Heaven rejects those testimonies the stones cannot recall
As with the ark of the covenant, swift death struck all who dared tread these sands. This desert protected no joshua trees, sand worms, nor roadrunners. Occasionally its dunes tumbled. Ill-fated seeds caught in its breeze baked upon falling to their misfortune. Clouds who loosed their waters above that land missed their outpourings ever rising back as steam.
The prince established his abode in that remote wasteland. This world belonged to him by cosmic rights, and all who traversed the greener parts belonged to his dominion. The deadly sands of the surrounding desert kept his mortal subjects from seeking audience at his footstool.
One day, for the first time in history, a man ventured upon that stretch of earth and survived. Life trespassed upon the prince’s barren sand-sea and marched toward the palace on foot.
After ten days had passed, the prince observed signs of the man’s slow deterioration. Though resilient before the elements, the man’s flesh shrunk with hunger. He trudged onward, toward the wasteland’s circumcenter, without food or water supplies, like the monks of legend, extracting all material sustenance from the dry air. His skin clung to ribs jutting out from his spine. Despite this frailty, the man’s feet remained unscorched from the burning sand below him. After another one month’s trek, the man stood outside the palace.
The prince beheld the man. “Refresh yourself, sir,” he exhorted.
The man called back to him, “My journey could not have been as tiring as tending this planet’s gardens these past million years.”
“You surely hunger,” the prince offered. “While I myself require no biomass nourishment of the sort harvested by your race, I shall have my imps divulge to a man of your perseverance the secret name of the moistest sweetloaf ever tasted.”
The man gestured his refusal.
The prince continued, “I know many secrets of this world, words of power potent from it’s geological youth. Your feet have tread its lands for only a brief blink of an eye. I guided your ancestors in their discoveries of agriculture, of fire, and of cooking. I prepared the dream that led your thousandth-great grandfather to crush millet into powder and to bake it into loaves. Your race knows bread because I taught them the bread’s truth.”
The prince whispered to a gaunt attendant, who knelt down at the man’s feet to draw letters in the sand.
“The spell for snow-white cake,” the prince explained. “I have no victuals stored away in any room of my castle. Guests here are not regular enough for that to be practical. The only supplies with which I can honor you are the kernels of language granting you that supernal knowledge to feed yourself. Speak the letters written below in your tongue, and before you shall a feast materialize.”
In silence, the man braced his stance against the harsh wind.
“You famished yourself journeying into my presence,” said the prince. “The words shared with you here, when uttered aloud, will transform the rocks before you into bread, in just the same manner how I transformed the rocks of Cro-Magnon man into ovens for baking. Over different timespans, the principle remains steadfast.”
“My people marched these sands a millennium ago,” the man pronounced. “Starving, they pleaded with you for bread. Though they had no ovens, they did not starve, for from these dead tracts of earth sprouted edible fruiting bodies, for which they thanked heaven. Our history indicates a lesson to be preserved from this episode: that the path of life is not always the path of bread.”
“Your pilgrimage demonstrated extra-human bravery,” the prince remarked, “but whatever you intend to bring before my attention should not be discussed on an empty stomach. Please, eat.”
“In his days,” the man reminisced, “my oldest friend in this world would leave open all four flaps of his tent so he could welcome strangers from any direction. To share what he had with me, he made a significant sacrifice, depleting his own bread reserves and wine stores by a noble fraction. Requiring guests to mumble your songs is not hospitality.”
“And I observe that neither have you, O crafty subject, offered your rightful sovereign any gesture of tribute.”
“I have come to relieve you of your position.”
“So, you believe yourself in possession of some authority over this world’s fate,” the prince yawned. “To parley with impudence is to demean the designs of paradise. Since the type of mind you carry needs vivid illustration, I will indulge your mistake to demonstrate a small show of my power.” The man swung his arms out to retain his balance. He no longer stood in the blistering sunlight of the boundless valley. Grey fog soaked the man’s fingertips. From atop the architectural jewel of his homeland’s largest city, gold shingles singed his soles. “Since none in history have so challenged me before, you must surely understand yourself to be the greatest of your kind. I will acknowledge your right to interfere in the governance of this world only if you demonstrate your superiority over the achievements of all your forebears. If the builders of the structure on which we now stand were not greater in their accomplishments than you are, than their tall building would be as nothing compared to your remarkable resilience. Demonstrate your greatness exceeds theirs.”
“Your regime, in violation of this system’s charter, introduced forbidden technologies,” the man hollered.
“The only beings qualified to place an injunction on my rule are immortal. Prove your immortality and I will submit as your rightful subordinate.”
“I will prove nothing,” the man asserted.
“Have these ancestors of yours, whose memory you just now invoked, not transmitted a poem for safety? If indeed you hold the authority to which you presume, then such authority must extend also to the monitoring forces charged with your defense. Those protectors surely have received their instructions to prevent your injury should you split your feet on the stones below you.”
“As prince, you guided the development of mankind, but laws of ethical conduct you did not reveal. This planet’s mortal lawgiver, who did discover the path of ethics, shared the imperfection of his humanity as well as the perfection of his discoveries.”
“O short-lived man, you know history only as your teachers saw fit to portray it. I observed it unfold firsthand. And you underestimate my hand in it.”
“I underestimate nothing. But as one who breathes this realm’s air, I bind myself to our lawgiver’s theorems, which you chose to guard against disclosure. Whereas our lawgiver chose to disclose even his own mistakes to warn us of violence against stones.”
“Pernicious arguments will not rescue you from the heights over which you’re now situated.”
“As mediums for travel go, the air ways certainly have the advantage of speed, but the earth ways constitute the more reliable route.”
The man and the prince both sank, slowly, as if weighted, into the depths of a rocky chasm, then below it, into warm darkness. As the man whispered to the encircling stones, a great earthquake shook them loose, propelling both through rivers of underground magma. After several constricted hours, an aftershock bubbled them back up through stalagmites to an air pocket dozens of kilometers to the southeast.
The man and the prince stood face-to-face inside a cave. The prince gasped for breath as he reoriented himself to his new surroundings. The man explained, “The mount below our feet now is the site of a great victory for my family. Today it becomes the site of another.”
“You have demonstrated yourself worthy to take over from me this responsibility,” the prince conceded. “I offer no further rebuttals against your accusation. I have indeed allowed the influences to which you alluded to build their own portions of this world’s foundations. I could justify to you the harmonious unity I see in my decision still, but their unwanted consequences are a matter of record. I submit— but under one condition.” The prince paused then, as if preparing his grand compromise. “Once relieved of my duties, I shall return to the stars, where opportunities for sense-experience are sparse. I will offer no further resistance to your superimposition if you send me off with a pleasant odor. Ignite the sage buds crushed at your heel for a ceremonial scent by which I may remember fondly my successes over these past million earth-years.”
The man responded, “The dignity of this world’s moral code is it’s rejection of idolatry. Henceforth will men no longer by compulsion make obeisances to the dictators of their fate, nor send forced concessions to the heavenly bodies, nor kneel without choice before their warrior kings. Mankind’s great lawgiver discerned the rectitude of constraining sacrifice only to honoring the originator.”
The prince, his offer begrudged, declined to abscond.
Warned the man, “You will arrange your affairs to afford due payment of the price your rebellion has cost.”
The prince scoffed, “When the consequences of your short lifetime finally rain judgment on your head, remember your death was brought about by your own hands.”
The man climbed down the mountain and continued on foot toward civilization.
