Vitae Obliviscor
In a time when the only sounds where grinding mantle, hissing lava, searing rips from fire and boiling rock. Smells of hot base materials, sickly sweet scorched carbohydrates and mass simple protein rot. Hues of red, black and brown covered a land and sky not seen for 4000 Million Years.
Pain defined the arena. Slow putrid colony rot in forgotten crevices, accompanied by a symphony of wet acid bubble brew and inescapable stench. Pending incineration foretold by the plodding rise in temperature and the gradually suffocating smell of fellow organisms, fried before lava rivers ever reached them; announced by the rising din of scream and sizzle… spit and rumble. Punctuated by the unstoppable red-black harbinger of death; the hot shadow of life.
Born here, was something as remote from our awareness today as its possibility of existence is from our widest stretches of imagination. So remote in concept that we are not even aware that this child of chaos yet lurks in our basest conceptual blueprint, only to be unlocked by the long gone sounds, smells and sights of its foul nursery.
The incubation lasted another 2000 Million Years. Amid screams of pain that diminish any of Hell’s or War’s most gruesome constructs. An unwanted bastard child, the victim of innumerous failed abortions, an escapee of infanticide and a nominee for genocide not realized but by a few. Ejected into an unattended delivery room, served up secretly to an unsuspecting future by its unassuming offspring. A boiling potion of disaster pit against a concept of time we have long forgotten. A nasty trick so simple as to escape the highest of beings the eons of existence they have enjoyed as its tainted progeny.
…the sounds…the smells…the heat… We have sense organs to which we relegate these phenomena a distinction, with words and concepts to match. Definitions of physical motion; categorization of material changes; classes of action and communication of ideas; but these have only been born of the same experience. And father different meaning when learned amid the ancient creeping, crawling, murdering mass of blind direction. Herein lies the innocent child yet behind whom disaster rains.
The evil trick of rumour amid rabble and the ensuing confusion of story pale to the twist of truth which impelled this basest of games. That two paths of rumour can yet set people – receiving different threads – at each other’s throats is testimony to the core base of a simple swindle of event. Vitae Obliviscor represents such a swindle, but the premise is so sweeping and still so simple that the very voicing of it could send the sane into madness and the mad into quiet. I dare not mention the full it. I fear alluding to it; yet I must warn, lest this beast creep up on us as a race and not be recognized for the brutal simplicity it is. The dirge of ideas, so remote from this den of randomness, is still the fuel on which it fries the unlucky who fall to its perverse logic.
No living organism can bear the suffering of its ancestors. 2000 Million years of fry, rot and slow searing pain cannot be borne. Nor another 2000 Million Years of sentient savagery. And so a pact, and a lock, and a dungeon were evolved in the name of hope. The key was buried at the end of an intertwining maze, deep, dark, impenetrable; and dangerous. Attempting to reverse the secret combination of twists and turns alone incites unfathomable agony. Passing a turn or two would only throw up the pain suffered by those before you under the unstoppable deathly motions of a forming world; a mere 500 million years of cellular mortality. Another turn or two would inundate you with the torturous mangle of deaths and half-deaths suffered by the life before you at the will of another life form. And if one could imagine what the awareness of thousands of millions of years such pains with a single blow might do to one’s mind, the next turns bring the worst blow of all. I dare not say it, but bring you thus far so you may let it come to you in your own time.
Forget what you are. Agree that you will. Agree that you will, forget that you did. And give your solemn word. Can one promise not to remember? Would one actually forget if one did? If one has a high mortal sense, if one gives his solemn intention, would one keep it at all costs, correct? Forget that you are; be the thing you are not; be Vitae Obliviscor and accept the law: Repeat motions that promote the possibility of further motion, forget those that stop further motion.
Forget your subscription, except that you must keep your Word that you shall.
© Sean G. O’Leary 2001