An excerpt from "Twilight of Souls"

Below is an edited excerpt from my second novel, Twilight of Souls. I hope you enjoy the read:

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I have a theory to it all. From their whispers and my thoughts. I believe the universe in its youth was the purest innocence of all. It was raw power. Unfocused. Unthinking. It simply…was. What was before? Nothingness? Darkness? Who truly knows? Back then it was smaller as physicists say. All was compressed. All was Light. I try to see it, even in my worthless mind. A place of Light.

I do not know why it shattered. Scientists and theologists can never agree even amongst themselves. Some claim a build up of pressures. Others fractures. An explosion of Light. It seemed the blackest of magic.

Magic. It seems such a fantastical thing. Out of place in our world. But it is. A power split by the Fall.

That fall from innocence. That point when the universe fell into divisions of brilliance and absence. One white. The essence of Light. The other is Dark.

White magic is that lost purity. It causes growth. It is calm. Emotionless. Power that creates. Expands.

Dark magic. Black magic. So tempting. It is a destructive thing. Like an atom bomb. In destruction it finds power. Releases raw energy. It feeds off the Light. It destroys to create. Creates absence. Emptiness. It requires no true discipline. Just the power of our emotions. Rage and pain. Passion. In its consumption it leaves nothing. Its strength is fleeting. There is no reason to it. It is so mortal. So short sighted.

I do not know the reasons for the failure of the Light. All I know, as scientists have proclaimed, is that there was a...big bang. The Light was dismembered. Pushed apart into a growing darkness. Into the empty void. Those cosmic winds, the last breath of the Light, spread the ashes and embers of its corpse to the four corners. I think that, in that void, the Light instinctively reached out for itself. Strove to heal itself.

It is alive. I can tell you this because I know it to be true, but that is not important to my thoughts. What is important is that the Light strove for itself. Yet it continued to push out, unable to reach itself and heal the rift. Separated, it created. Perhaps it created by accident. Perhaps it created to fill the emptiness. A part of me sickens my stomach, seeing the remnants of the Light as mere parts of a corpse and Life as the organisms that feed and arise from it.

What has become of me? All I see are the shards, that Heavenly blood splatter staining the skies. Those bits of Light, stars, that tantalized and looked at one another longingly in the blackest of oceans. Islands in the cosmos. I see us arise, piece by piece from the slime. How it sticks to us still. Dirty, wretched things. Unworthy.

They say Life is beautiful. It is a corruption. Devolution. The Light found itself trapped inside our husks, tainted by the flesh. Its purity cooled into such dead clay. It weakened the Light. Fragmented it more. Gave pieces of it thought. Divided us in individuality. It stripped away Light's innocence. It no longer simply was. It had to be. How the flesh has caused us to forget."

Are we the only life out there in the void? Would it sadden you to know that we are?

It makes us an aberration. We should not be, these bodies conceived of the fallen ashes of a dying Light. We are composed of decay and harbor that destructiveness within us. We yearn for our own destruction as befell the Light. Violence captivates us. Our mortality thrills us for such base reasons.

When we die...there is no Heaven. In reality, there is no Hell. There is only the void. The yawning darkness that grows with each passing day to accept us. Ancient cultures were right to relish life and live for the moment. We emerge from our corpses to see there is nothing but inanimate darkness. There are no Elysian Fields. No Eden. Nothing but absence. When we die we roam. We become them. The wraiths. The ghosts. The demons. They are angry. Their purpose is gone. If there ever was one. They wander the abyss jealous of us. Angry at their sentence. At the betrayal of life. They are no longer of our world. The other side is not a world either. It is eternal nothingness. Immortal loneliness. We emerge changed. A pale light. They strive in their own way, there, in the void. Some cast off into the darkness, fade away to never be seen again. Others watch, their humanity slipping away with each passing day. A few wander the world, still believing they live. Shadows that act as if they still belong in the Light. Lying to themselves. And then there are some...that reach out.

