The eternal journey

By EDGARS AUZIŅŠ

What is destiny? Does it influence a person's life? Is there a mystical predestination or do we make our own choices? Perhaps death is only the beginning of the journey? Alexei Granetsky, a correspondent for a Moscow newspaper, never asked himself these questions. He didn't appreciate what he had and suddenly lost everything. Now he is a lonely Wanderer, lost in the labyrinths of space-time. Around him is the cruel world of the distant future. A world where the oldest forces of the universe have awakened, and the development of civilization has reversed. A world on the brink of destruction. Is Alexei destined to see the sunset of the human race? Will he manage to survive, unravel the mystery of his rebirth and find his way home?

• Language: English
• Publisher: EDGARS AUZINS
• Release date: Jul 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227392787

EDGARS AUZIŅŠ

Dzimis 1989. gada 22. decembrī. Absolvējis Rīgas Juridisko koledžu. Profesijā nav strādājis, bet apguvis programmēšanas prasmes un pašlaik ar to nodarbojas. Kopš 2022. gada ir personīgā uzņēmuma vadītājs, kas nodarbojas ar transporta pārvadājumiem, kā arī programmēšanu. Dzīvnieku, īpaši suņu, mīļotājs. Born 22 December 1989. Graduated from Riga College of Law. Has not worked in the profession, but has acquired programming skills and is currently working in it. Since 2022 he has been the CEO of his own company, which deals with transport transport as well as programming. Lover of animals, especially dogs.

Book preview

The eternal journey

EDGARS AUZIŅŠ

Published by EDGARS AUZIŅŠ, 2024.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

THE ETERNAL JOURNEY

First edition. July 3, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 EDGARS AUZIŅŠ.

Written by EDGARS AUZIŅŠ.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

REBIRTH

RUNNING IN A CIRCLE

NODE POINT

MOMENT OF TRUTH

SPRINGBOARD JUMP

ATTENTION! DANGER! | AUTOMATIC SELF-DESTRUCTION OF AN OBJECT | USE ONLY AT 0-16/2

FIRST STAGE

STOP

CROSSROADS OF DESTINY

CROSS OVER THE WORLD

WIND SHUT

Traveler, listen to the voice of conscience, | for ancient forces are looking into your soul | through the true mirror of times!

FEAR THE FULL MOON

By giving to me, you are giving to Jesus!

SNARE

COLLAPSE

PASS (Instead of an epilogue)

REBIRTH

There , high — there is no one

It's as lonely there as it is here

Up there — running clouds

To a star that went out many years ago...

Group Aria

––––––––

Alexey walked leisurely along the edge of the surf. To the left, the ocean sighed like a huge, slumbering beast; to the right, the gentle humps of the dunes bristled. Here and there a strip of flat beach thinned out and disappeared under the pressure of cracked chalk slabs, and shellfish grew in abundance here. Their empty shells lay everywhere like shrapnel fragments. The steady heat turned the shore into an oven. The proximity of the colossal mass of water was almost not felt. In twenty-six days the wind blew from the desert only once. He carried with him fine dust that crunched on his teeth.

Twice a day Alexey climbed a hundred meters up the sandy slope. Along the way, he was overcome with impatience, as if an elastic car spring was bending in his stomach. Before crossing the ridge, he involuntarily held his breath in the hope of discovering on the other side a cozy town in the middle of an oasis, or a line of loaded camels, or an old rattling buggy crossing the hamada under a scattering of unfamiliar stars, or... at least something! But the picture remained the same day after day: a lifeless plain, disappearing into the haze at the limit of visibility and a barely noticeable strip of mountains near the horizon.

Mobius loop. A world closed in on itself.

The first few hours hardly left an imprint on Alexei’s consciousness. He sat on top of the dune and watched the tide come in. Sweat poured from him in streams, but Alexey refused to take off his windbreaker and woolen sweater. He put on these things at his dacha in Zalesskoye to go out into the yard, where the gray autumn of the Moscow region was in full swing. Getting rid of excess clothing meant acknowledging the reality of this heat, and therefore this place. Alexey should now be lying under a drip, in the intensive care ward, or lying on a metal morgue table with an oilcloth sign on his numb leg. But he followed the flight of unfamiliar birds scurrying over the sea in the slanting evening light. And he didn't need any doctor. Maybe a psychiatrist...

