Cum formidulosum est salire, tum ipsum saltas. Alioquin, in eodem loco per totam vitam manebis, quod ego facere non possum.
When it is scary to jump, then you jump. Otherwise, you will remain in the same place for the rest of your life, which I cannot do.
- Oscar Isaac
Betwixt subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion. Just as a candle cannot
burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing end them : to live, to laugh and to love in this life before the cold fleeting embrace of an ever restful slumber to die, to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end.
For to be, or not to be, that is the question. The heart ache of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation, devoutly to be wished — to die, to rest, to sleep and perhaps a chance to dream. For in that ever restful sleep of death, what dreams may come to be when we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Thus we give pause and reflect upon the undeniable fact that the dread of something after death is the undiscovered country. From whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, but hope against the greatest of adversities is nothing short of the highest form of faith and yet also the purest. Solitamente is something pious because The Gods approve of it? Or do The Gods approve of it because it is pious? Such is the nature of wisdom and truth, older than the mere confines of time themselves.
As they tend to continually progress
towards infinity without any versch wommenes, just as the first
man came to live without his first wife. Still bestrickened with the pale cast of thought, as moments and memories of joy and sorrow. Began Gradually losing their savory splendor, as orphaned children learn to grow up without their birth mothers. Dado que all of their past sins and transgressions forsakened nor forgiven, but not forgotten.
Albeit in the simplest and purest forms of providence and veracity, he was never truly an orphan. Quite far from it, yet death became his untimely importance --- a cold coin resting beneath his tongue. Driven by a lingering unknown temptation in a parallel plane of thought that never actually intercepted his own before, a quieter will moved brushing against him like a languid breath beneath a closed door. Something or better yet someone, faintly whispered as if underneath one's breath.
"Long time..."
"No see, old friend."
A low distortion — not merely sound, but pressure upon the architecture of serenity — propagated through the interstellar dark, as though some forgotten pulsar had resumed its dying broadcast.
Of a low and sustained resonance, beyond the tolerance of the human ear. Vibrating through the continuum
betwixte stellar bodies, yet it did not emerge from the void --- instead the void rearranged itself around it.
And what gathered there was less a figure than a negation of form — a density in the cosmic background, black not by absence of light but by a malignant absorption of it. As though photons, encountering its
trajectory suddenly reconsidered their allegiance to illumination.
With light gathering around it as though in worship, like moths to a flame yet none survived contact. The glow did not reveal it, but in lieu it was utterly devoured. As this figure, stood there in a way that if it were to be put gently into words had a strife with nature as if to out doo life itself which altogether seemed completely alien and attributed to something unbound by orientation — at an angle foreign to Euclidean expectation, misaligned with the grid by which minds misaligned with the grid measure space and time.
Like an ancient lighthouse erected before the invention of oceans, it emitted no beam, yet compelled navigation. Inclined at a degree unknown to terrestrial geometry, a deviation from the expected curvature of reality — and in that deviation lay its authority.
And those who felt its presence found themselves guided not towards harbor, but rather the thin membrane of the veil where dream decays into revelation.
To behold it was not to witness a thing, but to suspect that the cosmos had been whispering long before one possessed ears. And whatever whispered, was merely the echo of the mind collapsing under the strain of it's perception.
"Wast thou ever friends *!@%?#$"
And then precipitously, without warning a second voice intruded — echoing not louder, but clearer.
As though it had found a frequency the first one had only disturbed. Adopting a peculiar warmth, almost human --- although the resemblance felt engineered instead of organic.
Resonant with an authority that suggested not benevolence, but ancient function. It answered the first not in language, but in harmonic opposition as though two stellar bodies had entered gravitational dispute. And what followed after was not merely sound, but convulsion. As the surrounding background tremored as if interstellar orbits of space itself had shifted beneath an unseen strain.
Thereafter, a massive concussion rolled outward — vast, seismic and unmoored from any planetary crust of celestial bodies. Reverberating through the dark like the settling of some prodigious artwork, long buried beneath epochs. And beneath that thunder lay a susurration — innumerable murmurings braided together — not speech, yet unmistakably articulate
with meaning propagated beyond syllable and syntax.
The estranged exchange did not resemble conversation as normal minds conceive it. But it was alignment, a calibration between immense entities — a mutual adjustment of incomprehensible vectors. To bare witness to it was not to hear nor listen to dialogue, but to perceive the cosmos correcting itself.
"They first came to me as echoes from the aether..."
