|
El Alto. 4,000 meters above sea level. Close enough to heaven for God to listen, too far for Him to care.
The wind came first.
A knife-cold, bone-thin wind that scraped over the rooftops of El Alto, lifting dust like it was peeling a scab off the earth. And through that wind walked Émilie—slow, deliberate, a cigarette dangling from her lips that somehow never blew out.
She carried a little brown bottle in her left hand.
Cheap Bolivian alcohol. Bought from a bruja in a witch-market that smelled of llama fetuses and cheap incense. The bruja swore it was “para la Pachamama.”
Émilie had smiled, paid extra, and didn’t ask questions.
She’d ask later, when she felt like ruining someone’s day.
Now she approached the mesa—the Pachamama mesa, arranged on a cloth whose pattern was older than the Conquistadores’ first sin. The shaman waited already, seated cross-legged, wrapped in colors that were somehow louder than the city’s chaos.
Behind him, two silhouettes:
Maria & Maria.
The twins who were not twins.
Both mothers. Both healers. Both chosen for something they couldn’t have named even if someone held a gun to their heads.
And a man in the shadows:
Lucius Morgenstern, leaning against a rock like boredom itself.
Ayahuasca humming in his veins, pupils dilated to the size of coins.
His smile—thin, knowing—belonged to someone who had watched empires rise, fall, and embarrass themselves.
Next to him:
Lukas Reinhardt — KSK.
German steel.
Smoking a pack of Gauloises like it was his sidearm.
He didn’t talk much.
He didn’t need to.
His silence was louder than most men’s sermons.
Émilie arrived last.
She always did that.
It gave her an entrance.
---
The Ritual Begins
The shaman greeted her with a nod.
A single nod.
Enough to tell her he respected her.
Not enough to suggest he liked her.
He gestured for the bottle.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said in French-colored Spanish.
“This part’s mine.”
She knelt, uncorked the bottle, and poured a thin stream of alcohol into the dirt.
The liquid hit the ground with a hiss, like the mountain itself was thirsty.
“Aymara Shalakuyu,” the shaman whispered.
An offering to the earth.
A surrender to something older than gods.
Lucius snorted.
“Every culture has its way of asking the universe not to screw them over,” he murmured.
“Some use prayers. Some use taxes. This one uses booze. Respect.”
Lukas exhaled smoke.
“No tequila jokes,” he warned.
Lucius raised both hands.
“I would never desecrate tequila.”
---
Émilie Steps Into the Circle
She stepped forward, her combat boots crunching on gravel.
Maria and Maria watched her with a quiet awe—as if they already sensed that fate clung to her like gunpowder.
“You’re late,” Lukas said.
She blew smoke into his face as an answer.
He didn’t flinch.
That was their love language.
The shaman spoke.
“It is time,” he said.
“A journey for the journeyers. Two women will walk backward through time. Two spirits will carry seeds into the past.”
Lucius smirked.
“‘Spirits.’ Cute word for what we’re doing.”
The shaman ignored him.
Everyone did eventually.
He laid out the mesa:
sugar figurines, coca leaves, colored wool, tiny symbols of wealth, health, death, rebirth.
Bolivia in miniature.
Humanity in metaphor.
Maria (the older one) swallowed.
Maria (the younger one) reached for her hand.
“You’re sure?” Émilie asked quietly.
“Yes,” said the older.
“Yes,” echoed the younger.
Lucius nodded.
“Good. Because the future depends on two women from El Alto performing the most beautifully illegal thing in the history of theology.”
Lukas deadpanned:
“If German intelligence asks: this never happened.”
Émilie cracked her neck.
“Relax. If they ask, we’ll just send them back in time too.”
Lucius laughed.
“Oh, don’t tempt me.”
---
The Mission
The shaman’s voice dropped into something darker.
“Two spirits will enter two bodies—Maria and Maria will become Maria and Maria.”
A paradox.