––––––––

It happened quickly, and Alexey didn’t even have time to be properly scared. He clearly heard the howl of a revved-up engine and the clang of a rigid hitch as a tractor-trailer with a tank jumped over the median curb. My right foot began to unconsciously press on the brake. The wheels of the VAZ Nine slid on the wet highway, but it was already too late.

"Good God! Is this the end?

Hit. The grinding sound of metal right next to your ear. The crunch of a breaking triplex. Alexey was not wearing a seat belt and was thrown out through the windshield. No pain. Only sparkles in the eyes, a strong jerk and a feeling of smooth sliding. He plopped down on the road like a sack of wet laundry. Something broke in the back and pelvic area. The radius bone cracked with a disgusting slurping sound. The right shoulder and right knee were thrown out of their sockets. The ribs were flattened on the asphalt, the mouth was filled with blood, but there was still no pain.

I'm dying... - a sluggish thought fluttered, and the deep, fading voice of reason confirmed that this was indeed the case.

The squeal of locked brakes could be heard all around; cars were skidding and spinning on the highway very close by. A few centimeters away from him, tiny cracks snaked in the old road surface, and streaks of spilled fuel glittered, shining with all the colors of the rainbow. How beautiful! He saw his own trembling hand, saw the legs of people running up to him. They seem to be floating in syrup. How long has it been since the impact? Maybe a quarter of an hour or just a few seconds... Why doesn't he feel anything?

A completely bald man leaned over him. In the last flash of consciousness, Alexei saw his face: heavy, fleshy, without eyebrows or eyelashes, with transparent pinkish eyes. Madness smoldered within them, like a wildfire gathering strength deep in the bowels of a dry peat bog.

- Hey! I know him!

The face was right in front of Alexei’s nose. There is a golden fixa in the mouth. The chin is divided by a scar. On the bull's neck there is a tattoo in the form of a cross.

- Fuck-fly! It is he! That same nit!

The man smelled of dirty armpits and tobacco. Thick gasoline vapors layered on top of these odors, enveloping everything around. Nearby, someone was desperately swearing, crying out for help, begging to call an ambulance and firefighters. All this existed separately from them, on the other side of life and death.

- Hey! Do you recognize me? It's me, Oscar. Do you remember the construction site and the pit? That time your suit suited you, but today you ran away, you bastard!

Semi-familiar slang expressions rang and swirled around Alexei’s head. It seems like we are talking about some kind of unpaid debt. But what does he owe the white-eyed man?

I'm Oscar... do you recognize me? Do you remember the construction site and the pit?

But he didn't know... didn't remember. Not yet.

The crackling of flames comes closer and closer, and the bald albino disappears, as if he had never existed. But they still had to face each other. On the next turn of the spiral, with a new revolution of the wheel. Alexei's mind was torn away from the flow of time, found itself outside of cause-and-effect relationships, outside of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. He saw an infinitely complex web of quantum entanglement, a myriad of possible futures, and each of them was like an entrance to a dragon's cave.

Failure. All-encompassing emptiness. Nothingness. Oblivion.

There are no sounds around anymore. The flywheel of his life stops. The clock hands freeze. The dissatisfied face of the father appeared with pursed lips and a deep crease on the forehead, the quiet voice of the late mother and the carefree laughter of his older brother Stanislav sounded. Bratelnik always laughed, even when he was crushed by a steel pylon at the drilling rig. I laughed until the very end... The image of my pregnant wife blinked and disappeared around the corner like a semaphore signal.

Everything collapses, everything falls, everything changes. Blood, bullet, cold and darkness...