"And thereafter as lamenting screams of agony and despair"
"The dying breaths of The Bhikkhu Monks Of The Mikkyo Order."
As the voice echoed a gushing violent brilliance erupted — not merely light, but a saturation of perception — and within it unfolded a procession of images too rapid for ordered thought.
They did not flash, but rather they accumulated --- layering upon one another in dreadful simultaneity.
Cities reduced to geometric ruin, fields sown not with harvest, but with the still architecture of blood stained contusions, lesions and scars.
A misfortunate but fleeting niche of the rotting and decaying flesh of fallen bodies, as smoke rises in patient columns from countries whose names had not yet been conceived.
Yet the spectacle did not accuse, but it only catalogued. War appeared not as event, but as principle — an inherent tendency woven through the species like a genetic inevitability. Each and every single moment seemed increasingly more dire. Like a sesspool of miserability and despair, the staggering confusion felt as if one was being torn through a sunder of different worlds.
"Their vital essence, now forever sealed within The Trident Of Devastation"
As it quivered, in divine assent as all ancient vessels must when the current of decree passes through them. Just as, all of the celestial instruments strum when the deeper statutes of existence are spoken aloud. For within it's threefold triune crown it endured the reverberation of eighteen hundred million extinguished breaths.
Relinquished neither sanctified nor avenged — only recorded in the still ledger of existence in quiet accord with the utterance of the faint, ceaseless murmur of only the subsumed into the vast and indifferent calculus by which the cosmos inverts excess.
"The old laws grow ever so weaker..."
"And soon they will wither away along with these barriers..."
"Then the ugaritic walls of the stereoma will come tumbling down, like the falling leaves of an old dying peach tree."
Yet before the single moment could fracture into event, there was merely no reaction inclined nor did any colloquialism betray the intrusion of change. Au lieu de there endured a silence rather so absolute it seemed ancestral — older than mere speech and even thought itself, akin to that of that profound and suffocating hush which attends to the dead and does not concern itself with the living.
Lo and behold, miraculously out of the blue as though by some unseen providence something compelled the dreadful sight to sodeinly fade into complete utter nothingness. With it's shadow inferably quenched by a mind opening light, that inexorably shone unexpectedly as impetus stimuli gradually envelopes. And one fully succumbs, waking from the subconscious tether of the psyche.
He wakes up gasping for air, veins throbbing. As the andreline rushed to his beating heart in his pounding chest. Sweat clung to his skin, damp and slick as his mind registered only fragments of what he could still recall and conceive : illusions, phantoms and delusional misapprehensions of a sense that the world had shifted while he slept.
Sitting up slowly, as though the act itself might fracture. Every single heartbeat sounded like a drumbeat in a corridor of mirrors, reflecting a version of himself he did not recognize. The dream — no, the vision still lingered in his mind, a corrosive residue of shapes and voices that were not there, yet could not be denied. And for a moment he considered that he might be dead, or better yet even worse awake inside someone else's body.
As rational thought flutters weakly at the edge of his consciousness, trying to stitch together feeling and memory but it all recoiled under the weight of raw, absolute bewilderment. For that night Appolyse had several disturbing recurring dreams. A mysterious figure with burning eyes chasing after him, then falling but never hitting the ground and the faint whispers from the hoarse voice of a ghostly shadow. The mysterious figure with burning eyes held out his hand, and in his palm carried a Maduvu double bladed dagger. With which he then uses to stab young Appolyse in the back, before he falls.
Reality itself seemed to tilt. And he realized with a shudder, that the horror was not in the dream. The horror was that he could not be certain he had ever truly woken. Now disdained by the mental images that have been burned into his retina, he simply gets out of bed and heads outside for some fresh air. As he steps out his sleeping quarters, slowly breathing in and out --- each inhale and exhale a gentle rhythm as though the night itself had begun to pulse with him.
Above, the midnight sky swirling and dancing in quiet frenzies — of deep blues and indigos curling into one another, flecked with pinpricks of light that shined like distant coronae in the glimmer of the aurora borealis. The constellations of stars were not fixed, but twirled in luminous eddies, their brilliance spilling across the endless dark canvas in rippling arcs of golden and silvern halos.
With the horizon shimmering faintly, for 'tis was still dusk before dawn and the morning sun had not yet risen. The edges of the world alive with the first signs of approaching dawn, a pale brushstroke of color that bent and wavered with the wind.
