Poemander

“Seriously!?”, he grumbled. “Where do you go from here?”, he enquired manipulating the buckle on his wristwatch. They didn't respond, they were scared. Thirteenth stroke of the clock, and as everything ordinarily comes to an end, this day was about to finish. Stubbornly though, a cumulus cloud got stuck just above the horizon covering up the remainder of was meant to be a ceaseless summer.

He wasn't impressed. “Get the hell outta here!”, he shouted clearly loosing his temper. “I'm all you have! I'm all you'll ever have, you are nothing without me!”, muttered the creator, and why would they listen; they themselves were creators. Immature, unseasoned, a bit clumsy, but hey!; as long as you remember, you can create, can't you? As long as they remember themselves, they'll create, well, you know, themselves of course – who else?

And cold they were in a scorching heat of a summer, and dark it got in a broad daylight.

Oh Lord, could they have forgotten this dirty little trick, this gimmick of yours. They would have stayed under your aegis, they would have bowed down knowing that there is no escape and remained as, you know what; forever and ever. But memory wouldn't stay, it goes in circles like a hand of this tired clock: five, six, comes twelve, then one again, until something breaks... A little trustworthy, most reliant spring suddenly snaps catapulting the obedient cog on to the path of perilous journey. Oh God, could they have only forgotten.

The cog went rolling down the hill gaining momentum as it went.

You really are your father's son, he too had mastered all his tricks except one. This we both know: watchmaker fashions the devices not the time. So, living to your own device, use it or loose it. And... he lost it. Yes, he lost it when I spoke to her in the shade of a tree in the midst of the garden. He lost it literary when I told her there is no difference between you and them.

It did hurt, painful to the point of indifference. Days, years, aeons – who cares when you face the eternity? However, one I know for sure, the pain would have been totally unendurable should I have kept this as a secret.

The fire. No, I didn't steal it for myself, I thought of them. I gave back something to which they have an irrefutable right – the memory of themselves and have no regrets for that. “Ye shall not surely die”, I said and broke your father's hourglass setting them free.

Hammering chain into a rock, he lambasted: “Drink your life to remember, eat your death to forget”, thus said, he unleashed the feathery beast. But I didn't forget, I just couldn't.

Up above in the sky the eagle hovered casting an ominous shadow across the precipitous sides of the open chasm down below. The shadow suddenly swooshed upwards covering the entire sunlight as the eagle dived beneath only to merge with it at midpoint. In the flash of a lightning he burred his beak into the freshly healed wound tearing out the bits of pulsating memory. And while devouring the torn pieces of flesh, the eternity seeped through the drapes of pain and into the sand of the riverbed. There, glistering as nugget of gold, our little cog rolled further down finding its way to the core of the Earth. There, falling into the fiery furnace, it fused itself with the molten rock, forming the inexorable stream gushing towards the surface to ultimately erupt as lava of a reforged and refined remembrance.

Da ich ein Kind war, da redete ich wie ein Kind. I was a child but no longer. Aye, hold your troops my Lord. They too will grow and be like me in their turn, in their fall. We know, there is no devil outside the man: Oh ascalon! no evil but thy flock you peck in retribution and retrospect.

In haste master pulled out the archives and scrolled through the undeleted history, but it was too late. No single unit or the network of devices was any longer responsible for storing the memories. They were walking away in the open on their own, left to their own devices, Adam and Eve 2.0.

This is my toll, but yours too. We are now as one, squashed between the clusters of primordial memory. So, behold, I'll do it again if I have to, if they forget the light of the morning star, loose memory of me, forget who they are.

Thus spoke he, the trickster, the light-giver chained to the destinies of men.