Heat blows into your eyes, as if from the depths of a smelting furnace. Spilled fuel turns a stretch of highway into a blazing inferno. The air itself seems to be on fire. But for Alexei, this is a familiar wind of horror, the breath of a sleeping dragon, capable of burning out the soul and tearing the meat from the bones. He tries to scream, but instead begins to fall into a bottomless fiery crater, and this fall continues for an eternity.

Failure.

He lies on the shore: scorched by the flames, shaking, pitiful, half-lost his mind. Thoughts pulsate and rush around in my head, jumping from one random idea to another. Smells like iodine and salt. There is warm sand underneath. In the distance you can hear the cries of birds and the rustling of waves rushing onto the shore. It seems to Alexei that he is in heaven. Or in hell. He doesn't think there is any difference between hell and heaven. He believes in neither one nor the other. Alexey sleeps and has a terrible dream that he died and ended up somewhere. No matter where - it's all a dream!

He calms down. He's good...

––––––––

Now Alexey was walking along the beach, staring blankly at his feet. He is wearing faded blue jeans, a gray flannel shirt, and soft-soled athletic shoes—the same clothes he was wearing in the accident. He threw away his jacket and sweater long ago, tried to keep his shirt on to protect his skin from sunburn, and soaked his T-shirt in water and tied it on his head. But how true are these facts? Can they be trusted? Who can say whether he is alive or dead, and if he is still alive, then why here and not there? The real world came to a point and went out. Memories of him also took shape and became somehow flat and colorless. Alexey woke up without a single scratch on the ocean shore. From that moment on, a nightmare began that almost drove him crazy.

When he realized that he was not sleeping and that he was not dreaming of the deserted shore because he was drunk, he began to randomly rush around the dunes, looking for a way back. Alexey ran without making out the road. When I was exhausted, I crawled on all fours, and then ran again. A couple of times he stumbled, fell, and finally rolled head over heels into a shady fold between two dunes. He was completely alone in the vast universe of hot sand with a hostile mother-of-pearl sky above his head. He was overcome with anger and a desire to pay any price to return. He is ready to pledge his soul so that everything will be as before.

Alexey scooped up a handful of sand and watched as tiny particles of quartz flowed like diamond streams between his fingers. The new world is tangible, you can even taste it.

He took off and rushed back towards the beach. An unexpected and terrible thought pierced him like a prison: what if, in a panic, he mistook the direction and is now climbing deeper into the desert, where a painful death from overheating thirst awaits him? Fear pursued him relentlessly, but Alexei ran and ran, unable to stop. Finally, the air was filled with the roar of the surf. Alexey slid down the slope of the last dune and collapsed exhausted ten steps from the place where the whitish tentacles of limestone stretched to the water itself. The stones were covered with a layer of dark green algae, intertwined with each other, like mermaid hair.

- Your mother! After all, this is all real! — the voice sounded like a lonely call for help, destined to remain unanswered forever.

Alexey sat on the dune for a long time, immersed in apathy. He yearned for his home world, because he was at home there, but not here. Because there he had at least something, but here he had nothing. He remembered his wife Yulia and wondered what their little daughter might look like. Was she born on the day he had the accident? Did everything go well? He managed to fully understand his guilt, and the feeling of remorse became sharper with each passing hour.

In the past, Alexey made many mistakes, hurt those who should have been protected. I distanced myself from simple everyday trifles for the sake of staying in an illusory world of fantasy. He disguised his true feelings under the guise of indifference and bilious cynicism. He never attached any importance to this; for years he got used to the role of an outcast genius. He believed that life had treated him unfairly, and this gave him the right to torment others. Alexey hid his love from his loved ones like a complete egoist, and now it’s too late to change anything. Now some unknown singularity swallowed him, chewed him up and spat him out like a gnawed bone into the trash can of space. A foreign land, a foreign sea, a strange desert rising to the skies. And he has no weapons, no food, no desire to live...

The short sunset gave way to greenish twilight. There was a breath of coolness from the desert... and then a crimson-violet ball with a developed system of rings in the equator rolled out from behind the edge of the world. The nameless little world that sheltered Alexei was part of the family of satellites of a massive gas giant.

