Author: Alastair Millar
The cold wind, persistent further down, had died away. Now the silence was so intense that the man could hear his footfalls on the sandy soil. He was almost where he needed to be.
The hairs on his arms stood up as he made his way higher. Something like magic was palpable in the air. The landscape was not brooding, but waiting to be reawakened, holding its breath in expectation of life restored. What rites had taken place up here, he wondered, to cast their memories down the future so? Blood offerings? Human sacrifice? Bacchanals? Ignorant and fumbling, those long-dead priests could never have understood what they had found, or what it meant; but the man knew. Decades of hyperphysics research had shown him what was possible; he had persisted despite the sneers and disbelief of colleagues, and the laughter of peers. It no longer mattered. Years of more arcane and esoteric investigations had finally led him here, to this unique Place, sweating up the slope at the equinox.
The path ended beneath the peak, opening onto a flat, grassy ledge. Away to his right was a vast view across the plains, the plastisteel towers and ceramcrete spires of the nearest City just visible on the far horizon. To his left, some ten metres above him, a carved lintel and two large uprights framed a dark void – the entrance he sought. Climbing carved stone steps scaled to something slightly more than human, he approached the dark profundity of the beehive tomb lurking in the heart of the great hill.
He had expected to be chilled by the air within, and marvelled when the antechamber was warmer than the encroaching winter outside. The light from the doorway was just enough to show him the way forward – but as he stepped into the inner chamber, it failed completely. How else? he thought. Here, most of all, there could be no distractions, no sensory inputs to deceive and influence the pilgrim. He wondered how many had come before him, seeking to know the future, to escape the Earthly, or to speak with their gods. He wondered how many had succeeded.
Sitting cross legged in the dark, he chanted sounds of his own invention designed to pierce the veil. After an infinity, knowledge seeped out of the walls and crept into his consciousness. He had been born for this, he realised. Chance and luck were illusions; the paths of things, of people, of other beings, were charted by the Great Consciousness of the universe itself.
Hours later, exhausted, he reached a perfect resonance and balance, and felt himself swept up. He would never be seen in this world again, but as he had predicted, Others beyond his imagining were waiting for him. Welcoming him to their company as an ambassador for his species, they closed the hard-found Way behind him, and his real education began.