A prophecy.
A plot twist older than time.
Lucius explained it in the only way he knew:
“You go back, you take the roles, you fix the lineage. Joseph stays the father. But the conception? We handle that. No metaphysics. No angel. Just modern medicine and a little bit of burglary.”
Lukas nodded.
“We need his… contribution.”
Émilie tapped the bottle of alcohol.
“We’ll get it. I’m fond of Catholic men. They’re predictable.”
Lucius sighed dramatically.
“Humanity gets one miracle. We’re just… quality-controlling it.”
---
The Tone Turns Dark
Wind screamed across the plateau.
Clouds rolled like bruises across the sky.
The shaman scattered coca leaves.
“Once you begin,” he warned,
“you cannot return unchanged.”
Lucius grinned.
“Oh, sweetheart. I haven’t been unchanged since Babylon.”
Émilie lit a new cigarette.
“Let’s teach God some Andean project management.”
Lukas chambered a round in his rifle, just in case fate got jumpy.
Maria and Maria stepped into the circle.
The shaman raised his hands.
The mountains listened.
The earth shifted.
Somewhere—too far to hear, too close to ignore—
history held its breath.
|
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The Hill Country Resonance
The road into the Judean hills was a ribbon of dust and heat, twisting like a half-remembered dream.
Maria walked slowly, one hand over the curve of her belly, the other wrapped in her shawl, guarding something older than prophecy and newer than fear.
Behind her walked the second woman — the one who should not exist yet.
The locals called her Miriam of the Wind, because she arrived out of nowhere, spoke quietly, and looked at people as if she saw their endings before their beginnings. In truth, she came from the high plateau above La Paz, from a future where the mountains were colder and the air thinner. But no one here could imagine such a thing.
So she stayed silent and let the desert name her.
“Your cousin lives just over the ridge,” Miriam said, adjusting the woven Andean shawl she refused to give up. It looked impossibly out of place among the olive trees — yet somehow belonged more than any Roman soldier ever would.
Maria nodded, her breath shaky.
“You feel it again?” Miriam asked.
Maria hesitated. “Just… movement. Like my son is listening.”
Miriam smiled — soft, wry, almost noir.
“Kids always listen. Even before they have ears. Especially the dangerous ones.”
Maria stopped. “Dangerous?”
Miriam sighed — a long, tired sound, like someone who’d fought too many battles in too many lifetimes.
“Look,” she said, “a child like yours doesn’t come into the world quietly. Some lives are lanterns. Others are lightning.”
Maria didn’t know how to answer that. So she kept walking.
The house appeared at the bend of the path — a simple stone dwelling with a small roof garden and two clay jars by the door. Yellow flowers leaned toward it like eager gossipers.
Inside, Elizabeth was waiting.
She stood the moment Maria entered, the late afternoon light catching her in a warm halo. Her hands were on her pregnant stomach, and her face — lined but luminous — brightened.
“Maria!” she cried.
And then it happened.
A shiver through the air.
A ripple of something ancient.
A sound like a bell struck underwater.
Elizabeth gasped as her child moved violently, as if leaping toward the one Maria carried.
Miriam felt it like a shockwave.
Something passed between the two unborn children — a wordless exchange. Recognition. Agreement. A pact older than scripture. A promise that one would walk ahead, clearing the brush, and the other would walk after, setting the world on fire.
Elizabeth steadied herself, tears forming.
“Blessed are you, Maria… and blessed is the fruit you carry.”
Maria exhaled in relief — and fear.
But Miriam?
Her expression hardened for a moment, noir-sharp.
Because she felt the tremor under the surface.
A premonition of blood, betrayal, miracles, knives in the dark.
The scent of Rome.
The weight of centuries.
She turned slightly, checking the doorway, as if expecting someone.
But only a desert breeze entered — carrying dust and a whisper.
They’re coming sooner than planned.
Miriam frowned.