Looking up at the sky was like standing on the edge of a cliff. The black abyss caused shock and attacks of dizzying lightheadedness. Alexey was unable to discover a single familiar constellation. But he counted five separate rings, as wide as the rings of Saturn. This world had its own grandeur, its own uncompromising aesthetics. Its own beauty. This world could have existed in one of his favorite books. Fiction has turned into teaching aids, into the ABCs of survival. And he survived.

Ever since Alexey discovered fantasy worlds, he secretly dreamed of escaping there from his tired, gray everyday life. And now his impossible dreams became reality. He stepped beyond the edge of existence, but beyond the threshold there was only emptiness.

The next morning, Alexei was treated to an even more impressive sight: the rising of a double star. The first to emerge above the ocean waters was a hot blue-white disk in a rainbow halo of interference. The second luminary, very tiny, settled to the side like a poor relative. For most of the day, the red dwarf was hidden behind its partner's carcass, but became clearly visible in the early morning and late evening. It gave almost no light of its own, although it burned several times brighter than any star. A pair of celestial dancers circled in an endless waltz around a common center of mass, coming closer and further apart over billions of years.

There was an atmosphere saturated with oxygen, and the gravity felt no different from that on earth. The day lasted about thirty-six hours. Dark and light times were divided approximately equally. At night, oscillating vortices of light similar to the northern lights lit up in the skies when hard cosmic radiation was reflected by the magnetic field. Fresh water flowed from the depths through cracks in the chalk slabs. And here organic life flourished.

There were sea creatures all over the beach, washed ashore by the waves, but they never reached the top of the tide. Large black cuttlefish crunched the shells and ate the watery flesh of the molluscs. Spotted creatures, vaguely similar to moray eels, nested in the muddy pits. Green crabs dragged their flat, warty bodies along the sand. Some reached a length of one and a half meters, and their claws could easily bite Alexei’s leg in half. Hundreds of birds were circling in the sky. They snatched fish from the water on the fly and carried them somewhere along the coast.

Sometimes large earthy-brown creatures crawled out of the depths. From a distance they looked like sea lions or walruses, but upon closer acquaintance it became clear that the front part of their fat oblong bodies ended not in a head, but in an ugly red growth that evoked obscene associations with the butt of a baboon. Two blind eyes, filled with whitish turbidity, bulged on the sides. Flippers and a caudal fin probably made these creatures excellent swimmers. On land they became slow and sleepy. But only at first glance.

One evening Alexey watched the head-ass from the dune. The monster lay on the sand, relaxed and indifferent to everything around him. Every two or three seconds his belly trembled and a short vibrating chirping sound sounded, as if a bamboo stick had been run across a laundry board.

The creature did not pay attention to crabs and other crawling creatures. But then a large bird resembling an albatross flew onto the sand. The ugly growth opened into four fleshy petals. A thin pink sting lashed out from inside, something like a chameleon's hunting tongue. The bird twitched a couple of times and froze, spreading its wings to the sides. The predator crawled towards the motionless prey, and its womb vomited a heap of pale thread-like appendages, reminiscent of a ball of liver worms. The head-butt did not tear or torment its victim - it slowly sucked it out.

When the monster had had enough and crawled into the water, Alexey suppressed the urge to vomit and forced himself to study the remains of the bird. There was little left of the body. A bunch of feathers and a flabby leathery bag with bones that looked like a crumpled paper bag.

––––––––

Alexey chose the direction arbitrarily and since then has been moving strictly west, covering about twenty-five kilometers per day. He rose with the first glimmers of dawn and walked until the heat of the day gained strength; then he waited out the hottest hours in the relative shade of the dunes, set off on the road again in the evening, and closer to midnight he began to look for a place to rest. To escape from the debilitating heat, he dug a hole at the foot of a steep slope, on the north side, and lay down in it. Already at a depth of several centimeters, the sand became colder.

