Mad Gods - Predatory Ethics: Book I by Athanasios

behind
him. Kosta was very careful. He didn’t want anybody else to know about the
resurrection of the Royal Library. He was absolutely sure that no living person
knew of the lost entrance, let alone its exact location, but was prudent,
nonetheless.
    He stood for a moment, and snuffed out the light on
his helmet. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he sensed phalanxes of shelves,
with heaps of scrolls and leather-bound vellum, leafed volumes and rows,
stretching past perception. He sensed the vast breadth of storehouse; its edges
stretched for hundreds of feet to his left, right and before him. Every other
library and archive that Kosta had visited— private, secret, rare or
unique — was now forgotten. Some of those places had contained rare
volumes on forbidden subjects and lore, which would’ve damned or maddened lesser
men, yet there he stood, sensing pregnant danger in this dark. All other past
dangers paled in comparison to that which he now felt. This danger was latent,
rolled up in parchment, bound in vellum or forgotten pelt. The dark, itself, or
the reading of these words, freed them, allowing them to coalesce into their
most vicious possibilities.
    Their danger lay in their essence, what they were
— lies. Lies were valuable. The best lies were able to stand the test of
time and weren’t measured in black and white, fact and fiction. Rather, they
became society, respected thought, accepted dogma. If enough people believe
these lies long enough and hard enough, they will them to become fact. The
belief of these lies transmuted them over centuries into truths, for which
faithful millions had killed and been killed.
    Christians were told that somebody had died and three
days later, had come back to life. This was an old lie that many believed and
continue to believe. None of it was real, rather, it was the product of human
imagination — and all-powerful want and desire. This lie had been
believed and told long enough, that it became a something, without which faith
couldn’t continue. This particular belief illustrated that if something is
desired for long enough, imagination makes it real.
    In the past months Kosta had read myths that spoke
about the creation of all life. These creation stories explained that when the
cosmos was alone and there was nothing else, it wanted to breathe and
experience and, therefore, started life. It then furthered experience and went
on to touch, to eat. In time the cosmos wanted to experience more and made the
overwhelming abundance of life we know today. These myths explained that all
the diversity of life was made so the cosmos can experience itself. Nobody knew
what was before the desires for experience. The need to live became more basic
than thought. It was unquestioned. The questions came with why life existed at
all. Clerics, priests and philosophers, whose musings filled libraries, had
tried to answer with mixed results. History called them Pagans, Christians,
Luciferians, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists. It was all a matter of personal
choice. That was the essence of what Kosta had read, of all the combined lies:
desire.
    He came across many references to two copies of a
singularly unique tome, whose owners believed each was original, but was
actually a reproduction of the
Idammah-Gan Codex — a single, hand-written book. One copy was located
in the private library of a self-styled, poseur Satanist in the south of
France. The other was much harder to access. It was kept in the bowels of the
Vatican, in its Secret Archives, which spanned over thirty miles of shelves.
The Secret Archives held heretical works, by men such as Copernicus, Galileo
and the like, who were later exonerated by the light of reason and science. The
Vatican had held onto these works because in the past they were dangerous,
inflammatory and if dissipated to the population at large would damn the world.
    Most people now believe that words, ideas and written
discourse are not dangerous and would not damn