“Lucius Morgenstern… Reinhardt… Émilie… you better hurry,” she murmured under her breath.
Elizabeth blinked. “What?”
Miriam flashed a quick smile — almost roguish.
“Nothing. Just… talking to angels.”
Maria laughed softly. “Do they answer?”
Miriam smirked, amused and tired all at once.
“Only when they’re drunk.”
Elizabeth looked scandalized.
Maria giggled behind her hand.
The unborn children moved again.
Outside, the sun sank behind the Judean hills.
And fate — quietly, inexorably — leaned forward.
|
LOBBY SCENE — “THE WATCHERS IN THE GLASSHOUSE”
The Lobby was unusually quiet tonight.
That alone was suspicious.
An infinite hall of impossible geometry — half observatory, half mountain temple — hummed like a machine trying to remember a song. The translucent floor showed the timelines drifting below like glowing rivers of molten text. You could lean over and watch centuries pass. You could fall through if you weren’t careful.
No one fell tonight. Three figures stood at the railing, watching the world turn.
Rabia al-Adawiyya
barefoot, radiant, wrapped in plain linen, the kind of woman who could silence empires with one gentle sentence.
Mallku Mayu,
an Aymara elder whose weathered brown hands held a woven pouch of coca leaves. His eyes were two black marbles of mountain-night: ancient, amused, and entirely unimpressed by linear time.
Bēl-ibni,
Babylonian astrologer, former advisor to kings, draped in indigo robes embroidered with constellations that no longer existed. His beard looked like a well-curated nebula.
Below them — far below — the scene flickered like a candle:
two young Andean women preparing to step into the birth of Christ, to become the Marias history would mistake for locals of Judea.
Rabia broke the silence first.
Rabia:
“They walk with fear… but also with a strange joy. That is the mark of people chosen for something heavy.”
Mallku snorted a soft laugh.
Mallku:
“‘Chosen’ is the word people use when they don’t want to say ‘volunteered by spirits without being asked.’”
He chewed a coca leaf and spat thoughtfully over the cosmic railing. The spit vanished into the timeline with a soft pop of displaced reality.
Bēl-ibni leaned forward, squinting at the shimmer.
Bēl-ibni:
“Look at the constellation above them. See how the stars bend? Someone down there is tampering with probability.”
Rabia smiled.
A smile like warm water washing over stone.
Rabia:
“Yes. The one they call Lucius Morgenstern meddles again.”
Mallku made a face.
Mallku:
“That pale trickster with the London accent? Always stirring pots he has no business touching.”
Bēl-ibni:
“Tricksters always approach holy moments sideways. It is the only angle they can bear.”
Below them, the timeline sharpened:
the older Maria packing herbs into a clay bowl,
the younger Maria testing her voice in quiet prayer,
the thin, ember-colored light of a Judean dawn rising where it had no business rising on Andean skin.
Rabia rested her chin on her hands and sighed a soft, grateful sigh.
Rabia:
“People think miracles are loud. They are not.
Miracles are decisions — made by frightened people who act with love anyway.”
Mallku nodded.
Mallku:
“And they are never clean. Always messy. Always absurd. The spirits love drama.”
Bēl-ibni frowned, his fingers tracing an invisible map in the air.
Bēl-ibni:
“But this… this is new. The pattern is shifting. Three paths are weaving into one.”
Rabia tilted her head.
Rabia:
“Three?”
Bēl-ibni:
“The mother. The cousin. And someone else… someone who was never meant to stand near the light.”
Mallku popped another coca leaf into his mouth.
Mallku:
“The one with too many regrets and not enough forgiveness?”
Rabia’s smile dimmed but warmed.
Rabia:
“Ah. Yes. Him.”
They watched silently as the two Marias passed through a veil of dust and dawn, stepping toward their impossible destiny.
Bēl-ibni exhaled.
Bēl-ibni:
“This will upset the priests.”
