Prologue

Zebulon, crouched upon the cusp of a rotating platinum disc wedged like a splinter in the middle of the pulpy thermosphere of the most blue planet he had ever seen. He gazed down expecting to see the firework bursts of parasitic modern cities lit by millions of artificial cinders. Instead, he saw Nothing and he saw Everything. He clasped the world in his thunderous hand for a holy moment and shook the last evidence of what could be considered normal out of the universe.

It is 1983. You are an 8 year old boy dressed in brown courduroy pants and a long sleeved striped velour shirt with a collar that could poke out an eye and draped in the colors of an ailing autumn. It is your grandfather's birthday and you are at a celebration of this event. You hear the dull reverberations of adults throwing their heads back with copiuos mirth in response to sentences made up of enigmatic words you feel you may never comprehend fully. At the same time you notice an odoriferous collection of perfumes and coffee wafting into your olfactory lobe. The smell is stale and throttling. You anxiously glance around the room and see alien's flesh shrouded in flower patterned fabric, throbbing with laughter and humid breath. You feel surrounded by towering masses constantly brushing against your shoulders like the threat of jagged rocks when running aground in the fog.  The immensity of these sensory stimuli causes you to seek escape. You grasp tight the half deflated balloon recently handed to you by a man referred to as "Uncle Elroy" (who seemed to know you infinitely better than you knew anything of his whiskered rotund face, although the fabric of his pants and the feeling of his 3 day old whiskers rang with a distant familiarity) and vacate the celebration hall. You quickly stride across the cheap brown tile that is more cracked than not, held in place only by gravity and the idea that it has no better purpose, and then pass into an even more cheaply carpeted foyer emblazoned with light from a dying chandelier. You pass a group of former comrades in arms, one time objects of fleeting affections and other unknown colleagues-- all now co-conspirators in your planned demise at the hand of some cruel joke or game not yet disclosed. None of this matters, you only want to quickly get away from everything you've left behind. Un-beknownst to you at your current age this will be a pattern you follow for the better part of your life. Finally, you reach a cavernous sanctuary paneled in oak boards, lightly stained. The pews adorned in wine red uniforms, stationed as regiments poised to march on the podium during every Sunday sermon. While you had hoped that the sanctity of your new environment would alleviate your previous discomfort, you reel in disdain as you notice the cacophonous sounds seeping in through the woodwork, attacking you and your pew battalions. They violently gouge every last bit of life as blood explodes and splatters in a turbulent raspberry geyser. It covers you completely. It ruins you completely. You see now why the pews are clothed in red.

You untie the knot in the balloon, your last line of defense.

This is the start of a bleeding balloon. As the wrongly imprisoned air escapes through a tightened sphincter it will first pierce your eardrum as if uninvited. It will remember the injustice of its sentence and demand repayment on those who served judgment, in this case, humanity. As it builds in intensity and density it will rip through your aural nerve like a love-sick banshee, seeing the world through eyes that, for the first time see only the beauty in all things. It will blind you with radiance through synaesthesia, but realize that it means you no malicious harm. It only wishes to atomize your perdition by splitting each hydrogen molecule in your body and releasing their energy back to the sky showing you the peaceful existence in burning alive... in infinite gravity.

In return for it's freedom it wishes to set you free.

Upon regaining your eyesight, you will notice that the sound has not subsided, but it has become bearable and dulled. It will never leave you. It will be with you always; cleansing you of the effects of your audibly thronged existence. It will greet you every morning with a reminder that escape doesn't exist. It is only a prolonging of the inevitable. Everything ends, but everything must travel to reach its end, and the reaching of the end is also the very means for never reaching it.

Please, do not refer to your handbook in hopes to review images illustrating this meaningless statement. The handbook will not help you now. We have begun a descent into the leveraged weight of all mindless excursion.

A man stands with a list of items that he reads, memorizes and then repeats aloud, fifteen times. The list is not a list, but it is the knowledge of a forgotten star contained within the repetition of words that mean nothing without the context of a distant science currently unknown to the man.

It is always assumed that distant galaxies and stars behave the same way as the ones we can see with our own eyes. This assumption could very well be wrong as we'll never be able to view our own star from another with our own eyes, but there is only one way to know if they actually do or not, and that one way of knowing is contained within the man's list and no one knows what it means. In all probability, another being who is nearly identical to you is reading a book that is nearly identical to this book on a nearly identical planet third from their nearly identical sun. They also will never be able to see their sun from our planet, just as we can never see our sun from theirs. The point of this is that we can never assume that our science is the same as distant science for the sake of writing a book that makes sense to everyone here.

The second point is that this distant star's sole purpose in the grand scheme of what we call "things" is that it sings the songs of tiny animals who cannot sing their own songs.

Tiny animals have a system in which they climb trees, grab leaves, chew on them, collect food, copulate, reproduce, rend, tear, and die. They believe this is how to create music; to sing the songs that they hear larger creatures singing. They are not wrong. Every song is sung with the belief that it is what a song should be, and every song is what it should be. And every song can have a meaning to you if you will only let it.

There is a beautiful bear with silver hair who sings the songs of destruction. He drives the workers to toil and snare and create a numinous construction. It is a shiny new portal in the woods. The song would sound familiar if you could understand it, but it is difficult for your kind. The tiny animals also never quite understand it. They continue to climb their trees and sing their songs to the universe, to the distant star, and to Zebulon; The one who signifies the end of eveything.