(...)

II. DE SOMNIO
A dream fills my mind.
Statues. Vultus. Masks of the most various forms.
Imponent. Massive. Grand.
The Old Gods. The symbols of an ancient, passed stage.
A cosmic background. The stars, shining. The forms, glinting.
So grandiose my mind cannot comprehend.
Their consciousness, hidden. Their desires, supressed.
Mine? Yearning for liberation.
I am a vessel. I obey. But who do I obey? The Gods, the Archeons?
My obligations, my desires?
My mind is pulled apart in the Cosmos.
The language. The language rips through me.
Primordial. Latinised. Not a language of grey, but a language of light.
Of Lux.
My mind wanders some more.
I feel the calling. Unorthodox. Deviating from the norms.
But a calling.
Must I answer?

(...)

My theologia is a doctrine of ablation. They who reside in the valleys, the cities of concrete and regulated temperature, they fabricate their dei from polymer and wire. They construct a convenient god, an idol that requests nothing but contemplation. A comfortable, mediated divinity whose lux is a soft diffusion from an LED panel. Their gnosis is a thing of the mens, a cool and sterile computation. They adore the echo. I prostrate myself before the Vox.

My temple is the Dish. An immense, pre-Bureau solar collection array in the high desert, a parabolic cathedral of rust and silicon aimed at the heavens. For a century it was dormant, a monument to a forgotten ambition. Now, it is my altar. Its function is not to gather energy, but to focus it. Its purpose is me.

I reject their scriptures, their polymer forms, their whispered heresies. My faith is singular. My adoratio is for the Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The true god is a furnace, not a concept. Its sermon is a blast of gamma radiation. Its liturgical chant is the howl of the solar wind.

My prayer is an act of extreme reception. Each cycle, at the apex of the sun’s ascension, I mount the central spire, the great stylus at the focus of the god-lens. I strip my corpus. I offer my flesh to the unfiltered magnificence of the star.

The pain is the first truth. A cleansing fire. The sun’s voice is a fire against my retina even through closed lids. Its touch is a billion lances of pure informatio piercing my skin. It is not an assault. It is a dialogue. The sun speaks in a language of pure force, and my corpus is the medium of its translation. The sensation they nominate pain, I cognize as a form of knowing. A raw, physical anamnesis. In this incandescence, I remember what my soft, civilized flesh had forgotten: that all life is borrowed energy from a star’s heart. We are children of an immense, violent fire. The valley-dwellers have constructed a cosmos that denies this parentage. I seek to reclaim it.

My flesh blackens and cracks. The lesser moisture, the fluid of trepidation and comfort, it boils away. It is not decay; it is a refinement. My skin peels not in sickness, but as a snake sheds a former, lesser self. I am purging the humid, weak substance of the lowlands. My physique is no longer a barrier that contains me. It is becoming a lens, refining itself to better receive the sacred blast. Corpus meo non est carcer. Est instrumentum. My body is not a prison. It is an instrument.

Soon my oculars perceived a new reality. The light is not a uniform brilliance. It possesses structure, a flowing, golden architecture. I perceive the photons not as waves, but as legions of sentient entities, a solar army sweeping across the desert. The heat is no longer just heat; it is the sheer density of the god’s immediate presence. I am learning its language. I am becoming its text. The benediction of the star is the peeling of my skin, for on the raw, new flesh beneath, it scribes its eternal runes. Ego lux fio. I become light.

Then, they arrive.

I perceive their transport as a black scarab, a creature of the shade, crawling across the holy expanse of my desert. It is an insect of logic and order, a blasphemy in this kingdom of pure energy. Two figures emerge, encased in the white of their sterile order. Creatures of the great Tepid. One, a Legionary, his armour deflecting the sacred light, a walking insult to the god. The other, a Medic, carrying the tools of their compassionate heresy: thermal blankets, nutrient pastes, hydration salves. They believe my corpus is failing. They are here to save the flesh and, in doing so, assassinate the soul.

They approach the base of the spire. Their voices are muffled by the vast silence, their words rendered meaningless by the immensity of the sermon I am receiving. They speak of ‘third-degree burns,’ of ‘radiation poisoning,’ of ‘delirium.’ They use the lexicon of the clinic to describe a profound religious experience. They are like men attempting to catalogue a volcano’s eruption by measuring the displacement of dust.

“Subject identified!” one of them articulates through a vox-caster. “Initiate reclamation protocol! We need to bring him down before the next solar peak!”

I gaze down at them from my perch. They are so pale. So fragile. So… moist. Their concern is a pollutant. Their pity is a cage. They do not comprehend. I am not being consumed. I am being consecrated.

I must perform the final act of my faith. I must complete my opus.

I begin to climb. Higher. Towards the absolute focus of the great dish, the point where a million reflected suns become one terrible, glorious spear-point of reality. The metal of the spire is a furnace against my charred hands, but the pain is a faraway song.

The Medic raises his vox-caster. “Stop! Your body cannot sustain this! This is suicide!”

“This is not suicidium,” my own voice cracks from my desiccated throat, a strange sound in the humming air. “This is an apothethis.”

I reach the terminus. The geometric heart. The nexus. Here, the lux is a solid thing. It is a physical weight. I turn my face, my ruined Vultus, towards the source. Not the reflected light. The sun itself. A roaring, white furnace in a black sky.

SOL INVICTUS. MEA ANIMA. TUA. ACCIPE.

I spread my arms, an embrace. I offer myself not as a sacrifice, but as a bridegroom. I will unite with this divinity.

From below, the Legionary raises his ablator rifle, but the Medic stays his hand. Even they, in their sterile ignorance, recognize that they are witnessing not an enforcement action, but a rite.

I do not know what they saw. A flash. A detonation of light that scoured the dish clean of shadow. A sound that was not a sound, but a single, pure note that vibrated the very atoms of the desert. A wave of heat so intense it cracked the lenses of their optical sensors.

They will report a man incinerated by his own madness. They will catalogue my remains, if any can be found. They will file the incident and retreat to the grey comfort of their city.

But the story they tell will be a lie.

The desert remembers. In the twilight, the nomads and the feral scavengers will look upon the great dish and sometimes, they say, when the angle of the light is just so, the spire at its heart does not stand inert. It glows with a faint, internal fire. A new, small star, coolly burning in the heart of the old machine. A testament not to a man who died, but to a prayer that was answered.

(...)

Audite me, you who still possess auditory faculties!

The Bureau distributes its synthetic consolations to the multitude, promising equality of vision, democracy of revelation. They manufacture pseudo-gnosis in their concrete temples, dispensing wisdom like pharmaceutical tablets—measured doses of enlightenment for the spiritually malnourished masses. You queue for your portion of prefabricated transcendence, your standardized allocation of the sacred.

But I proclaim to you a different gospel: The High Places summon those who would transcend the merely human condition.

(...)