I had lost everything.
My wife, my children, my home, my friends… everything that ever mattered to me was lost to the war and the ideologies of cowardly old men sitting in well lit safe places. I somehow survived it all. The marches, the hunger, the endless terror and strife that sat about us like a cloud of flies. When it was over, some of us could not believe it. They thought it was another terror to push us over the edge, so they would take their own lives, which after the abject nightmare we had survived, was irony defined. I stumbled out of the ashes of the old world into a world I did not know. The daily ins and outs of living a mediocre life after what I had seen and felt was an insult above all others.
So I packed a bag, gathered what little things I had and left for the mountains.
I didn’t pick a direction, other than west, and I didn’t take anything to protect myself other than a camp knife, a small hunting bow, and the desire to die. I think it was time for a reckoning of my account against what God had tallied for me so far. I would avoid all others, and just walk, hoping to find the un-askable question and the unspoken answer that plagued my dreams.
I walked for weeks. Stopping only to sleep or gather water and food. I never went thirsty or hungry as I traveled, and I didn’t worry much about where the next bed or meal would be. At least the war had taught me something useful. Something other than how to be a victim of other men. I walked sometimes awake, sometimes asleep, letting my feet carry me as I wove in and out of consciousness, watching the mountains pass around me as a morning fog before the sun can do anything useful. Somewhere along the way, I must have stepped in a shadow of a shadow, or behind a curtain of rain, or took the fifth turn at an animal crossroad… because when I awoke, I was stumbling among rocks that were not of this earth.
The mountains around me where at once brown and red, the trees upon them gray and green. The trees flowered here and there, great boughs of white flowers sinking towards the ground, waving gently in the mountain breeze that kissed them gently. The mountains towered far above, thousands of feet higher than what I had been hiking through, many of their peaks subdued in cloud, hidden and deep among the secrets of the sky. The sun was setting behind me, a clear sign that I was no longer headed the never wavering west of my travels. The orange velvet of the setting sun lit a crevasse between two mountains, as if a single peak had split in two by an axe of an elder god looking to cleave the world. Something bright shone from deep in the crack, a small sun opposite the one setting behind me, obscured by mists and living things.
There were two trees on either side of the vertical crack, each as a tall as a skyscraper, from the miles away that I was, I could behold them in a single glance, but I lose all perspective of them if I traveled closer. The trees were more than trees, they were monuments in and of themselves, and I felt a deep terror in my mind by perceiving them. But that strange power worked upon me and through me, building a perception of what I saw. In the boughs I could see many hands, some held in anger, some held in deference, some held in gestures of peace. Across the two trees, what I thought as a single branch between them, was actually a great staff being pulled in opposite directions. The great tree on the right pulled with its hand towards itself, the great tree to the left did the same with one of its own great hands. The staff was a great winding wood of itself, a massive bristle cone pine of a sort, older than all the ages of the world, wrought by gods of the first forest to be a balance. Between the cleft of the mountain, the two trees standing in great opposing strength, the two hands pulling upon the bones of the unimaginably old staff between them… the picture formed a gate, framing the whitish glowing sun deep in the vertical crevasse behind it all.
I did not know how I knew these things. Seeing it for the first time with my humble human eyes, but the understanding fell upon me like snow, small illuminations gathering in strength and speed until they achieved a greater clarity in a momentous single thought. I could see the great trees for what they were… guardians of the worlds, the balance of all fates pulled between them in a contentious battle of non-movement.
I stumbled forward, still trying to grasp the thing that I had seen. I found myself exhausted, and I stopped for the night, with a camp fire illuminating not far into the dark, but the moon and the stars lighting up huge, spindly trees walking towards the gate. They where tall men-shaped trees, with find willowy limbs attached to a wood like body, wrought in the color of old dead vines. The closest that passed my small fire regarded me without any emotion, only for a moment, its glowing blue eyes landing upon my features, surely wrinkled in fear. The creature meant me no harm, and I was nothing but an idle curiosity as it passed, silently taking its delicate steps, striding tens of feet with every step.
