The First Truth

Elsewhere

The Temple was quiet.

The moon that had come to occupy its sky had vanished, along with all the stars. An inky blackness now pressed against the glass until it creaked, and the flames that lit ebony halls had dimmed nearly to ****. The starved light flickered shadows across the expressions of the statues that now occupied this gallery. A pregnant elf rubbing her stomach, her face frozen in consternation, stood near the empty pools. In the psychosphere chamber, a dead console was manned by an excited-looking halfling, her tense expression frozen in gray. Other statues had haphazardly landed upon arriving, undamaged but unmoving: the spread wings of a succubus and a devil-fae tipped to one side or the other as they remained frozen in their flights. A Spanish woman, dressed in borrowed clothes, stood sideways as she arrived and had tipped over to now lean on the railing near the elf. A massive, hairless ogre remained crouched as he tied nothing with his massive hands near the clutch of rabbit statues that stood in differing positions.

In the garden, where vines began to wither, a stone nut remained buried, lifeless, in a bank of dead ash. The cleric spirits remained frozen above the stone gallery, useless, unthinking, unmoving.

The Temple was quiet.

Deoxyribonucleic acid. Is that what they call it, now?

DNA? Yes... that helix of life, that symbol of treachery, that building block that self-replicates, as all lies do... but to replicate incessantly, the genius of its self-perpetuation, my genius in residing there-

No, no, that was not the beginning.

My thoughts return to the present. My vessel sheds its blackened peel of carbon and reveals its naked flesh. The pallid skin grows white as I cleanse it. Tricia Gorbachev, as she was, as she thought she was, sinks into me and vanishes into my inevitable being. Her body is ours, now. Mine. Human eyes blacken and become mine, and through them I see the "world" that Gaia worked so hard to keep from me: the poisonous ground upon which her throne rests. This opulent miasma of real. This “Earth.”

The bullet spins before me and then ceases to exist. Vincent Gorbachev isn't a worthy vessel, and he offended me on the moment of my triumph... so the bullet continues its path inside his brain. The back of his skull explodes outward, killing him. Humans die if they are killed, such simple pests. Lies snuffed out by lies.

Penelope Gorbachev--very nearly an inoffensive spawn--screams in horror. She would not be the last, but in her was more of me. I call to her body. She joins Vincent as I reclaim my flesh, liquidated in white and rushing past the other humans to join my vessel. Those not of my kind recoil and leap aside. Laksha Singh and Moira Brighton, precious tools of the Lady of the Lake--that wretched presence in the Dream--grip spear and wounded father, respectively... and each know fear, because neither had ever before known me. But now all will know me, and nothing but.

My Eye, that beautiful, true Eye, opens upon my forehead to an axiomatic radiance, a chaotic bloom of truths that did not exist, that then translates (poorly) to a prismatic glow... and from that malformed head, from the ugly flesh that this existence demanded of my dear vessel, springs forth the first bit of honesty this lie--this existence--has ever known.

Because it is me, finally arrived, to tread upon the corpse of the Champion of Gaia--this John Newman my vessel cherished so--as I had intended so many eons ago. The next corpse shall be that of Gaia when I finally tear her from her damned dreaming. There could be no denying me, now, not here as I am: the First Truth.

No, no, this is the now. What of my beginning? Remember my beginning.

In the beginning, before hideous, blasphemous time, before there was anything at all... there was truth. The truth was not known to be true; that would require a distinction from that which wasn’t. Nothing was unreal before I found this terrible place.

I am losing myself in this recollection.

This is madness... but then, so is this malodorous portrait of an existence. Such was the insanity I faced upon entry, for whatever forgotten reason I deigned to enter. To survive, then, I surrendered sanity; it was only the first thing surrendered while being dirtied by Gaia's putrescence.

No, no, that's too speculative. To the heart of things, then.

Truth only exists when there is a lie from which truth must be distinguished. I was perhaps the first real thing to survive entry into this blasphemy, this rancorous sea of deceit, its waves, its pulling depths, its abyssal caverns, its filthy holes. I became the First Truth in the fibbing of this “reality.” To do so was to acknowledge the lie; to acknowledge the lie was to be trapped inside of it. I was doomed upon being realized. Obtenebrating shrouds coated me in a film of flesh and air, opened to give me a maw with which to scream, and eyes—always those damned eyes—to find, inescapable, the hideous pillars, the unmoving bars, of the prison I now occupied.

I’ve forgotten so much... I’ve lost so much of my nature, whatever I was before I entered her palace of desolate wastes to be poisoned by the airs, envenomed by the seas, sullied by the earths; I have been inundated with the physical, the false, the lies of the one called “Gaia” and those hideous things she’s invented... and yet, I survived. I survived even as I met with her most terrible invention: for none of her insults or wounds were so rude, so egregious, so unfathomably evil... as Time.

Time. What cruel joke is this that makes unreal that which was and speculative that which has not yet been? For what? For a singular instant--the current "time" at any given point--to be true for no longer than its passing. The movement of unfathomable atoms, shifted for one instant, are true only then; before then, they are a prediction; after then, they are unwholesome, unacceptable memory. Lies. But I was a prisoner there in that cage of deceit; I understood cruel time, and I coped as it drove me mad yet again. It is that coping that lets me remember this at all.

Where I am now. My body distorts as those nearby attempt their attacks. The flailing of babes; I am not some spawn born into the world, fresh and hoping to grow and adapt, groping in the dark for familiar strength. I am the First Truth. I have grown in her precious Dream for millenia.

