Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  A’Nu-Ahki was both one of the pale children and a self-involved father. Had he not also reduced timeless absolute spiritual principles into mere sandcastle virtues in front of his children, swept away by the tide? His daughters had languished their final years in captivity somewhere in Assuri and it had often been years between the times he had pleaded for their release with simpering and mealy-mouthed platitudes before this very Divine Wind. At last, he saw himself, another Iyared in the making, or worse yet, another Adiyuri—doubly responsible for having known more at a younger age.

  His entire life rattled with shortcuts inside a gleaming façade behind which foamed the rottenness of the castle from his vision. The wormhole-connected private quagmires of self-deception, self-protection, and spiritual pride erupted with the filth of the dungeon at the tower’s foundations. Nu began to console himself that at least he was not the only one—that he was far from the worst. He almost added, better than most, until he saw what lay inside the enormous blind spot of that outlook.

  If one man was an inner vacuum, what happened if every man and woman was the same or even worse? A massive black hole imploded in the heavens, pulling untold billions into the screaming heat of outer darkness. Nothing Nu could say or do would lessen the Apparition’s monstrously true indictment.

  The storm intensified as its cyclone shifted from a mournful wail to a crescendo of rage. “I-i-i-i will destroy mankind whom I created from off the surface of the Earth! Not only man, but beasts and crawling things, and the birds of the sky, for it grieves me that I ever made them-m-m.”

  The weather trailed off into choppy gusts like convulsive sobs.

  Nu rose slowly from below the shelf.

  It’s all true! Who can have the courage to see it all for what it really is without hiding his face from the howling emptiness of his own heart? What man has power to change on such a scale? How can I even begin to comfort anyone from the reality of the roaring world-wide void? I can’t even comfort myself! I can try to do the right thing, but Nature wears my attempts down and twists them into something horrible! And if I let go for just one weary second, Evil erupts in me with consequences that expand to others, who pass them on, exponentially consuming still others!

  Nu wanted somehow to reach out and comfort this tremendous, sorrow-filled father. I’m the Comforter from A’Nu, after all! He laughed hysterically and nearly choked on his own stomach acid.

  It was impossible. I’m an impossible fool with an impossible job! Such a concentration of sorrow, anger, and loss would drive anyone who tried to share it insane. That must be where I am right now—at the Mountain of Madness! E’Yahavah A’Nu doesn’t need my support! Self-sufficiency infuses anyone who can speak worlds into existence!

  Nu understood in utter despair how no amount of sorrow on his part could even make up for that portion of infinite grief he himself had caused. This realization left him empty and helpless, with the true motive for his sympathy staring him like a betraying friend right back in his face:

  I do not want to be destroyed with the Earth.

  With every pretense stripped away, Nu shrieked into the wind, “I’m only a man of rotting flesh! Though my heart has been like Qayin’s, I have offered the blood of innocent sacrifice, like Heh’Bul, in my place! I want to be different, but I don’t know how—not at the depth you require!”

  The wind and thunder subsided. A clear airy voice answered through the shrubs, cracks, and hollows all around. “The blood of innocence has been accepted for your guilty blood.”

  Nu clutched these words to his chest. “Please, tell me how to walk with you like Q’Enukki did! I find no strength—not even from the prophecies you have given me!”

  “You have found my favor. It is sufficient.”

  “But what do you want from me?” Nu’s tears rolled from his face into the soft moss. “I don’t know what to do! I never have!”

  “Plant a seven hundred-by-seven hundred row orchard of straight resinous saplings in the woodlands leading up to the Haunted Lands Pass and let them grow. Wait on me daily for further instructions.”

  Nu dropped into the dust, dazed, and exhausted.

  Muhet’Usalaq lay unconscious, having fainted during the revelation of the Divine Wind.

  Perhaps this is good, Nu thought. No man should have to hear exactly how many years he has left to live. Then he realized that the Old Man would soon have to discover that information from him anyway.

  Darkness broke rapidly to reveal a wine colored sunset. The dazzling sword-shaped comet carved across the heavens in blue celestial warning.

  A’Nu-Ahki still did not know exactly what approached to destroy the Earth. But, at least he now knew when it would arrive.

  They had a hundred and twenty years left to prepare.

  Epilogue

  Q’

  Enukki had left Earth in the sky chariot only about an hour ago. At least he thought it was an hour. Could it have been a day?

  Samuille, the faintly glowing celestial being who commanded the living chariot, had kept him occupied with their long conversation so that he was no longer sure. Time itself seemed to have lost its coherence. Stars slowly shifted their positions in the ebony deep outside the crystal view port, lazy fireflies in the endless night.

  Q’Enukki tried to shake his momentary disorientation. Had it really been only a moment?

  Samuille seemed to be saying something about the fundamental curvatures of the heavens. He used terms Q’Enukki himself had designed to describe subtle and highly technical aspects of celestial mechanics, though in ways that went far beyond the Seer’s theory. The serene voice of the holy Watcher confirmed many guesses Q’Enukki had made back on Earth. Yet the Seer needed to know if he had just heard his guide correctly.

