of a battle where everyone’s getting killed. Rather than fighting to help his friends, he looks at all the carnage, then puts his finger to his chin, and says: ‘What, really, is war?’ People are dying, his friends are begging for help, and he says: ‘What, really, is help? What, really, is the word is?’”

“Sounds annoying,” Basil said.

“Annoying and useless,” Alexios said. “He took science and philosophy so far that he stopped caring about anyone or anything. He also offered to turn me into a god. I could have left all of you and disappeared forever. I could have had absolute power.”

“But does that mean power is bad?” Kassia said.

“No, of course not.” Alexios shook his head. “We’re trying to take back power in Trebizond—we’re trying to help people around the world. There’s nothing wrong with that. But Hermes has absolute power over existence, which means, at the same time, that he doesn’t exist.”

“Even if you just met him,” Basil said.

“It’s a contradiction. Life is full of contradictions! Anyway, if I had gone with him, I could have left all of this behind, all the toil and frustration. But I decided not to betray everyone who matters to me.”

“I’m sure you’ll never let us forget it,” Basil said.

“Still haven’t lost your acerbic sense of humor I see.” Alexios looked at the people listening to their conversation. “The only trouble now is figuring out what to do next. I have to go back to Trebizond, that’s for sure.”

“We’re coming with you,” Kassia said. “Don’t even think about leaving us.”

“Kassia, it’s too dangerous—”

“We’ve proven we can fight,” she said.

“Child soldiers,” he said. “Great. There’s nothing weird about having your own Volksturm.”

Za-Ilmaknun glanced at Isato, then stepped forward with his painted tau-shaped mequamia. “We have chosen to come with you also, if you will have us.”

Alexios nodded. “Of course I will!”

“I’m coming too, dear,” Miriai groaned, half-asleep in her nearby tent. “If you’ll let me nap a bit.”

“I should probably get some rest, too,” Alexios said. “Then we can get moving. I guess we’re going back to Trebizond—to march through the snow for weeks before facing an army of thousands of merciless, experienced, well-trained, well-supplied knights.” He looked at Amina and Jafer El-Hadi. “Does that sound good? Do you two want to join as well?”

They glanced at each other.

“The Domari are not fighters,” Amina said. “And yet we have spoken of this with one another. This place you often speak of, this Trebizond, it is welcoming to all the world’s poor, is it not?”

“If you’re a worker, a peasant, or a slave, there’s a place for you,” Alexios said. “It’s your home.”

“They do not hate the Domari there?” said Jafer El-Hadi.

Alexios shook his head. “Until I came here, I had never even heard of you. There is no exploitation, and therefore no dehumanization.”

“We will come,” Amina said. “We are nomads, yes, but we do not wish to be captured and made slaves again. We will be safe there.”

“As long as you know the dangers,” Alexios said.

“We know,” Jafer El-Hadi said. “We have spoken with the others, and they have agreed with us.”

“Great,” Alexios said. “I have a couple dozen people, mostly consisting of families with children, none of whom know how to fight.”

“We can teach them,” Basil said. “Some of the kids already know a little about the farr.”

“That’s true,” Alexios said. “But that’s what I did at Trebizond for hundreds of people, and look what happened.”

“We’ve learned so much since then,” Basil said. “You’ve fought the Latins before. You know their strengths and weaknesses—as well as your own. By the time we find the Latins again, they won’t even recognize us. They’ll be lazy from months of carousing in Trebizond, while we’ll be strengthened from all our time in the wilds.”

“Or they’ll have food and heat,” Alexios said. “While we’ll be cold and starving.”

“Are we not passing through many cities along the way?” Jafer El-Hadi said. “Why not free the poor there, let them come with us if they want, and take on supplies for our journey—weapons, food, armor?”

“You mean places like Samosata and Melitené,” Alexios said. “Huge cities with powerful armies.”

“I have seen what you and your friends can do,” Amina said. “Miriai can call down the waters of heaven. Isato can become a fearsome beast, trampling all her foes underfoot. Za-Ilmaknun fights with the power of Allah.”

“It’s God, actually,” Za-Ilmaknun said. “But never mind.”

“And you, Alexios,” Amina continued, “you and your children, you sweep all before you, moving so quickly my eyes could not even follow. Teach us your skills, and no city will be able to stop us.”

Alexios regarded all of them for a moment. “So it turns out there aren’t any shortcuts to victory. We are the Simurgh. We’re the thirty birds. That’s the pat little lesson Dionysios wanted me to learn. He could have just told me, but I doubt I would have listened.”

Alexios was so excited by the idea of teaching everyone—and the farr, too, was growing within him again—that he climbed out of the tent and scarfed down a quick breakfast.

Once the camp was ready, lessons began.

By evening, with the help of Basil and Kassia, almost everyone in the camp was moving objects with their mind and leaping into the sky. Some of the other nomads who were camped nearby as well as the cave squatters had joined them, tripling the size of their ranks, so they almost had an entire century. People were calling Alexios Kentarch Leandros again, and he had even gotten his friends elected as dekarchs, while likewise ordering Kassia and Basil to care for the babies and young children whenever a battle took place, only fighting as a last resort.

“We can’t have child soldiers,” Alexios told them. “We just can’t. Where I come from, it’s something only really fucked up organizations do. It’s pretty much the same as here. Have you ever seen an army with children in it?”

“We haven’t seen many armies,” Basil said.

“Give me a break,” Alexios said. “You’ve seen at least three—the Workers’ Army, the Latin army, and even the Roman army. None of them had any children—except, now that I think about it, the Romans. They had a bunch of twelve-year-olds fighting for them. How well did that work out?”

“But you told us you would treat us equally,” Kassia said. “With respect.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Alexios said. “Listen to me. One day you’ll be grown up and strong, and then you can join the army if you like. Until then, we have tasks we desperately need you to do which no one else can do. If you want to help us, this is the best way. Not everyone needs to hold a sword. We’ll lose a few mothers if they have to stay back and take care of their children rather than fight alongside us.”

“But women don’t usually fight either,” Basil said. “Outside of the Workers’ Army, anyway…”

“They’re amazons,” Alexios said. “And where I come from, plenty of women fight. So stop wasting my time with this. You can still help. You can still be with us and make everyone proud. You can still make a difference.”

The children reluctantly agreed.

New Quest begins, the game voice said. The Return to Trebizond.

By next morning, the camp—officially constituted as the Fifth Century of the Workers’ Army—was getting ready to leave for Samosata, having voted to train along the way. They were unsure of whether they would attack the city, or merely purchase supplies. All they knew was that things would work out, one way or another.