A Chapter in Four Poems
12th Day of Autumn
767 Karloman’s Peace
The Book of Heaven was unlike any other book.
It defied every categorisation known to human comprehension.
It contained knowledge, as all books do, but it was no repository of mere words, those human-made scribbles that fail in their multitude to capture even a fragment of the infinite. It was not possessed of any syntactic structure, nor any swelling paragraphs or grand chapters through which an acolyte might leaf as if it were one of the scrolls found in the empire’s temples.
Nor was it a visual chronicle. Absent were intricate sketches, colourful diagrams, or any artistic imprints.
Not even numbers, which some argued were the universal language through which existence might be understood, could quantify the enigma of its contents.
And yet, the pages whispered, far from vacant.
Instead of sentences, it conveyed ineffable notions; fragments of thought that transcended linguistic barriers. Where paragraphs should reside, there existed constellations of interconnected ideas, woven and webbed together to form a tapestry of the unknowable. Its chapters weren't delineated by numbered pages or demarcated pauses, but by entire lifetimes of wisdom, long-lived and intimately understood. Its imagery was wrought not in ink, but in pure inspiration. Each page was composed of notes of muse and harmonies of emotion, and that most elusive element, the melody of divine vision.
The Book of Heaven had not been penned. It had been dreamed into existence.
It was a manuscript written by the soul, for the soul, and it unfurled its secrets only to those minds worthy of a journey more transcendent than that of the corporeal.
To read The Book of Heaven, one must go beyond the physical realm and pass into the ethereal network of existence’s own foundations.
Ekkehard held that tome open before him for what felt like a period unrecordable.
When he had first opened the book, all he had seen was a series of blank but gilded pages, their golden hue reflecting back upon him, and he flitted from page to page.
The more he looked into the pages, however, the more he saw.
There was a voice behind the pages, and it spoke to him.
Though the words he heard were in a language foreign to him, every syllable spoken carried with it meaning. Often, that meaning was out of reach, and although Ekkehard caught glimpses of the intended understanding, the knowledge fluttered free of him and left him with a sense of grief-stricken frustration.
Fragments of wisdom, however, were granted to him, and although Ekkehard comprehended little of what he learned, he began to form an idea of what the book was. He understood its irony.
His eyes grew heavy with fatigue.
Trying to fathom the full breadth of understanding the book possessed made his head pound. He closed the book, allowing himself a moment to reflect upon all he had already seen. He was surprised by how exhausted he felt.
He placed the tome gingerly beside him and looked up over the mountainside to watch the rising dawn.
When Ekkehard escaped the cave the day had been in its earliest stages. It was that moment when the first vestiges of twilight tinged the night sky, a soft transition from pure black to a tainted velvety dark blue, like an ink-drenched mockery of day.
Now he noted the sky had shifted to those lighter hues of blue. The sun was still hidden from view, the wake of its presence casting fingers of rosy, orange, red, and purple that ignited the clouds in the eastern sky.
To Ekkehard, it looked as if the roof of the world had been set aflame.
From the height of the Udine Mountain upon which he sat, and in the light of a new day, Ekkehard could see more clearly the lands beyond.
He scanned the expanse of the Hastfala Forest that had sheltered and hidden him and his brothers in recent days. Its treetops were a mosaic of evergreen emerald and seasonal gold, their colours marking the contrast between the perpetual and those irrevocably chained to a cyclical death and rebirth.
This vibrant canopy stretched for hundreds of miles, as if the world itself were the forest.
Running along its border was the primordial Danzig. The mighty river from which the heart of the Karloman Empire drew life.
Its meandering stream flowed along the subtle contours of the earth, thousands of miles in length. It bent around the impassable ancient rock of the land and cut through sediment laid down over millennia. Here it widened, where softer rock had welcomed the relentless flow, and there it narrowed, confined by harder, unyielding strata. It shimmered in the light of the new day, its pure and crisp waters clear enough that the foreign beings that call its depths home could be gazed upon by a mortal, like a celestial might do from the heavens above.
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Then Ekkehard’s eyes drifted to the younger additions to the landscape.
Distant towers of stone and wood ambitiously pierced the horizon, their imposing figures overshadowed by the ageless grandeur of the mountains. Farmhouses tentatively punctuated the meadows beyond the forest's edge, their presence an incongruous mark upon the deep green expanse.
Then there were the walls of Werth, the city that had been his home mere days ago.
Its fortifications stood in silent dialogue with the land, promising man a sanctuary against the chaos, and the wild a reprieve from man. Wrapped within those walls, the ugliness of humanity persisted in its beautiful endeavour for survival.
Surveying the land, Ekkehard’s thoughts began to drift.
‘This,’ he mused, recalling the scriptures that had been a steadfast presence throughout his life, ‘is the gift.’
These words, lifted from the sacred Words of Doctrine themselves, framed his understanding of the complex garden that unfolded before his eyes.
It was just that: a divine gift.
