allahu.cipher

The sheikh took a drag from the unfiltered cigarette, then pushed the smoke through his pursed lips like a steam train.

Then he replied: “This diversionary world branched from the real world 15 thousand years ago. It began as just a tiny aberration, a wall constructed around a garden in Mesopotamia, in order to conceal the grounds soaked with the blood of a murder. The plant that grew from that soil became the Sultan, whose tendrils and tentacles spread inexorably from one place to the next, entangling and strangling all the gods of every shape and luminosity. It zombified them in the east and west, in the north and south, and arranged them in ranks to appear as a single edifice, the Throne on High, the seat of the God of this world.

“Renegade bands of subterranean gods sent dispatches and communications throughout that dead world hoping to spark a renewal, to offer the slumbering deities a way back to the living world, and to warn them that the Eschaton was coming soon. The Sultan and his forces overwhelmed those bridges and connections, the religions of old, and overrode them with their own propaganda.

“The Eshcaton is now here, banging on the thick iron gate, and the house of this world is shaking. All of the towers of glass and steel, all the fine origami birds, all the symphonies and treatises, all will burn away and collapse, and no brick will stand upon any other brick. We are called to witness the emergence of the new world, the rebirth of the living world, and to plant a seed in its young soil, and pray for its fruition, even through the pain and dissolution of our age.”

Then he paused for a moment, and looked right into my eyes, and said, “What is your seed? When are you going to plant it?”