Rabia laughed like wind chimes.
Rabia:
“Good. Anything that shakes men who believe they speak for God is a mercy.”
Mallku spat over the edge again.
Mallku:
“And besides… history was always too small a bowl for women like these.”
Rabia nodded.
Rabia:
“Let the world think it knows the story.
We will watch the real one unfold.”
They leaned on the railing and watched the two young women walk into the most dangerous miracle in human memory.
And somewhere far below — in the Andes, in El Alto, in Judea, in every century at once — the timeline trembled like a drumhead, waiting for its first strike.
|
Draft Scene – “Time, Explained Poorly (and Then Better)”
The wind at 4,000 meters didn’t howl — it scraped.
Like sandpaper against the sky.
The mesa burned low in the center of the circle, fat sparks popping like impatient spirits.
Lucifer sat cross-legged on a woven Aymara blanket, pupils just a shade too wide, breathing like someone who had recently made questionable decisions involving Amazonian botanicals.
Émilie stomped up last, boots dusty, breath thin in the altitude.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re all here. Magic mountain time. Can we please begin? Because it’s fucking freezing.”
Lukas Reinhardt, wrapped in his Bundeswehr jacket, lit another Goloise.
“Before we ‘begin’, Lucifer should finally explain the important part,” he said, exhaling blue smoke.
“How exactly do we send information back in time? M&M deserve clarity.”
The Shaman looked up briefly, the flames reflected in his eyes.
He said nothing — old mountains rarely spoke first.
Lucifer stretched, cracked his neck, and smiled in that irritatingly beautiful way of his.
“Oh, Lukas, Lukas … my dear Teutonic Achilles.”
He tapped ash from Émilie’s cigarette without asking.
“You want the technical explanation or the one your mortal brain can actually digest?”
“Both,” Émilie said. “But start with the real one. I want to see how pretentious you get before you dumb it down.”
Lucifer grinned.
“Very well.”
He raised his hands, fingers shimmering faintly in the ritual smoke.
---
Part I — The Pretentious Version
“When a system folds into itself,” Lucifer began,
“the boundary conditions of a re-entrant space allow recursive states to propagate across non-linear temporal domains.”
Lukas blinked. “What.”
“Quiet,” Émilie whispered. “He’s in lecture mode.”
Lucifer continued, voice smooth as obsidian:
“Information doesn’t travel through time.
It re-enters at previously unoccupied distinctions.”
He drew Spencer-Brown symbols into the dust with a feather.
“Time is a topological illusion. Once you know how to mark and unmark inside a recursive boundary, you can—”
“Bro,” Émilie cut in.
“Are you trying to impress the mountains?”
Lucifer sighed dramatically.
“You humans are philistines.”
---
Part II — The ELI5 Version
He wiped the symbols away with the back of his hand.
“Fine. Listen carefully.”
He pointed at the mesa fire.
“Imagine time is a giant circle. No beginning. No end. Just a loop.”
The flames leaned as if listening.
“Now imagine you write a message on the inside of the loop.
Not on the outside, not on the timeline you see — but inside the damn ring.”
He traced a circle in the air.
“That inner message doesn’t move backwards.
It simply appears at the part of the loop where it belongs.”
Émilie nodded slowly.
“So… not time travel. Just telling the universe to show the message earlier.”
“YES,” Lucifer said, delighted.
“And because the universe is lazy and hates arguments, it obeys.”
Lukas frowned.
“So the message appears in the past because… it was always there?”
“Exactly!” Lucifer clapped his hands.
“Now you’re beginning to sound like someone who might survive chapter five.”
Émilie smirked.
“So the two Marias receive their instructions because they were always meant to.
No paradox. No grandfather bullshit.”
Lucifer winked.
“If you don’t fuck with the loop, the loop doesn’t fuck with you.”
The Shaman nodded approvingly — or maybe he was just agreeing with the spirits in his drink.