As the faunachrons above and below
seemed to lean toward the sky, their shadows galloping about in the luminescent starlight. Quivering as if the night were breathing through them. Time felt suspended, his presence a soft pulse in the living artwork of the sky, a solitary witness to the celestial dance that spun and glimmered far beyond human comprehension.
न कश्चित् अस्मान् तारयति केवलं स्वतः एव
न कश्चित् शक्नोति न च कश्चित् स्यात्
अस्माभिः स्वयमेव मार्गः अवश्यं गन्तव्यः
यत् वयं स्मः तत् सर्वं अस्माभिः यत् चिन्तितम् तस्य परिणामः एव अस्माकं विचारेषु आधारितं अस्माकं विचारैः च निर्मितम् अस्ति।.
No one saves us but ourselves, No one can and no one will. We must walk the path ourselves, What we are is everything we think we are that's the result based on our thoughts and it is made up of our thoughts.
- Gautama Buddha
After an hoursworth of introspective thought and contemplation the boy decides to go out a little early for his morning run today.
As he heads south of the island, running at a relatively slow pace to preserve stamina and endurance for the entire full course lap. Still bestrickend and rather puzzled by the weight of his bestranged dream.
With his mind still a little bit fuzzy and fogheaded, but he is gradually
becoming of sound mind and body.
As young Appolyse tracks along the island contour, he happens to notice a small group of men causing commotion near the seaport.
Suddenly he feels the vigour of curiosity overwhelming caution, and thus he decides to approach the docks to get a closer look.
"Utterly ridiculous!"
The deep based voice of an old grumpy drunkard sailor could be heard shouting from one of the
Aqua Galleons by the docks.
"What! How?
"That scoundrel..."
"Where could it have gone?"
As the other smugglers murmured
on as if in response to a previously mentioned statement in argument.
And then out of nowhere the gangway gate busted open, spitting out a skinny young man tumbling onto the docks. As the gangway gate shut close after him, the irritable commotion could be heard gradually exacerbating.
Until it became a full on skirmish, with all the seamen aggressively barking at each other and pointing fingers as if asserting some form of blame to one another.
As they inexorably grumbled on, the innocent bystander on the side simply picked himself up and carried on.
Standing up on his feet and dusting off the dirt on his clothes as he walked off.
"Ugh, still hate that part".
The meagre and dashing young gentleman muttered whilst adjusting the collar of his faded leather trench coat.
With the mainland spread out before him, a sprawling neon-drenched
cyberpunk heterotopia. With a panoramic view of chrome
spires, glass skyscrapers and grim streetway alleys.
He had just arrived in the city on a day when the rain refused to fall. Walking along the southern seaport with a slick leather trench coat and the calm of a man who had survived one too many prison cells to fear another cage.
The journey across The Mediterranid Bay was long and treacherous, with the vast open sea stretched endlessly as far as the eye can see. A relentless and restless
expanse of grey area that mirrored the bruised blue sky up above.
A beautiful canvas of clouds hung low, heavy and perennially overcast as if the heavens themselves were watching, and patiently waiting. The waves lashed against the hull with a rhythm that gnawed at his nerves, each crash a reminder that escape was never simple—and that danger had a way of following him, no matter how far he ran.
The nino frankish looking noir caballero tightly gripped the medallion pendant dangling around his collarbone, a precious family heirloom. Clutched knuckles white
beneath his black leather gloves. It had taken him a full fortnight to slip out of The Democratic Republic Of Libya undetected, a feat that should have earned him some measure of relief but alas nevertheless.
As the elegant and graceful solarpunk city of Khalifa Monrovia Tripolis, the capital of The Democratic Republic Of Libya basked in it's reflective glory in the backdrop.
With it's sublime, sophisticated and exquisite architectural design, all the way down to its fundamental infrastructure. Making great effective and productive use of different elements, natural features and resources such as the integration of flora in its celtic knot architecture.
Acting as "vertical botanical gardens" that improve air quality and sustain aesthetic appeal. While some structures are often retrofitted, focusing on repairing existing environments rather than building anew. The indigenous manhattan area was built on a megaregion, of a large-scale clustered network of two interconnected tectonic plates
and their shared community.
Characterized by their unentitled
susceptibility, diverse ecology and geopolitical tensions. Which often spans across different cities within their national border, causing a significantly increasing concern for their national security and mutual economic interest. The extravagant megaregion is a hybrid landscape, where rapid often unplanned urban growth and development merges with previously rural areas.
