by Sean Ellis
The failure of this magnificent species to evolve socially was its death warrant.
No other destiny could have awaited the Ascendant Ones. Though the herds might have continued to refine their mental and physical powers, it is doubtful that they would ever have conceived of aesthetic beauty. The laws of natural selection do not encourage a species to care for its sick and old, or to manufacture that which nature has not provided in order to subdue nature itself. Only less developed minds could value an idea or a thing more than the betterment of the species. Only the underdeveloped psyche of a creature without inherent god-like powers would imagine the existence of a god and build fantastic temples and cathedrals, write transcendent works of doctrine, poetry and prose, or develop the concepts of love, morality or conscience in their behalf.
The Ascendant Ones made one other fatal error in their intrinsic belief in the power of natural selection. They imagined that the exiled ones would fail to thrive. And although most of them did indeed perish, unable to stay the jaws of predators or turn the fury of storms, a few—the fittest of the rejected—survived and prospered. Lacking the mental puissance of the herds, they were compelled to find or fashion the means to defend their existence.
These tool- and fire-users prospered in their enclaves, but never dared to challenge the Ascendant Ones’ supremacy. But then, when seven generations had passed, the Wise Father appeared and everything changed.
The exiles did not revere the aged as they later would. Few enough lived even to maturity in their harsh world, and those who did survive to see their hair turn gray were often viewed as a burden to the rest. Although the men were stronger than the women and cherished for their hunting prowess, they could not work the magic of making children, and so the females, with their fertile wombs, were more highly esteemed—worshiped even. Then the coming of the Wise Father challenged the way the outcasts saw their world.
He roamed the earth, seeking out the camps of the exiles, speaking the tongues of these diverse groups as easily as if he had been born in their midst. He did not openly oppose the will of the Mothers, the fertile matriarchs of each clan, but so valuable were the new skills he imparted to their communities—the understanding of seasons and rudimentary agriculture—that he was soon elevated to a greater stature than the Mothers. Long after his departure, the men scattering seed—whether on fertile ground or in fertile wombs—would make supplication to the Wise Father in order that the resulting harvest might be abundant.
When he had gained their trust, when the cult of the Wise Father was universal in their scattered enclaves and his archetype imprinted in their collective memory, he returned. And this time with a new message.
The time of hiding is nearly at an end. This world belongs to you, my children, and soon you will take it back from those who spurned you.
He began drawing them from their caves and their crudely fashioned huts to a place of ancient power. It was said by some that the Wise Father was not born of woman, and while he gave no credit to any supernatural origin, their pilgrimage brought them one and all to the great mountain, named for the Earth’s navel, the very place from which it was believed the Wise Father had come into existence.
Foreseeing that the Ascendant Ones would one day perceive the exiles as a threat to their hegemony, the Wise Father determined to act preemptively. Under his tutelage, the exiles fashioned weapons and built palisades of wood and stone. But his guidance did not end there. He taught them ways to hunt great beasts, so that their physical bodies became powerful where their minds were not. And even their primal mental energies were made sharper.
From their guttural language, a new form of communication developed, and soon thereafter, the means to record them in soft clay or with pigments upon scraped animal hides. The children learned games of skill that subtly taught them the concept of strategy. The strongest and smartest soon came to comprise a superior caste, honored above all their peers, and beholden only to the Wise Father.
As the power of the enclave that resided at the Earth’s navel continued to grow, their benefactor took a bride—a girl child who had never known a man, but was herself descended from the fiercest war-leader and the most revered of the Mothers. In the fullness of time, she came to be with child, though many secretly believed that the seed in her belly had been planted through the Wise Father’s magic, a rumor that seemed to be confirmed when the time of the harvest came, and it was revealed that not one but three sons had been conceived.
Three sons, the offspring of the Wise Father; men who were also gods.
Their names—Sham’b’Alla, Le’Mu, Atl’an—would be eternally imprinted onto the consciousness of the human species.
Though they were not alike in appearance or temperament, they were all worshipped alike, and when they reached adulthood, the Wise Father granted them their birthright.
Metalworking was unknown to them, and none could comprehend by what means the Wise Father had fashioned the crowns which he now bestowed upon his children.
The eyes of your enemy are ever on you, the Wise Father told them. With this, you will hide your strength as you grow in power and solidarity. When the crowns sat upon their brows, their understanding of his high-sounding words and complicated gestures increased, as did their comprehension of the ideas he sought to convey.
Each of you is guardian of a part of this great power, he explained. But together, you are greater than the sum of your parts. When this Trinity is joined together, what is the thing that you may conceive, yet not accomplish?
With that unanswered question, the Wise Father left the enclave of the exiles, never to be seen again. Yet his sons knew that when they had completed the Great Work, when the world was made ready, He would return.
For a generation, the three guardians continued to hide their people from the eyes of the Ascendant Ones, even as they explored the intelligence and might bequeathed to them by their magnificent benefactor. Their health and youth were extended indefinitely, granting them the time and vigor to conceive ideas previously undreamed and perform feats thought impossible. Then, when each was at the summit of his individual growth, the next phase of the Great Work began.
