Revolving Door

Being (A Preface)

'The universes spin in the flow of the Light—the Light of being that created all that is, the ether in which all possible universes float, and of which they are made.

'At the centre of this carousel of Light lies a knot, binding the far reaches of existence together. As reality grows ever more complex, it also becomes dangerously strained, threatening to be destroyed at any moment in a cataclysmic rending of space and time. Only these bindings prevent such a cataclysm from ever coming to be.

'As time progresses towards infinity, so too does the knot grow tauter, demanding ever greater tenacity to maintain. While it once hung suspended among atoms in space, it eventually began to anchor itself to rocks, then to the first cellular life in the oceans, and when thought and autonomy in the form of nervous systems first emerged, the knot became entangled in them, as if their existence exerted some exceptional force: perhaps the force by which they began to defy the trajectories of determinism.

'On a fateful day in the ancient past, before all known record, the knot clove for the first time to a new kind of entity—a consciousness, a being, one who perceived itself as apart from the material world. This being happened to be its first human bearer.

'Thus began a disconnected lineage of bearers of the knot—one that would span thousands of millennia.

'The identities of the earliest knot-bearers are all but lost to time, but we know the names of later ones from written record. In every dynasty it crossed, this invisible heirloom drew awe and dread. Every bearer was revered above all others, like a god almost, and guarded jealously by their most loyal. Some coveted it for their own, forcibly becoming its new bearer through intimidation or deception.

'But in all the millennia it has been taken and given and stolen, not one bearer of the knot has ever truly loved their role. For should the knot be loosened, then all of existence would at once be rent to pieces. The bearer becomes reality's custodian—reality incarnate, even. If they were to die, then existence would die with them.

'Much to the fortune of all individuals who treasure existence, this precarious arrangement is not the sole thing holding the universe in a stable form: around the knot, eight vortices—the cores of the universe—draw Light into themselves and synthesise it to ever newer forms, easing its internal forces.

'Perhaps they might delay the destruction of the system if the knot ever comes undone: no one dares kill a knot-bearer to find out.'

— Introductory chapter of the Scripture of the Light, author unknown