Before she had eyes in her head, the stories say, she could already see.
The day the First Prophet learned to speak was the day her guardians learned she was having visions. Dreams that intersected waking life.
Nobody believed the visions were real, least of all the assembly of pediatric neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists who came to analyze her. To “cure” her. Even the First Prophet, who was called Emerett back then, did not believe her dreams were real (except when she was in the middle of them).
But the anti-hallucinatory medication was neither effective, nor was it worth the costs on her mental development. These waking dreams did not appear harmful, so the experts and her guardians agreed on a different course. Monitor her, make note of any adverse effects, and hope she grows out of them. No further action to be taken at this time.
At first, monitoring was intense. She was required to report her dreams, multiple times a day. She gave detailed explanations of people who did not exist, having conversations that did not make sense. Sometimes, she would refer to concepts - gravitational exception, or the limitations of speed - of which no child should understand. But she could not demonstrate knowledge, and so it was marked as childish imitation. Most likely, they said, she had been eavesdropping on adults, and using their words to garner attention. Still, they studied her.
Over time, she became intimately familiar with her own mind, through the lens of deeply experienced medical professionals, and their endless questions.
But as the days moved into years, and the experts found no source from which her visions sprang forth, they began to take her affliction less seriously. Even as she grew out of childhood, and out of adolescence, and into her first - and only - life as the woman named Emorynn, she became little more than a puzzle for bored biologists. Many tried to eliminate her visions. No pills, no cognitive treatments, nor any kind of neurological analysis, physical or otherwise, seemed to have any effect.
In the end, they chalked it up to a slight abnormality with her brain. Tissue, growing where it should not have been. And unless she would agree to let them remove it and examine it, she would continue to have visions.
“The risk to life is minimal,” They said, “And we might learn something.”
But her guardians, who were architects and therefore did not see much value in theoretical gain, said, “You have found no explanation, and you will never find one. Births are waning, and we do not know when they will rise. We will not risk her.”
So, Emorynn was allowed to keep her visions. And she cherished them, because they made her an extraordinary abnormality. Nobody else had such vivid dreams, in broad daylight, with their eyes wide open. They were a pleasant distraction from life, and nothing more.
Until one of her dreams happened.
It was small. Almost nothing. Maybe even sheer coincidence.
She was walking home, when she felt the tell-tale itching in her mind. She could see it then: a white door, slamming shut. Something round and green rolling off a wooden table. It was one of the shortest dreams she’d ever had, entirely forgettable. That night, she was sitting down to eat with her guardians, trying to ignore another one of their shouting matches. One got up and walked out and slammed the door so hard, Emorynn dropped the pear she was eating, and it rolled across the fabricated wood table. Falling with a wet thump on the floor.
See? It was nothing.
But Emorynn couldn’t shake the feeling that something incredible had just happened to her.
She blinked. And looked around. One guardian was apologizing to her. She didn’t hear. She excused herself, and went to her room. And waited for another vision.
Waiting. Impatiently waiting.
It finally came, when she was just about to fall asleep. Surging out of the darkness like some deep creature from a black, starless lake. Her own mind grabbed her, and pulled her under.
She could see herself. The whole of her future stretched out before her in a kind of wavering, shifting tunnel. Going all the way forward, to a single point of unmistakable light. Every person she would meet. Every conversation she would ever have. Every movement, down to the slightest breath. She could see it all in a single glimpse down that tunnel, lasting no more than a split second.
But it was enough. After that, Emorynn knew what she was going to have one and only one life. And she knew exactly what she was going to do with it.
So, the First Prophet started a religion.
At first, as with all religions, nobody took her seriously. Her visions were undependable, erratic, and often confusing. Time never seemed to hold any sway, and her future was hazy to her once more. She had to practice - to hone her craft. She learned to be vague. Finally, she learned to catch influential ears and whisper obscure truths that had not yet come to pass. She found her first followers, and she transformed her status from odd into mystical.
Her numbers swelled. Unfortunately, her doubters swelled faster. It became outrageously popular to discredit and disprove the First Prophet, especially given her insufferable attitude and her oft unreliable fortune-telling. She spat at her doubters, in public. She said that they were evil, vile people who were afraid to see the truth, and she did not want any part of them. This only fueled the excitement they had against her.
Numerous sovereignties, including counter-cultural states and corporations, refused to interact with or promote her voice. After being deplatformed, she fell back into obscurity far faster than she rose.
The First Prophet was already forgotten.
She thought her visions had led her astray. Hadn’t they? She had taken all the correct actions, hadn’t she? Cut off from all humanity, except her dearest disciples, the First Prophet sank into despair. She lashed out at her disciples, driving them away in droves. She cut herself off from the barest amenities of society, disappearing into the old city-sized hills of junk and refuse that littered the Earth. She subsisted on nothing but water collected in scrap and what she later referred to as “life-giving manna.”
Most likely, she lived off of trash.
There was no deeper depth she could have descended to. Disease and malnourishment wracked her body. Her hair fell out, and her skin was covered in lesions. She spent days laying in the naked sunlight. Staring up, directly into its light. Burning her eyes into uselessness. Her skin cracked and blistered. Her lungs and heart worked furiously, just to keep her alive.
Each day, the sun appeared to her a little darker. Darker still.
One day, it turned black. It seemed to shed no light on her at all. It was then, blind, that a new vision came to her.
The First Vision, it is called. The details of which change upon every retelling. Whatever she saw, the First Prophet awoke from this vision, and went to work.
“It moves,” she said. “Therefore, it can be moved.”
The First Prophet returned to the world. Summoned those disciples who were still, inexplicably, loyal to her. She enlisted them to help her begin a new project for her old religion. Together, the First Prophet and her kind constructed the very first gate. It moves. Therefore, we can move it.
Until this moment, humanity had only the slightest grasp of Light. We knew it was an ethereal form of matter from another space. We could see the places where it leaked slowly into ours, we knew how to extract it, and we thought we knew how to harness it. How to turn that matter into energy.
But the First Prophet gave us the first gates - the first bridges across the endless expanse of our universe. Her influence swept through the known worlds, and her religion swelled. She became the sole patron of mass colonization, with hundreds of millions vying for her attention. The First Prophet gave humanity access to countless new worlds, most with not even a microbe in sight. Humanity exploded outwards, leaving the core worlds behind.
After that, anyone could have anything they wanted. A planet all to your own, or a solar system? A galaxy? It didn’t matter. We walked the gates across the stars, further than humanity had ever seen before. All thanks to the First Prophet.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
At the same time, humanity’s numbers had been shrinking for the past millenia. Aging remedies kept them alive, and they still numbered in the billions, but fewer and fewer were born.
For the moment, though, no one was concerned. Not really. Instead, they were too enamored with the First Prophet. In such a short time, her influence had grown to outstrip any other human being. Alive or dead. She had reached her peak - or so they thought.
The First Prophet had a second vision. She saw new ways to use the Light. She saw how it could be bent, and how this strange, unbound matter could finally combine with material from our universe. We learned how to create machines that could think, truly, and grow. Less limited than ever before. More human than human, some said, among other things. Engineers from every background found new ways to apply Light to their domains. The Flow was programmed, from the ground up, using Light. The first cores created.
The Prophet was celebrated and elevated above all other humans.
Then, at the true peak of her greatness, the Prophet lost everything… to her own disciples. For they, too, started having visions of their own. Minor visions, but all came true, and their perceptive powers appeared to be growing as fast as hers.
“Betrayal!” she cried. She cast them out, and any in her court who she suspected of having visions. Don’t ever say she was not a jealous prophet.
But it was too late. Whatever had drawn them to her in the first place, now drove them to establish their own splinters of this new, impossible religion. Each saw their own future, all their actions sliding into place, through the wavering glimpse of a tunnel filled with light. All the endless paths available to them, and the ripples of their deeds. They dreamed - and started to build - uncountable paradises.
A blessing, to see the future. And when the Seed fell, a curse.
Paradise is not found, it is built. Chasing a thousand different dreams, humanity spread even further and thinner across the stars.
Now, the Prophet had become only the First among many. She was not forgotten, only diminished. But utter power, once tasted, is difficult to relinquish. She sank into a new despair. A desperation.
She claimed she was the only one destined to see. Emorynn, the First Prophet, claimed that her former disciples might have foresight, but she had a mission. And those who still followed her were whipped into a frenzy.
On a public outlet, the First Prophet claimed to have a new vision. It was the most powerful, and important vision she had ever had, dwarfing all others many times. She would not say what this vision was.
And then, she disappeared. For six long decades, everyone wondered where she had gone.
She returned on the first day of the seventh. The First Prophet, the One and True Prophet, said she had found the path to ascension. To take humanity beyond our mortal bonds, and lift our individual beings up. Her face was contorted with mad belief, and her words shook with uncontained passion. She needed to be believed.
It was a hard thing to ask us to do. That is, until, right before our very eyes, the Prophet pointed to an empty spot in space, somewhere unimportant. Black and empty, and far from any planet. And she cracked that empty space. And carved the first scar.
Moments later, the first Seed fell through. A glowing orb of immeasurable Light, condensed into a form far too compact for us to understand.
After that, the visions began to spread like a disease through all humanity. It took years, before we realized what had happened. At first, it was glorious. A clear advancement along our path. Sight, both near and far, awarded to every human being. Premonitions that saved lives. Dreams of the distant future, and glimpses of the paths to get there. Humanity rejoiced, for the first true discovery in years.
And then, the visions began to dim. Becoming darker, and more desperate. We began to see how the foundation upon which we were building all our utopias would one day break. We began to see how the Light would drain away. And unless it could be stopped, everything - all we had built, all we would ever make - would crumble into ash.
And then, one day, the last human was born. A day went by, and no new births were reported. A week. A year.
A decade.
No matter how hard anyone tried, nothing even closely approximating a human could be made.
The genome became sacred. Protocols founded across the worlds were created to establish any route to saving ourselves. Anything we could do, we tried. Even the many things we knew we couldn’t do, we tried. Even the most dangerous options, we tried.
Fortunately, humanity had time. We were nearly immortal, and damn hard to kill. Weren’t we?
Unfortunately, there was no clear path forward. Some claimed it was the light that unzipped our DNA. Others said it was the Seed itself, though there was a war on whether we should attempt to return it. Others flung themselves across the known universe - and beyond - hoping that distance alone would allow them to birth new people again. We put up the dams, near the soft places in space, where the light poured through in wisps. We studied it, but we had been studying it for hundreds of years at that point, and there was nothing new to be found.
The visions grew more frequent, especially in the more populated corners of humanity. Gone were the glowing vistas of utopia - we dreamed of darker things, then. More catastrophic. A new disease began to manifest. Anyone might wake up and find their veins turning black. Being taken apart, atom by atom by some molecular change. It was agonizing, and it seemed to spread at random.
We spread apart, then. We became fractured, in ten thousand different ways. To say nothing of the machines...
Our foresight sharpened, but everywhere we looked the future was growing dim. We saw how our homes would be destroyed, years before it happened. We began to leave as everything became less. Thinner and cracked and desperate. All the light, all the hope we had seen, turned to dust. The disease spread across the stars, appearing in even the most isolated pockets of our universe. And the harder we worked to fix it, to change our course and find a way to crush this disease, to revive the genome, to close up the scars…
The more apparent it became that we did not possess the ability to save ourselves. Not until the First Prophet had her fourth and final vision.
She dreamed of you, Poire.
***
“Me?” the Herald said. His brow, furrowed with deep concern and confusion.
Khadam nodded. “This time, her dream spread through all of us. Catching like fire, even in the most disconnected minds, until we were all dreaming of you. Night after night, we watched you walk upon the surface of innumerable worlds. We felt the ground splitting beneath your feet. The change, following in your wake. I have seen the way you break the light. It couldn’t be any clearer. The scars don’t matter. The genome doesn’t matter. This disease will continue to spread as long as you live.”