The Trinity crowns imparted to them a blueprint for a great city, built of living rock and hidden in a cavern beneath the Earth’s navel. That holy mountain, in whose shadow they had dwelt for centuries, would become the foundation cornerstone of a city to rival any accomplishment of man into the distant future.
Using the power of the Trinity, they brought forth a swarm of beetles, as wide as the great river, who devoured stone the way the great mastodon herds devoured grass. In a mere score of years, the passages and galleries were hewn, honeycombing the massive mountain and descending deep into the earth.
Upon the exposed stone, they worked a different magic, and soon walls of crystal began to grow. Transformed molten rock, pulsating with a strange kind of life, grew as well, shaping into structures and passages according to the will of the Trinity, in much the same way that an embryo takes shape according to the master plan written in an individual’s genetic code. In the greatest chambers, the roof glowed with light like the sun, and soon crops began to give their yield deep underground, feeding the exiles as they had never been fed on the surface.
Into this city—Agartha—the triumvirate led their exiles.
On the fertile plains of an untamed world, the Ascendant Ones continued as they had for centuries, maintaining a strong gene pool by casting out the weak and crippled. The alpha males of each herd had never imagined that those who had survived the initial days of their banishment would eventually find refuge in the marvelous hidden city. Even if they had cared enough to reach out with their minds, analyzing the potential threat to their status as the dominant intelligent species, the fact of the city’s existence would have been blocked from their sight. The power of the Trinity effectively cloaked the cavern city in a haze of mental white noise.
And then the moment they had eagerly awaited came. The Wi
se Father appeared to the Trinity bearers in a vision, commanding them to enter the Shrine of the Trinity, located on the uppermost level of the great city, where they joined their crowns together upon the altar. Amplified by the unique properties of the Shrine, they expressed a single command in one unified voice.
All over the surface of the globe, the Ascendant Ones took notice. With the psychic equivalent of a lightning flash . . . a shrieking cacophony . . . their superior mental abilities were deadened.
In a collective state of shock, the herds fell apart. Young rivals overwhelmed their alpha males, ignoring the approaching threat of predatory beasts. Unable to collect food or shelter themselves from the elements, thousands died before a season had passed. A few smaller herds drew together out of the chaos, but it was now physical strength, rather than mental superiority, which determined who would lead.
Within three generations, the gene that had once granted this race of hominids virtual omnipotence over their planet had become recessive, occurring in less than one in a hundred births. Even when it did manifest, the blanket of silence cast by the Trinity remained, stifling the growth of the pineal gland, the organ that produced the unique hormone that accelerated brain activity.
The Trinity bearers looked out in triumph at their victory over the Ascendant Ones. Though they could not fathom why the Wise Father had given them the opportunity to avenge an aeon of perceived injustice, they were proud to have been the instrument of judgment. Those who lived beneath the sheltering rock prospered, wanting for nothing and rarely spared a thought for returning to the wild spaces where their ancestors had once roamed. Perhaps it was inevitable that a serpent would enter paradise and tempt Eve with forbidden fruit.
As the Great Work progressed, it became evident that the prosperity of the human race could not be contained in the caverns beneath the Earth’s navel. Whether at the subtle insistence of the Trinity, or merely the voice of reason, the three brothers determined at long last to divide the Trinity again, and to go their separate ways. The brother whose name was Sham’b’Alla, ventured a short distance from the mountain to a concealed valley and established a city that bore his name. Le’Mu used his Trinity to found a city in a land across the ocean from whence the sun rose. The third brother, Atl’an, established a similar city on an island in the great ocean of the sun’s setting. But events would soon transpire there that would alter the history of the world.
Hidden from the eyes of the great king, the high priest, a man named Atl’as hungered after the power of the Trinity. He set forth from the island under the guise of a pilgrim, visiting first the secret valley of Shambala. Using guile, he struck a cowardly blow from the embrace of a supplicant, killing Sham’b’Alla even as he wrestled the Trinity from the fallen king’s brow. With his stolen power, he smote Le’Mu. Uniting two of the Trinity talismans, he set forth on a campaign to seize the third, but craven deception would avail him naught against the remaining brother.
In distant Atlantis, the king knew of his brothers’ deaths and the betrayal by his own high priest, and readied himself for the siege to come.
The final struggle was a cataclysm so tremendous that it would be imprinted upon the consciousness of the species, both as a memory of an ancient tribulation and as a prophecy of the end of days.
The heavens wept, flooding all but the highest peaks. The Earth split apart, swallowing those that were not burned by the bleeding rivers of lava and fire. The island where Le’Mu had built his city was enveloped in a volcanic upheaval. The sun was darkened in the sky, freezing the floodwaters and ruining the vegetation. At the heart of the apocalypse, noble Atlantis vanished beneath the waves.
The loss of life was unparalleled. Not since the fall of the Ascendant Ones had so many people died in so short a time.