He thought upon his understanding of the world, as it had been taught to him by his faith.
The sacred texts spoke of a dark era when gods were excised from the world, leaving humanity at the mercy of entities far more malevolent.
These malefic beings subjected mankind to cruelties so unimaginable that not even the scriptures dared name them. The land itself became a casualty of their diabolic reign. Their sadistic acts fouled the earth and poisoned its very soil, saturating the roots of the world in an ichor of blood, rendering the landscape barren and lifeless.
Yet, the scriptures also proclaimed that humanity was not devoid of hope, for the benevolent god Spring had not forsaken them.
The Heavenly King had mingled his divine nature with that of humankind, siring the foundation of salvation. This celestial lineage weathered millennia in bondage, enslaved with the rest of humanity, until the day Karloman emerged.
That true Scion of Spring, the god's very essence having blossomed within him, rose against the demonic overlords, vanquished their king Gader'el, unshackling humanity.
In a grand act to forever banish the demons, Karloman offered the ultimate sacrifice, anointing the accursed soil with his own lifeblood. It was through this sacred infusion that the life-giving essence of Spring was replanted within the earth, awakening the cycle of rebirth once more, sanctifying the soil.
Life returned as it was always fated to do.
This, the ever-proliferating infusion of Spring’s vitality, bequeathed unto mankind the most holy gift, sanctified earth for cultivation. Now touched by Spring's grace, the land became inhospitable to malevolence, its very soil anathema to it.
Consequently, the bloodline of the Karloman family was exalted above all, ensuring that as long as their sovereign blood sustains the earth, the paradise they reign over will endure and possess the strength to resist the encroaching waves of wickedness.
Ekkehard looked upon the complex beauty before him and understood how one would easily believe its origins divine.
Ekkehard knew, however, that it was a lie.
The book had shown him that much.
He understood now that the earth was not a gift given to humanity; it was theirs by right. The author of the book understood that Karloman was not some benevolent saviour; he was the enslaver, the thief who stole the world from humanity.
Ekkehard knew this now, but what was to be done about it?
He thought about the vision he had seen in the cave, the creature he had encountered, the thing that had guarded the tome.
Guarding, is that what it was doing?
Whatever it had been doing, thinking of it sent shivers down Ekkehard’s spine.
He shrugged them off and tried instead to think of the message the book had given him when he first held it.
It was a message, wasn’t it? Or was it memory?
In a moment of confusion, he tried to remember the beautiful man.
There had been a beautiful man, hadn’t there? He was sure there had been a man, but he struggled to picture him now.
Ekkehard shook his head and tried once more to focus on the vision the book had given him.
What was he meant to understand from it? What had he even really seen?
A billion, billion images had rushed into his mind, assaulting him with a history of existence yet to occur.
What was he being asked to do?
He thought of the oncoming darkness ever present through the vision and wondered if perhaps it was a warning. A call to arms.
Maybe the darkness was the ignorance which chained the people of his empire, and he was the silver knight, called to shine the light of revelation upon them.
But how was he to do that?
Did he even care to? What did it matter to him?
This world and its fallacies meant little to him, as his world had already been taken. For what reason should he take on the burden of this call?
An afterimage flashed behind Ekkehard’s vision, and a powerful gust of wind blew across the mountain. Dirt and dust struck him in the eyes, and he was forced to shut them tightly. He rubbed at them, trying to clear the debris.
The outline of a figure, glowing, tall and lithe, was burned into his retina and lingered behind his eyelids.
He heard a subtle whispering. A gentle summoning. Words he did not understand spoke to him of a champion in the sun. When Ekkehard opened his eyes, he noticed the wind had blown open the Book of Heaven.
Something moved across the golden pages, a figure beneath, like a being trapped within.
Ekkehard picked up the book once more and examined the page.
Understanding came to him, and he rose to his feet. Like a man possessed, he turned to the east as the sun finally crested the horizon for the first time that day.
Ekkehard spoke to it.
He spoke to the sun in a language he did not know.
The words rocked him.
His body was shattered as a force unintended for mortals buffeted through him. His throat stretched and strained as he spoke, every syllable threatening to tear him open. He tasted the coppery flavour of blood in his mouth.
It became overwhelming.
His head didn’t pound; it exploded with pain. Every synapse within his brain ignited as impulses flooded through them in their infinity. His ears rang, they threatened to deafen him permanently as they fought not to hear the words coming from his own mouth.
His body trembled, every muscle tearing and every bone breaking.
He could feel himself coming undone.
He collapsed.
The book fell from his hands.
Whatever had overcome him had ended.
Lying sideways on the mountainside, his body was broken, having reached a level of exhaustion he did not think was possible. He worried his heart, still racing, would fail at any moment. He felt blood trickle from his nose.
He was still looking toward the sun.
Something was moving within it.
Ekkehard watched in rapt awe as the Red Angel walked out of the sun and stood before him on the mountainside.