He looked up. Clouds were gathering. A cold wind was blowing. Something was coming…
He thought back to what he had seen. A hushed conversation, conducted with seriousness amidst anxious glances, and a single look from piercing blue eyes that had conveyed a message of infinite capacity.
That look had endowed in him a sense of foreboding the like of which he had not known before, yet one that seemed destined. Something was coming. Something big. And somehow he knew that he was going to be a large part of it. It was as if everything had been leading to this. Some kind of major declaration of purpose was coming and coming soon and then, then he’d know what he needed to do, or at least he would have all the options laid out before him.
All of the cryptic little lessons that the old man had given him in the past now started to make sense. That look from him had confirmed it. He was being prepared for something, something important, and the time was now very soon.
He wanted to go and ask just what exactly was going on, yet something stopped him. That look. That little glance that had said, quite clearly, “not yet…” He’d always wanted knowledge, wanted all of it at once, yet one of his most important lessons had been that very one – “not yet”. One thing at a time, step by step, to wait until the time was right.
He turned around, and found himself locked onto another pair of startling eyes, these ones a bright, vivid green, and everything stopped.
The world dissolved into a boundless ocean of thought, and he was drifting through it, towards those green eyes, the only island in existence. Yet somehow he found he could not swim, though he longed to get there. He could only drift with the tide, a slave to its will, but he could not look away from those eyes, those bright beacons which seemed to contain the universe, and which were calling to him, a distant, soft echoing sound of longing and sorrow, of fear yet also of hope.
Then she turned away, and reality snapped back in. He was left standing alone and he realised that he must have been calling back in response to her calling. Now it was him saying, “not yet…”, though he wasn’t sure he knew why.
Not yet, not just yet, though I am waiting. But first I need to learn to swim…
And how does one learn to swim? One must be thrown into the deep end. One cannot not inhale the sweet aromas of heaven without first having choked on the smoke and sulphur of hellish fumes.
Something had awakened now, both inside of him and out in the world. He felt as if some kind of cage had been unlocked and the wild beast within him could now be loosed upon the world. He turned around again, and retreated back inside the castle, turning down the dark corridor that led down to the dungeons. For that was where the other beasts dwelt.
It was a savage world, he knew, yet it was one he needed to conquer. He couldn’t shy away from it, for there was no way of bypassing it. He had to fully engage with it, grapple with the other beasts and assert himself in their midst. Only then could he rise up and out of that world, and now he felt he had the ultimate weapons at his disposal. He had his allies, he had his sources of knowledge and now, as he remembered those green eyes, he realised he had a goal, a far higher goal than any of the more primitive beasts.
He had been shown a sign, and in that sign he would conquer.
Omega Synthesis 