(for the sake of ease of reading and flow, I have compiled all three parts here into one. There have been no changes otherwise)
The Tortoise and the Dragon
Once upon a time there lived a tortoise. Big as a Volkswagen Bug and twice as tough, the tortoise never considered himself particularly special. He had never accomplished anything commoners would consider heroic. Until, of course, the king tortoise's epic and legendary battle with Zorfaux, the Dragon Lord.
The tortoise had lived his long 222 years in a murky swamp of mangroves and beard lichen like dirty clouds. The neon green water was covered in purple lily pads, to which shifting rainbow colored frogs would jump and play. The tortoise was content to watch the frogs and contemplate eternity; a concept, admittedly, the tortoise only had a vague concept of, like deja vu, or a half remembered dream to which the tortoise continually awoke from.
Contentment breeds complacency, stagnation, rot and decay; the effluvium vapors that filled the swamp like London fog reeked of contentment and despair, a seeming irreconcilable contradiction. To truly understand this concept is difficult, like describing to a friend a color he has never seen: it must be experienced into wisdom.
One day, the tortoise's bittersweet contentment was turned to ash when the Dragon Lord Zorfaux swooped into the valley that contained the swamp, destroying everything in his path with breath of Fire and Brimstone. The animals and hominids fled in mortal terror, but only a few lucky ones; most were terminated with shocking ease.
Now, Zorfaux has a long history worthy of his own tale, but that is unimportant. The Dragon, ferocious and gracious though he most certainly was, was something else as well: he was absolutely, rapturously beautiful. Shimmering scales of the purest opalescence, each as big as a car hood; claws and teeth like twisted diamonds; ruby-jeweled eyes with splashes of supernova and lava; wings of iridescent gold; a tongue pink as strawberry taffy, and a lemon yellow rippling belly. To look upon Zorfaux was to look upon a god: he inspired both fear and worship, which is, of course, the same thing. One worships because one is afraid.
Snow fell from the sky in lazy puffs. The tortoise popped his wrinkled, leathery head out from the safety of his shell. It had been long ages since he had seen snow. He stuck out his tongue to catch a flake, which landed and did not dissolve: it was ash, raining from the sky. The tortoise was confused but not particularly concerned: he lived in a strange land in a strange time. Oddity had become normal.
A shadow like a giant bird crossed the waters of the swamp. The tortoise looked up just in time to see the Dragon spew fire in all directions. The sound was like a collapsing bridge. The tortoise retreated back into his shell just as a wave of fire swept and splashed over him. The swamp around him evaporated instantly in great clouds of steam, and the wet mud turned to parched, cracked desert. The tortoise could not see the devastation from inside his shell, but he could feel the souls of millions of creatures large and small screaming in bewilderment; it is a shock to any soul to be removed with such violent swiftness.
Lord Zorfaux let out a mighty victory cry, and he did a loop to loop in the air to survey the scorched earth below. It gave him enormous satisfaction to be the bringer of pain and suffering: it was, in fact, the very food that sustained him. Some entities feed on nuts and berries, others fruits and vegetables, but some fed on emotional chaos. The Fear Vibration is all they know or understand, and they would rather die a thousand deaths than change their food to the Frequency of Love.
The Dragon Lord paused in mid-flight like a hummingbird, though his golden wings moved much slower and sent hurricane force winds and thunderclaps in his wake. Zorfaux saw nothing below but desert. All life had been snuffed out like a candle. But when the dust his wings had sent billowing up had settled, he saw what appeared to be a large boulder in the middle of where the lake had been. A brief confusion followed: his Breath of Fire had melted all the other rocks in this faraway land. The confusion was brief because Zorfaux could see the brilliant white light surrounding the so-called boulder, and he knew at once that his flame had failed to extinguish the bright soul of the tortoise.
The tortoise had never been given a name; it was not needed. His brothers and sisters knew him from the glorious light emanating all around him. A name would cheapen and limit the tortoise. The tortoise was not a fan of imposed limitations of any kind. From inside his shell he smelled the sulfur all around him, felt the pain of life blown and scattered apart, but still he was content to simply sit in the dry dirt and do nothing. Then he felt more flame landing on him, and he knew the Dragon Lord was trying to kill him. No matter: his shell is quite indestructible, it contains adamantine particles of Creator Light that repels Darkness in all forms.
