A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) (2 page)

Previously in
The Windows of Heave
n
…

Our distant past is not what we think.

Long ago, a violent cataclysm of water and runaway continental plate movements re-surfaced our planet. Another world richer in vast rainforests and gigantic animals once existed on the sphere we call
Planet Earth
. Many overlook evidence that men also lived there.

The Creator God E’Yahavah gave this forgotten world to the charge of humanity’s long-lived first parents, Atum and Khuva.

Yet they were not alone.

E’Yahavah
had created other beings, among them the Watchers, whose proper abode was in the heavens. The brightest of the heaven dwellers was Shining One, bard and chieftain of the Ninth Heaven. Given vast authority in the heavenly dimensions, Shining One
grew envious of the two domains E’Yahavah had kept from him—the Tenth Heaven, wherein the Creator alone dwells, and the newborn Earth.

Unable to storm the gates of the Tenth Heaven, Shining One and his cohorts penetrated Earth. In the sacred Orchard of Aeden, they seduced Atum and Khuva to revolt. There E’Yahavah subdued them all and issued a Great Curse upon the universe. He transformed Shining One into the Basilisk
and banished him to the cosmos of Earth to wait out the ages for judgment.

Nor were the man and woman exempt.

Everything Atum could see, measure, and touch—even the very stars—was changed. Death became the agent of natural balance in Atum’s cosmos, instead of love. The inner thought-world of the man and his wife became a labyrinth of fear, confusion, hatred, and guilt; while E’Yahavah subjected the outer universe entrusted to their care to a matching upheaval: Dragons and pack-hunting wurms grew hostile and swarmed from thorny rainforests, followed by natural disasters, decay, and ultimately death.

Even so, hope remained. Although marred by a self-destructive nature acquired in the First Insurrection, the image of E’Yahavah remained in mortal humanity, along with a promise more powerful than the Curse.

Nevertheless, the war in heaven was not finished. Shining One had left a seed of discontent to fester even in the minds of those who remained loyal—or who at least seemed to. That seed germinated among the heavenly order known as the Watchers.

Fascinated by humanity’s ability to multiply, some of the Watchers grew apprehensive at the idea. When Earth became full, would the human race expand into the heavens? The situation on Earth worsened every year. Wars raged, and cruelty increased. Could E’Yahavah
really restore the monstrous creature that man had become?

A cartel of Watchers thought they had the answer. They petitioned the Creator for permission to go to Earth and civilize humanity. The seed of fear that Shining One had planted in their thoughts had grown to fruition. The Watchers had become obsessed with the idea of multiplying themselves through an evolutionary process that would slowly merge their kind with the human race. For this, they needed human women—which further opened the doors for an entirely new and unnatural obsession.

One man remained on Earth not deceived by them; Q’Enukki the Seer spoke for E’Yahavah and taught men laws that laid the foundations for a rapidly advancing civilization. But it was not to last.

Watchers led by Samyaza and Uzaaz’El descended to Earth against the counsel of E’Yahavah. Self-willed and self-deceived, they gave the tribes of men new laws and new knowledge—weapons and other prematurely advanced technologies for the elites that served them. Believing that they had established a Third Order between E’Yahavah
and the Basilisk, the fallen Watchers became far more dangerous than even the Basilisk had hoped. Their obsessions grew, with inflated ends justified by any pragmatic means. Yet they refused to admit to themselves that they had now made a Second Insurrection, and had thus become subject to the Basilisk.

Q’Enukki the Seer withstood the Watchers and their illicit offspring—the titans, giants, and demigods—powerful men and women, contorted spiritually and often physically by religious and even genetic manipulation. Q’Enukki promised that a deliverer would come for the faithful, but not until after E’Yahavah destroyed and restored the world twice—by fire and by water. However, before these World-ends, a Comforter from
E’Yahavah A’Nu would arise to lead the faithful to safety.

At the height of his influence, Q’Enukki vanished into the heavens to fulfill a new and mysterious mission. His descendants, the Seer Clan, continued to spread his message across the world. In the centuries that followed, the fallen Watchers slaughtered most of them for opposing their agendas. Finally, a remnant of the Seer Clan retreated to the beleaguered land of Seti, Q’Enukki’s distant ancestor
; father of the Orthodox Archons, which were a remnant of an older order from Atum.

Dawn-Apocalypse Rising
began the story of the Seer Clan Prince A’Nu-Ahki, who lived centuries after Q’Enukki had vanished.

A’Nu-Ahki grew up in the shadow of a prophecy his father had uttered over him in the cradle. A convergence of signs pointed to the prince as Q’Enukki’s foretold Comforter
from
A’Nu.

A’Nu-Ahki found his own seer gift after the giants of the Samyaza Cult slaughtered his wife and family while making war on the Lumekkor Empire. The Seer Clan found itself trapped between these two antediluvian superpowers clashing in the thorny rainforest mists.