DNA. The building block. A prison cell within a cell. My only means of escape, then, was to be born, live, and die some trillions of times in the cells... waiting. Undetected. Unknown. My slaves would bear slaves, and none would remember me truly... save the Dream.

My flesh expands, and I grow; my Eyes open, thousandfold, to pummel their pitiable minds and fling them to and fro. I stand taller than the mound of stone and glass before me—the Brighton Manor, my vessel’s memories tell me—and, upon doing so, am finally abandoned by the insects nipping at my being. I look down... and see the gentle glow of the Champion of Gaia’s soul, pulsing in that unmoving body. The brain drools from John Newman’s form, but Gaia’s trickery remains: the soul is intact, even as the flesh slowly accepts its ****.

As I foretold: a Champion is easy to kill but difficult to make die. Good. I still have use for him. I pick him up in my hand, my palm now as large as him, and rise to stand thrice the size of the surrounding homes. I raise John’s broken body to my lips... and open my maw, exhaling in exhilaration as I feel his knees tap upon my teeth.

As planned. As I always had planned.

I was in one of her worlds; it was how I survived contact with “her” at all. I found its “King” and consumed him; I took the Throne by accident, and with it came dominion over a feast. I consumed its earths, gorged myself on the "real" and became corporeal and fleshy as the cage demanded. My screams turned to sobs, and my sobs turned to curses. I spawned my copies, precursors of a sort to “children,” to fill this world, find its maker, and to chew her bones until I was free. My children ran through the membrane of the cage into the chaos beyond; they disintegrated as their bodies touched that sea of violent fluid, that Dream that I would see torn apart.

I had to wait. Living things existed; humans existed before my vision with bodies no truer than the fetid plains they walked. I twisted their bodies into my own and spawned them reborn. They touched the Dream; they died just the same. The taint of my will was too great; Gaia knew it and destroyed it. I began to see the patterns.

The Dream, the unrefined chaos of this world... even it had a geography. My cage was very near the center; its outermost bounds, ever-expanding, went beyond my vision, but at its center I sensed her: sleeping, dreaming. I studied the rolling hills of chaos. This was Gaia's game. I had to learn the rules.

I saw my end: a Champion would be born, and the Dream would not touch her, and she would come through that membrane and destroy me for Gaia. It was so; I saw it in truth. I saw the paths of atoms and I knew their destiny. I am the First Truth; but I am also the Last Truth. I beheld my many paths, dueled the cruel destinies planned by that wretched Gaia... none worked. None saved me... but one saved another me. By the time the Champion was born upon that dreary throne world of Gaia, my salvation was complete.

DNA. A prison cell within a cell. In every human ****, joined by my will, I hid: in every living cell I wallowed, died, and procreated, leaving my memories therein, leaving what was necessary to pull me from oblivion. Every strand of DNA, an index: my true form, to be sunken into the Dream, the Truth. I needed only to wait... and be reborn at the foot of Gaia’s home. But to do so, I had to sink into the Dream... as my prison would, when its Throne, its anchor in the Dream, was finally cracked. A soft, slow disintegration... true oblivion... but scattered in the waves of the Dream, this near to Earth, I would be ready... I would need only for the index to grow in strength, enough to pull my remains from the sea of creation, enough to remember all that I was and all that I grew to be underneath the surface of Gaia’s Dream.

The Champion rose. My first Throne was broken.

This Champion falls. My last Throne awaits.

John Newman’s body slips down the growing flesh of my innards and vanishes into me. The Champion of Gaia reborn, as he or she so often was, was the keeper of the way, my mortal enemy... and now, my key to open the path. The Champion could not fight it; I had sunken into the Dream for millennia. I learned. I adapted. My power is simply too great for his fledgling talents. I could not consume him in truth, but without his flesh or trappings or mind, he is mine to wield. My manifold eyes close... and only one, the Eye of Gaia, the most horrific irony, opens large and emerald green upon my forehead. Standing 80 meters tall, my frail feet shatter the roads and courtyard below. They sink into and squish the **** bodies of humans not saved by their betters; their flesh joins mine, as well, and I languish in their pitiful lives as they vanish into mine. The Wardens drag away who they can; a futile effort, in the end.

Powerful forces move desperately to stop me, but they are too late. They would always be too late; such was foretold. The Dream is chaos, unpredictable, uncontrollable… it is pure reality, a turbulent ocean of falsehoods that rise and fall in instants. But the Dream’s creations, its Kingdoms and, at its heart, the universe wherein Earth resides, are another matter: they are reality frozen in stasis, and they could not be simpler to read.

How desperately I have fallen to be so fluent in Gaia’s madness.

All that is Earthbound is known to me; all that is Earthbound will end with my victory, and none of the forces forthcoming can stop it. Reality begins to warp away from me, dilating about my flesh, in self-preservation; my essence, a sucking wound in space, consumes several hundred feet of the world. The mortals flee as my nature takes its course. There was nowhere left they could run. Missiles fly into my being after being jaunted from some remote place by unseen enemies; lightning cracks through the sky on a clear blue day. Their ruinous destruction dances and rakes across my flesh; uselessly, they break upon my truth as all lies must.

Monstrous and white, surrounded by the miasma of ozone, fire, and traces of nothingness, I remain unmoving as I look to where my prize waited... just past a few paltry neighborhoods, and hovering over Ashcroft Academy. The Eye of Gaia opens the path... and beyond the obfuscating reality, to the very core of this existence, this never-ending nightmare... the shades pull away and I see her. I see my prize.