The opening prologue to Maestri (rough draft)
The patter reminded him of another place, in another moment forever trapped behind the wall of entropy. He could watch it again and again but never again would he be able to actually feel the cold Spring rain upon his skin. That momentary stinging shock of condensation used to irritate him when he would run about his business among the living world but now oh how he longed for the embrace of it.
Leaning against a bus stop shelter somewhere on seventy eighth avenue, a figure hidden beneath a brown jacket gazed longingly at the sidewalk before him. Just thirteen years ago he had first arrived at this very spot, his first time in New York City after wandering the Earth for thousands of years. Gone was the sense of awe, or even hope - replaced by visions of what was to come and the knowledge that he was absolutely impotent to stop it.
His head lifted and what once were his eyes focused on the pale city light reflecting off the belly of clouds. He used to peer out his window for hours at the storms when he was alive. They brought a sense of power and chaos that oddly calmed him. If he had only known what pure chaos was, back then, he wouldn’t have admired it nearly as much. One such memory flitted through his mind, holding her and gazing into the midnight frenzy of an electrical storm. The thought only drove him further into the depths of despair. It was all gone. This world around him was merely an echo of what had already been. Unblinking eyes stared into the maelstrom writhing above as he stood still beneath it, hoping in vain that some force would wield an electrical current in his direction that was somehow strong enough to blow his atoms apart and grant him the peace that he had spent millenia searching for.
Instead, he stood calmly beneath the flickers and echoing roars of a storm in the city while the few people who had been in the streets fled indoors. In a few moments a bolt of lightning would strike through an open window in an apartment two blocks from here, killing a mother and her three month old daughter that she was trying to calm after waking from the thunder. The man had already seen it happen. He had bore witness to a thousand moments such as that in the time that he had walked the world. In the beginning he believed he could change things like that. Several frustrating attempts taught him that it was impossible. Time was not fluid about him. He had lapsed beyond that dimension of existence. No matter what he tried it would simply unwind and correct itself as if he had never been there in the first place. He had even attempted to correct a tragedy from his own life, only to watch the very dimensions of existence splinter into a near infinite number of pieces in an explosion of such magnitude never before experienced in the linear universe. It had taken him and his gifts thousands of years to reassemble existence back into its former form. Never again did he attempt to correct another moment. His fate was simply to wander it and learn.
Learn, he did. He stayed in the shadows and watched the great Priors teach their acolytes far from the eyes of skeptics. For hundreds of years he followed the secret and those who knew how to unlock it until he began to understand the subtle nuances of what he carried around inside of him. He was different from everyone else who had ever lived. Some carried talents that he also possessed but many of his gifts had never manifested in any of the great Maestri in the living world or beyond. His ability to look beyond the dimensions of creation and into the very tendons that held entropy together, for example, was an ability beyond the comprehension of any who had ever wielded the Art. Yet, frustratingly, he had never learned what to do with it or how to undo what was coming. There was a storm approaching and he played no small part in its creation. It made the swirling chaos in the black sky above seem like a drop in the ocean compared to the unraveling of reality that was approaching. Despite his deep knowledge of the living All, he still couldn’t comprehend the desire to perform such an act as great and terrible as the One who also wandered the Earth was planning.
His life had ended in a sacrifice to save the universe, but what he never realized until it was far too late is that it had all been a distraction. The true evil had lurked within him all his life, and had been set free in a sunny meadow on the other side.
There were no more places left to wander to. There was no absolution coming, no way to change what had already unfolded. Once he had left this plain of existence that power had been stripped from him. There was no hope.
Yet, there was a hiccup in the universe that he couldn’t ignore. Something powerful, dangerous, lurked out there somewhere. He knew not where, only able to vaguely feel it. It was a part of time that he couldn’t navigate toward. It had been hidden from him by one of the others. He turned his head toward the west and tried to peer through those fractal barriers between realities and dimensions of existence but his mind couldn’t navigate toward that ripple in the very fabric of existence. It wasn’t his story. His part in the tale was over, and it was time to go back.
He looked down at the sidewalk, again, and watched the drops of water flow and slip into the cracks of the concrete. He focused on the drops so closely that he could see the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen bouncing off one another. Further yet, he could see inside the very fabric of this world and, eventually, the cracks in it that lead to the other places beyond the world of the living. His mind drifted into them and he disappeared from existence.
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Read the 1st book before the sequel comes out in 2020!
The Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett. Free with Kindle Unlimited of $2.99 on eBook, $12.99 paperback https://www.amazon.com/Morbid-Fascinations-David-Bennett-ebook/dp/B07ZG4N2XB
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