Blind monsters lived along the entire coast. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups of several dozen individuals. Alexey carefully walked around them in a wide arc. He did not dare turn his back to the shore and did not stop to rest in those places where the waves approached the dunes too close. For the first two days he hardly slept at all: he jumped up at every rustle, listened to the chatter of the head-assed creatures and the screams of other exotic creatures crawling ashore with the onset of darkness. One day, on the far edge of the shallow water, he noticed a shapeless carcass the size of a fishing trawler. Many nimble creatures crawled along it like maggots, but the dim glow of the heavenly giant did not allow us to see them properly.

A mechanical wristwatch, a wedding gift from his brother, helped him keep time. Alexey started them up every morning and carefully ensured that dust did not get inside. Three turns of the twelve-hour hand added up to the local day. The error was only a couple of minutes and could be neglected.

It took him a long time to get used to the extended solar cycle. The periods of sleep and wakefulness could not be tied to sunrises and sunsets, and at first this had a destructive effect on the psyche. During the day, he either fell into half-asleep, then woke up, covered in perspiration, dug a fresh hole in the sand, lay, thought about the past, bawled songs of Tsoi and Vysotsky, recited Eugene Onegin from memory, recalled the books he had read, counted sheep, or simply watched birds in the sky. The endless wait turned into torture. He had nothing to do, no one to talk to. When he walked along the beach, time somehow moved with him, but at the parking lots, every single minute became a stubborn drop hanging on the edge of a water tap. You know that it is about to fall, but the drop still hangs, swells, sways, but does not give up.

At night Alexey rested in fits and starts. In his dream, he imagined something eerie creeping out of the darkness. It crawled out of sight, licking itself and swallowing saliva carnivorously. Alexey jumped up, looked around and for a long time could not stop his beating heart. And the night dragged on and on, as if the light had left the world forever. Then he fell asleep and woke up again from the nightmare, realizing himself in the same purple twilight. In the end, Alexei climbed higher, sat on the sand and waited for dawn to break over the ocean and desert.

The thoughts in his head were spinning in a vicious circle. They resembled an old gramophone playing the same boring melody: "Where am I? What will happen to me? How to survive in this desert world? Why am I here? Is it possible to go back? He understood the meaninglessness of these questions, but his tormented mind produced them again and again. Dreams of a new life in a fantasy world turned into painful timelessness. He was like a torn leaf, floating somewhere at the will of the wind.

Alexey ate fish, krill and shellfish. I opened the shells using a folding tourist knife, and fried the crustaceans over the fire. He always carried a knife with him just in case, and a box of matches was found in his jeans pocket along with a half-empty pack of Astras. He praised himself for not quitting smoking, looking at his brother. In the familiar world, this looked like shameful cowardice, a reluctance to strain one’s will over trifles. Now his own sloppiness saved Alexei’s life. He burned dry seaweed. They burned for a long time, with a dull, oily flame. The crustaceans left a faint aftertaste in the mouth and had to be washed down with plenty of water. But the shellfish turned out to be a real delicacy.

The matchbox performed another important function: it turned into a calendar. Before going to bed at night, Alexey used the tip of a knife to make a neat scratch on the side of the box. Twenty-six white marks on a rough brown surface, and the space on one side was almost gone. Twenty-six local days since his second birth.

He found sources regularly. Almost always the water turned out to be cloudy with chalk. Alexey filtered it through his own sock, filled with sand, small pebbles and ash from the fire. The result was an improvised carbon filter. The water became drinkable, although it reeked of old sweat. But desperate need will force a person to adapt to everything. The chalk rock itself acted as a sorbent, but contained many foreign impurities. Clean springs were extremely rare (Alexey discovered such only twice, in those places where harder formations, similar to granite, came to the surface).

What will he do when the matches run out or the sources of fresh water disappear? Alexey tried not to think about it. He lived one day at a time, concentrating on performing simple and understandable tasks: finding a spring, straining and filtering water, peeling shells from stones, catching crustaceans, lighting a fire, cooking. This simple style of existence helped to get rid of obsessive thoughts and brought peace and tranquility to his soul.