  “Are you saying the mathematical relationship between time and planetary attraction is not just something I’ve dreamed up to explain away certain problems?” Q’Enukki asked.

  “Yes,” said the Watcher. “It is one of the foundations of the cosmos; intimately linked to how the heavens have been stretched out by E’Yahavah and to the speed of light. Light is the constant on which much else rides—a model of the Divine Name. Thus time itself, and all things temporal, must bend to give way when that limit of the created medium is pressed.”

  “And the waters above the heaven?”

  “Look outside the viewport. Tell me what you see.”

  The star chariot had apparently slowed, for they had pulled abreast of the icy head of a giant comet. It had approached so rapidly that Q’Enukki had not even noticed until they were right on top of it.

  “Am I mistaken, or is the comet’s solid part made up mostly of frozen water?”

  Samuille nodded. “Correct again, though also of frozen airs. On the first day of creation, E’Yahavah had the substance of all the cosmos contained in one great water sphere, which you know from the Cosmic Dynasty Stele as the Abyssu.

  “This watery mass lay deep within the event-horizon of what we call a black vortex. The immense attraction of such an enormous globe of water caused the elementary particles of its own super-compressed interior to be ripped apart and reformed into the heavier elements from which the Earth and all the solid materials of the cosmos were soon to be made. Everything at first was without form inside the deep—void and chaotic with energies building to be unleashed on command.

  “When the Eluhar commanded, ‘Light be!’ he reversed the heavenly constant—the elastic tension value of space—transforming the black vortex that contained the Abyssu into a white fountain. A fountain is the opposite of a vortex; having an attraction-well that pulls what is inside outward rather than drawing what is outside in. The attraction force has the same mathematical relationship to time in either case. The closer an object is to the attraction well, the slower time—and all natural processes—moves for that object relative to other objects and events happening further away.

  “After this conversion, the event-horizon of the fountain began to shrink inwa
rd toward the Abyssu, while diffuse vapors started to move through it. On day two, Earth Time Reference, the horizon shrank close enough to the surface of the waters for its attraction to counteract the Abyssu’s own. The outward pull of the white fountain increased, as it absorbed space and primitive particles, while that of the Abyssu remained constant.

  “E’Yahavah created the First Heaven we now travel in when the two conflicting attractions ripped the outer layers of the water sphere away from its core—creating a space between the waters above and the waters below. The outer waters expanded in a bubble, away toward the shrinking event-horizon and soon passed beyond it.

  “The massive attraction of the fountain’s horizon had its time-bending effect described in your formulas. Beyond the event horizon, natural events ran many billions of times faster than inside, where the forming Earth remained. The liberated residues—the gases, solids, and energies from the dividing of the Abyssu—soon followed outward through the horizon, as indeed the heavens themselves stretched forth in all directions. Those expanding heavens are the very space in which the stars now reside. For as you have guessed, space itself is a created thing vast beyond human comprehension, but not mere emptiness. Time as you know it is merely a property of the substance of space.

  “The leftover clumps of gases, solids, and waters passed into the outer realm in great whirlpool storms where the bending of time occurred. This happened because the great size of these masses made it impossible for them to pass through the event-horizon instantaneously. Tremendous stresses acted on the matter streams across the violently different rates at which time passed in the outer, versus inner, regions. The spirals concentrated the matter into massive cores that often became black vortices once freed of the event horizon on the outer side.

  “These spiral matter clouds were raw material for what the people of Time’s End will call ‘galaxies’ of stars. Masses of water, and other vapors within them, often froze into bodies like this comet.

  “By the end of two days, Earth Time, the equivalent of several billion years had passed outside the white fountain’s horizon. My people and some of the other Orders that serve in the heavens, were created and grew ancient because, to the extent that we operated in your space-time cosmos, we did so outside the event-horizon—where the time rate and all natural processes by comparison, was so greatly accelerated.

  “Many aeons we waited in wonder for the mystery to be unveiled of what lay within the fountain—your finished world! Oh, we understood the physics of laying its foundations well enough, but not its full purpose. For us it was to be the culmination of all E’Yahavah’s handiwork. We did not know he had something further in mind.

  “The white fountain shrank until the innermost of the larger matter clumps passed beyond in a great swirling stream to form the Milky Way—that river of stars that is your own galaxy. The Milky Way spiral then had a greater attraction-well than what remained of the white fountain itself—on its outside. The fountain expanded space from itself, moving relative to the core of the Milky Way outward into one of its arms.

  “Before the fountain ceased, the last remaining matter—including the waters below the heavens, from which your world was being formed—fell into orbit around the galactic core at the optimal distance, between your galaxy’s spirals, to support life. If not for that position between the spirals, you would never have been able to observe most of the heavens. I, of course, describe to you how it appeared to us. From the Earth, the expansion of the heavens simply slowed to their current rate, with your planet’s galaxy effectively near the core of the cosmos, albeit not exactly so.

  “The last bit of leftover matter was used to form your sun and its other planets. Before vanishing, the fountain remnant took up an orbit around the new sun at E’Yahavah’s precise distance and speed so essential for life, with little more left inside it than your world and her forming moon.

