You, Enoch the Rogue, son of Thyan, you have behaved like a boor unworthy of the great privilege of knowing the secrets of the islands of the Sun. As a result, I banish you from the living of the gods, and I send you back to earth to finish your life deep in mud and garbage like those of your kind!
These words are those of the Great Goddess. I hear them resonate in my poor head every morning when I go hunting the bear with a band of poor buggers, hunters like me, that is, forced and forced by our masters, the all-powerful gods. I hear them every day when the Sun of the Gods darts on me its rays of hell, and I hear my annealed skin creak on my shoulders, and I lose my blood, my precious energy and my time. The gods have sentenced me to live another thousand years. I do not know the exact number, I asked to ignore it. No one knows neither the day nor the hour. It’s better that way.
I do not remember anything else. I do not even know what is being reproached for me. The Goddess erased my memory and confiscated my diary where I had recorded my adventures with the Mighty ones. She does not want me to take away any memory of those years spent on these islands in the sky. The thousand and one secrets I had undoubtedly discovered up there are forever lost for me for all mine and all my descendants. I made a mistake, I do not know which, I offended the Goddess who immediately inflicted this heavy punishment. My chain mates are very envious of the privileges I have received. What’s the point, if I do not remember? The cruel words of the Goddess are the origin of my life, a second birth to adulthood, which erased everything I had lived before.
Since then, these words obsess me. I hear them when I come back to the night, exhausted, out of breath, tired, cursing between my teeth the sacred name of the Almighty, she who gave me everything to take me back to the ultimate hope. To act. Do not think, do not curse, act. Every morning I find myself chained to the sluggish band trained to finish the bears. Each day finds me slave of this stupid hunting which consists of raising traps where roars the wounded, furious, terrible plantigrade with its four meters of height. It’s about staying out of reach of his claws longer than my arm, sharper than a flint, and faster than lightning. It’s about surviving.
The human losses are enormous, only half of the hunters finish the day, with cripples, cripples, amputees who will come back to be finished tomorrow. And tomorrow, half of the hunters will be newcomers, without training, who will be slashed, eviscerate, quartered, decapitate by the terrifying claws. Whoever survives the first day can hope to survive for a long time. But hope is dead in my heart, scattered with the wind blowing in my empty skull, on the deserted paths of my memory. It is said that a rebellious would have survived a whole year! A month already seems a superhuman feat, how can we survive a year? My horizon is to survive one day.
And every morning that comes back wakes up the wounds, the aches and the fear in the belly. But this morning I woke up in a comfortable room. The stinking dormitory where I slept chained to the bedstead was gone. Who carried me in my sleep? Usually I only sleep with one eye, a little awakens me. Then the Goddess came into my room. Unable to conceal both my surprise and my nakedness, I opted to hide the second. The Goddess laughed. “Why do you hide from me, am I not your mother, like that of all living things on this planet and on others?”
The Goddess was scarcely dressed in a diaphanous veil that draped her without constraining her. I saw with my eyes a splendid body with nubile forms. She seemed to barely get out of adolescence – inconceivable prowess when one is her age: she still approaches the 5000 years … Yet I had no desire for her. “Enoch, Enoch, what did you do with the talents you got from the witches, what did you do with the knowledge that reptiles gave you?” What has become of wisdom, acquired knowledge, inexhaustible energy that animated your body? Where is the love that burned your heart? It seems that all these gifts are nothing … “
– Sublime Goddess, I have other questions: Where are my hunting companions? Who carried me up to this layer? Where are my weapons, my hunting lattice and my shield? I’m naked like a worm … How can I hunt the bear in this outfit?
– Bear hunting is part of your dreams. You have just spent three nights and two days asleep in this room. You’ve never been near death, you’ve never risked terrible wounds, you’ve only slept like a stump. And you have not even used your cataleptic sleep to try to find your precious memories.
In front of my dazed air, she gave a little pearled laugh and then, tilting her head back, laughter turned into a song of wolf or some unknown wildcat. I saw the lightning in her eye and I got scared. “Stop shaking, when you’ll know, you’ll laugh, nothing tragic happened to you, you were not expelled from heaven, your memory was not erased by my order. It is you, and you alone, who has chosen to forget.Your mission now is to find one by one these lost memories. They are so many keys that could open your inner fortress. You are walled up like a poisoned well. Start at the beginning, uncover the hidden facts. You will find your dear friends the Cyclopes and their incredible know-how, they have given you so much, and you have to recover everything, restore everything, take everything back to your account, do you feel able to do so? “
I could not even answer a single word. Her kindness became polar coldness. She looks at me with contempt and turns on her heels. Leaving my room, she throws these words like a bone to a dog: “Try to be better this time!”
