Dear Friends,
This is the second part of the city of light as I see it. You will notice that the main conflict that began the story comes to a very unceremonious end here. I’ll get to it. In the mean time, notice how much fresh conflict (competing dualities) have arisen because of what was really only a minor annoyance. By now, all shit is hitting the fan; that is to say that time and space have begun their reign of terror.
The third part will be out very soon. Thank you for reading.
City of Light: (The Second Part) Still Very Reasonable
They honeymooned in infinity and planned their new life together. Miss Mountain, as she became known, had insisted on moving off the mountaintop and finding someplace more civilized to raise their family. She certainly wasn’t going to allow her children to be raised by the cliff-hopping goats, and something still had to be done about the power monger who was making everyone’s life difficult. If they didn’t have a son everyone was going to leave and then even the timeless world would be void, and no one wanted that.
The problem was that Miss Mountain was just a simple village girl from the hills and the Destroyer was much friskier and much more experienced than she could handle. The sex was great, this goes without saying since the Destroyer was known far and wide as a master of Tantra and the destroyer had to be milked for many, too many hours before he could release his seed. This left Mrs. Mountain exhausted and fully satisfied, but still without a son.
It was rumoured that the Destroyer was holding back his seed because he believed Mrs. Mountain to be too frail for childbirth. Eventually, Miss Mountain had to tell the destroyer about the need for him to have a son to rid everyone of nuisance that had been making timelessness intolerable. He was annoyed at having been used for such a petty purpose, but he consented with several conditions. He knew when he opened his eyes and came down from the mountain that there would not only be many unintended consequences, but that the motivations for waking him could not have been a straight forward coincidence. He knew better than anyone that a long chain of invisible causes preceded everything that could ever happen. Some suspected that he say it all coming but preferred to play it dumb.
Now that the plan was out, the Destroyer set about at once to deposit his seed.
Some say he had an affair with the beautiful woman everyone knew as Miss River, and others say he merely brought his seed to her. The Destroyer stuck by his strange story that he’d thrown his seed in the fire (he was known to have done stranger things). Miss Mountain herself was never sure what exactly happened. In any case, a boy was born in the forest and everyone said it belonged to the Destroyer. For the first time that anyone could remember, it was the mothers identity that was in question, and no the father. Some people even suspected that Mrs. Mountain herself was the mother, but she seemed to be cultivating a strong jealousy for Miss River.
The boy was sent to be raised by six sisters. He grew quickly and fulfilled his destiny bringing a kind of peace to timelessness. (more on this coming soon)
But by now everything had changed. Ever since the Destroyer’s honeymoon strange things had begun to happen, the most notable of which was the beginning of time and the space that came with it.
No one knew how it happened. It almost seemed like it was always there. No one thought to blame the creator for the mess since he was still doing things on the sly. By the time anyone noticed anything, the Sustainer was usually looking after it, and he almost never started anything because he knew it would just mean more work for him. Besides, everyone liked the Sustainer and never gave him any grief. They liked that he never pulled any surprises and they knew exactly what to expect from him. He kinda kept things going.
There certainly would have been hell to pay if anyone from before time now found themselves subject to its ravages, but this wasn’t the case so no one really cared. Besides it was really neat that so many thing that had only been possibilities before were now becoming reality. And there were so many realities that no one could keep up, and sometimes people still got confused about the difference between a reality and a possibility. Some said you could tell the difference because reality shone much more radiantly than possibility; actual existence seemed to make everything more beautiful. None the less the possibilities for time and space seemed endless and that was in itself a thing of beauty.
Possibility itself now seemed to change its nature. Whereas before when there was just possibility, anything might be possible, but now possibility found itself confined by time-space* (see technical note below). The possibilities of any given moment were entirely dependent on the situation of time and space during the moment immediately preceding the moment of possibilities. The curious thing was that although this seemed to limit the possibilities, the possibilities remained endless none-the-less.
One particularly strange possibility became a reality. The City of Light, which had been around since even before timelessness, found itself a small plot of land on the earth. People said that it was on the earth, but not of the earth. It was here that the Destroyer decided to settle down with his new wife. They both loved their new home. The Destroyer still, however, preferred to be left alone so he took up residence at the place where all the people affected by time went to burn their dead bodies. It was a despicable place of fire and morning and only partially charred flesh that the dogs would over fight over. No one visited him much, but he was staying just a little to close to the River tramps abode for Miss Mountain’s comfort. To keep her own mind off this possibility of infidelity that loomed over her marriage and, hopefully, to keep the Destroyer in check, she busied herself to such a degree around the city that it seemed as though she was everywhere at once. After some time, people started to believe that she had become the city herself.
And what a strange city it was. Streams ran in every direction with water so pure and fresh that people began to believe it was enchanted (although it wasn’t yet as enchanted as it would soon become).
[Technical note: To those who were here before time, time and space appeared at the same time so they often consider them to be one thing; like two heads of the same creature. It was only to those who came after time that the two seem to be different. And even today this distinction will cause to people to raise their voice. For the remainder of the story the author will attempt to appease those who came before by referring to time-space rather than time & space.]
