Chapter 1 Rewritten

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From the Fiery Depths to Starpara

Book One in the Metagopolis Tetralogy

Chapter 1

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

With those words imprinted on his brain, the white-haired young man at the center of our story woke out of his dream and into a nightmare. He arrived in a panic, gasping and choking, as if he had just emerged from the sea after almost drowning. The world he found himself in contrasted harshly with his dream, as different as the depths of an ocean would be to a creature of the sky. Ironically this was not far from the truth.

He sat upright in a bed, naked and alone, the room lit a low, cool blue like just before dawn, or just after dusk. Behind him a mostly-closed shutter door let in that bluish light through the large window it protected. He had been drooling like a baby, though he did not know it.

The Sentence that accompanied him into this new reality held him in its clutches, repeating itself over and over again as consistently as the tide.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

He looked in consternation around the room, searching for answers, taking everything in as the overarching question of WHY? raged and slashed through him. No solution came as his eyes took in his surroundings. Ordinary household furnishings filled the room: a dresser, a fireplace, and a stove; a desk, a stool, and a closet; a sink, a few cupboards and a doorway to a bathroom. He knew what these were, but had no recollection of seeing or using any of them before.

Nor could he remember doing anything before. You see, he had lost his memory, forgotten everything before these first few waking minutes. All that populated his mind now was his memory of the dream world he had awoken from. But as second after second passed, the water of memory slipped through his careless fingers. And so a desperation to retain the sights and sounds he still remembered rose.

He blundered out of bed and over to the desk. There he found a pad of paper and a pen, which he took in his hands. He scribbled furiously the first three words that came to him.

soar

sky

light

That was it. Only those fragments remained. And soon, they had gone away too. He stared at the paper desperately, his mind totally empty —

Except for that Sentence, those words with which he had awoken.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.

It continued to ring in his ears, the words clear as day. And so of course questions naturally sprang up in the vacuum of his mind. Questions as to the identity of this “Gregor Townsend.” He supposed it was probably him, as that would make the most sense. But how could he have purpose? He, being as innocent and ignorant as a newborn babe, didn’t even know who he was, nor where he had come from, nor where he was going. So of course the notion of ‘purpose’ seemed secondary to him. But he wrote down these questions anyway, right underneath the other words.

Who?

Where?

Why?

Curiously, he did not write down the Sentence. He didn’t feel he had to. Already it had taken permanent residence in his subconscious, able to be recalled at any time. It would not be forgotten easily, as had the dream world from which he had awoken.

His attention again turned to the rest of the room. He knew what all these things were. He knew language, and how to write. He knew laws of physics and everything like that. He just did not know himself. Our young man was lost in an inverted fog.

His eye caught the crack of light from the slightly open window shutter. The light it let through had changed from blue to red. The room had grown brighter since his awakening. Striding over to the window, he took the shutters in hand and pulled them open.

Light flooded the room, and the young man took a step back, startled by what he saw. It was not the scene outside that jolted his senses; that scene was rather ordinary: a green grassy field, a humble babbling brook, and a single tall oak tree, all warmed by the yellow light of a rising sun. No, it was not what lay beyond the window, but the window itself.

The window, clearly not an ordinary pane of glass, rippled like liquid, like a wind-kissed pond. It distorted the outside world like glass or water would, almost as if the grass and brook and tree were a painting, not yet dry. He reached up to touch it, entranced...

And as it looked, it felt. Like liquid, like a painting. Wet, but more so: his fingers, upon penetrating this strange matter, lost their material form and added their color to the world beyond. A puddle of pink mixed into the green field where he had touched. At first this frightened him, and he quickly drew his hand away. The alien color twirled back in to the point where he had entered, and his finger returned to its original form.

He looked back and forth between his hand and the window, or whatever it was. No harm had been done. Cautious, but very much curious, he again reached in, this time with his whole hand. The pinkish color his hand supplied swirled into the colors of the outside world, mixing with the green of the grass and blue of the sky, interrupting their place in this painting that had depth in addition to height and width. He moved his hand from the dark rocks of the brook across the grass, up the tree trunk, through its many leaves, into the blue sky, over the white clouds, and, with slight trepidation for a reason he did not understand and did not think about, into the very center of the blinding, rising sun.

But the darker colors never got that far. Instead, they faded away as they went higher, disappearing as the sun’s rays grew closer. Upon reaching the source of all light, the dark colors had gone completely, for light destroys darkness, banishes it.

The young man’s understanding of this, however, was currently very limited, and what he saw did not compute with his implicit understanding of pigment. But he took this in stride, for he admitted to himself that he didn’t understand what this window, this strange, beautiful, interactive painting of reality, was at all. There was no way he could at that time. And as fascinating as he found it, its mystery did not compare with his own.

Still — something about it, this window, felt right to him. As if it were another piece to his puzzle, and he had connected it with the piece he had woken up already possessing. Of course, the puzzle would surely take hundreds, perhaps thousands more pieces to complete, and what he had so far remained positively inconclusive, but this was a start, and as everybody knows, a journey has to start somewhere.

Lost in thought, or perhaps in feeling, the white-haired young man stared dreamily at the opposite wall, upon which the dawning sunlight from the window fell. In the background he heard a bird chirping, but did not actively register it. A vague, fuzzy peace was calming the distress with which he had awoken. It took him a good while for his mind to truly see what his eyes were already seeing. When he finally noticed it, some of that vague, fuzzy peace departed, and he took a few steps closer to get a better look.

A pattern of strange, dark lines had materialized, and were becoming sharper and more defined as the sun rose higher. A pattern of arcane symbols and mysterious drawings. It could have been a map, or a diagram, or even a language. To his surprise the lines began to disappear as he drew closer. But, he realized, only where his person blocked the sunlight and created shadow. He stepped to the side, allowing the light to touch the wall, and the lines and symbols reappeared. Lines of shadow, of material darkness, ablaze in the midst of light, impossible to be seen otherwise. Something mystical that our white-haired young man did not understand.

The song of the bird outside stole his stare back from the lines of shadow, and he glanced back out the window. Suddenly a feathery flash of blue swerved into his vision and the young man ducked. In through the window flew the tiny blue songbird, as if the window did not exist at all, and twice it circled overhead, finally coming to light on a bedpost. Next to the bird at the foot of the bed lay a stack of folded clothes. Sometimes the most strange and bizarre occurrences have a way of bringing simple and necessary things to our attention. Our young man, bemused by the bird, put on these clothes. And then, not knowing what else to do, he took the pen and notebook from the desk, walked to the doorway leading out, and pulled on the handle.

As he exited, the Sentence continued to reverberate against the walls of his brain, echoing back and forth, filling his otherwise empty mind.

Gregor Townsend exists for a wise and glorious purpose.