Sojourns of Gods

The voyage began the same as the voluminous bygone journeys of that great space-faring race: a long procession past the Virgo Stones, heart-felt blessings before the iridescent hull of the ship, and a collective salute from the quarter that had apprenticed Kep for seven confluences. He felt his heart quicken at the site of so many joyous faces before him. He burned in gratitude to all those men and women who had raised him up to be the man he was today—ready for the laborious final rite. 

Kep bowed low before the multitude, held the curve in his back, feeling the heat of so much love and respect upon his heart. One last sweeping gaze… Kep turned around and walked inside the vessel that would be his new home.

It rose above the watchful crowd, above the white spires and causeways of the nearby city, ascending past the floating traffic, up to the heights of the mountain peaks that towered ink-black on the horizon, rising and piercing the thick bank of apical clouds that wrapped the entire world and never broke, and out into the vast beyond. Above the opalescent sphere, that marvelous arc that glowed inside infinity’s dark ocean, a planet he would never see again, his ship aligned before the Denebian Gates. 

Kep knew how delicate the next task would be. Instinctively and ardently, he turned to the Progenitors. From the first days of his life, he had venerated those mysterious beings who had traversed the known universe and sowed its worlds with life. Without a drop of doubt, the silent and familiar prayers came easily to Kep. The cadence and warmth of the words instantly filled his heart with strength. 

He closed his eyes and relaxed. All the faces, moments, and memories, all attachments and sentiments that drew him back, that tugged at his heart, stood in the way. Kep thanked and dispelled their specters from his mind. He was thorough. Any scrap of residue, however small, would sunder ship and crew to dust. He searched his mind… no magnetic tug, however feeble, should linger in the shadows…

Master Tallius watched keenly but did not intervene. He felt no fear, having trained his pupil profoundly and precisely. This journey, this wild shot out into sidereal infinity, was the sole purpose of his venerable age, come life or oblivion. Thus he placed his destiny in the hands of Kep.

With a shiver, the vessel leapt and pierced the round, colossal portal.

A familiar jolt, just like in their training flights: seen as a flash of molten pearls, felt as a sobering shock of current. They were through.

The ship was gone—its skin translucent suddenly.

This was nothing like the training flights. They did not orbit around the gates and safely move back through.

The galactic disk of light and life that held Kep’s planet, a hundred-thousand light years or more across, began to move. Its tiny specs of white flew by—distant sparks of fire and radiation. The ship moved rapidly across the spiral expanse, frozen in one mysterious moment of a cosmic dance. Living planets, craggy moons, fiery suns, intricate solar systems, and marvelous constellations appeared and just as quickly vanished in the ship’s steady wake.

Kep did not wonder about the worlds on their port and starboard, concentrating entirely on the craft at his command. Any distraction could spell their doom. He focused on keeping them on the shot toward their goal—past millions of possibilities—toward the culmination of his training and his life.

This destiny appeared then, straight ahead in inky nothingness. They slowed down, shooting past a colossal sphere with pale and reddish smoky clouds. Farther away, they witnessed a rough, red marble. It disappeared as they flew on. 

And finally, their goal approached, a beautiful orb of blue and white that gleamed and brimmed with vitality as it swam in black waters.

It was hurling quickly towards them. Kep steadied the ship. Their speed dropped. He sent them straight down and the new world expanded in all directions, a massive panorama of white vapor, deep-blue water, and verdant earth.

They fell toward its surface. The green and slate and ultramarine met them with a broad embrace. 

Kep abnegated the ship’s controls to Tallius. He sat back in the comfortable chair, readying himself for the next, truly onerous, part. The sheer weight of it… He prayed to the Progenitors for help.

 

In the night and under the starry dome that was so quiet, Kep stood alone. His eyes lifted up to the bright lights that were familiar to him, but from down here they were somehow different. From outside the shielding hull of his ship, the cool, white emanations looked out of reach and indifferent. He shivered in the rough, wool clothes that he was not used to and tried to spot a silhouette of the craft that was hovering up there somewhere; but the night hid it well. 

The sensations of a breeze and of the cold air probing his body for warmth were not novel. The world he had come from had its fluctuations of temperature, movements of air, colorful phenomena that unfolded in the skies as water and heat and light… But to stand on the hard ground of this place, outside the safety of the craft, made him uneasy. There was a stark wildness to the vast, dark skies and to the frigid air sighing and whipping at the tall grass all around him.

Kep had some ideas of what was about to take place—he shivered again.

Something began to happen to him. 

He didn’t understand it at first. There was a shifting feeling in his mind and a sensation like moving, rearranging… vitality. Then, on the distant horizon… a small point—innocuous at first but quickly growing—dark, empty, expanding, devouring. Before the growing black mass, Kep began to implode.

Watching through his mind’s eye as the horror unfolded, he fully grasped it suddenly—this was death.