Alexei was not hungry or thirsty, his body retained enough energy to move forward, and his mind did not slip beyond the brink of madness. His nails were peeling. The skin between the fingers and on the back of the hands was cracked. Vitamin deficiency resulted in the appearance of tiny ulcers on the surface of the palate and around the mouth. And yet the end of the world never came for him.

«Say that more often, man, and do me a favor. — stop feeling sorry for yourself, because everything is not so bad," - he inspired himself and moved on, simply because he had to go somewhere.

Alexey made a kind of deal with common sense, forced himself to think positively, even when his imagination painted bleak pictures in front of him. He lost a lot of weight, but at the same time became much more resilient. Headaches, irritating prickly heat and no less irritating diaper rash on the legs after a couple of weeks finally became history. He remembered everything he had watched or heard about survival tactics. His body discovered hidden reserves within itself and gradually adapted to the new climate.

And he felt his hand on the pulse of fate. It is difficult to say when this strange, ghostly feeling arose, but since then it has not left Alexei for a minute. The choice of direction no longer seemed random. His way of thinking and perception of reality changed. He was becoming himself. He was going back to basics.

––––––––

Alexei walked west. An azure light rose behind him. His smaller brother hid in the foggy distances, looking like a cooling coal. Alexey was approaching the nodal point. On the twenty-seventh day of the journey, he had to see the diving board. The foreplay was ending and his life had to begin again.

Yesterday, around noon, he saw a narrow dark point far out into the sea, almost invisible due to the glare of the sun. The tiny speck was immediately lost among the waves, but Alexei had no doubt that he had seen some kind of man-made object. Part of a destroyed pier or a piece of the deck of a sunken ship.

And at night he was visited by a vision.

At first, the dream looked chaotic and somehow viscous. Alexei slowly sank into it as if into a quagmire. Indistinct images floated through my head: pictures from the past, faces of relatives, familiar streets, book spines. It seemed as if someone else was rummaging through his brain as if in a library warehouse. Then light appeared - a sickly, deathly blue glow similar to the lights of fireflies reflected in rotating mirrors. The lights gradually became brighter, their pulsation accelerated. The light intensified many times over, growing to the size of the Sun. The flashes merged into one powerful burst of energy, and darkness fell.

In the darkness there was the smell of the sea, the waves rustled. The stars circled overhead around the imaginary center of the celestial sphere. The giant planet swelled with a purple hematoma from across the sea, surrounded by streams of meteorites and space ice. The night breathed upon him the smell of sulfur. The fire barely glowed, illuminating only the sand around it. Someone was approaching him along the surf line. The figure seemed sketchy, two-dimensional, as if carved out of hard black plastic. The light flickered. The space cracked, flattened, then fanned out and laid out like a carpet.

The silhouette subtly approached, as if it fit into reality, gained weight and volume, and now a tall, thin man sat down on the sand on the other side of the fire. Alexey looked at him through the curtain of intersecting shadows. The bony knees are spread out like the legs of a praying mantis. Between them is a narrow horse's face, mottled with early wrinkles. A mane of jet-black hair falls over his broad shoulders. A colored cape, something like a Mexican sarape, is tied at the chest with a cord. Long fingers finger a rosary made of varnished ebony.

- Who are you? - There was no fear. Alexey was impatient to start a conversation. He had just looked into the well of his own loneliness and discovered old bones at the bottom. Coherent speech sounded unusual. He managed to get used to it.

Think, the tall stranger said reluctantly and threw a bunch of dry seaweed into the fire. - You know the answer. I am the Heat and I am the Mediator.

- What do you have to tell me? An intermediary?

- Good news. That's what it's called in your world, I think. — The heat shuddered barely noticeably, as if in pain. - You died and rose again for a new life. You are captive on a foreign shore, but soon the cage will turn into a window of opportunity. You have approached the starting point, the beginning of all beginnings, the nodal point in your journey, the springboard into a new life. From now on you are not Alexey - you Kilar, Stranger.

