Eschatorus

  Cosmically speaking, your death and your birth very much happened in the same instance. And for that I harbor a profound regret, which demands an apology so grand that its full weight may well elude your comprehension.

  When we, the architects of that universe, believed our labor complete, a consensus was met: it was a beguiling creation, beautiful in its simplicity. It was not devoid of complexity, but rather employed it when useful. Everything it needed was all bundled up together in one little space. And space was quite simply all it needed. My colleagues thought it perfect — and perhaps it was.

  Yet I perceived a shameful squandering of potential. Though it possessed all requisite elements, what virtue lies in stagnation? So in a fit of pique, I crafted time. Isolated, of course. My habits trend toward cavalier, not foolish. And the whole idea seemed rather genius.

  But time, as it transpires, proved itself an adhesive substance of considerable viscosity. It was an absolute mess, you see. I had no intent to mix these two creations together at this stage. Time was simply too immature. It traveled only in one direction: out. Worse, the tempo wavered between languorous stretches and swift surges (depending on proximity to other bodies). And it seemingly had no capacity for cadence. I suspected that, for any being audacious enough to acquire the faculties of temporal perception, these inconsistencies would only further compound.

  Ah, but it did happen. During a particularly harrowing attempt to discipline the thing into a construct more malleable, it slipped away and found that universe waiting. They met. They mixed. They fell in love and eloped.

  That was my first mistake.

  And as is often the way with secondary errors, mine was born of good intent to fix the first. In striving to transform time into a vessel of merit, I inadvertently caught a snag, and a small part of myself broke away and fell into the fray. It set this whole affair into motion with a bang. Perhaps by now you might grasp the peril inherent in any fragment of my essence roaming without constraint. So I peered in deeply to find it — perhaps my third mistake.

  Billions of starts and stops consumed me. That piece of me was clever and seemed to use time as its cloak. Until finally, an ember of my light illuminated faintly in the distance. I traversed to it hastily. However, to truly find it, I felt I could no longer simply be an external observer. I needed these vessels and creatures to serve as theater in order understand the realm. Through these new eyes, I touched that old piece of myself and rather than facilitating a return to me, I was inexorably drawn along instead.

  Time saturated me. My own senses, to use a relatable term, were numbed. And… I… slowed…

∆ ∆ ∆

  In the dawn, I saw light. Light more than light before.

  I sit on the ground. Ground is home.

  Trees around. Trees are home too. They bring food.

  Food is happiness. Such sweetness and bitterness.

  I look at my hands. Hands that can do.

  I reach. I eat. I feel. Feel more than before.

  I see others. Like me. But different.

  I am alone. But not.

  I burn. Fire. Light comes again. I chase it.

∆ ∆ ∆

  Another billions of starts and stops pass and I find another place to look in.

  The sun sets, and the wind begins its song. I’m one of the last ones like me, watching everything change. New ones are here, walking tall and using old rocks in new ways. It feels like we’re becoming just… old stories. Standing under the stars, I feel lost. After we’re gone, will anyone remember us. Will we just be bones? Where do we go?

∆ ∆ ∆

  I sifted through even more beginnings and ends. More than I know numbers for when visiting these blinks of the conscious.

  We all feel like there’s someone bigger than us. It must be the sun. It makes the food we eat. It makes the things we build our homes with. So we thank the sun. Can it hear us?

∆ ∆ ∆

  This seemed to echo on for quite some time. Through the lens of many more starts and stops my wits became slightly less dulled. I am unwilling, or perhaps even unable, to affect the will of these fleeting whispers of consciousness. I am relegated to the role of a mere spectator, consigned to a state of passive observation. I always felt on the precipice of uncovering that missing piece of myself, and found an opportunity to regain my bearings with one particularly illuminated and recent beginning. I focused on it intently.

∆

  Inside an old house, I found a magical object, overflowing with joy at my arrival and promising adventure. The small beast was half my small height, and it thought I was the whole world. Every dream seemed possible. At last, this must be the piece of me we were looking for.

∆

  On adulthood’s brink my canine guardian and confidant was at my side in the twilight. Its youthful vigor had faded, but its loyalty remained. As autumn colored the world, my companion’s final breath joined the wind. All our adventures, from imaginary battles to trips across the landscape, hadn’t prepared me for such a departure. An older man taught me how to dig a grave. How could I have thought this was the ember we were missing? Is it even real?

∆

  The threshold of a new era beckoned, marked by maturity and past adventures. A union began. A pure celebration beneath the vast, starry sky, symbolized the convergence of distinct journeys. The person holding my hand, once an unexpected figure, became my second life through serendipitous conversations and shared laughter. Our connection, revealed through time, showed that love thrives on the unforeseen, turning previously overlooked moments into the core substance of life itself. There it is. This feeling of bliss. This is the elusive piece of me we must have been searching for. But if I return it to myself, the observer, it would deprive you of it. I hesitate.

∆

  My life, enriched with love and laughter in a once whisper-filled home, was beautifully transformed. Our daughter, with her limitless imagination, brought joy and chased away old shadows. Our days were filled with make-believe adventures, where we proudly played her sidekick.

  A sudden fierce storm tested my courage, pushing me to protect her with boundless love. And she survived. As the stage of the theater I had been watching dimmed, I left with the discovery that every end heralds a new beginning.

∆ ∆ ∆

  At last an epiphany struck: my missing piece was everywhere; my essence pervaded all and commingled with every layer of this place.

