Legend of Ransera

Every day the same dream. That is Petra’s life.

She thought, when it first began, that it was not going to be permanent. When the dream continued for weeks, over and over in its thousand small variations, she told herself it was not such a problem. After all, what matter are dreams?

It is a terrifying thing, to spend a third of your life trapped. Petra already disliked sleep. Like death, it left the powerful and the weak alike on their back. Vulnerable, still, and pointless. A moment spent sleeping was a moment paused on the climb of life, but at least it was varied. Some dreamless, some dreaming – some peaceful, some hectic, some restive, some troubled. A thousand visions presented by the overactive mind, with images drawn from the Land of Nod and vouchsafed by the heralds of Morpheus.

Now there is neither variation nor charm. There are shackles around Petra’s wrists and a cage before her. The knife of fatigue is at her back, and it forces her to walk forward to her own prison. That ignominy, perhaps, is the very worst part.

She wakes as she always does, on a Plutonian shore. There is magic in the air. She doesn’t know, in her waking mind, what magic tastes like, but she can taste it here. She breathes in great lungfuls of it, and breathes it right back out. She sees it steaming in front of her, a shimmering haze of power-made-manifest. It always breaks her heart to see it fading away. What a waste.

The world in which she finds herself is beautiful, and cold. The water is a dull, oceanic grey, washing on bone-flecked sand. The beach runs up rocky cliffs that, in a better world, might have been white. Now they are spray-scarred and ragged, with sharp points menacing any who might dare have the foolish desire to climb.

The path cut up them is always empty. None come here. She has a few moments of solitude before she joins the great mass which mills beyond the shore. Once, in her evening lull, she determined to herself that she would not leave the beach, that she would stay there resolute against whatever dream has devoured her. That plan lasted until her feet sank into the sand, and felt the compulsion, the need to obey. It was, she suspects, what an addict feels when presented with his vice. Moving up the path is to her as liquor is to the drunk. Subtly, and unconsciously, irresistible.

The masses are faceless, shapeless, nameless. They are a people with only identity as a crowd. Each one is a drop in the ocean, and only in their aggregate does conscious thought echo. Currents pull and push, but each section seems uniform to Petra. Perhaps that is in part because she is so short. She had hoped in her dreams, at least, she might be tall. Instead, she as she is – drowning in the sea of grey bodies and blurry faces.

They move without thought, but not without purpose. Sorted by some unknowable purpose beneath a sky as grey as their bodies, they move on paths preordained. Petra falls in with them, but she chooses her own way. Some nights she mills towards the mines or the forests, where the peons cut with sharp axes and picks the bounty of this dying world. They pile wood and pull it on carts themselves, for there are no animals here, none except these faceless-men. They fill trolleys with ore and send them rattling along to the forges, where fires hotter than Hell boil away the impurities and leak out cold, sharp, monotone steel. Steel as grey as the sky, steel as dark as the age.

Some days she walks among the farriers and porters. She watches the nebulous grey forms take up baskets of stones or pallets of bricks with truly impressive strength. She sees them sorting parcels of nails or mixing concrete, their great barrels spinning and the water being added slowly. Teeth bite into stone and shatter it to fragments, and then even the fragment are ground into powder. Emulsified into a paste which is slathered onto palettes and carried up the great hill.

It all goes up there. The hill is the terminus of each and every figure, and there are thousands upon thousands. No taskmasters, only tasks. No slave-drivers, only slaves. No whips crack, yet the peons haul the goods as if the drivers sneer behind them, with threats of crucifixion and collective punishment.

The hill protrudes from the ground unsupported. Petra doesn’t know enough about geology to know if it is natural or manmade. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was piled, dirt-upon-dirt, for the millions of man-hours required to build an artificial hill. The peons swarm, expressionless and indefatigable. The sheet of cloud is unchanging overhead, and the hill reaches up to it like the spiteful hand of a jealous Earth, as if the ground itself might claw at the sky and drag it back down.
Petra’s eyes trace over the great temple built there. She walks up the hill as she takes it in, as she has taken it in every night. A great spire of a thing, floor-upon-floor, with pillars supporting arches whose only function is to support more pillars. It will never be completed. It has never changed. Thirty-five floors high, and ever-growing. An enormous work of fantastical architecture. The kind of madness that would blot out the sun, if there were a sun to be blotted.

And every inch is carved. The fine masons who work the friezes and frescos on the outer walls, they are her favorite of the mindless automatons. While others load barrows or shape bricks, they carve works of art in perfect uniformity. Repeating patterns of dizzying complexity. Once, Petra tried to recreate them. Her memory, prodigious in itself, was hardly able to get down half before it unspooled and failed her. But they just continue, chisel-and-pick, slicing their own futility into stone.

This time she passes them by. They do not acknowledge her. None acknowledge her, or each other. They can only comprehend the machine that they are a part of, none of the individual pieces. They see the herd, not the animals within. So she slides inside, a splash of color on marble chased with chalcedony.

Seven gates, each of a different color. Carmine, Ochre, Gold, Chartreuse, Cerulean, Azure, Belladonna. Each almost hurt to look upon, against their backdrop of steel and stone grey. But they do not hold the eye for long.

The Tree within holds the answers. She hears its call, within the too-large, endlessly-tall monolith which rises with each taken breath. Demons warped upon each other, twisted together. Yesod is of them, and within them, and they are of Yesod. Demons tied into one being, a great tree whose roots stretch not into the ground but into the shells that were once people.

The beating heart of the machine, this Leviathan-God of orderly inhumanity, rises high. Monsters of white and red twist into boughs, shells of grey and black pulsate and leak their noxious fluid. Blood runs freely down branches of shattered bones, and coalesce into fruits.

Petra has the names for them. She has always known them. She, perhaps alone in this latter day, knows their names. She has Seen them, and they have Come.

Malkuth. Yesod. Da’at. Binah. Keter, the crown, whose mass pulls from amongst the branches and coalesces above, a great figure of a man, a mighty automaton cast in the form of God, but given none of His spirit. The gateway above his head hangs wide, gaping. It is a maw that leads to the infinite, and Petra cannot look within.

She hears the pulse of it. Feels its compulsion wind into her. She knows it will take root in her heart and blossom in her soul. It will cleanse her, and wipe her clean. It will remove ambiguity, and clarify purpose. She will fetch stones, and carry concrete, and cut patterns, all to serve this mighty tree, this cancer-in-the-shape-of-God.

Mankind are its roots. Bodies are its soil. It digs into them, and drags them up into its demonic flowers. She knows if she waits too long she will never be able to leave this place. It will enrapture her, and bind her to its will, and her ambition will be its ambition, world without end.

So she looks up, and into the infinite. She peers into the great disk above the endless tree, and sees, for a moment, the grand design. An orderly world, scoured of imperfections. A world fired to one perfect ambition, animated with a single soul. Empty, hollow, complete.

She wakes in her bed, breathing hard.

She knows one thing of Demons. That the ambitions that bring them into the world are never their own. Their causes are inherited from Mankind, whose glories, and whose hubris, is magnified only by power.
History has taught her that ambition is a competition of power, and that one only ends when another has surpassed what came before.

She fears, as she pulls her robe on and returns to her research, that perhaps the world she sees in an inevitability.

Worse: in her darkest moments, she fears it will be hers.