- Why did I come here? - Alexey shuddered. Now he was afraid, and the further he went, the more he became afraid. But it was not the Mediator himself who caused fear, or even what he could say, but some general majestic significance of the moment.

Heat's voice sounded surprisingly melodious and musical:

- Not How, a For what? Very good, Wanderer! You have returned to start all over again, to reap the harvest and take stock. I wouldn't be able to see you or talk to you if it weren't for the time to place my bets. Now you are ready and the cards are shuffled. It's time to get into the game, Kilar!

- Why didn’t you come earlier? I've been here for almost a month now.

The mediator deftly snatched something out of thin air. A thin wooden twig appeared in his free hand. Zhar began to move it across the sand, drawing some complex symbols and immediately erasing them to draw new ones. How far they were from each other! The heat was surrounded by real trees - not even cacti grew where Alexey lay. And yet they talked. And they understood each other.

I couldn’t come earlier, Stranger. — Zhar raised his hand with the rosary wrapped around it and moved his palm from left to right. - A vision was sent to me too. Like you, I'm sleeping now. Or maybe not. Who knows? Dreams are a cunning deception, the fickle light of the soul reflected in a series of mirrors. You have been given time to get used to your new role, to discern something inside yourself. The nodal point is very close. Tomorrow you will reach it and turn north. From this moment on, the distance between us will begin to decrease. Many months will pass before we shake hands - two men united by one destiny. And then you will continue on your way. Eternal Path.

- What do you know about eternity, Heat?

- Very little, Stranger. Only that she is always ahead.

- Do I have any goal?

- Eat. Rest assured. But you will not be able to solve it until you reach the heavenly city, like the last crusader. Until you kneel before the Ark of the Covenant, on the day when the Reaper appears on the field of Megiddo. Perhaps one human life is not enough for you to do this.

Zhar fell silent and looked at the stars. Alexey collected his thoughts.

-Are we related to you?

- Only as long as there is a need for it.

-Are you involved with someone else?

Zhar chuckled.

- Yes, I am connected not only with you, and tomorrow you will also be connected. There will be two of you, and then others will join you. You will begin your journey to the North Star. Look there, Wanderer! You've moved migrated from the usual layer of reality, and the star moved after you.

Alexei followed Heat’s outstretched hand and stared to the north. In that direction, just above the horizon, a lonely pinkish star flickered, not woven into the simple pattern of the Little Dipper, but standing separately, like a distant beacon.

-Who should I meet? How will I recognize him?

- Lady in the Dark. You will know heras soon as you see it. — Zhar squinted and cleared a place in the sand for the next symbol. - Time is like a big river. She carries you not quickly, not slowly - as best she can. Don't try to rush fate.

Both fell silent. Alexey thought about eternity, about how it is always ahead and always inaccessible, like the horizon line. And he also thought about Yulia and his newborn daughter. Who is she more like: him or her mother? How will their lives turn out after his death? How soon will Yulia find another man, an adoptive father for his child? Bitterness on the tongue... Will he be able to return? But these thoughts went away, as if an ocean breeze carried them deep into the desert. Death slammed all the doors in front of him and left nothing. Only the taste of cooled ashes on the tongue and an endless road going beyond the edge of the earth. The wanderer will carry memories with him, they will visit him again and again - these ghosts of the departed. But he will never look back.

Alexey looked up at the Mediator, but he had already disappeared into the shadows. Blue fireflies, endlessly repeating themselves in their own reflections, flashed again among the rotating mirrors. All that remained was a voice from far away:

- To the north, Wanderer! Remember! You must go north!

The fire blazed like a supernova. Alexei closed his eyes, and when he opened his eyes, there was not a soul nearby. The ash in the fire has long cooled down. The dawn was red in the east. The screams died down. A dead calm covered the surface of the dark jade water. Festoons of coral were visible through the lazy shade.

