Neytopia › Part 1: Dawn › Chapter 9

Ziggurats and fire gods

She hid from the world in a mansion on a small island. There she realized that there really aren’t that many things to do in life. She didn’t need food nor money, she didn’t have any hobbies, and she barely tolerated reading.

Some people can’t retire. They think they can, but they can’t so they end up restlessly miserable. Usually retirement comes when death is near. But she couldn’t die. So after a couple years of rest she planned her return. Everyone deserves a second chance. Besides, there was plenty of world left to conquer, and who better to do it than her?

So she sailed to the northern continent. There she looked for people who claimed to be powerful and soon reached the capital of a small independent state. She asked its citizens for directions to their highest authority. The beggars told her that the king was a puppet on a string controlled by the high priest.

The capital was built with an ivory white stone carved out of nearby mountains. It rested on the southern end of the northern continent, separated from the southern continent by the Middle sea. The local religion was based on the idea that everything was fire. Their god was fire, stuff like wood was fire, water was fire, evenfire was fire. Kind of stupid and far-fetched if we’re being honest.

Stick to the story, impartial narrator.

Anyway, these simplistic religions disgusted her. She thought they were little more than superstition, unlike her “real” ideologies. The church taxed one quarter of the peasants income, and used that revenue to build ever-greater temples and buy fine products from merchants for the priests.

She explained to poor people that there were other ways to live. She told them that the high priest (the head of the church) was only a madman who had been lying to them and she promised to prove her accusations:

When I show you the truth, you will follow me, obey me without question. Truth will set you free!

After only a few days of preaching to the masses she had surrounded herself with beggars, drunkards, criminals, idol peddlers and every kind of degenerate she could find. But when she talked to the young and beautiful citizens, oh, that’s when she crossed the line. The priests branded her as a “destructive and heretical element which should be handled like a plague”.

She and her followers had to go into hiding for months until she was sold to the authorities by one of her shoeless beggars for a few silver coins. The beggar went on to build a shoe company with that money, and soon a chain of shoe shops. But that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, by the time of her arrest, everyone in the capital knew her and her crazy ideas. She was brought in chains to the center of the fire temple’s patio, a great semicircle of stone which had immense stairs that led to the temple. Only she realized the irony that the semicircle symbology was originally hers: it was the shape of the shining Sun over the horizon, which happens at dawn.

The temple proper was an ancient ziggurat, two-hundred and fifty-six meters tall. It had been entirely sculpted on a titanic chunk of land that stretched out from the continent to the sea. From their ziggurat, the priests accused her of crimes against the state and the fire god and sentenced her to death by… it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Fire.

The streets and balconies were packed. The whole city was there to watch. When asked to say her final words, she looked at the audience and said,

I will come with the first rays of dawn, and when I do, this land will be mine.

Then the high priest set her on fire and she burned until there were only her ashes left. Everyone stood there doubting, wondering, fearing, waiting for something to happen. But after the fires died down, most believed she had been just another deranged martyr of a lost cause. She, of course, had known all along where she was headed; she knew the strongest proof is the one that’s paid in blood. Some walked on hot coals to prove their faith. She knew it was much better if the faith came out of the fire itself.

She had committed suicide through political terrorism, and any other interpretation would be missing the point. But there was something else behind her desire to burn. She wanted to feel the pain so she could attone for all the evil she had done, specially to the skeptic man. At first she had thought it would keep him around, but it turned out it was only a pointless and painful torture. Yes, she was riddled with guilt, the very guilt she had crafted for men to stop them from being cruel to one another.

By dawn, sixteen disciples were still kneeling at a safe distance away from her charred corpse, waiting for her return. The rest of the citizens just passed by, ignoring her.

The day was heavily clouded, with sparse rain falling over the ocean behind the temple. Around noon, the clouds left an opening just big enough to let some rays to grace her. She exploded in a flash of light. The explosion cracked the base of the ziggurat and cleared every cloud, leaving a clear blue sky and a radiant sun. Without saying a word, she looked to the temple.

She rushed to the crack in the floor and placed her hands inside. The priests stood at the balconies and stairs of their temple, alerted by the tremors. They screamed at her “demon”, “evil”, “whore”. But she ignored them, keeping her hands on the crack. The priests watched in horror as the crack spread through the temple’s foundation. They begged her to stop in the name of their god, then they threatened to burn her in the eternal lake of fire if she did not stop.

The priests tried to escape their ziggurat, but the stairs were too large. A loud explosion and the ziggurat began to slide toward the sea until it crashed against the waters. The great wave created by the impact drowned away their screams and the sea engulfed that small fragment of the past.