Thursday, August 10, 2017

Microstory 644: Reclaim the Sword of Assimilation

The next taikon marks the beginning of the Week in One Day. During the course of a standard twenty-hour day, ten taikon were fulfilled in succession, overlapping each other as necessary. Earlier taikon shared days with others, and more later will do the same, but this is special for being a harrowing journey involving a small number of people. The first involves the most powerful weapon known to man. Sacred Savior, Sotiren Zahir, along with his followers, first witnessed the power of the Sword of Assimilation while our ancestors were still trapped on Earth. A ruthless and charming man suddenly appeared in their midsts. With him came the Sword, as well as a handful of supposed former friends who were trying to keep him from having it. We know very little about how the Sword was created, but this mysterious visitor revealed that it comes from a different universe entirely. He was hoping to procure it for Sotiren as a gift of friendship. Having been living in advanced civilization for centuries, humans have encountered just about every phenomenon the universe has to offer. Why, our ultimate origins are sourced from another universe, so even that isn’t unusual. But we have not seen anything like what the visitor described. The other universe is right next to ours, and it follows the exact same physical laws as this one. Travel between them is, though not the easiest thing ever, quite trivial to us now. We regularly traverse the kasma when we need something from the other side, careful to avoid our oppressors of days past. Prior to the completion of any of the exodus ships that would finally take us home to this galaxy, the idea of parallel universes was even more fantastical than it is now. At least outside of a virtual simulated environment, that is. And these more distant universes sounded far more interesting than we can see here.
The visitor and Sotiren took to each other, and immediately developed an unbreakable friendship, and an unshakeable alliance. They both knew that the visitor—and newest eido—would one day be forced to continue his journey across the kasmic void, so he wanted to help while he was still around. He fought at Sotiren’s side, against his once-comrades, hoping to garner the Sword of Assimilation from them. As the eido was struggling with his former lover for the weapon, the blade slipped, impaling both her, and another man who was merely caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, the other travelers eventually escaped with the sword, taking the eido with them. None of them has been seen since. The man who was accidentally stabbed with the Sword, however, was rushed to medical treatment, and spent the next couple of weeks recovering. As if his body were waiting for him to be well enough, he one day disappeared, and didn’t reappear for another year. He spent the whole day then trying to figure out what was happening, only to find himself jumping a year once more come the stroke of midnight. He has been doing that for the last several centuries. To him, only a few years have passed since that fateful day on the field of battle. Seeing this, Sotiren realized that what the visitor had said of the Sword of Assimilation was true. It could transfer great power from one person to another. He predicted that the Sword would one day return to our universe, and that is exactly what happened. Its return heralded not only the beginning of the Week in One Day, but also specifically Eido Mateo’s return to this universe. But he came back different.

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