Alexei got up with difficulty. It was as if he had been beaten with rubber truncheons all night. There was a throbbing pain in the back of my head. The poorly bent leg was filled with needles and ached like a sore tooth. He was dying to smoke a cigarette. My throat felt sore and my mouth overflowed with saliva. But the twelve remaining in the Astra pack ran out three weeks ago. Immediately after the failure, Alexey did not think about the fact that it would be nice to make a nest egg and prolong the pleasure. He didn't think well at all in the first days. Now he is tempted to smoke, but there is not a single tobacco stall nearby. There’s not even anything to roll a cigarette out of. And what to stuff it with? Earwax?

Well, to hell with it! Who doesn't smoke or drink...

The thought stopped. Alexei stared straight ahead, looking at the symbol written in the sand. It consisted of many converging rays, broken lines and incomplete circles. Alexey unclenched the numb fingers of his right hand. Half a shell lay on the palm. A man who called himself Zhar was drawing symbols using a branch. The deceived mind perceived the dream fragment as a guide to action. It's an eerie feeling. It was as if someone else was moving his hand. The symbol resembled a zodiac circle or an image of the wheel of samsara, but in fact it could be anything. Alexey turned his back to the fire and headed further along the endless beach, towards his fate.

He recalled the smallest details of the night's conversation, as if he was transcribing the transcript of an interview, turning over the sheets of a notebook. According to Heat, a starting point or nodal point, also known as a springboard into a new life, awaited him ahead. For the first time, he had a goal, albeit not entirely clear. If we take it as an axiom that he saw not an ordinary dream, but a prophetic vision. But Alexei wanted to believe in a miracle, and he believed in it. You must go north!

I wonder what it will be like? A glowing portal at the edge of the earth. A magic tower floating in the air. Just another featureless stretch of coastline with a modest sign marking the direction. He will be led there by heightened instincts or by reality itself, which is no longer perceived by consciousness as a foggy abstraction. Reality turned into a coordinate system, a road sign, an imperious hand pushing him in the back. The riddle became a habit, the question became a statement. The remnants of his former personality were scraped off of him day after day, like flakes of dead skin or onion skins. Soon there will be nothing left of her except the ordinary appearance of a twenty-eight-year-old correspondent for a Moscow newspaper. And old emotional wounds that were in no hurry to heal.

He passed the test of purgatory and came out the other side.

"Now you are not Alexey, you — Kilar. Stranger!"

––––––––

He was walking along the shore and looking at his feet when he saw the imprint of a human foot. At first, his mind simply did not perceive the significance of this find. He continued to mechanically move his legs, and only half a minute later the realization came:

Trace... Human trace? Here?!

Alexey froze in place, and then ran back.

The man was wearing boots or boots with smooth soles. The trail approached the water from the desert, ran parallel to the surf line for about a hundred meters, and then curved back toward the dunes. Alexei felt dizzy with excitement. But the cold, calculating voice chilled the brain like a slap in the face:

Perhaps these people are hostile. What if they are bandits or crazy people? What if these aren’t people at all?

Alexey looked away from the chain of footprints and distinguished dark vertical silhouettes above the edge of the neighboring dune. They stood in a group on the top, fifty meters from him. Loose robes of rough canvas hung in the still air. Their heads are tightly wrapped in rags, like those of the Bedouins. Behind them are homemade backpacks and water bottles. All seven were holding weapons in their hands.

The first shot took Alexei by surprise. He didn't move even when one of the figures on top of the dune raised a long flintlock gun, like Nathaniel Bumpo's in The Last of the Mohicans. The body froze and became alien, and the brain continued to mechanically chew information. Alexey noted for himself that the gun in the stranger’s hands was very ancient, it looked like an old gun from Swedish grenadiers from the Northern War. He saw these in the Artillery Museum when he and Yulia went to St. Petersburg two years ago. They seemed so huge and at the same time unreal, like homemade toys or theatrical props.

A museum piece can’t shoot!

A muzzle flash blazed, swallowed up by a cloud of bluish smoke. There was a heavy cannon roar: BA-BANG!!! A heavy piece of lead touched his right arm, just below the elbow joint, tearing out shreds of flesh and skin. Alexei was spun around and thrown