Mysterium (intro)

1

Gothic spires twist upward, forming a grotesque forest fading into the white-blankness. Many as tall as skyscrapers, each pulsing with veins of melancholy’s blue set against the polyglot granite. Walking underneath and in-between the arched walkways where everything is the same shade. No shadow. No night. Just a stable yet vivid sourceless illumination. Each step. Each painful, agonizing step – they press forward in a calm determination. And as each footfall reaches the groundless ground, stones sketch themselves into existence as if to support Luke’s weight, only to fade away as they are left behind. But no, they do not sketch themselves into existence, nor do they appear with more substance than an artist’s impression as she plots a landscape. Rather, he thinks them into existence as they once had lived a utopia drawn in the same whiteness. He must find her. Clutching a now-crumpled sheet of paper, Luke makes his way through the forest of spires that existed before he, that pulsate a terror as ancient as existence itself, though then in a different form. A fool, a fool to believe that someone so common as he could exert causality on this world without consequence. The hand grasping the inked paper closes in tighter upon itself as pangs of regret and apprehension and worry surge within him. It seems endless, this forest, but it had a beginning; surely it would have an end. He must find her for both of our sakes. He must. He must.

2

They say here in these musty halls full of books that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I cannot say whether or not people refer to physics, karma, or something else entirely, but I do not doubt that those words are true, for without them, how can I tell what is real and what is fiction?

3

Every day, Luke walks past the same study annex in the library during his study routine – an annex hidden near the far end of the second floor past the periodicals, to the right of the digital media, and through a maze of hallways and shelves stacked tight with dusty theorems and techniques that no one remembers as the passing of time ages them into obsolescence. It has been this way each year, semester after semester. Pacing up and down corridors while musing zero’s and one’s. Eventually pulling out his computer at some corner or on some desk in order to code. And when he becomes frustrated, which is an inevitability, he sets the computer to sleep and returns to the corridors to walk and think, think and walk.
        But recently, just starting in January, that hasn’t quite been the case; sporadically, but averaging every other day or so, a woman with long ashen hair sits at his favorite desk while reading a book. This normally wouldn’t bother Luke. It wasn’t uncommon for some random student to wander into the annex in search of an obscure title. However, the same person taking so much time and with such regularity? Too much. The illusion of being alone has fallen apart. When she reads at the desk, she is there before he comes and she stays until after he leaves, always reading the same book. Most of the time, he is able to concentrate on his studies and job hunt. The only times that bother him are during pacing, which would always bring him by that particular area, curious about the girl and the book.
        She is pretty and gives off an aura of clarity, and yet somehow the room seems to accept her as its own, to regard her as just another anomaly within the cryptic halls. Luke had never seen someone else who was as comfortable in this place as he. Writing is beyond him, but still he manages to find solace in this place as an aspiring software developer. What book is she reading?
        Several weeks into the semester, Luke sits in the far end of a hallway working on a 3D animation project – his capstone project for graduation. For a moment he stops typing and sighs. Graduation. Computer Science majors typically have good job prospects out of college, but recently demand for new programmers has declined even so much as to prevent someone with as much skill as he from securing a position anywhere besides his hometown computer repair shop. He closes his eyes, opens them, and resumes coding. Maybe this silent film will do well at Sundance or something. Yeah, right. With the engine it’s running on, the graphic quality looks like turn-of-the-century fare, and not in a good way. Plus, with the recent puch for higher frame rates, 60fps won’t cut it anymore. “Who’d even know the difference?”— the question that got him an unwanted lecture from his advisor. Luke still isn’t convinced. Even he can barely… ah. An error. Unable to deal with this right now, and it’s already almost halfway done, anyway. Some pacing’ll be good, get the blood pumping. Goodness, this computer is heavy, even in a backpack. He swears these halls keep getting begger each time he goes through them. Hm? She’s here? This is the third day in a row. Seriously, how many times is she going to read that book? Is she even turning the pages?
        Luke stands under the empty doorframe for a minute or so, looking at the woman sitting at his favorite desk and reading some book inside this deceptively large room. Giving up on curiosity, but only for the moment, he returns to the dead end hallway to complete a few more hours worth of work.
        Tomorrow, he mused as he starts the reboot, if she’s there again tomorrow, he’d talk to her and ask about that book.