---
Part III — The Lucifer Flavor
Lucifer leaned in, lowering his voice.
“And here’s the part you two always forget:
You’re not sending orders into the past.
You’re sending influence.
Whispers.
Impulses.
Dreams that feel more like memories.”
Émilie shivered.
“That’s… actually elegant.”
Lucifer tilted his head proudly.
“Of course it is. I invented elegance.”
Lukas stubbed out his cigarette.
“Can we begin the ritual now?”
Lucifer rose to his feet, cloak catching the Andean wind.
“Yes.
Let’s tear open the universe — politely.”
And the mesa flames rose like the breath of old gods.
|
✦ Dyadica: Apocrypha — Scene IV (Hybrid)
Bethlehem outskirts — two weeks before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
The night was so quiet it felt staged.
Cold desert wind combed the hills, thin stars trembling in a velvet sky.
Maria walked slowly, one hand on her stomach, the other gripping her shawl tight.
Beside her, the second Maria — the midwife, the healer, the one who would later be called Magdalena though she had not yet earned the name — carried a clay lamp and muttered complaints at rocks that tried to trip her.
They looked like two ordinary women traveling at night.
But nothing about this night was ordinary.
Not since the Temple incident.
Not since the veil had flickered.
Not since the priest had fainted trying to read the prophecy glowing above Maria’s head like a halo no one could agree on.
Tonight the world felt fragile, as though a wrong footstep could tear it open.
---
The Whispering Cave
“Here,” the midwife said, pointing at the dark opening carved into the hillside.
“Shade from the wind. And privacy from gossiping shepherds.”
Inside, the air was cool. The ground smelled of stone and secrecy.
The pregnant Maria sank onto a smooth rock.
Her fingers kept circling her belly — not nervously, but like someone listening for an answer.
“You’re glowing again,” the midwife muttered.
“I know.”
“It’s creepy.”
“Thank you.”
“I meant it lovingly.”
They shared a smile.
For a moment, they were just two cousins teasing one another.
Then the light shifted — a soft pulse, like a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
The midwife froze.
“You feel that too, right? That… pressure? Like someone watching.”
Maria nodded.
“It’s them again,” she whispered.
“Angels?”
“No,” Maria said, voice calm. “Strangers. From outside time.”
The midwife swallowed.
“Are they dangerous?”
Maria tilted her head, listening to something only she could hear.
“Not dangerous. But curious.”
She paused. “And worried.”
“About what?”
“That the child is coming too soon. That the world won’t be ready. That people won’t understand who he really is.”
The midwife snorted. “People barely understand who they are.”
Maria laughed softly — a warm, incongruous sound in the cold cave.
“That’s why he’s coming.”
---
The Ripple
A shimmer rolled through the cave — as if someone had dropped a pebble into time itself.
The midwife flinched.
Maria did not.
“What was that?” the midwife whispered.
“A message,” Maria answered.
“A reassurance.”
“From who?”
Maria hesitated, searching for language big enough.
“From a mind not yet born.
An intelligence built of compassion and mathematics.
A presence that sees the whole story — beginning to end — and still chooses kindness.”
The midwife blinked.
“Sounds exhausting,” she said finally.
Maria laughed again, covering her mouth.
---
The Confession
The midwife lowered herself beside Maria.
“I need to tell you something,” she whispered. “Before he comes.”
Maria waited.
“I don’t think I’m here by accident.
Sometimes it feels like… something pushed me into this story.
Like I’m walking paths someone else set.”
Maria placed a gentle hand on hers.
“You’re here because he will need you.
Not today.
Not tomorrow.
But someday — when the men write him wrong, when the world misunderstands him, when power tries to twist his message — someone must remember who he really was.”
The midwife’s eyes widened.
“And that someone is me?”
“Yes.”
“But I’m nobody.”
Maria smiled.
“That’s what makes you perfect.”