His body may continue living, but everything else would be snuffed out by the all consuming black cloud that struck and blew through him. Nothing was safe, nothing could be hidden. Everything from the past, every shard of his identity, all thoughts, all faces, all plans, every joyous memory, every melancholic state, all moments good and bad and…

A physical death is better than this!

There was a reason that Kep had agreed to such a horrible ordeal but… He could no longer remember why! Master Tallius was responsible for what was happening—they had both discussed it before sending Kep down.

But why?

It was unclear why the Master would deliberately cause such disturbances in his student. Once, he thought, once he had known… But now… Truly, Kep knew very little about the other man…

The convulsing maelstrom raked and stripped him of his bearings. 

Why am I down here in the field? How did I get here? 

Familiar, cognitive places winked out of reality faster and faster. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his swimming head in both hands.

His lungs convulsed for what felt like hours.

Or minutes. 

He stopped. 

Why am I panting?

The field, the night sky, the world—all poured in through dilated eyes. 

Alone… In the dark predawn…

He looked down at his old clothes pocked with mud and patches. The fiber felt coarse and heavy against his pulsating skin.

Strange rags for a person to wear…

He laughed out loud—a dissonant tone of forced relief shooting out across the empty countryside. 

So now you’re too good for your own clothes? He confronted himself. Is that right, goatherd?

Again he laughed, this time managing a more sincere timbre. The night air was playing with his head and maybe he wasn’t fully awake yet. It seemed difficult to remember simple things.

How did I get here? 

A hollowness of familiar memories no longer…

There! In a sudden flash that lit up his mind’s eye he saw himself waking up early, leaving his hut and beasts, and walking under the starry glimmer of a moonless night. But this vibrant memory felt foreign—not his own… 

Was it a dream?

The shepherd chuckled. The night air really was working a magic over him.

Once again he lifted his eyes up to the stars. Their gleam was beginning to give way before a thin hint of radiance on the far horizon. And in that moment he was overcome by an emotion, one so common that surely he had experienced it before, but the deluge of helplessness that hit him then was not something he could recall. The herder felt so small, so vulnerable, so utterly at the mercy of the heavens and the world around him. He didn’t know anything. 

Where did all this come from? The Gods, sure… but… how? How? And why?

The Gods… The familiar concept sounded very strange to him all of a sudden, like a fantastical story carried on the lips of merchants from distant lands, regarded with much incredulity and skepticism. Was it the feelings of loss and insignificance—the gaping void inside—that gave birth to new, bitter doubts?

The answers were not above him at that moment. The heavens looked calm and deep as the sun grew close to breaching the horizon. The remaining stars would wink out now one-by-one. 

He thought he saw something move across the sky—a round, glimmering shape… metallic. It happened so fast in a sudden streak and then… nothing. The sky was still. No motion. 

Metallic? Impossible. No, he had imagined it.

The goatherd shook his head. It was time to put what was surely the strangest morning he had ever had out of his mind. It was time to come back to earth.

He found the familiar dirt-trail at the edge of the field and walked along it back to his hut. Light and color continued to flow into the atmosphere and the surroundings became easier to see. The curve of the trail and the scraggly bushes that sparsely dotted the landscape looked familiar.

So why did it feel like his first time here?  Maybe it was the way sunlight fell with a rich, golden glow on this particular morning that gave the whole experience a novel cast.

The shepherd arrived at his tiny, thatch-roofed shack. He recalled emerging from it earlier, bleary-eyed in the dark hour. A stone chimney at the side of the simple structure emitted a whiff of smoke from the remnant of the fire he had lit last night. He remembered stacking the kindling and lighting the dry tinder, but the memory didn’t feel solid enough… Everything felt… and looked… off. The hut, the chimney, the low stone wall that ran and tapered into a grassy knoll… It all seemed… Contrived.

Contrived? How?

The goat herder shrugged in frustration at the absurdities playing with his mind.

Near the tiny house, inside a paddock made of woven willow branches, stood a crooked lean-to. Sounds of shuffling and lugubrious bleating were already drifting from inside the enclosure—not unpleasant music to which the shepherd was used to working. 

But why does the whole thing feel like it’s staged for me?

With a resigned sigh, he grabbed a metal pail, and let himself in through a gate that leaned awkwardly from a need of maintenance.

The goatherd sank to his knees, into the mud. With a bent back, he began to harvest the sustenance that he required to live. Around him the scruffy creatures muddled and shambled. Bumping into their caretaker and each other, they brayed out in protest and frustration.

The cold of the sodden earth seeped in with a vigorous, numbing shock, saturating his knees and digging into his bones. He froze, looking into the half-filled pail.

