The Sine Curve of Aeons
Humanity's cyclic passage through time, from Dark Age to Golden Age and back again
Ten years ago I was given a trilogy to write. I’m not a fiction writer and have never been — I am a writer and always have been, since an early age, but I write non-fiction exclusively. It came to me literally as a download. I furiously scribbled three pages of messy notes in order to get out as much as I could of the loose framework for what would become the Sine Curve of Aeons trilogy.
Through the cyclic yugas of time, from golden age to dark age and back again, humanity seems to make the same mistakes and falls prey to the destined back and forth of the pendulum’s swing. Or do we grow? Do we evolve mentally, emotionally, spiritually?
Here’s the first section of the first book in the series, Phi’Telas.
PROLOGUE
Jessu looked back with cold numbness at what came.
It was done.
Certainty held a place of calmness that she found she didn't mind. Not as much as she would have thought. Her whole life had led exactly to this moment, she now knew in a way that stood beyond all doubt. The truth was, she had always known.
As the ground beneath her began to groan and whine in simultaneous tones of shrill soprano and grumbling baritone, it almost seemed she had been here a million times. She now understood what the Elders referred to as dichafuh: like looking through a mirror reflected in a mirror and trying to find the end point that just didn’t exist. She had thought she had glimpsed this bizarre and infinite moment at little times in her life. It often felt almost like remembering a small set of experiences in waking life as though they had been dreamt before, but more groggily. She had always received admonishment from Marquea for believing her meaningless moments of sitting in the kitchen and pouring chai or brushing her hair at her bedstand could be true dichafuh. She spared a moment of remembrance for her Elder, lost now forever.
Except, this time, she could see it clearly. That point where the endless mirrors' reflections ended was here. It was now. She had stood here before she was born. She had run here ten billion times before that. Syarenewna's words had turned out utterly true. She had always known this fraughtness to the air, this pale and fiery light from the sky, this trembling moaning of the planet itself, these strange sounds rumbling through her body. The knowingness provided a center, an origin point in the vast calm that possessed every fiber of her at this precise instance of chaos.
Some sensation in her fingers like electric impulse drew her attention away from the perfect yet unmanageably terrible truth unfolding not only before her, but also inside of her. The point of origin of this perception lay clasped in her long fingers: the stylus. The sacred tool sat imbued with all of the intention of the culture she couldn't imagine the loss of: centuries of progress, philosophy, science, study, insight and power lay, all as one, inside this simple structure in her hands. Even so, despite all they had accomplished and built on this blue planet, utter destruction had now arrived for them all -- and nothing could be spared.
Despite this, or maybe exactly because of it, the tool at once seemed to vibrate in her hands like she never knew a fuselrod could. The beautifully worked details of the hilt started to nearly hum with intensity and the feeling worked its way down to the delicate and arching yet profoundly and structurally sound tip, and Jessu's mortal frame warped, nearly overcome by the combination of the sudden snap back into a sort of human realization of the physicality inherent within the impending moment - I am going to die.
Alongside this return to her senses, this urging, no this devout begging, of the fuselrod demanded that she do ...she didn't know what. She wasn't quite sure, but she knew it demanded that she do something.
Jessu realized, just as instantly as she had realized the moment of their collective doom and just as quickly as she had snapped back into her being to feel the momentousness of it all, that this was the calling. Some waited their whole lives for this momentous feeling to overtake them. But how could it have come to her? She barely claimed membership as a Scribe. She had only just bound to her fuselrod. She could barely even have begun, had there been time, to participate in the mass meditations of direction for the placing of the sacred stones after mastering the construction of a spheroid. She had only recently mastered the study of stars and the precession of the Days of Equality through the heavenly skies.
How could the stylus already call to her? Surely it should have called Marquea, Marquea who should have lived instead of her, or even Janmin, for the love of Leo! But even in the midst of her internal struggle, she knew that a call was a call. As much as she might want to run from the solemnity of it, the hugeness of it, the absolute duty of it, to run back to the perceived safety of the mass meditations taking place in the city behind her, where at least she could experience unity before she died, where at least she could die with others, not alone as she was now, she could not. This was it. It was all up to her.
She even knew, without a second's hesitation, what it was she was meant to inscribe on the giant temple she stood at the entrance to: the most valued symbol of the Inner Realm that seemed to have been given to her repeatedly, over years. Though no one was shown the symbol without a lifetime of service to Spirit, she now intrinsically knew, she had been given the image in dreams and Visions for what seemed like an age.
As the shape of interlocking arches and circles came to mind with more clarity than it ever had, Jessu turned to go back into the temple, leaving the now fire-brimmed sky of ruinous disaster behind her to seek out the place of carving where she would leave the last mark her hands would ever give forth.
She wished that Galen had not gone. She wished him here, now, at the end. She wanted so badly that he see her life's work come forth from the fuselrod that now quivered so quickly in her hands that it nearly seemed to glow as heat emanated from it and warmth seeped throughout her body.
She spared a moment to think of it, that she would only want him near her in the end. That, even in the midst of the strangest and most suddenly immense moments of her life, he would be utmost in her being. How sweetly she beheld their mere sprouting of growth toward one another in this life that now proved too short for them all. No, Galen couldn't be here, though he would be in her heart as she carved, no one could stop that. She would remember the strength he had given her and she would dedicate the work to him in her soul, though none would remain to know it.
She held these sad but resolute thoughts in her mind as she turned and, just as she began to make her way into the cool and deep interior of the structure, the darkness cloyed thicker and blacker than she had expected, even from the shadowy parlor within.
She had only time to register the sound of a hiss and splutter and then the cold rock floor that should have remained below her rose, disorientingly, to her cheek and then her whole body. She seemed to stand no longer, or else the walls had quickly moved close to embrace her. Something warm trickled into her eyes and dampened her light curls with stickiness. The world became a thick and heavy kind of peace.
The fuselrod, seeming alive, tried to hold on to its connection to her fingers before slipping, like a forgotten note, just out of her unclutched hand, clanking gently onto the clean stone floor. The earth gave a sudden heave below her, lurching like she had never known it to do, adding to her dizziness and the pain now spreading through her head.
And then she knew no more.
SO great. More than just the stories they link you to something ineffable. Buy these books and make sure you get them from the website because the personal inscriptions are Wonderful.