777

God was angry.

 

And he was leaving.

 

He had begun rising from his crater in the mountain valley, and all the land had begun rising with him. Rock that had been tethered to God via ropes and cables now broke away, stretching to their limits into the sky, until soil separated from the tether, continuing to rise, while the surly bonds swung back at gravity's command, whereupon it would crash into more of the land, breaking the very earth free from itself.

 

The sight would have been majestic, if it had not been so terrifying to the inhabitants of the world. The terror wasn't from the physical destruction of the land around God, but of what that destruction implied: the end of the human race.

 

When God left, he would destroy the world. It was not an act of vengeance of a petty God, but a fact that a world, whose existence was sustained by the roots of God's tree of knowledge, would literally disintegrate without his presence there to sustain it. Those roots were the cables and tethers God had sent out through the land, that fed the existence of the people, granting power and knowledge to the leaders of the people there who knew how to communicate with God, and ask for his divine wisdom and guidance.

 

It fell to five of the most educated scholars and priests to go to God, and placate him into staying and serving his people. Their knowledge was esoteric and apocryphal, and some even accused it of being heretical. The church had allowed this group of scholars, through the ages, to continue to read all the scriptures that were carefully preserved and copied onto pristine white papers in the meticulously kept church archives, and doctrinal manuals and theses of the prior compilers of knowledge. The church would never admit the need for this group to the people, but when the end of the world came, their base of knowledge would a necessity for mankind's survival and recovery.

 

Wearing on their back God's symbol, an unbroken golden ring of light, these priests made their pilgrimage to God. It was a holy site, but access was forbidden to all but the most elite of the church. The valley, amongst its rocky crags and stone spires, was where God himself had crashed into earth before planting his tree of knowledge and spreading out its roots to the world, bringing the primitive man out of his dark ages into one of enlightenment and evolution. It was not a story of creation, but of salvation. For without God, man would have remained savage beasts, beating each other to death with each other's bones in the wasteland that was the time before God on earth. God, in his infinite wisdom, with his infinite knowledge changed the design and destiny of man, reshaping the beasts into his image to walk and talk and reason and cease fighting, if only to worship him.

 

The sight of God gave the men pause. It had been weeks on this journey already, and more than one of them wondered if the church had not misdirected them, seeing them as unworthy of knowing the true location of God. The unbroken ring on their backs bore a testament to their faith: it was not just the icon of their deity, it was also their vestment. Publicly disavowed radicals and heretics they may have been, the church had elevated them in private to their position as priests. And now it was only their knowledge of the arcane languages and gestures meant to placate God from leaving them, and taking his knowledge and blessings from them. That weight was lifted, just for a few moments, seeing the majesty of God rise in his sphere, with all its musics humming through the valley and resonating off the rock spires that had yet to decide if they would collapse to the ground, or rise into the sky with God himself.

 

They began their ascent to God by climbing upon his roots that fed out from the tree of knowledge. Roped together, they climbed the cables that God had fed through the ground, noting their condition. The roots had decayed, leaving bare patches where they could see fibers lit and pulsing. So much like human muscle where the tissue under the flesh conducted blood to the extremities, they felt they had gained a better understanding of what it was to be made in the image of their savior.

 

God granted them entrance as one of the five spoke words of supplication before the portal to God's presence at the top of one of those cables. Each of them had a role, and his was to utter the words and phrases before God, to grant them access to the very core of divinity, to see God himself.

 

God tested them on the inside of his shell. One of the scholars was the pathfinder. He knew they would be tried and challenged. The path to God has always been taught as a long a difficult path that one must never stray from as a metaphor of life. However, amongst the columns and cables and passages, this scholar understood that the path to God was literal, and as it was laid out in the texts he had studied. The paths were man-made, from a time long forgotten, and forged with tools that these pilgrims had no access to, but still man-made. The scholars spoke amongst themselves at this revelation and decided that it would be fitting if God had commanded his earliest followers to house and enshrine his terrestrial form as an act of obedience and veneration.

 

Periodically, the travelers would hear and feel the sphere shake as larges pieces of the cliffs surrounding it shook free and fell to the valley floor, or tumbled from above, striking the housing. The time this planet had with God still upon it was becoming shorter and shorter.

 

Following the maze deeper into God's house, these scholars eventually found themselves in the very center of the sphere. This should have been where God's very physical presence stood, where the shaper and developer of humanity existed. There was nothing. Machinery, more of the kind that guarded the portal and defined the physical paths to God, was everywhere. Three glass boxes hung in the walls, and beneath were panels inlaid with mosaics that included pictographs and glyphs in an ancient script that the scholars only half-understood.

 

Understanding has not always been necessary for God's followers. Obedience and observance of ritual is often all he asks of us to prove our obedience and devotion.

 

And so the remaining three scholars set themselves before the three blank faces of God and set about the rituals they had learned in their esoteric and arcane studies of the most ancient (and therefore whitest, as they were never used by the church, for fear of damaging them) pages and manuals. They observed the gestures they were to commit to, by crossing themselves once from each shoulder to hip, and then again from shoulder to shoulder, and finally hip to hip. Having prepared themselves to look into the trinity of faces of God, they pressed the sequence of glyphs required to command his attentions.

 

God never appeared in that room, not in any form those travelers ever understood. The ascent of God's house did stop, as they could feel the shaking cease, and any sounds beyond the sphere's unique music stop -- the cliffs were no longer collapsing onto the sphere as it strained to tear away from the surface of the earth.

 

These were scholars, people who had trained themselves to think and reason with the gifts and knowledge God had passed onto everyone. They were the ones who read it, though. In reading, they understood what they saw when each of the trinity of glass boxes lit up black, with a white light flashing in the top left hand of each.

 

They were not speaking to God. In this room, in this center of God's home on this world, God was already present. And the form God took was that of five pilgrims. The sphere contained God only when they acted, and they understood that when the sphere had stopped its ascent. The trinity in front of them were servitors, obedient only of the commands given to them by God. In seeking God, they had discovered that God did not exist in any way they could conceive, and they had, in fact, elevated themselves to God's place when attempting to commune with him.

 

Five pilgrims that day became five heretics. They knew the truth was unacceptable to the world at large, even if the world would believe them. Returning home was never an option after learning the truth of the divine. One can never tolerate returning to a lower level of existence after such enlightenment and elevation in status. So they decided they would wander, teaching those who would listen the heresies of man elevated to God. As a symbol of their understanding, they broke the golden rings upon their backs, and hacked a line down the center, breaking that unending cycle of God, and representing the power that man had over the systems of the world, including themselves.

 

# # #

Author's Note

PHOTO CREDIT: Florent Llamas, via ArtStation
PHOTO CONTENT: "Planet" (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lGJyJ)

1,548 words.

ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Every piece was written before I knew who or what the image was about. Credit and attribution was revealed only after completing the story for each picture.

Each of these stories is in the same form as it immediately came out onto the page. The exercise is to produce words, and a habit. Please feel free to critique on content and rate accordingly. Leave notes about egregious technical errors, but please don't let it stand against your rating of the content.