He held the piece of the Emerald Tablet, touching it lovingly.
“But I knew that life wouldn’t last, so I left clues for myself, knowing eventually I’d be pulled to Antarctica. I’d come here, seeking the truth as many others have. As I’m sure you know. The conspiracy theories. The world leaders taken here to see, to understand. To try to convince them that we’re all part of a greater legacy and shouldn’t be killing each other over recent squabbles or toddler religions when our history goes so much deeper.”
“Noble…” Caleb tried to say, but Raiden laughed him down.
“I stopped all that,” he said. “In this last incarnation. When I regained the truth, a journey that took two decades after meeting your father, to come here, to answer the desperate yearning in my soul instilled throughout the last lifetime. I would not be denied. After drinking the sap, convincing these guardians here of my worthiness…”
The two jackal headed sentinels bowed to him, and then stamped their spears down hard.
“I regained all the memories, and the greatest of which was where I hid this little charm.” He tapped it again. “I found that, found the other Children of Horus, the seekers of the truth, the ones whose path had always been to understand — and gain the secrets of immortality. We came here once more and finalized our plan.”
Raiden stepped into the circle, coming now to the twins’ table. Their little bodies swaddled, yet on their stomachs, as needles were in their lower spines — extracting something.
“Spinal fluid from your sister’s children,” Raiden said. “The final ingredient. This… is nothing so sinister as a sacrificial rite, or whatever your psychic mind had seen and likely misinterpreted.”
“What more do you want?” Caleb managed to say as his blood boiled and his senses spun. Whatever he had been injected with was flooding his cells, lifting his thoughts. It felt like he was becoming detached from his body. “You have immortality… in a sense. This sap… drink of it every time you start again, and it will be like…”
“True,” Raiden said. “we could do that. Bottle the stuff and leave it around hospitals, but how do you know who to give it to? How many million births happen every week? Do we give it to everyone?”
Yes, Caleb wanted to say, but found his lips wouldn’t obey. But even as he wanted to say it, he wondered… The serpent. The admonition. Whatever this was, ancient parable or nexus for the intersection of reality and an ultimate dimension of consciousness, maybe it really was the best possible route. Not to remember, not to know it all.
We were given a choice, he wanted to say. To live and suffer in ignorance — that had its own simple grace. The other choice was to exist in perfect recollection and continue and start over in new bodies with new challenges, but to remember everything and continue to learn.
Pros and cons swirled in his thoughts even as he struggled to move, even as he fell — and hit the ground without feeling a thing. Face turned, he could see only the underside of the tables, where his nephew and niece lay.
He could, gratefully, still hear their breathing, their heartbeats — so faint.
“No, Caleb. Letting everyone in on the big secret is the very problem we’ve discovered with this reincarnation business.”
Which is?
“Which is, with modern advancements and science and health, we’ve reached a point where we are over-saturated. The quality of souls coming back from the pool of wherever they’re swimming between lives… it gets diluted as we’ve gone from millions to billions. Spreading all that cosmic sentience over so many more souls can only lead to what we’re seeing now: diminishing of human potential. Greed, violence, sin. Sin with a capital S, I, N.”
He breathed out and a cloud of steam glowed green in his gem’s radiance.
Ah, Caleb thought. Now I understand.
“Overpopulation has to be controlled. With a smaller, controlled group of loyal subjects, all working lifetime after lifetime in unison according to the plan, we can — and will — return to a golden age. And the souls that are reborn and recycled will be purer, less diffused and strained over so many bodies. And we will have a chance to improve and excel and grow as they were meant to.”
He lorded over Caleb, then took a knee.
“That’s step one. My plan you messed up with nuclear launches I will solve through other means. But that can come later, after I join my brothers in the other realm, beyond the Sword, where we will absorb the knowledge of the infinite, first-hand.”
No…
Caleb tried to warn him, as he saw the glimpse of a golden, shimmering tree of data: bits and bytes, ones and zeros and glowing strands connecting golden-hued humanoid forms…
It’s not what you think… Or maybe it is.
All the same. Beyond the sword. Beyond the veil of Maya, of Illusion, of Matrix. The Tree truly exists in that other dimension outside this world that may or may not be real, based on perspective, but it doesn’t matter. If you go beyond the veil, there may be no coming back.
Raiden leaned down close. “The DNA of your relations, we found that to be the key. They can separate between worlds, they’re the ones that were prophesied. Other psychics among us had foreseen this, and their coming, and now — injecting that spinal fluid into ourselves, we can do the same. As my friends have just done.”
He reached back and came up with another syringe, handing it to one of the Jackal-headed figures who took it reverently, and inserted it into Raiden’s neck, then stepped away.
Raiden lay down, getting comfortable beside Caleb.
“But don’t worry, dear friend. My thoughts of revenge are gone. Childish really. I wouldn’t dream of doing this next part without you.”
Caleb’s eyes fluttered, mouth opened, and he gasped as his pupils rolled up. A sudden flash of a vision, not of the past, but the present or near-future: Alexander, rushing ahead of the others, in front of Aria, Phoebe, Orlando… Heading to the pyramid, to the entrance — which had been sealed, and the door locked behind a deadly trap.
And the words of his enemy, still ringing in his ear…
“See you at the sword…”
32
“They don’t know we’re coming.”
“Yes, they do,” Jacob insisted, arguing over Alex and the rumbling of the engines and the grinding of the landing gear as they came in fast over the snow-covered runway. “Doesn’t matter that we have little Miss Bluescreen here. There’s a little thing called radar—”
“Nope, Alexander’s right,” Orlando said, opening his eyes after a long respite where Phoebe and the others thought he’d been sound asleep. “They can’t sense us anymore, even if they’re psychic and good at it all of a sudden; the destroyer knocked out the temporary base they’ve been using for the last few years.”
His voice turned grim though. “But they’re in a hell of a dogfight. Locals — maybe possessed or on our enemy’s team — and Temple’s team.”
“Locals?” Aria asked. “I thought Antarctica was demilitarized and by treaty no one could have any sort of military presence.”
“That’s the way it was supposed to be,” Phoebe said gently, watching out the window with concern. The sun was low, barely clearing the mountain to the east, the one that looked surprisingly angular and man-made. “But as my brother could tell you—”
“Over hours and hours of lame-story-night,” Jacob quipped.
“—it was likely a joint decision to hide the truth, build out a presence here, run by a multinational force, and monitor whatever it is that was found decades ago.”