Ophois

"There is no end in nature, but every end is a begining; that there is always another dawn risen mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."

Circles (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson


I.

There is a patch of ground in the open desert not far from the Valley of Kings known only to those who have been banished there, never to return, where shadow is seen when all the sands around are illuminated in a blue sea of moonlight.

Medu Neter was a tomb worker on the wide channel risers filled with water from the Nile which floated the huge blocks of stone on vessels crafted precisely to each dimension, level by level, until they were firmly set in place by thick ropes of interwoven twine, cranes and levers.

More philosophical than most men of this time, two strange overseers had questioned his allegiance to the Pharaoh and his Queen, something overheard perhaps in a rare moment of exhaustion and idleness and uttered in desperation after hours of agonizing labor. He was abruptly cast out of the city to wander alone far into to the desert, for regions outside heavenly centers of civilization in the linear ancient Egyptian world were considered the land of the dead for the those that were merely common. An old camel near the end of its usefulness, wounded and nearly lame, was provided to him, and he headed westward as instructed toward the unknown meridian.

He was determined to survive; it was the only rationalization that allowed him to travel quite a distance well beyond the torch lit city. Though the sharp grains of sands shifted beneath his blistered and bloodied feet, the restless wind had fortunately been still and the desert without suffocating storms of dust.

Apart from the beast of burden whose hooves he often admired along the ordeal, his immediate thoughts and advanced reasoning were his only companions. Had he not been an obedient member of the kingdom that had functioned well during entirety of his lifetime? Was this decision by mere overseers brought to him on scrolls not unjust?

This was the time of scribes. Words spoken through the Pharaoh and his Queen given to them by gods and goddesses, recorded through symbolic hieroglyphs and brought forward to their people by their messengers were not only those of law but magic.

Should not ideas and the power of speech through the written word belong the everyone?

This was also the time before the invention of widely distributed lexicons of freedom.

The full moon reached apex. While the rest of the desert remained fully illuminated by moonlight, the outcast arrived at the crescent-shaped boundary of a vast circular shadow. In the darkness below that enmanated from above, many heaped into windswept piles, slivered bones burnished gray by the sand, others scattered near the edges where fallen from recent dehydration and hunger in tatters of flesh, he beheld an Underworld portal into which the forgotten and forlorn were drawn.

Ophois then sent forth a tempting invitation by placing the vision of an oasis within the early philosopher's sight.

Though he was physically exhausted, his wits remained keen. Medu Neter, now both silent and still, did not cross over or enter therein.








©2019 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.


[genre: satanic fiction]