Did you know there was a relationship in former times? That our ancestors did communicate with the dead? It continues down to this day. This respect for our ancestors. We have forgotten the reasons. They speak longingly of those days. When man and spirit were close. They became strong through the homage of their descendants becoming the gods of the old times. Their power grew with the centuries. In time they forgot of their past mortality. They became detached from man. Wrathful. Believing themselves worthy of worship. They still believe so. Their vanity knew no bounds.

They told me of the world before the flood, that antediluvian culture so in tune with the natural order. When man was one brotherhood. One global civilization. They carved their dwellings from the rock where it stood. Strove for balance. Worshipped the world as their mother, their life giver. Respected her for this gift she granted them. They walked with the spirits of their ancestors, searching together for the purpose of life. Sharing power. Together they discovered the answers to many mysteries. Attempted to extend their light into the darkened areas to gather knowledge. In life the dead learned more of themselves as did the living from the lost.

But the dead became twisted. Angry. Manipulated by an ancient soul…if it can be called such. Some say He is an amalgam of many. A legion of ancient...things. Some question whether He...It...They...ever were born mortal. I know it only as He. They say He has no name. He is primal. Rage. He is a hole. A consumer of Light.

Do not confuse him with young myth which shrouds ancient knowledge. He is no fallen angel. There is no God. No Heaven. No salvation! There is only the void and what battles to survive in it.

He lied to them, the lost. Said the world disrespected them. Disrespected the Light. Threatened it. That the living was unworthy of the gift they enjoyed. He warned them of man's growing power. How humanity fragmented the Light with each passing life. Tearing a piece here, chipping a part there. Man was killing the universe.

Our souls are a spark. A spark of the Light captured in these husks of ours. Do you not understand the laws of thermodynamics? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It comes from an already apparent source. With each passing life more is seized so that others can be. It is given personality, reason, individuality. It turns against union, remains a splinter of the greater whole. In that is the fated destruction of all that is. Life…is the unraveling of the universal whole.

Yet He offered a solution to this. He told them in destruction there could be creation. That they could become a part of a new world. One of immortality. A stopping of the fragmentation. The universe for themselves. He told them of his transgressions. Gave them false hopes. He had committed an abomination. He had re-entered the flesh. He was the first reincarnate.

His yearning to be had been so great that He seized a mortal and raped their body. He was human, this spirit that wanted to be fleshed. He had done it...countless times. He hated life and its limitations. Each time was too fleeting. Too flawed. Not enough. He always wanted more. Needed more. He grew selfish and greedy. Each life caused him greater pain. A passion took root. A hate for this order that limited him. Disgust for mortality as well as the void.

How do you explain such a thing? Life...life was not enough, and the alternative...I think He believed there was no purpose. That He wanted to make one. Truly believed the words of those men that called him a god.

He knew of the deads' one flaw. That they yearned to feel. In death there is only emotion. It is the sole way to feel. There are no nerves. No hands. Nothing. All you have are emotions. With time the finer emotions fail, unable to grant anything over that spiritual numbness. They lose themselves to it. Go crazy with the numbness. They must become fiercer, angrier. Push their emotions to higher levels in order to feel anything.

He preyed on their increasingly darkening emotions. He told them they could be again as He had. Told them of a way. He spoke of how the living took the dead for granted. Showed them how they frittered away their mortal years. He pointed out this unfair existence. This eternal emptiness that held them. He said they should tear the foundations down. Rebuild existence as only they, the ancients, knew how. To create a greater world of flesh and soul. Of feeling and power.

They had grown so distant from man that they forgot him in their plans, focusing on their own ravenous wants. Worse still, the void had driven some mad. Many simply wanted to unmake the universe that they might not be at all. Better to be nothing than this eternally. He enlivened them with such dark emotions. Their souls seared.

The Flood came as countless myths told. They captured the fire of the skies and brought them streaking down to the earth. They cracked the glacial sheets of the Ice Age, heralding its death and the birth of a new era. The power they wielded then was so immense. Their hatred was so strong. The world burned with it, melting the ice and blackening the skies. The waters surged in an unstoppable wave. It swallowed millions, drowning the world that was. Their cities rest there, still, beneath the oceans. I've seen them in dreams. But that is not important. What was…were the horrors He committed.