A rage the Dragon had not known in thousands of years consumed him: he had never encountered any living creature that could block his Flame. Screaming like a train, he dives down and begins a frenzied clawing at the tortoise shell that is mocking him. The only effect is pretty rainbow sparks flying from the shell, and Zorfaux gets a shock: he had chipped his diamond claws on this tortoise. These same claws that had gripped asteroids and comets, crushing them to powder with the ease of stepping on a pill of aspirin; these same claws that had torn entire planets to confetti: they didn't even scratch the tortoise.
Lord Zolfaux is not one to give up, no matter what humiliation breaking nails caused him. He still had one enormous advantage: he was a hundred times bigger than the tortoise. And he still had teeth. Like a pelican scooping up a fish, the Dragon Lord swallowed the tortoise whole.
From inside the belly of the beast, the tortoise felt his first real emotion since the encounter with Zorfaux began: annoyance. He floated in the bile and half-digested Emotional Chaos of the Dragon's stomach. It stank in here, and burned his eyes. And he had been plunged into total darkness. Unacceptable. The tortoise made up his mind to free himself from this prison.
Lord Zorfaux felt the swelling pride of victory: the planet had been completely destroyed of all life. It was now just a floating rock in space. His mission accomplished, he flew up and out of the planet's gravitational pull, out into the great void of space. The cold and the darkness gave him comfort. The trillions of pinpoints of starlight piercing this darkness made him slightly uncomfortable, but the Dragon Lord had committed himself to extinguishing all that light, all of it; if it took ten billion years, so be it. The Dragon didn't understand that the Darkness simply contained the Light. He had an incomplete knowledge because he thought he knew it all: he had stopped searching. That is the Deathblow: when one stops asking questions, stops seeking higher plateaus, you are already dead. Lord Zorfaux, who thought himself immortal, was dead. He just didn't know it yet.
Meanwhile, the tortoise was climbing his way up out of the Dragon's stomach. He could not see, but he let intuition guide him. His progress was slow and steady, climbing up, up, up. Wet, sticky, and hot. When he reached the highway long throat of the Dragon, the tortoise, on an instinctual whim, took a slight detour and bit his way through the neck and started climbing the Dragon's spinal column like a ladder.
Pain. The Dragon was in pain. It confused him: he was the bringer of pain, not a participant in its effects. He felt it at the base of his neck, and he could feel the tortoise inside climbing on nerves, ventricles, sulfur sacks, arteries. Zorfaux, now long past the solar system of the planet he had laid waste, scratched his neck like a dog with fleas. It agonized and infuriated him, and he scratched harder, his chipped claws sending scales like dandruff floating off into the void. Zorfaux knew the accursed tortoise was close to reaching his brain. If you could hear sound in space, you would hear screaming.
Inside the squishy brain of the Dragon, the tortoise saw a light. The light came from the very center of the brain, and he knew what it was: the Dragon's pineal gland. The tortoise clawed and chewed his way to the pineal gland. It was bigger than a pilates ball, and pulsed and vibrated a liquid, golden light, veined with crystals. The tortoise, just as he had been swallowed, opened his mouth and gobbled up the Zorfaux's pineal gland like a gumball.
The very instant the tortoise swallowed the pineal gland, the Dragon Lord exploded into billions of tiny pieces: he was no more. Lord Zolfaux had passed into the halls of legend.
Eons passed. The tortoise had been hurling like a comet in space for uncountable years. The explosion of Zorfaux had killed the tortoise, yet his shell and the contents within remained intact. The tortoise's soul had moved on to a higher octave of creative expression: his life had been a glorious success, and the angels wept with the joy that his sacrifice would eventually herald.
The tortoise shell entered the Milky Way Galaxy. It passed stars, fledgling planets; crossed asteroid belts, flourishing civilizations, and dying worlds. What would later become known as planet Earth was still in the early stages of development; it had just cooled enough to enable the possibility of life.
The tortoise shell crashed into Earth; the crater left in the impact would later become known as the Pacific Ocean.
More uncountable eons passed. The tortoise shell had dissolved, leaving only the shining pineal gland of the Dragon intact. When the asteroid that contained the first bacterial cells of life smashed into Earth, these cells were magnetically drawn to the pineal gland. The cells ate the pineal gland gradually over millions of years. Each cell now had a spark of a chemical, a chemical that interwove itself into the Crystal Matrix of Earth, which future humans would name
Dimethyltryptamine.
The rest is history.
The EndFear, belief, love phenomena that determined the course of our lives. These forces begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. We cross and recross our old paths like figure skaters; our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
---David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas