Reinventing Reality

The air was rancid, saturated with vapors of blood and sweat. The night was harrowing with reverberations of hollow screams from bodies no longer capable of producing sound. Electricity, dancing with death instilling rhythm, coursed through the spines of the few remaining. Timid, the night grew too shy to speak up. Neither whispers from the wind or echoes of silence from the vastness above could muffle the tumult.

A shocked and regretful Mehno sitting abreast the decrepit altar, hung his head with disdain for the scene conjured in his mind.

“Is this truly what will occur?” questioned the behemoth, using the altar to speak to the disembodied heavenly entity known as “The Ether.”

“You must know by now better than anyone, that doubting the visions is the best recipe for your own demise,” replied The Ether.

“That wasn’t my fault!” asserted Mehno.

“Delude yourself all you want with fantasies of utopia! Your gift has withered, courtesy of your own folly!” hollered The Ether. “Remember, the only reason you even rely on the altars to produce these visions and communicate with me is your prior hesitation that led to the severing of our natural connection. You let those despicable Shadow vultures blind you from the future, and in turn greatly compromised all our collective omniscience. Your brothers and sisters are desperately waiting to ascend, but because of you they are stuck. Evict self-pity from the realm of your mind alr—”

“I’ve already apologized! I am just a Dragon not an Infinite like you. And unlike my kin, I had only just gained access to your omniscience, not nearly enough time to learn how to navigate it!” desperately interjected Mehno.

“Listen, my spawn, I am not angry. They are not angry either. They just all want to ascend. The only way for you to restore what you have confounded, is for you to find the Prime Reflexive and foster his Ethereal nature, ” she continued to lecture.

“I can search for and raise the human child; I have no reluctance towards that task” responded Mehno. “But you know that I cannot betray Morality! I am no murderer!”

“That is not up to you,” calmly asserted The Ether. “Besides, Morality’s rules are simultaneously simple and complex. Yes, murder is immoral, but it is even more treacherous to allow yourself and others to be murdered, especially when they are innocent. It’s a constant game of navigating closer and closer to what is an unreachable equilibria for those unascended. And if you don’t raise that child, the Shadow-Reflexives will certainly turn him into a weapon capable of eliminating every unascended Dragon!”

“I… I understand now. It shall be done.”

“Good! Now I cannot say definitively if they are yet aware of the nature of the child’s existence, since the blind spot they created by attenuating your mental force has compromised mine as well, but it is best to operate as if they do. A mild non-draconic, ethereal energy has recently been emanating from a hollow in the Stygian Forrest. Waste no more time, and get there immediately!”

“I will not let you or anyone else down,” affirmed the Dragon.

Promptly, Mehno flew off into the night with the goal of finding the Prime-Reflexive.

In the world of Pinea, humans have two fundamental birth natures and two fundamental auras related to their connection to The Ether, and by which they have segregated their societies. The two natures are Visionaries and Marauders, the former being one with high mental energy capable of molding or absorbing others’ thoughts and perception through psionic means, while the latter being one with the ability to manipulate the appearance of objects through psionic means. The two auras are Shadow and Luminous, the former relating to the destructive and often siphonic aspects of The Ether, and the latter relating to the creative and often generative aspects of The Ether.

These characteristics are codominantly inherited and while most humans have one birth nature and one aura, interbreeding has given rise to “Reflexives,” individuals possessing either two auras and/or two natures. Prime-Reflexives (ethereals), like Dragons, have both natures and both auras, allowing them to fully connect and communicate with The Ether as they grow stronger. A human Prime-Reflexive is exceedingly rare, primarily due to the politics of the Pinea, that greatly frowns upon cross-aura-breeding as multi-aura individuals have substantial advantages over regular individuals by being connected to both the Shadow and Luminous sides of The Ether. While multi-natured individuals are revered, especially in Shadow societies, only very high status individuals are allowed to interbreed.

Shadow societies are often brutal, as their aura drives them to seek power over others. They have the ability to absorb and delete others’ thoughts and feel especially threatened by those that have a positive disposition over them, primarily Spawn of the Ether, aka Dragons and Prime-Reflexives. In fact, in almost every city their central buildings are painted with a speech by one of the first Shadow-Reflexives:

“Do you remember the day that reality started? We of course mean reality as you know it, that moment when “the lights seemed to turn on” and there was finally illumination in that previously dark, cerebral abyss. You have knowledge and recognition of some things, such as your primary language and your family, but you don’t quite know how you’ve come to know these things. Clearly some of your thoughts have vanished, but how? Well, it is time you know, The Ether and his children drain your mental energy everyday to power themselves! Our only chance of freedom is to drain them first! Long live the Shadows!” — Stygian Gallows

After hours of flying, Mehno finally finds the toddler and realizes he has entered right into his earlier vision where he killed a bunch of Shadow individuals. He blacks out. And hears nothing but screams.