The Osmotic Path: Surrounded by Enemies

This was, then, the airport. Addis Ababa. Someone just in from London, the West End, Soho. Where he had been so many years before. The Thai contingent had been and gone. The Americans were coming. Others had been pissed right off. All this and nothing, our lives are a mist and then we are gone, as the Stoics said. 

He was both captured and free, dwelling in the flesh, there, here, everywhere at once, profoundly moved, fascinated by the organic sensation, captured in the flesh, and then they moved on, and left their trails, and were all encompassing. 

And on the broader plane, at a larger scale, this transgression, the transgression that had been perpetrated upon us all, did not fade, as the perpetrators wished, did not deceive the masses, as they had worked so hard to do, and this transgression, the evil in the land, it simmered, that was the wrong word, it lay there in the ether like an evil fog hanging low in the valley, across us all, in naked light, plain sight, was as if unencumbered, as if the truth would out, as if the evil would be exposed. 

And in a flash it was all gone. They reverted back to an agrarian society. The evil that had stalked the masses, the billions, literally billions, out of all scale to the past transgressions, which had numbered only in their millions, now this evil was perpetrated at scale, could reek no common understanding, could not be absolved, and lay there, in that low valley planet wide, and they said, clearly and easily: Vengeance is mine.

These things, these strange things, this evil with which they had all wrestled, so great the carnage, so great the outrage it had become impossible to comprehend, how humans, this species, could do these things to each other. 

Well that was a mystery, greater than the spirits who had always been here and always would, until the planet itself fell into the sun, and the evolution of intelligence took us all on a different path. Be careful. The humans and the gods intertwined; and those who sought power, it would kill them. Simple as that.