  “From the time elapsed on Earth, all was completed by the end of the fourth day, when the fountain shrank to nonexistence. The Earth and her moon were the last things to pass beyond the horizon into this current space. Your Sun’s system has since orbited slightly away from the central universal axis, as will your galaxy in time.”

  Q’Enukki summarized the resolution of his own question. “And that is how light from distant stars had time to reach the Earth even though the time it took was far greater than the age of the cosmos itself, when measured from my planet?”

  The Watcher nodded. “As time is measured from Earth’s surface, yes. While the first four days of creation week passed on your planet, aeons passed simultaneously in the voids beyond the fountain. This is the time-bending effect of a singularity—the engine E’Yahavah used to stretch out the heavens at his word.

  “So far, you are the only man who understands that eternity is not infinite linear time. Time itself is an attribute of space, velocity, and mass—as I said before, a thing created by E’Yahavah. It flows, with all natural processes, at different rates in different localities, depending on the attraction-force of whatever mass is in the vicinity. Usually the differences in time-passage rate across the cosmos are not wide; except near event-horizons of black vortices, or as it was in creation week with the white fountain. The other heavens you visited before exist in dimensions beyond those you can normally perceive.

  “We in the heavens have greater access to a domain beyond time. We must therefore use much imagination and caution when we communicate with you. Our language concepts reflect our environments.

  “Our Master exists in the dimension beyond all others, which includes the sum of them all—the heaven of heavens. From it, he sees the end from the beginning and can intervene at any point, even as you can look down upon a two dimensional scroll unfurled to insert your quill upon any portion of the plane from the all-seeing height of your third dimension. Do you know why I have shown you this comet?”

  Q’Enukki said, “It wasn’t about the primordial waters?”

  Samuille’s black white-less eyes took on the gravity of the Abyssu. “No. When we left your world, we increased our speed to near the velocity of light. Time back on Earth has moved more rapidly than for us in this chariot—just as time moved more rapidly beyond the white fountain than for the Earth when it was still inside during the early days of Creation Week.

  “When we left Earth’s solar system, we deliberately knocked this chunk of primordial ice from its course. It has now fallen into the attraction-well of the sun. It will orbit once, taking one hundred and fifteen years—Earth Time—to do so. We have looped back into the solar system to check its progress, with a few other things that are not for you to know.”

  “Why will it orbit only once?”

  “Because this comet is Sword of the Breaker; destined to divide the Leviathan, Tiamatu—that fifth inner planet which the Basilisk has taught the sons of Earth to worship. In a sense, the shards of Tiamatu’s cleaving shall destroy the old Earth and be used to create the new.”

  Appendix

  About the Language Usage and Cosmology of the Seer Clan and the City-States of Seti

  Any expert will notice that the peoples of the first four books of this novel series seldom behave in ancient Near-Eastern ways. This is because the story assumes that the peoples of the ancient Near East operated from a memory of pre-Deluge patriarch lists without much knowledge of the advanced civilization that existed before the First World-end, when those patriarchs lived. We today often anglicize peoples, names, and events of the Bible and other ancient literature in the same way without knowing it.

  Historians, theologians, and mythographers will notice a fusion of theological names in the worldview of A’Nu-Ahki’s people that some might understandably find a little disturbing. The implications of Genesis 10 and 11 demanded this approach. If all humanity is of one blood, there is a branching point, historically speaking. It is not my intention to suggest that the polytheistic gods of Sumer and Akkad are at all the same being as the Judeo-Christian Yahweh. I am a s
tudent of history who understands the mechanics of revisionist history and how it affects worldviews.

  My novels operate on the hypothesis that the polytheistic mythology of Sumer, Akkad, and to some extent Egypt, is a form of revisionist history that altered the character of how subsequent generations viewed their past and its theology. Marxist, Fascist, and Postmodernist historic revisionists do not erase the names of the past and replace them with entirely new terminology and characters; their contemporaries would immediately reject such an approach. Rather, revisionism redefines the characters and terminology of whatever is the traditional history, ideology, or theology system of their times according to its own agenda.

  Only in later generations do openly foreign names and grosser departures enter the system. In The Windows of Heaven series, the progression follows this pattern. Hence, Sumero-Akkadian polytheistic god names like Anu, Enlil, and Ea are, in the story, redefined terms, distorted in character from whatever concept of history and theology came over on the boat with the historic Noah, which I have tried to portray with respect. I believe we get an undiluted flavor of that original character only in Genesis, for reasons that will become clear in my next novels and their appendices.

  In this series, the paganesque names hypothetically stem from before the historical and theological revisionism erased knowledge of the Creator God E’Yahavah (understood as a tri-unity of E’Yahavah A’Nu, E’Yahavah El-N’Lil, and the Messenger of E’Yahavah) in the story. The triune Divinity appears as a simpler version of the Christian Trinity in the story, which does no violence to the idea that God truthfully revealed Himself to an earlier people who spoke another language and had a different worldview. The Deity has a biblical character, though the names are cosmetically somewhat Sumerian and Akkadian and may seem foreign to modern Christians.