Thus producing a beautiful blend of
modern and medieval, formal and informal semi-rural settlements. Of a vital, positive and vibrant sustainable vision of the future merging advanced technology with natural biology. For an eco-friendly
environment, powered by renewable energy sources such as solar energy, aerodynamics, hydraulics, pneumatics, geothermal energy and human labor. Aiming for a net-positive green footprint, meaning the city produces more energy than it consumes.
With it's greater society guided and governed by principle, it purely prides itself on equity. And as such communal gardening and local agriculture help to reduce reliance on long-distance supply chains and expended toiling. Empowering local small businesses and entrepreneurs replacing consumerist and industrial sociostructural hierarchies.
The city is powered by The De Rivaz Voltswagons, retrofitted with
electromagnetic repulsor engines and carbon fiber optics allowing for fast paced public transits and transportation. With a significantly reduced carbon footprint and extended traffic. This district is characterized by the semiarid climate of the boreal forest biome, and it is now the third most populated region on the entire planet.
But there was no relief for him—not when the whispers of his last mission had already reached the ears of The Black Quixotes Mafia, and he shuddered at the memory.
His last operation had been clean, precise…until he'd made the one mistake that could get a man killed. Double-crossing The Mafia was never a good idea, but shooting El Chapo the head huncho of the organization was nothing but stupid and suicidal.
He wasn't even sure why he'd done it—maybe rage or pride—but the forthcoming consequences were imminent and brutal. Now he was a man on the lam, a criminal and a fugitive hunted by both criminals and the authorities alike. Men who didn't forgive such mistakes. And the horizon offered no sanctuary, only the faint glimmer of a world that didn't care if he lived or died.
But the fiendish young vagabond carelessly smiled, a smaug almost feral grin whilst tightening his grip on the belt on his hip. For he knew he had survived much worse. And if The Mafia thought they could catch him this time…they had another thing coming.
Somewhere ahead beyond the darkness brewing in the light of the storm, his next challenge awaited. And Redd, he was just getting started. Ever since that move, he's been burning hot. A risky play even for him, being The Boss's right hand man but still he has always been a hotheaded fool.
After his middle man had gotten him a new connect with a lead operating deep in The Black Market. The underground illegal marketing for firearms, narcotics, bio-chemicals, nuclear weapons, xeno-transplantations and necro transplantation operations. Which involves and encompasses any surgical operations of the most extreme cases pertaining to all strange manner of mauna and faunachron body parts and organs.
His designated reconnaissance
mission, locate and retrieve Newtonium (also known as Element X-123) a quantum nuclear fusion reactor functioning as a self-renewing and perpetually versatile energy core. Said to be nesting on the island of stability with it's arcane glow painting the landscape in sickly silvern and blue cyber hues, a constant reminder of humanity's hubris. With it's nucleus producing a quantum tunneling field that suppresses proton repulsion, allowing for continuous fusion.
The Secluded Island Of Orizaba Hiroshima is the designated location and private property of
Newtown Orizuru Laboratories (HQ) a special private research company and facility owned by The Star Child.
Serving as The Genomian Light Order's primary outpost and workstation, and thus it has come to be rumored by some as The Surgery Of Death. Where insidious life ceasing operations and procedures take place, and man slaughtering contraptions are made.
But still there was more to the island than meets the eye. A few hours later, after poorly navigating the mainland's labyrinthine underbelly. And bartering with a one-eyed, jutting chin and pipe-smoking
smuggler called Popovich for directions.
Redd found himself on an old and rusty ferry with the toiling and roaring of the sea, its bite like acid on bare wood.
But still the scoundrelish vagabond treads on steadfast ahead looking on to The Orizuru Tower on the horizon, shining like the north star with its power grid still faintly humming even from the distance.
With the cold and foggy mountains looming over, their peaks incessantly
shrouded in storm clouds even as the lower slopes were carved into precarious rocks. The air here was different – thinner and sharper
with a slight salty taste and
the scent of something much much older.
As the old ferry groaned into a rickety, empty and dusty dock covered in dustbunnies and spiderwebs.
Redd disembarked, the metal gangplank groaning under his weight. The dock was mostly deserted, save for a few haggard
-looking fishermen mending nets under the flickering glow of a single, bare bulb.
And then, he saw him. A kid no older than 11, maybe 7. He was hiding behind a stack of dilapidated crates near the base of the mountain, knees drawn up to his chin admiring the view.
His clothes were threadbare, too large for his skinny frame, and his hair a shock of unkempt umber. Framed a face that looked far too innocent to incur any suspicion. Redd sauntered over, a practiced smirk playing on his lips.