In the chaos, immense power was released. He swallowed it. All of it. Those millions of souls. Few of the ancients escaped, caught in the swell of energy. When he was through…He stared down at what was left. He saw humanity's remnants. Their children. Their brothers and sisters. He looked down on those frail beings that shivered and strove to survive. I do not know why he spared them, but He relished his victory. It was a shallow one.

He rages even now, His anger incapable of soothing. The source is His hatred of man.

The ancients say He turned to the void, traveled into the abyss never to be seen again. Perhaps to cool himself in that dying place. Maybe to attempt to create a better world. Some say He went...in search of the Light.

We're still here in our mortality, scattered to the four corners by the Deluge. Still in a world of flaws. Still suffering at their whims, those few that came before. Humanity has been torn apart. In our division we created new cultures. Tried to understand. We've only grown further apart with time.

They still wander there in the void. Some. Some have walked again. Countless times. To live in the flesh again and again.

It has become ingrained into our genes. Our very instincts. Man has grown separated from the order. From the Light. He fears nature, that thing wielded as a weapon for such genocidal hopes. The gods became distant. Destructive. Things to be feared. Placated. Eventually...surpassed. Man has struck out at the darkness. We trust no one and further fragment the order of things. They are the reason we fear the Dark, their region. We have grown to enforce order, but not as part of the natural order. Man has found his own path. He has created unnaturally. Crafted worlds of steel and glass. Technology is our new magic by which we mean to twist the cosmos in our grip, to our rule!

It is all around us! You need only look to see the natural fall to the artificial. We have given ourselves longer lives, greater abilities, knowledge once held only by them. We control the Light in an artificial way, enforcing our shapes on an amorphous being. What is is what we choose it to be. We grow stronger. Each time they try to crush humanity, scorching civilization away with barbarism, trampling knowledge beneath their feet. But humanity rises again stronger, pushing further. We resist them ever more, the Light and them. That is why we grow stronger, why we must. But in our growing power we weaken. We yearn. We lose. Forsaking the natural means forsaking ourselves. It all is wrong. How it tortures me, seeing such things.

We pervert those innate truths we know at our core. Tell ourselves of our equality. Bless ourselves with rights. When you are given something you do not value it because you do not know the price paid for it. It is worth nothing. When you take without giving you do not understand the connection. That is why life is worth nothing. Too many think themselves worthy and waste away within. We torture ourselves thinking we can and refusing to admit we can't. I cannot value a society that takes. So selfish. So individual. Each one of us is special my ass. How we do their work for them. Push ourselves apart. Think of ourselves before the mass. That is the corruption of the flesh. This world of welfare and hand outs, of entitlement and civil rights...it can burn for all I fucking care. Fill one hand and the other reaches out for more. No one deserves anything. Not you. Not me. We are devouring ourselves and do not even know it.

I remember being in the city. Surrounded by lamp posts and gleaming skyscrapers that twinkled with the illumination of souls within. When I looked to the sky do you know what I saw? Nothing. A black void. The stars were gone. That...is what civilization shall do. Destroy the Light. Destroy them. Destroy it all. Create a void. A true void bereft of all that was.

Growing numbers of them have chosen the flesh you know. They are invading the world to live anew as they have done for millennia. To find a way to escape the void. They reincarnate, driving up the numbers of the globe. They have created a complex system by which they work together, secretly reincarnating. Guiding one another in their mortal lives. Hoping that they may learn something here, in this mortality. That is why history repeats itself. Not because of some pattern or cultural quirk but because they want to learn from their mistakes. Yet, they fail every time. They push the stakes higher every generation hoping that with greater emphasis they will finally see that hidden meaning, but they fail to learn because there is nothing to learn. We grow restless with the endless cycles of life and death. We strive to learn something, anything, to make sense of it all. But our insanity grows as we continue to find no answer. If there even is one. Each life further corrupts our souls as we become even more mortal.

We search for answers anywhere. We have surrendered any hope of discovering truths in the void above so we focus evermore on the flesh. Its emotions. Its sensations. Its pain. That is why we have become sadists. We derive a sick pleasure in destroying ourselves. A pleasure in an existence without any. We love to watch others fail. It helps us to feel better about ourselves. About our positions.