Yet, despite his mastery of two-thirds of the Trinity, Atl’as proved weaker than his noble foe, and in the end he was vanquished, sealed in an abyss beneath another mountain on the edge of a great desert. Uniting the Trinity once more, Atl’an alone struggled to save the last vestiges of life on the Earth. He returned to Agartha, a city unremembered by the survivors of the cataclysm, and entered the Shrine where he silently beseeched the Wise Father for guidance. His prayers were in vain. The burden of preserving the human species would be his alone.
There seemed but one course of action. The Trinity was a threat to the future safety of humanity. How long before the lure of such power, perhaps with noble intent, led to another uprising? How long before another Atl’as arose from the survivors of the cataclysm, and in attempting to wrest control of the Trinity, might utterly destroy the Earth? The Trinity of brothers had already failed; the Great Work would never be complete, but there would be a future for humanity.
As the scattered survivors went forth to every corner of the world, Atl’an sealed up forever the entrance to the mountain city and then led a small group of exiles from Atlantis on one final quest. The Trinity was divided once more and the three relics were hidden away in distant lands, as far from each other as night is from day. Only his own Trinity did Atl’an keep, more as a memento mori than anything else, and despite the fact that the talisman had kept him vital for centuries, he soon began to grow old.
As the centuries passed, the truth about the cataclysm and the great migration grew into the myths, legends and religions of the disparate cultures descended from the original trinity of cities. The names of the cities were not forgotten, and their rulers were remembered as gods. Even the Wise Father came to be deified by a people who scarcely knew he had ever existed.
The Trinity talisman passed entirely from the memory of mankind, but the purpose for which it had been forged by an intelligence not of this earth—a task the ancient triumvirate knew only as “the Great Work”—remained unfinished.
For long millennia, the three relics remained hidden in the places so remote that no human could be found to rouse them from slumber. And then, more than ten thousand years after the catastrophe, they were found, and the Trinity was about to be rejoined.
As the three pieces came into close proximity again, thousands of years after the time when the Great Work ought to have been completed, a message was sent. A beacon shining across time and space, into dimensions of existence unimagined by men, warned a slumbering intelligence that its scheme for earth had gone awry.
And the Great Father began to stir.
Mira’s eyes flashed open. Still gripping the two joined pieces of the Trinity, she staggered under the weight of knowledge, experienced as vividly as if she had lived those many centuries herself, but was also stunned by the import of that final revelation.
The Trinity was about to become whole again. But that could only mean . . .
Reflexively, she reached for her gun, but froze before her hand could close on the Beretta’s grip. DiLorenzo, too, blinked in disbelief as the apocalyptic vision faded, and he became fully aware of the half-dozen gunmen now surrounding them.
Though their reverie had lasted only a moment, it had been enough time for their enemies to find them.
PART THREE: TRINITY
THIRTEEN
For countless centuries, deep beneath the mountain, a collision of water and magma had created sporadic eruptions of super-heated vapor. During that period, geological activity of varying degrees of magnitude had changed the geyser’s pattern of behavior, sometimes coaxing it into long periods of activity or alternately blocking its vent with rock and soil, which inevitably resulted in violent, explosive bursts. Such was the power of the steam pressure that not even stone could prevent its release.
In the late 1930’s, when an SS officer named Gerhardt Mann saw the potential to harness the geyser’s power for his generators, he of necessity had to create a controlled method for storing up that highly pressurized vapor. The steam jet would turn the enormous turbines, which would spin magnetos and create an electrical current. The mechanical elements of the system were state of the art for their time, utilizing the strongest and most durable
alloyed steel products from Krups and an innovative self-lubricating process that actually pumped and refined small amounts of naturally occurring crude petroleum before injecting the finished product into the main hub of the turbine. The result was a syncretism of mechanical and geological engineering that performed beyond the wildest expectations of its heinous creator.
Even so, Mann had provided for the possibility that the turbine might one day need hands-on maintenance, and to that end he had created a shut-off valve for the purpose of temporarily capping the geyser so that his engineers might be able to safely perform whatever repairs were needed. This override valve could not, of course, avert the continued buildup of steam pressure in the superior holding tank, nor in the caverns deep beneath the mountain; such was never its intent. Mann had designed the valve to be employed for brief periods of inspection and maintenance only. In the event that a longer shut-down was needed, a second vent shaft was to have been dug at a future date, but events in the outside world permanently forestalled that phase of construction.
It had been nearly an hour since Montero closed that valve for the first time in sixty years—quite possibly for the first time ever. Though neither the steel nor rock yielded so much as a millimeter to the building mass of pressurized steam, the strain against them was growing exponentially. A gauge near the flywheel control, registering the internal pressure both in millibars of mercury and with a simple color code—red for dangerously high—had already ceased to give an accurate measure. The needle had been pegged for over ten minutes when, with an earsplitting crack, the gauge’s steel pipe fitting blew off of the tank and blasted through the metal cowling as if it were made of paper. It shot as high as the cavernous ceiling where it drove like an arrow into the heart of the stone.