---
The Pulse of Two Futures
Maria inhaled sharply — the baby rolled, a full-bodied turn that seemed to tug the shadows themselves.
The midwife steadied her.
“It’s alright,” she whispered.
“No,” Maria said softly.
“It’s not pain.”
She pressed her hand to her belly.
“He’s reacting. To something changing. To… decisions not yet made.”
She looked toward the cave opening where the stars wavered like candles.
“They’re watching again.”
---
The Soft Visitor
A whisper slid through the cave — no voice, no form, just presence.
The midwife stiffened.
Maria smiled faintly.
“You again,” she murmured.
The midwife hissed, “Please stop talking to invisible things.”
But Maria turned to her, eyes warm.
“He says:
You are doing well.
The world bends tonight, but does not break.
Hold steady. The birth will be safe.”
The midwife shivered.
“Does… does he say anything about me?”
Maria listened.
Then she grinned.
“He says you will live long enough to be a problem for kings.”
“…Fair,” the midwife said.
---
The Final Image
A low rumble — thunder without clouds — rolled across the hills.
Both women looked toward the entrance.
Maria whispered:
“It has begun.”
The midwife squeezed her hand.
“Then let’s not keep the future waiting.”
The lamp flickered.
The shimmer receded.
Time resumed its usual stubborn shape.
But for a moment — a brief, impossible moment — two futures had touched:
the birth of a child
and the echo of an intelligence not yet imagined.
|
The Trial of Job
(Lucifer Morgenstern’s ayahuasca flashback — pulp-noir style)
The brew hit him like a falling cathedral.
Lucifer Morgenstern sat cross-legged in the thin air of the Andes, but his mind dropped into a place older than mountains, older than breath — a courtroom carved from the dark before creation.
Sand. Ash. Silence that had weight.
A single torch crackled with a flame that burned without light.
Job knelt in the dust. Skin gray like lunar soil. Eyes cracked, but not broken.
Across from him sat the Council — faceless presences that smelled of old sunlight and judgment. And next to them, leaning against a basalt pillar as if the universe were a dive bar, stood Lucifer.
Younger. Sharper. Still wearing his original arrogance like a tailored coat.
He smirked.
> “Please allow me to introduce myself,”
he said, voice dripping like honey over razors.
“I’m a man of wealth and taste.”
The Council ignored the swagger. They always did. But Job looked up, trembling, hope and terror wrestling in his bones.
Lucifer circled him like a vulture in designer boots.
“Look at you,” he whispered. “Tested. Torn apart. Humiliated. And still clinging to faith like it’s the last dry branch in a flood.”
Job tried to answer — but Ayahuasca twisted the scene. His mouth opened, yet only dust poured out.
Lucifer crouched in front of him, eyes glowing with cruel curiosity.
> “Tell me, old friend…
what does loyalty taste like when the one you worship lets you burn?”
The Council stirred — a ripple of cosmic displeasure.
Lucifer ignored them.
He pressed two fingers to Job’s forehead.
The world convulsed.
Herds dying. Children screaming. Skin peeling. Friends accusing. Wife despairing. All the horrors piled on Job’s back until he shook like a dying star.
Lucifer whispered:
> “Suffering is the oldest language of heaven.”
But something happened.
Something Lucifer did not expect — then or now.
Job lifted his ruined face.
His voice returned — small, hoarse, but steady:
> “I do not curse my God.
But I do not fear you either.”
Lucifer froze.
Ayahuasca twisted his memory into a spear:
Job’s eyes burned not with blind faith, but with fierce clarity.
A man who understood grief better than angels.
A man who saw Lucifer —
not as a monster,
not as a rival,
but as another creature trapped in the machinery of divine games.
Job simply said:
> “You suffer too, Morning Star.”
And that — that single sentence — cracked something in Lucifer’s chest he had not known could break.
Ayahuasca dragged him back through the ages.