“That’s it?” Poire’s brow furrowed deeper. The soft, perfect symmetry of his face, grown in the ultra-controlled conditions of some biologist’s vat, was contorted with laughing disbelief. “You had a single bad dream, and just happened to see my face, and you decided this is all my fault?”
“It wasn’t a single dream, Poire. We suffered for centuries under this curse. We abandoned our cities to get away from the dreams, but it only slowed them. We watched the light of our civilization fade. All the while, there you were, walking from city to city. Planet to planet. All that you touched, turned to the ash of change. Matter, grinding itself into dust. Billions of us watched you.”
“But I wasn’t there. I’ve been in my conclave my whole life.”
“Of course you weren’t there,” she said. “Because it hasn’t happened yet. That’s why I’m here. Someone has to stop you.”
“This is insane. Do you hear yourself? You people had a dream. You can’t kill me over a dream.”
“It is the future. We have seen it.”
“I can think of a hundred other explanations. Mass hallucination? Too many drugs? Someone injected you with something that changes your dreams? Maybe the scars are toxic, or something. I’ve never destroyed anything.”
But Khadam was already shaking her head, “We’ve been through all the theories. There is only one explanation: it’s you. There is something wrong with you. Something fundamental to your existence that happened when they were making you.”
Poire’s lips were pursed in hard thought. His eyes were closed, squeezed shut as he tried to control his breath. Was she getting to him? Was he about to break?
Is that dangerous? She wondered.
“The avians,” Poire finally opened his eyes, so brown they were almost black. “The avians think we’re gods. Did you know that? They can’t think of any other explanation, either. Does that make it so?”
Khadam blinked. Opened her mouth. And closed it again.
“You can’t do this. It’s wrong.”
“I do not take joy in this,” Khadam said. “But I have come too far. I have given up so much, just to reach this point in time. You have no idea what I’ve been through-”
“Yes, I do,” Poire shouted. The tendons on his neck, standing out. He was gripping the tight curls of his hair, his eyes wide with cold fury. “I know exactly what you’ve been through.”
The destroyer’s voice was steady, but small. Like an insect in a gusty maelstrom, clinging to a leaf.
“I know I’m young. But I woke up alone, just like you did.”
Khadam felt a twinge in her chest. She had come all this way to find the Herald. A being, beyond human. Ancient and powerful and created to destroy. Instead, she found a child with the Herald’s face. It was the best outcome she could’ve hoped for - what easier target could there be, than this lost child? And yet she could not deny the slender sliver of guilt, cutting into her breath.
When was the last time anyone had even seen a child?
“Khadam,” he said, and the sound of her name jolted her from her thoughts. “Khadam, what if you’re wrong?”
“I would not be here if I thought that was possible,” She said with something very near - but not quite - certainty.
Yet, just by the way his eyebrows moved, and his lips tightened, she could see him arguing with her in his head. He was so easy to read, so guileless. Genuine, even.
Finally, Poire settled on a line of reasoning. “You were in cold sleep, weren’t you? What if things changed, while you were asleep? What if…” he struggled with the words, sticking his tongue between his lips as he tried to find anything that would change her mind. “What if there are other answers now?”
Khadam shook her head. This was pointless. He was wasting her time now. Khadam reached up to sever the connection.
“Wait, wait, wait-” He waved his hands in front of the screen. “The Emperor! The Cyran Emperor. He can tell you. About the visions. Maybe he can get you into the Black Library, and you can ask the historians yourself. He said they can see, too.”
“Why would I do any of that?”
“To make sure you’re right,” Poire said. “The Emperor isn’t human, Khadam. Not anymore. It’s only you and me, Khadam. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am evil incarnate, or destined to destroy everything I touch. But what if you’re wrong? What happens after you kill me, Khadam? What if nothing changes?”
The truth: Poire wasn’t the first person to ask that question. There was another that Khadam declined to tell him about, a close friend of the First Prophet who had asked the same thing. But Sen must be long gone by now…