  I came to the somber realization that reclaiming that fragment of my being would necessitate the unraveling of this realm itself; thus, it seemed wiser to simply watch over it. Maybe in its independence it would learn lessons, just as I had through your limbs and organs.

  Time regained a momentum that I was more accustomed to and years once again passed as seconds to me. Wars, epochs of cultures, entire nations of beginnings and ends, played out before me — often in the name of some failed attempt to understand your creation. Resentment burgeoned and endeavors to understand your own complexities propelled a great many of you to loathe the very idea of it.

  So I withdrew with all the swiftness and distance I could muster. In my travels, millennia rolled by, filled with the rich tapestry of your joy, sorrow, and boundless ambition. A phenomenon of tragic recursion was at play: you, too, were in search of that elusive fragment of me, oblivious to the fact that you were composed of it entirely. I sought to end this whole abomination and rid you of the endless anguish whenever I managed a return to my own home.

  The more I endeavored to extricate myself, to ascend, the deeper that universe plunged into turmoil. I had been disturbing and influencing so much more than I realized throughout my movements. Glancing back, I witnessed your descent into chaos and your frantic efforts to decipher the vacuums and dark matter my departure had wrought. Through mathematics, sciences, and philosophies, you embarked on creations and expansions of a magnitude I did not think conceivable during my sojourns among you.

  Many of you began to suspect the existence of forces beyond comprehension, dedicating half a millennium to constructing methods to transcend the boundaries of your universe. But you were not built for such a place, you see. And that realization filled me with sorrow. Your remarkable brilliance and ambition, while commendable, seemed to be yet another unintended consequence of my earlier mistakes. Should you even succeed in transcending, I wondered if you would merely undo yourselves.

  I finally managed my egress and discovered the reason for such a strenuous exit: the experiment was expanding exponentially. Furthermore, it was evident that I had torn a significant breach with my departure.

  Suddenly I perceived a surge of triumph within you, a luminous flare igniting within our interconnected filaments. Casting my gaze upon the universe, I was awestruck. How had you achieved such a feat? The sheer audacity was breathtaking. You were here! Thousands from your domain had achieved what was once deemed impossible, venturing to the very brink and then… beyond. Those pioneering few of you were seeing your creators — something you had simultaneously been afraid to be true and also very much hoped was.

  But you were vindictive. A prevailing misconception among you was that we, by some malevolent design, had orchestrated the myriad sorrows, conflicts, and collapses that had shadowed your existence. A nearby colleague expressed curiosity which quickly curdled into irritation. Unfortunately, I was the only one with the necessary experience in time’s flow to foster patience and empathy toward such ignorance. Unceremoniously, you were shushed, the lot of you that dared to enter our realm, out of existence.

  I am incapable of, in a medium such as this, expressing the despair I felt. My dismay was twofold: not merely at the precipitous action of my colleague but also at the realization that you were unfailingly drawn to return to me. You seem bound by a yearning both tragic and fated. My attempts to distance myself from you were ultimately in vain. You followed. So I decided it all had to come apart.

  Fueled by a resolve and ambition forged by my time among you, I commenced the task of removing time and my pervasive energy in massive swathes. Your universe began to collapse without that scaffolding and began shrinking in irregular and unpredictable shapes.

  As I worked, a singular string of you, inspired by the ensuing irregularities, found a renewed vibration of ambition. My actions had inadvertently lent credence to the notion of a greater force at play. Faced with your burgeoning enlightenment, I lacked the cruelty necessary to obliterate everything in its path. Thus, I adopted a more calculated approach to the dismantling process, allowing it to persist until the very last moment.

  I was pulling on the last long thread that intertwined time and my lost glimmer when, well… in terms relatable to your experience might best be described as a knock at my door. It was a polite, albeit unexpected, request for entry. And I obliged.

  I was in awe once more as one of you stood before me. Your greeting was one of respect and confidence, like that of a peer. As if the universe were a giant model of your brain and each lifetime was a synapse passing information on to the next. That grand neural pathway led to an understanding of time so comprehensive, so nuanced, that it is only attainable to those who, unlike myself, had been ensnared by its flow for eons.

  Moreover, there was something in the eyes, indeed in the very matter and consistency of that one you, that struck a chord of familiarity within me. It was as though I were beholding the long shadow of a daughter I had once seen shielded from the fury of a devastating storm.

  In the moments that followed, which by your measure of time may have seemed significant, we stood together, so to speak, gazing upon a universe in a state of partial collapse. Yet she taught me it was not broken. It was merely incomplete. I learned of time’s faults through her, and we hypothesized that tying the ends together might mature it into the sophisticated mechanism it deserved to be. And so that we did. I extended my reach back to the very genesis as only I could, while you, embodying the culmination of countless aspirations and knowledge, bestowed upon me the very end. Together, we forged a new torus knot, intertwining start and finish.

  Pleased with the result, I lifted up your consciousness en mass, gathering them collectively as one might a rug, then deftly slid the newly forged trefoil loop of time beneath them. The achieved effect is that your consciousness experiences time from above, as I do. And as I ease you over the new construct, a serene equilibrium descends upon the universe. It neither collapses nor expands nor stagnates. You gain the extraordinary capacity to witness both the inception and culmination of your existence. Adjustments are made as you traverse across the loop, at will, creating your own final complete perceptions.

  Time, now liberated from its linear constraints, is the gift I always intended it to be. My apologies for the trouble along the way. Though, as we all learn during our time, sometimes trouble is necessary to find tranquility. Now more than ever, your birth and your death very much happen in the same instance.