The milk frothed and bubbled softly, meeting the cool atmosphere with its heat. His life depended completely upon this liquid that the funny creatures carried in their bellies. The goat herder needed to watch and care for them with diligence and devotion. He had no wealth or knowledge of any other trade. To survive meant to exist among mud and manure and to kneel down in it each day.

Something moved through the shepherd then, like a shiver—but not from the cold. He tried to chuckle at himself, at the sudden fervor of longing that trembled in his heart.

Do you really think you’re meant for greater things, goat herder?

The mystery of it all!

He walked to the edge of the paddock and carefully set the bucket outside the fence, away from the unsteady, stumbling ruminants. Wistfully the shepherd’s eyes scanned the heavens—now a beautiful, dark-blue. He was quiet, letting his emotions stir and move through his heart. This vast canopy… this immense roof… or was it a veil?

Feeling so small and insignificant, the goat herder calmed and settled and became more cognizant of his disquietude. It was a sensation not unlike being upside-down. The whole world seemed flipped, but not only that… All of existence had been broken loose and turned over.

What a mystery—that he should be a frail speck of dust and know nothing under the wide firmament.

But the coming of winter does not delay because of the philosophical wonderings of goat herders.

He laughed at himself again, but more kindly this time. The cold months in this region could be relentless and brutal. The day was just beginning and there was a lot to do before the sun dropped below the horizon. He lifted his pail and walked back to the middle of the paddock, moving heavily under the weight and callousness of nature.

Then the herder remembered the market that would be gathering tomorrow (the memory seemed to visit him like an external, foreign thing). The shepherd thought of all the townspeople and artisans who would be there, mingling, selling, and exchanging news. He could reach the market on foot in the afternoon and trade some of his milk for the tools and parts that would allow him to repair the gate that held and protected his beasts. He could ask about news from distant cities and lands. Perhaps he could find a cheese-maker to partner with. The goat herder would need all that, and to work very hard, to survive another harsh season.

 

Tallius winced at the sight of the ignorant man below his invisible ship. Kep stood not far from the crude home that the ship’s Manifester had contrived: a rustic and aged hut. Bending his back, the shepherd tended to his small herd. Like the shack, the funny creatures were products of the machine carried in the hull of their space-faring vessel. The Manifester had the power to negotiate with creation itself and to engender life.

There were other technological wonders on board. Working with a scope-like apparatus from a distance, Tallius had cut away Kep’s identity with the precision of a surgeon. The artificial memories he had replaced it with were a lamentably-thin bandage for such a grave wound. Just because his student had volunteered for the descent and the operation that followed did not make the psychic incisions any easier to perform. And having done the same thing many times before to other disciples did not mean that Tallius felt any less awful at disfiguring someone like that again.

Why had he done it?

Was there any other way than to follow in the orbit of the galactonauts who had come before them? 

Tallius and Kep, master and pupil, were on that same timeworn journey through the Milky Way. The Sojourn Ritual. A rung in a ladder. The only way to… their ultimate destination: the galactic center. The Great Mystery.

Inside his silent ship that hovered over the bucolic pasture and its goat herder, Tallius recalled the legend that had been first imparted to him nearly a thousand years ago. The mysterious words that spoke of a vast realm of light… 

White-hot furnace of the Gods… Giving off, beaming, projecting out pure luminescence. Exuding an astronomical outpouring of solar wind that extended for thousands of light years. Saturating, reviving, fueling, and sustaining an entire galaxy that dripped with energy and splendor.

And the impersonal, unknowable, and pandimensional intelligence that rules it. This being, or beings, whatever it is—and who knows the essence of its motivation (if the notion of motivation could even apply to such a preternatural thing)—does not easily permit entry into its realm. The demands for open passage are of the loftiest degree. This immortal shard of the infinite that stands with a terrible solidity behind all matter and phenomena, the secret of secrets, cannot be reached with mortal flesh and seen with untrained eyes. Only a superlative master can stand before it and comprehend its reality. Only they can pass through the flames, attain the galactic incandescent locus, and learn its secrets.

This was the reason that Kep now found himself in the mud of earthly existence. Tallius knew the man’s plight well—he himself had descended to many planets. He remembered viscerally the horrible plunge into the abyss that smothers your identity, knowledge, powers, faculties, memories, dreams… He could vividly identify with Kep, stripped of all his galactic consciousness and agency, reduced to the wretched life of a goatherd. 

A mighty being who had traversed the galaxy, from solar system to solar system, was now at the whim of a planet’s capricious ecology and reliant on the milk of its grass eaters. The process would be repeated again, and again, on other worlds.

This ancient rite was the only way. How else to temper a blade than to throw it into fire and then plunge it into water? How else to winnow a soul completely of all weakness, pride, and delusion?

Would Kep withstand it? What if he failed to qualify like so many others had…

Tallius shook his head. Speculating about such things would lead nowhere. He had a job: to stay hidden and keep flawless watch over his pupil. Tallius would need infinite patience.