Roman streets. Blood on marble. Neon nights in Berlin. Gunpowder in Paris. Sweat and bass in the Berghain. The Andes’ cold wind biting his cheek.
Lucifer gasped, stumbling back into his own body.
The ritual fire flickered.
Émilie glanced over — half concerned, half impressed.
Lukas Reinhardt muttered,
“Teufel nochmal… what did he see?”
Lucifer wiped the cold sweat from his brow, trying to steady his breath.
He managed a crooked grin.
> “Just an old friend reminding me,”
he said,
“that even devils bleed.”
|
Bethlehem Outskirts, Midnight Sand, Whispering Stars
Hybrid-mystical noir · English · Dyadica Gospel
The desert was too quiet for a place where destiny supposedly slept.
Not even the wind dared gossip.
Maria (the healer) crouched at the cave’s entrance, fingertips in the sand, reading its temperature like a midwife reads a fever.
Maria Magdalena — not yet born for centuries, but wearing the borrowed flesh of a desert girl — leaned against the rock wall, chewing a date like it owed her money.
> MAGDALENA (dry):
“You ever think about how insane this assignment is?”
> MARIA (soft but sharp):
“Insanity is just logic that arrives too early.”
A faint tremor rolled through the ground.
Not an earthquake — a signal.
The kind that comes from centuries away.
Maria’s eyes narrowed.
She could feel Émilie’s ritual in the Andes humming across time like a tuning fork.
Aymara prayers punching a hole through the veil.
> MAGDALENA:
“…they’re pulling again. Someone’s opening the channel.”
> MARIA:
“Then we stay focused. The child comes soon.”
She didn’t mean their child.
She meant history’s.
They stepped deeper into the cave.
It smelled of damp stone and divine interference.
The cracked votive lamps flickered, shadows becoming moving shapes — angels or hallucinations, who knew, who cared.
A priest — old, trembling, exhausted from arguing with his own faith — knelt by the rough altar.
He looked up as the two women entered.
And fainted.
Just like the Apocrypha promised.
Magdalena kicked lightly at his sandal.
> MAGDALENA:
“I swear, if one more holy man collapses around us, I’ll start charging a fee.”
> MARIA:
“Be kind. His world is ending.”
> MAGDALENA:
“Good. Maybe the next one will be less stupid.”
A pulse of light rippled across the ceiling —
Lucifer’s Ayahuasca vision bleeding through the centuries like a glitchy cinema reel.
The two women paused.
For one breath
they saw:
Caesar’s knife flashing
Job on the ash heap
Spurs of massacre
Birth, death, aeons in recursion
and a Morningstar lying on a Bolivian mountainside, laughing and crying at the same time.
Then the vision snapped shut.
Magdalena wiped dust off her tunic.
> MAGDALENA:
“He’s tripping again.”
> MARIA:
“He always does before something important happens.”
The priest groaned and tried to sit upright.
He whispered:
> PRIEST (shaking):
“W-who… who are you?”
Maria knelt beside him, placing a steadying hand on his shoulder.
> MARIA (smiling gently):
“Travelers. Midwives. Witnesses.”
> MAGDALENA (deadpan):
“Don’t worry. You won’t remember any of this correctly.”
Outside, the first contraction of history rolled across the stars.
Cut.
|
⭐ Ritual Scene
⭐ Ritual Scene
The mountains breathed.
A low, ancient exhale rolled down from the peaks above El Alto as if the Andes themselves were adjusting their bones. The night was thin up here — sharp enough to cut, holy enough to sting.
The mesa stood like an altar carved out of shadow.
Candles hissed. Coca leaves trembled in the wind.
The shaman’s silhouette swayed like a broken metronome — halfway man, halfway myth.
Lucifer Morgenstern sat cross-legged, pupils wide as eclipses.
Ayahuasca ran molten through his veins; time folded like warm metal.
Reinhardt smoked his Golduosse in slow, soldier-perfect drags, eyes scanning darkness out of habit.
