id="id00186" style="margin-top: 2em">                "… and it came to pass, that in a time,
                one was chosen as the one favourite to live
                with love, whilst the other died; and in the
                eyes of God"
                                        PILLARS 93: A 11

PART I: THE SCORCHED EARTH

CHAPTER ONE

Another day ended. Sol, once again, retired its eternal radiance from man, as it has in its never-ending cycles of dawns and dusks, witnessed by all the generations. In its greatness, it survived all of Terra's hardships and afflictions and it was a living monument to forever.

No one seemed to look to it for comfort any more. The faces of women and children didn't reflect its brilliance, since no one had reverence for its good any more. It was a mindless disregard that was sustained and nurtured by the generations of man that survived. For almost a millennia they forced themselves into ignorance and then blamed it on the chaotic destructions that scorched the earth and that burned the human spirit. Nowhere, it seemed, was there anyone of power willing to point-out a way to betterment.

Trust knew not any man who was strong enough to deny the utter discontent that trembled in the hearts of men without freedom. To almost every man, innately loomed a feeling of utter hopelessness.

In a dark room of the Blue Mountain, atop Bimini Hill, sat a middle-aged man of high station. He was a man richly endowed with great wealth, majesty and power, and he held the people's respect. This man had taken pride in his accomplishments but he had become saddened by his inability to present himself to the citizens in the way that they revered him; as living strength.

Brook had long since known the problems of the noble land in which he lived and reigned. He pondered its past and its future while he aimlessly stared out of the window at the warming sunset. In his mind flashed a memory of an old writing that expressed in an awesome detail the fear and the agony of oppression that the whole world must have felt in the final days, when the prophesied great abolition had come to pass.

Entranced, his thoughts were prolonged as he sat and watched the sun disappear into the earth; its light casting a reddish hue over his light beard and reflected cooly from his vacant blue eyes.

His mind embraced time. It drifted along its tenses, all at once, as if they were all merged into one music; a music that played continually, along with the troubled voices that cried, only to him, for help.

Caught up within his own thoughts, he payed little attention to the servant boy that set a drink on the table by his chair.

Without a word the boy flamed the gas torches and the room no longer remained dark. Quickly, he left the room.

"The sun was resting," thought Brook, as he reached for the chalice of ale beside him.

He took a drink and the ale soothed his soddy thirst, and his parched manner, much like the milk of a mother's milken breast soothes a distressed babe, thus letting it sleep. But Brook could not sleep.

Brook waited for the moon and he finally welcomed its cool radiance at midnight when he saw it rise over the junipers. Its silvery light reflected its beauty off the scanty layers of the farming terraces.

Brook's eyes were fixed on the view outside his window. He tried to envision himself living a thousand years ago gazing out of the same window, marvelling at the sights that may have been there. In his heart, he recited a badly remembered poem that was written just prior to the War of Wars:

                A torn heart dying within the mind
                A failure to the reckonings —
                Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows."

He lifted the palms of his hands to his sweaty face desperately trying to keep from screaming out his tortured agonies. He believed that he couldn't tell a soul about the truth concerning the past. He knew that the Law was explicit:

"The Past is non-existent. This is never to be questioned, and no investigation is permitted to be conducted, in pursuit of the question of history. History begins with "ONE". Only that which, henceforth, occurs from the year ONE will be recognised as history. Death, by torture, is the punishment for this Law's transgression." (CANON 3:18)

He turned his eyes away from the window and rose out of his chair. He slowly paced to a large cabinet beside the huge entrance doors. From around his neck, he brought forth a key and placed it into the slot of the cabinet door then slowly opened it. Inside this cabinet Brook kept, what he liked to call, "his gadgets." There were rows of buttons glowing like coloured embers. Brook applied pressure to several of the buttons.

Quickly, long drapes on the far wall rolled away and revealed a blank, white, wall that soon began to produce pictures that moved like life itself.

The images were of fire and of raging destruction. There were scenes of huge cities that stood majestically on the horizon one moment, then falling into mountainous piles of rubble, the next. More pictures showed fat people, conspiracies, death and misunderstandings. Every kind of unimaginable horror played upon the wall.

Brook sighed to himself, as he remembered the rest of the poem:

                        "His music ends …
                         His silence devours his soul,
                         Caging his ever-diminishing days
                         In a way that any man could lose
                         His assurance in himself,
                         And 'why?' he is!"

Then he slowly repeated to himself the words that were the Law: "The Past is non-existent", but he couldn't allow himself to believe this, especially with the truth revealing itself in front of him, at this moment.

He felt a cold tightness within his chest when he let himself think about his ancestors and the way that they destroyed themselves. Their greed for wealth and their crazed megalomania was the cause for the deaths of millions. He saw these men die, in the pictures that played-out right before his eyes. Once more he slowly breathed out the words: "The past is non-existent."

He cautiously looked around so that no one would hear him, if only by chance, as they passed in the hallway.

He remained in private thought.

He sat back down in his chair and closely watched the horrific and colourful images that danced on the wall. "How can a truth be hidden for a thousand years?" he wondered. "For a thousand years no one has even imagined that the very fabric of life itself, had nearly become death for every living thing beneath the sun." He looked at the fiery scourge projected onto the wall, then lowered his head and pondered heavily. How could he tell his people in Phoride, the truth about the past. That the knowledge about it was subdued by fanatic