I ate what little I had left, and decided to push on in the direction of the Gate along with the quiet mammoth supplicants that still occasionally passed me in their wide walks. I pushed on for the most of the day, the clouds never really broke above, the overcasting clouds roiling slowly only occasionally gave notice of where the sun sat in sky as it crawled far over head. At times I despaired, for the Gate came no closer to my small eyes, among the rocks and rubble of the angry mountains around me. The ocher pall of the dust soon coated my clothing and gear, giving me the look of a long rusted blade. When the sun started to set again, I could hear the walking tree giants around me start a song of sorts, a cascading lilt of dreams lost and futures realized. They were thicker now, and the only measure of my progress as I plodded ever-onwards to my destination.
On my third day of hiking these mountains, in a place far from the dreams of any mortal man, I finally reached the foot of the gate. The trees, the giants that had been walking through the valleys around me, knelt in silent supplication before the great trees and their quiet struggle with the staff between them. I looked straight up, dizzied by the very height presented to me, and I could barely see the massive hands pulling on the great staff far, far above. It was if two trees, tall as as skyscrapers, fought over a fallen ancestor’s bones, trying to justify their own birthright and not yielding to their beloved brother. The supplicants, their glowing eyes closed, paid no mind to me or my investigations, but they themselves stayed at a safe distance from the Gate itself. They formed a wide half circle from one tree to the other, staying well away from the center.
I stepped into the circle, the hallowed ground, and a great wind came from deep in the crevasse past the gate. It was a mighty and powerful gust that nearly sent me tumbling back into the crowd assembled. Again, not a single one raised their heads to see what the fuss was about, and again, they remained in their subservient posture, kneeling and bowing towards the great trees and their burden. The wind was more than just air, it was a question, spoken by something older than time itself.
“THE BALANCE IS.”
I brushed myself off, and stepped into the circle again. The wind nearly picked me up and sent me flying like a leaf on the wind.
“THE BALANCE IS.”
Again, I brushed myself off from ground and stepped again into the circle of open earth between the worshipers and the targets of their silent affection. As I stepped in, I braced myself and leaned into the oncoming storm. I leaned into the breath of God.
“THE BALANCE IS.”
“There is no balance!” I yelled impotently into the void between the cloven mountain. “There is nothing!”
The wind shook for a moment, and then redoubled its violent push. I cowered, falling to the ground to scratch at the stones and grasses as to not be dashed across the stones. The voice found me still, as low as I was, rattling my teeth and shaking my bones with its voice.
“THE BALANCE IS FOR ITSELF NOT THOSE THAT ARE MEASURED AGAINST IT.”
I found something deep in myself, my tears streaming from my slitted eyes in the wind that assaulted me, flaying me with its almost tenable whips of violent air. It thrashed me, tearing at my clothes, pulling my hair, scratching my face as the loose gravel sprayed across me. I yelled back in defiance, pulling myself forward by scrabbling fingertips, fingernails cracking and bending in the soil.
“If there was balance, all would see it. If there was balance, all would know it. Your balance is a lie!”
The wind stopped as if the breath of God had to pause before another long exhale. I heard a crack. A resounding and powerful, a lightening bolt of untold power thrashed the ground near me. Then another, and another, until I was under a dome of pure awful light. In the noise of broiling, bubbling ion soaked plasma, the voice that I heard before was almost a whisper. I picked up a tone of sadness in it, a deeper regret than I could ever understand.
“Then you will bear witness to it.”
The flashing stopped all at once and without warning. I pushed myself up slowly, my clothes and gear was shredded and utterly destroyed on the ground at my feet, yet I felt no remorse. I was naked, yet I felt no cold or chill. I looked at my hands, and saw the long limber fingers of a tree wave before my eyes. I touched my torso and felt the braided weave of my wooden chest. I looked down and saw the ground meters and meters away from me, yet I felt no change in stature. I was myself, yet I was no longer the man I was.
I was another watcher, to observe the staff, and forces of the universe act upon it, for all the long ages of the world yet standing before me. I thought my loss was complete, but now I understood it was just the beginning. My loss was something to birth something new and to make me a greater thing than I was before.
I was given purpose. I am purpose.
I am.