Kade/Overview

In the darkness, there was a mind. The mind was alone in the darkness, because the darkness was, itself, almost perfect loneliness. The mind had no body. It had no eyes with which to see that there was nothing around it to see. It had no mouth to scream and no hands to claw pointlessly for release. It was thought and memory, alone, without even the distraction of physical agony. Time was meaningless in the darkness. For the first span of time, the mind raged against its imprisonment. It did not know how long it raged. It could have been five minutes. It could have been five thousand years. After its rage was exhausted, the mind grieved. Once it had lived in a world of sunshine and apples and brightcolored birds. Fish had darted, trees had grown, clouds had carved poetry in skies lit by sunrise. The mind had been named Kothar-wa-Khasis. He had served with honor and distinction; he had loved his duties and rejoiced to perform them. He had possessed a body, he’d had friends, and he’d known purpose. Now he had nothing. Not even pain or hope. For all Kothar-wa-Khasis knew, the world was as lost, as broken, as annihilated as himself. After grieving, Kothar-wa-Khasis despaired. He wondered if this void, this torment, was what the Maker of All had felt before Creation. Surely no other suffering could lead a perfect being to create a flawed world. But the maddening silence —silence that was not merely the loss of sound, but its impossibility—surely that, and the dark beyond darkness, and the crushing, numbing terror of being all there was, of being a universe unto oneself… that could drive even an infinite entity mad. And for an infinite entity, any madness would be infinite as well. These fears filled Kothar-wa-Khasis’s mind, which was all that remained of him. The cosmos was doomed from the start. All of it—the glory, the corruption, the hope, the horror, the pride of defiance and the brutality of War on Earth as in Heaven—all had been preordained. The ending was cut in stone before the first word was breathed.