The Aeterna Empire

Chapter 15.7 - What was Inevitable

I gulped and stepped into the illuminated horror of my visions. The chair was simple, light, wooden, and creaked slightly under my weight. I was not a heavy man, but the cheapness of the material showed after such heavy men as before had used it. Between us was no table, no physical wall nor distance to hide familiarity. There was no secrets or lies or hidden thing here. The sun's eye was on us two, and us alone. Stepping into the light, all the world disappeared behind a veil and I was left alone with him. Despite all my struggle, I had gained no ally or power against him.  In a sense it felt poetic. This was the man I had warned my father of, and, inevitably as the new day, he had come.

Adam crossed his legs and rested his hands together on his knee, and he smiled slightly as he looked at me. The smile reminded me of the chaotically humored nature of the man I had met, yet the gold gauntlet coiled itself around his arm as a snake from his wrist to his shoulder and ending at his hand in a skeletonized wrapping along his fingers proved to me that the man I met was not whoever this is sitting before me.

"Sisyphus." The Aeterna said. "Are you familiar with him?"

"Sisyphus was a man who had defied death twice, so the ancestors gave him an impossible task of pushing a boulder up a mountain. With each attempt he fails as it rolled down the side to the start. It is a child's teaching story."

He looked at me slightly confused for a moment, "Child's teaching story? Okay, what lesson would it teach?"

"Man's stubborn nature is absurd. Accept failure for what it is."

"You don't think its possible for him to win the contest?"

"No. The odds are stacked against him. Mountains are tall, increasingly so, the peak is small, and the weight is beyond anything a man can sustain up such a journey. He was punished for his defiance, that is his sin, and it was exploited against him to give him his punishment."

"Yet would not victory prove him correct?"

"It would, but again, it was designed to be an impossible task."

"Not so." The Aeterna refutes me. "He has a clear goal. He need only achieve it. If it was truly meant to be impossible, there would be no goal to begin with."

"The goal was made to mock him."

"Then he would be the mocker upon his victory."

"You make it sound as if victory is the way of proving yourself right."

"It is, is it not? Justice is decided by the winner, no matter the contest, including war. It is by my decisive victory that I can be here making judgement of the loser."

What is that supposed to mean? Sure, its an easy enough concept to say the conqueror is supreme over the conquered, but what relevance does it have with the story?

The Aeterna continues, "Does the story require he push it up the mountain all at once?"

"No."

"Does it require he not use any other tool at his disposal?"

"No."

"Does it mean he can't take paths up the mountain or place the boulder in the crevice of holds or held by tree roots while he rests?"

"No."

"Is the boulder enchanted somehow to stay the same size for all time as the rain beats on it and would otherwise wear it down to a smaller size?"

"Not that I know of."

"I agree that stubborn nature is absurd, but only when it refuses to adapt or when it accepts failure as failure, as you say. Failure, when learned from, is not failure. It is merely a journey to success. The legend, I believe, is about stupidity and the inability to plan. It is about adapting, not giving in to disappointment."