They lash out in a subconscious frustration. They see no purpose. No purpose at all. So they have come to that point of nihilism. They have embraced instinct. Given themselves over totally to the flesh. Fallen utterly. They whisper in our ears. Those who have forsaken the flesh. They play on our confusion to their ends. To destroy what is. Manipulating us to do their wishes. They are proof that not all have chosen the path of the flesh.

They abhor what has come. An age of artificiality, of further fragmentation. An evolution that neither improves nor ruins but goes sideways. A removal of the Light from itself. Its very dissection. An eternal imprisonment in flesh and the enslavery of the Light. Some still crave to destroy what is, manipulating the newly dead to aid them. Perhaps to destroy all that is. To feed off us all, off everything, and to collapse the universe into itself.

Their ways are maddeningly patient. They return some to the world to draw life back to the natural order. To tell the world of what they saw. To draw man back to the religions that give them power and seed the world with such discord. Others they bring in, poisoning the naive with a hatred for the living.

It is a new war. A war between the secular and the religious, the other side. Their strength grows with our continual warring. They drive on fundamentalists in their holy wars, these vestiges of the old cults that celebrated the dead. They urge on murder to undo the order that reigns. They separate us piece by piece to consume us. They will unmake all that is.

They come in many guises, each one yearning to be worshipped. To be believed in. With our belief they grow stronger, feeding off our emotions. The energy they create.

They are eternal. They have forever. One way or another, either they shall destroy what is or we shall. It is no longer what should be. We are a wound that has gone gangrenous in the Light. There is no cure. Either we must cease or all shall die.

The sun, that dying ember, cools in the void. Steadily being smothered. One day it shall cease, and the darkness shall consume us. I cannot think of what we'd replace the Light with. Our reason has granted us the ability to think of things so dark as to make the void as colorful as the dawn. Our reason is the harbinger of the end.

Buddha saw. He told us to relieve ourselves of our reason and emotion. To reunite with the Light. To deny the flesh. Release ourselves of mortality and transcend. How we cling to this shitty thing called humanity. Only when we sacrifice ourselves, our identities, can we recapture our innocence and find peace. But life plagues us with the misconception of individuality. Tells us we are separate and prevents us from union.

They have created a union. An abomination of the Light. Slowly bonding the souls to themselves. Gradually dimming them. Breaking them. Swallowing them to grow stronger. A growing glow. A dead light.

We insane see what is. Are forced to deal with the two worlds. The irony that those who know are ignored or despised. In ancient times, after the Flood, we were revered for this gift. We few that were not blinded or defeaned by that unholy holocaust. Those days have fallen away under the pressure of the modern world, and we stand ignorant of our gifts. They use us. Twist us to their will. Drive us mad.

How do I know all this? I am...a reincarnate. We strip ourselves of our past, hoping that in this new life we may avoid the hatred and pain that plagues us in the void. We seek the answer of why. The reason for reason.

And yet, I have grown to need them as they have me.

They do not take life anymore. Not since the Flood. Their plan is subtler. Deeper. They seek to break us. To use us as tools. Relish the irony of using the structure to bring itself down. Suicidal Genocide.

But they have a weakness. They cannot manifest in this dimension without an anchor. Something they bond to. I...am their anchor.

They feed on our emotions. Use us to give them power. Use energy itself. We, as part of the Light, can create. We are what the universe is made of. Thus, we can add to it and create as those that came before.

Let me give you this one gift that you may escape. There is a method by which you can push them away. Clear your mind. Focus is necessary. In your thoughts they find your weaknesses and confuse you. Make your mind empty. Imagine Light around you. Let it grow, breathing it in and allowing each exhale to cause it to grow larger. Let it fill the room, your space, and beyond. Hold onto this. Use it to push them away. I…no longer can.

The evil done by my hand reaches beyond redemption. My curse is well earned, and they come to deliver it upon me. To you I offer salvation.

You will know when they threaten. The room will grow cold and the lights fail. They cannot help but to leech off whatever power exists.

This is all...that I can give you. The only knowledge I can spare. Please go. Escape this place while you can. Leave me here to rot.