The Ouroboros Cycle

Step 001/02

NOW

— - —

The Garden, if nothing else, was tranquil. Untouched by man for a hundred thousand years, its waters were clear and its grasses green, and the sun overhead nearly always occupied a blue sky. On the rare occasions it would rain, the Garden’s tranquility would turn to melancholy, a quiet gloom that settled over it like a blanket. At the next sunrise the rains would subside and the Garden would dry and all would be as it has been for a thousand generations.

Today, though, it was raining.

“Step aside!” Aaron screamed, tearing across the plain towards the Gate. The Guardian, stalwart and unmoving, did little to acknowledge him besides slightly raising its flaming sword. Aaron’s eyes burned into the Guardian, his gaze locked on the unseeing helmet of the goliath before him. As the tip of the sword began to luminesce, and as a streak of fire lanced out of it towards him, Aaron produced a thin metal rod with a tripod base and a blue, glowing tip. He rolled out of the way of the flame and, as another began to form on the Guardian’s sword, he slammed the reality anchor into the ground.

The world shimmered for a moment, and Aaron could feel the ground beneath him vibrating. In his mind’s eye he could see threads, endless trillions of threads in the air around him, each of them tuned to a specific note in the song of the universe. Their melody was discordant, and no more so than around the Guardian, where their song shrieked and howled. As the tip of the anchor flashed, the threads harmonized in unison, each of them momentarily drawn back in line with each other. As the choral pitch struck the Guardian it seized, the fire in its sword drawing back into its body, and then folding in upon itself until it was little more than charred skeleton, broken and festering, hanging loosely in the air by blue threads.

Aaron sprinted towards the gate, but felt himself growing unexpectedly exhausted. He looked down at himself and saw the hands of an old man, one whose life had been touched by the hand of fate and stretched unnaturally. His skin grew taut and he felt his muscles atrophying with every step. He struggled forward, the hum of the reality anchor behind him growing fainter and fainter, until he could no longer hear it and his body was renewed. Reaching the Gate, he threw it open and ran inside.

It was said that the night Adam El Asem took Eve as his wife, she had dreamed of Eden as she conceived her first son, and it was born with he. When the child had grown, Adam longed for a sword to put in his hand, and the Garden had provided it. When the Children of the Night and the mournful gods bore down on the world of Men, the Garden had sheltered them. Eden was such that, endless a space as it was, anyone within it was never far from wherever they wanted to be.

This is how Aaron Seigel found himself standing at the foot of the Tree of Life Everlasting, his feet soaked in a pool of blood, and the white corpse of Sophia Light staring up at him behind glassy eyes. A dark stream of blood ran from each of her wrists to the ground beneath her, and laying at her side was a thin silver razor, its edge marked red with Sophia’s last breath.

Aaron’s hand trembled, the air catching in his throat and threatening to suffocate him. He fell to his knees at her side, flecks of blood splashing up onto her face with the impact. Her skin was cold, like it had been so many times before, he thought, and while Aaron had been here before he felt a knowing dread creep up his spine and fix itself around his heart.

“Death!” he screamed, as he had screamed before. “Death! Reveal yourself! Take me! Take me instead of her!” Only the rain answered, each droplet an eye of a silent and watchful god that did not care. Aaron looked around desperately, blood and water soaking his clothes as he dug into his mind for any answer, any way out. “Death! Honor your promises! Give her back! Give her back goddammit!”