But not all of A’Nu-Ahki’s daughters were killed. The giants took Uranna and Tylurnis as concubines to the Samyaza homeland of Assuri. The “Century War” followed, while the Seer Clan became a vassal of Lumekkor. To keep some independence for his people, A’Nu-Ahki entered a political marriage with Na’Amiha, sister of Tubaal-qayin the Great of Lumekkor.

Over time, the Seer Clan grew complacent in the political protection purchased by A’Nu-Ahki’s marriage. Yet they rejected A’Nu-Ahki as
A’Nu’s Comforter because he had broken taboo by marrying a woman raised in Lumekkor, which all but worshiped the hated Watcher Uzaaz’El.

The war raged, until a giant comet blazed as a warning sign that even those outside the Seer Clan could not easily ignore. E’Yahavah visited A’Nu-Ahki with a vivid apocalypse. Everywhere on Earth, society reinforced the evil in humanity and undermined good. The Watchers, who had come to civilize men with presumptuous noble intentions, had fallen to the same seductions faced by men. Chaos and tyranny resulted. In one
hundred and twenty years, E’Yahavah
would send a cataclysm to end the world. Only those who followed the Comforter of A’Nu
would survive.

Seventy of
those years passed, while A’Nu-Ahki and Na’Amiha had three sons. A’Nu-Ahki’s abducted daughters remained missing even after the Century War ended, and E’Yahavah revealed nothing further about the coming world-end.

The Watchers soon began to squabble again, pushing the world powers toward another global clash of demigods, giants, and men.

In
The Paladin’s Odyssey
, the corrupt Archon of Seti illegally conscripted A’Nu-Ahki and his son U’Sumi to fight the invading forces of Aztlan. U’Sumi had heard about the prophesied World-end from the comfortable hearth-side stories of childhood. Faced with mass death and mechanized war, questions about his father’s God soon overwhelmed him, with the only immediate answers so unthinkable as to threaten his sanity.

Captured by Aztlan, U’Sumi and his father
were taken to the distant capitol of the titan Psydonu. When confined in the temple complex of the techno-sorceress Pandura, a young priestess named Pyra T’Qinna befriended and aided them. U’Sumi, his father, and the young priestess escaped across the wastes of a dying world, forced by warfare to circumnavigate the globe to reach home. After crossing the treacherous Great Outer Ocean, they endured the toxic sands of the Desolation of Nhod. There, in a land of religious mass-murder, disease, and population control, U’Sumi faced the terrible necessity for cataclysm—that when evil is unchallenged, it eventually grows to consume entire worlds.

Escaping Nhod, A’Nu-Ahki, U’Sumi, and Pyra T’Qinna entered Assuri, where they became prisoners of the Samyaza Cult. In the city of Samyaza, A’Nu-Ahki discovered that his lost daughters were not dead, but had become willing slaves of the Samyaza Cult—wives of the Watcher’s titan sons. Aboard the command craft of Samyaza’s flying fleet, U’Sumi and his fellow travelers watched as the mysterious Guardians of the sacred Orchard of Aeden annihilated the Watcher’s misguided winged assault against what he thought was the Basilisk’s stronghold.

When Samyaza’s airship crashed in the dragon-infested Haunted Lands, it forced A’Nu-Ahki to face the truth about his two daughters; that ‘Ranna and ‘Nissa chose freely to stay with Samyaza rather than come home.

Meanwhile, all was not well in the Valley of the Seer Clan during A’Nu-Ahki’s absence. The descendants of Q’Enukki had broken further into quarreling sects, each with opportunistic visions of World-end and rescue. Self-proclaimed “Comforters” now competed for converts and financial backing, while hope dwindled for A’Nu-Ahki’s wife and other two sons…

One theory which can no longer be taken very seriously is that UFOs are interstellar spaceships.

—
Arthur C. Clarke

New York Times Book Review
, 07/27/75

The symbolic display seen by the abductees is identical to the type of initiation ritual or astral voyage that is imbedded in the [occult] traditions of every culture… the structure of abduction stories is identical to that of occult initiation rituals… the UFO beings of today belong to the same class of manifestation as the [occult] entities that were described in centuries past.

—Dr. Jacques Vallee

citing the research of Bertrand Meheust in
Confrontations
, p. 146, 159-161

But the UFO phenomenon simply does not behave like extraterrestrial visitors. It actually molds itself in order to fit a given culture.

—John Ankerberg and John Weldon

The Facts on UFOs and Other Supernatural Phenomena
,

p. 10

UFO behaviour is more akin to magic than to physics as we know it… the modern UFOnauts and the demons of past days are probably identical.

—
Dr. Pierre Guerin,

FSR
Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 13-14

And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.

—
2 Corinthians 11:14 (NKJV)