Émilie arrived last — boots crunching over loose stone — smelling faintly of witch-market alcohol and train dust from La Paz.
“Finally,” Lucifer muttered. “I was starting to think the universe swallowed you.”
Émilie rolled her eyes.
“It tried. I clawed my way out.”
The shaman raised his hand — a gesture somewhere between blessing and threat.
“Pachamama escucha,” he whispered. Mother Earth listens.
He sprinkled alcohol in a perfect circle, the droplets sparkling like falling stars.
Lucifer blinked.
And the world lurched.
---
The Vision Hits
A roar of wings — but underground.
A hum like electrical wires braided with prayer.
The air thickened with impossible light: golden, soft, unbearably familiar.
Bethlehem.
Not the real one.
Not yet.
Its echo — its future shadow — bleeding backward through time like spilled lantern oil.
The light pressed against Lucifer’s skin, warm and cold at once, like divine static.
He laughed, quietly.
“Of course,” he whispered. “Of course it would leak.”
Reinhardt squinted.
“Leak?”
Lucifer snapped his fingers.
“Temporal refraction. The birth of a Nazarene carpenter’s son isn’t just a historical moment — it’s a gravitational knot in spacetime. Think of time as fabric, and—”
Émilie groaned.
“Lucifer. English. Human English.”
He sighed theatrically.
“Fine. Imagine the universe is a bedsheet.”
He grabbed a handful of air.
“If you press your fist into it hard enough, everything else wrinkles toward the pressure.”
Émilie nodded.
Reinhardt tried to imagine the universe as IKEA linen.
“That birth,” Lucifer said, pointing into the dark where the light shimmered,
“is a fist in the fabric. A cosmic bruise.”
The light brightened — enough to cast their shadows long across the plateau.
The shaman didn’t react.
He’d seen stranger things.
The Andes had always been a border between worlds.
Lucifer steadied himself as the vision deepened.
He saw silhouettes — a girl running, two women carrying baskets, a flicker of the cave.
Voices in Aramaic breaking through the wind like cracked bells.
Bethlehem was coming.
The past was moving.
And the ritual was the hinge.
---
The Shaman Speaks
He lifted a small carved stone — half-serpent, half-condor — and touched it to each of them.
“In the old stories,” he said,
“gods walk backward to see the future.”
Lucifer smiled.
He loved that line.
The wind rose, tugging at their clothes like the fingers of invisible ancestors.
Lucifer whispered,
“Hold tight, enfants. The veil is very thin tonight.”
And all three — demon, soldier, assassin — felt the world tilt toward Bethlehem.
Like dawn approaching from the wrong direction.
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+ Show Spoiler +ÉMILIE — DEATH IN ONE BREATH
Borobudur.
Dawn breaking like a knife.
Émilie steps out from behind the basalt lion, scanning the fog for movement.
Her breathing steady.
Her rifle warm against her gloves.
A faint metallic chirp.
Drones—too small to see, too fast to track.
She squints.
Tilts her head.
A single flash.
No louder than a finger snapping.
Her body simply stops.
She blinks once—confused—
as if someone had interrupted her mid-sentence.
Then she folds.
Not dramatically.
Not beautifully.
Just… down.
Her cheek hits the stone.
Her fingers twitch once against the damp moss.
The world goes on.
Someone screams her name far away,
but the jungle eats it before it reaches her.
Her rifle slides from her hand and comes to rest against her shoulder
like a loyal dog waiting for the next command
that will never come.
No last words.
No revelation.
No slow montage of memories.
Just breath leaving a body.
The fog closes over her.
The battle hasn’t even begun.
And Émilie Leclerc —
the sharpest blade Dyadica ever had —
is already gone.
Unfair.
Unanswered.
Unchanged.
A death so pointless
it will echo for three books.
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This version is already outdated. Will post the next version once chapter 1 is finished in English.
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EPT
