Microstory 684: The Quantum Darkness Begins

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This is a turning point; in the taikon, for the believers, and for Fosteans as a whole. It’s easy to forget that Sotiren Zahir did not write the taikon as prophecy. We do occasionally use that word, but we know that it can be rather misleading. He was not telling us what would happen, he was telling us what needs to happen if we are to survive them. The taikon are tests, our salvation being dependent upon our ability to succeed in them. Which means that it is entirely possible to fail, leading either to the uprising of The Liar, or a complete cessation of the taikon. This particular taikon, in fact, is one where the latter possibility is more likely than it ever has been before. It is designed to test our faith. We have been steadily gaining followers to the Light. Even before the taikon began, our numbers would show a general trend upwards. The Quantum Darkness threatens to damage that trend, and could even go so far as to diminish our numbers to their lowest in recent history. The day after the observation of the very first Daglit, all stars switched off simultaneously, as if mere lightbulbs. Literally every single star in the galaxy simply disappeared from sight. Their power was still warming their respective orbitals, and the people on them, but they could not be detected by the naked eye, or simple telescopes. Plants began to suffer from having no way to conduct photosynthesis, destroying a significant amount of the animal population almost immediately. Humans have plenty of ways to survive this in our advanced technological era, but that was never our problem. We crave the light. You’ll notice that nobody lives in the void between galaxies, and only the sickest few of us live underground, deep underwater, or otherwise cut off from daylight. Every intelligent species in the universe evolved and grew out of the light of a sun, and to lose them all at once was the worst thing we’ve ever experienced. When the Sacred Savior spoke of this in the Book of Light, it’s not that we didn’t believe him that something like this could happen, but we severely overestimated his use of metaphors. We could never dream of the possibility that we would be plunged into actual darkness everywhere. We don’t know how to save ourselves from this terrible new environment. We know only that if we don’t, we shall all surely die, or be as good as dead.