Post Modern Mythology #2
Fredrick - The Prophet
Fredrick sat alone in his cabin hidden deep within the mountainous forests where the divisions of the German and Prussian states were somewhat ambiguous.
He much preferred it this way, being alone. He found most of the chatter between his aristocratic contemporaries to be little more than idle circles drawn around fragmentary ideas left behind by the once thought wise-men who died centuries before his own fatherland ever held a proper name. Even those forefathers closer to him in the linear stretches of time, the one’s responsible for divining conceptual metaphysics out of infancy, seeking out that ever pervasive — capital Truth — fell victim to their own manifested ouroboros.
Yes, Fredrick much preferred his solitude. Rather than groan his way through the sort of repetitive rabble prolonged by his generation’s materialism and subtly growing nihilistic angst.
The world was changing rapidly, alien from what he knew as a boy. Machines were reaching higher aptitudes, and performing the sort of labors in hours that would take a hundred men weeks to complete. Factories produced. Trains hauled. Riches grew. Means of murder becoming more and more effective. And in between it all, there was a fading sense of something lost.
Something the world had collectively forgotten.
Throughout his life, Fredrick would often climb to the highest peak he could find, looking out at the expanse his eyes could perceive, and gaze in wonder whilst challenging truths the whole world took for granted. His only friends were that of an eagle and a serpent that would occasionally join him atop these mountains. The serpent taught him how to think, and the eagle taught him how to fly. Like a tightrope walker, he would balance himself between these two dichotomous worlds, searching deeper within reaches of himself for the ever evasive and illusive Truth.
And whenever it seemed within his grasp, it would turn to sand and slip between his fingers.
Alone he sat on this moonless night. His cabin lit only by the waning candle-flame sitting on his wooden corner-desk.
He was tired, fed up with the world’s pageantry of half-hearted glamour and regurgitated intellect. A sickening affair between pompous optimism and dire lethargy.
The candle flickered, and the cabin’s room grew dark.
He went where he always did when the torment of his own genius ruled his thoughts. Receding into the dark and vast reaches of his own mind, where the seduction of Truth always lured him.
Images began to appear.
Swirling about.
Wiggling and dancing.
Incoherent and intangible.
Only his will ensured lucidity.
And vivaciousness was rendered.
Fredrick saw an old and decrepit man sitting on a throne made of the purest gold. His face was long, and his thinning ashen beard poorly hid his sunken cheeks. A tattered and gray cloak draped in a baggy fashion around the old man’s emaciated frame. Boney fingers were curled around the throne’s armrests. A weak grip, clinging to the golden chair as if it were life itself.
He was starving. For what, Fredrick did not know.
Around the old man’s throne was a crumbling castle of gothic stone and rusted iron bars. Remnants of ages-old steeples were strung throughout the court, broken and smashed by their own weight when they fell from their high reaching turrets. The roof was gone and the skies were scourged black and brown, choked by a smog produced by some unseen force.
There was a sound coming from outside that Fredrick could not see. It was loud and grotesque. Full of knocking’s and clanging’s and battering’s, metal scrapping metal in unnatural and irregular patterns.
The old man’s decaying body began to wither even more as the intrusive sounds grew nearer. His eyes were sunken black, and his lips receded into his mouth, baring ugly and jagged teeth. His fingers bent in manners which they ought not while wisps of his ashy hair fell to the floor, leaving behind only a few pitiful and ever thinning strands.
Fredrick pressed his hand to his mouth as he gasped.
“Who goes there?” The old man tried to sit up straight, but crumpled back into a waning slouch. He reached a blind hand out and felt around the dusty air in front of him.
Fredrick didn’t speak, terrified as to what sort of horrors were in store for him if he did.
“Do not hide from me, my son. I know you are there.” The old man shifted uneasily, his bones creaking under his own weight. Those sunken black eyes scanning the room with an eerie futility.
“I am in search of Truth and my heart and mind have brought me here,” Fredrick finally said.
“Truth?” The old man sat up a little before faltering back against the throne. “Yes, Truth.” He stroked his beard as long strands of hair freed themselves from his sickly chin. “There is much to be considered with Truth.”
“Who are you?” There was a shakiness to Fredrick’s voice.
“Do you not recognize me, and my promised kingdom?” The old man gestured to the crumbling architecture around him. “I am the beginning and the end.” His voice echoed off the walls of the castle with a strange and crippled omniscience. “I am Alpha and Omega. Father of man and scribe of eternity.” The old man wheezed and coughed violently, kicking up the soot around him. “I am He who is Lord.”
The mechanized sounds outside grew closer, shaking the floor beneath Fredrick’s feet. Gravel and loose debris tumbled to the floor from the high and disfigured walls. Grinding metal on metal. Smoke streaming from unseen stacks of whatever force produced those haunting sounds.
“Harmony,” the old man began “has come to an end, dear Fredrick. Only sulfur awaits.” He coughed and hacked, his body withering ever further, barely resembling a man at all.
The disquiet roared.
The walls began to sway and falter.
“What is this sound? What spirit yields this fright?” Fredrick called out to the old man.
Whole blocks of stone tumbled and crashed. The walls showed signs of imminent collapse.
The old man shuttered awake, having dozed off, fatigued. “You did this!” He pointed a long crooked finger at Fredrick. “You’ve become fearless and will destroy yourselves!” His body trembled and jaw hung open between words.
“I’ve only come for Truth!”
The walls swayed under blasts of wind, sweeping particulates of rubble around the two men.
Fog horns cried out from all directions.
“What would you have me do?" Fredrick shouted through the whirlwind. “What is fear but an opium? What is fear but a contradiction of the will to power?
“Power…” The old man’s breaths were heavy and few. “…is now man’s burden to bear.”
The walls around them collapsed inward, tumbling down like an avalanche. What was left of the sky was blackened out by the resounding smoke. Fredrick covered his head while his ears were deafened by the tumultuous cry of mechanization. Metal grinding against metal overlain with bellowing blasts of horns and trumpets alike. A hurried sense of imminence.
The old man disappeared behind the clouds of soot, ash, and debris.
The noise quieted, and the turmoil ceased.
When Fredrick looked up, there was only an empty abyss.
A void of absolute darkness.
And a vacant throne.
With no king to sit upon it.
The candle upon his desk flickered from the opposite corner of the cabin. The image of that empty throne lingering in the reflection of Fredrick’s left eye.
He looked over to his desk, where his pen called out to him.
“Write it!” the pen demanded.
Fredrick didn’t move.
“It must be said!” the pen insisted.
Fredrick stood from his chair, walking upon wobbly legs across the wooden floor to his desk.
He took up the pen, his hand still shaking, echoes of the old man’s words and the mechanized fury still ringing in his ears, and dabbed it the inkwell.
“Write it!” the pen repeated.
His hand moved itself, as if possessed by something other than he. Inscribing only eight words:
God is dead. And we have killed him.
I hope you enjoyed this second part of Post-Modern Mythology! Join me for the next chapter aptly named - The Beast of Cairo
If you’re interested in delving into more context regarding this series, consider checking my Introduction to Post-Modern Mythology, or the preceding Part One.
Also check out my first novel Chapel Perilous, now available in paperback and Kindle Unlimited.
Much Love and Happy Holidays.
-B