Meeting Truth

  The crimson sky turns blue, the black blood trees become as mundane as trees can be leaving the two men, Smith and Carter, alone to stand confused one moved through the time, the other through space alone in the clearing where the girl had chanted to an unseen force in the wind, only now there is naught but silence here. A silence broken by a voice, familiar yet strange to them both.

 

   “The can only come into this world when invited, those are the rules.”

 

   It is each their own voice they hear, a voice coming from a man upon the hill.

 

  “Professor Branden?” says Smith seeing is long dead role model standing before him.

 

  “Since when does Professor Branden dress like superman?” asks Carter.

 

  “I am neither man,” says the figure, “and you hear your own voices when I speak.”

 

   “Who…who are you?” demands Carter.

 

  “I am the Zhar’Atala.” Says the figure calmly, “You hear your own voices, see a respected figure from your own mind.”

 

   Smith raises an eyebrow to Carter, “Superman? I see my professor in college and you see a comic book superhero?”

 

   “I am told I also smell like your favorite food or flower,” says the figure in a far too serious tone for such a sequence of words.

 

   “What are you?” demands Carter.

 

  “I am who Smith summoned, who through his broken mind was the one he called upon the most as he opened windows into many realms beyond your knowing and called to those who dwell within. I was called the loudest. I am the knower of truths.”

 

   “Why would I summon you?” asks Smith, his mind its clearest it has been since this ordeal began.

 

   “Because you wish to know the truth, and the location of the book. You wish to be in her presence again, to feel her eternal grace, a spiritual addiction, even by only glimpsing an avatar of her.”

 

   “You mean that thing we summoned in the experiment?” asks Carter, “I feel no such inkling myself.”

 

   “You analyzed the situation,” says the Zhar’Atala, “this other man was forced to look at it, his mind shattered and left open to the ethereal waves of her avatar form breaching your world.”

 

   To Carter that doesn’t make any sense, to Smith it makes too much sense. Before either can speak the figure says, “Your next questions are who is she, where is the book, and what does that girl want with it.”

 

   Smith and Carter only exchange looks as the Zhar’Atala speaks, “She is a being beyond true understanding, deeper than time, older than space, incomprehensible yet fully understandable, seeable yet truly unknowable. She is what you might call the embodiment of change, transition, evolution, adaptation, chaos, creation, and destruction.”

 

   “Where is the book,” says the being that wears other men’s faces, “the girl whose true name is Elizabeth Gingerly has claimed it, what she wants it for is to summon the greatest of the great ones, and call upon the apocalypse, the destruction and recreation of all things.”

 

   Without another pause the being is simply not there, leaving the two men to ponder its words.