The Confession of Kaleth

I have carried this for twelve and a half thousand years, and in every life since I have found some way to be useful, some way to serve, some small repayment offered into the ledger. It has never been enough. It was never going to be enough. So let me do the only thing I have not yet done properly, which is to tell it plainly, from the inside, in my own voice, without the softening that memory applies to itself to soothe the sound of hearing a long forgotten story once again. My name, the one written into the Council record, was Kaleth of Og. It was not the name I was born with.

Meruvia

I was born in the industrial quarter of Meruvia on the Isle of Aryan, in the twelfth generation after the Second Deluge, and I was named Belor-Kaan. My mother worked in the reclamation halls, sorting the failed products of the genetic houses. My father had been a Legionary and came home from the colonial wars with a body that no longer obeyed him. We were of the Bronze Race, which meant we made up most of the island’s population and owned almost none of it.

I did not grow up hating the Law of One or even thinking about them at all. Instead, I remember the smell of the reclamation halls, and the sound of my father’s breathing at night, and the daily and unremarkable knowledge that the White families of the upper terraces lived in a different world above us, lit differently, and that no amount of anything would move us there. But, when I was seven years old, someone from that upper terrace came down and told me I was extraordinary – understand what that does to a child!

The Long Seeding

They had a name for the programme, though I didn’t learn it for many years. They called it the Long Seeding, and it was exactly what the name suggests. The Sons of Belial had understood something that the Atla-Ra, in all their luminous wisdom, had not troubled to even consider: that the surest way to take a fortress is not to storm the walls but to be inside them for forty years, holding the gate open when the time comes, and to be loved by everyone in the courtyard whilst you wait. That was an incredibly well planned long term strategy.

They took eleven of us that year. Children of the Bronze and the Red, chosen young, chosen from families whose servitude could be relied upon. My mother wept for joy when they came for me. She thought I had been selected for the academies and in a sense, I had.

We were taught in a compound outside Meruvia that had no name and appeared on no register or map. We were taught rhetoric, and law, and the structures of Poseidan governance. We were taught the Law of One itself, in genuine depth, by tutors who had studied it seriously, because a false convert who does not understand the doctrine is exposed within a season. I could recite all the Principles before I could shave.

We were taught patience, which was the hardest of the disciplines, and the one most of the eleven failed. Four were removed in the first six years. I do not know what became of them and I thought no more about them. We were taught the thing that made the whole scheme possible, the technique upon which everything turned, and which I have never seen described anywhere in the accounts.

The Problem of the Light

You must understand the difficulty the Poseidans faced. In Atlantis, the auric field was visible. Not by using instruments, not to initiates only, but to everyone, plainly, naturally, in daylight, as clear as the way you see the colour of a person’s eyes. Deception carried an energy signature. A man who lied, stood in a colour coded field that announced the lie before he had even finished the sentence. This is precisely why the Poseidans were so trusting and so hopeless at politics, and why they never thought to guard against what I was. Amongst people whose interiors are just as visible as the exterior, no one invents a lie detector, because no one has ever needed one.

So the Sons of Belial did not train us to lie – they trained us to believe. They gave me a history. I was Kaleth, born on the Isle of Og, orphaned in the coastal collapse, raised in a Poseidan relief settlement, drawn to the Law of One by the kindness shown to me there. They did not ask me to memorise this story. They installed it. Repetition under deep resonance, layered in over nine years, sound and light and sleep, until the reclamation halls of Meruvia were a dream I occasionally had and could not place, and the collapse of Og was my earliest clear memory, complete with the sound of the water and the name of the woman who pulled me out.

By the time I walked into Poseida at the age of nineteen, I was not an agent pretending to be Kaleth of Og – I was Kaleth of Og. My aura was clean because I was clean. There was nothing in me to detect. The Atla-Ra looked at me, and I looked back at them with the entirely honest face of an orphan who had found his home, and everything they saw was true.

My early teachers had set the future recall to a single phrase. One sentence, spoken by one man, at a time of their choosing to become activated, decades away. That was the whole of the mechanism. A locked room in a house I did not even know I owned.

I loved living in Poseida, I have to say that clearly, because it would be far more comfortable for everyone, including me, if I had spent forty years in Poseida gritting my teeth behind a smile. That is the story people would prefer, but it is not what happened.

The Emerald City was the most beautiful thing that has ever stood upon this Earth, and I do not say that as a personal matter of taste. The dome above it glowed green at night, and the canals took the light and moved it, and you could walk the concentric ways at any hour and hear music from the Temple of Sound that made the bones behave differently. I studied at the Temple of Knowledge. I was good at learning all I was taught and I was hungry for more. That got me noticed.

The Atla-Ra were not what you might imagine from the word – Priesthood. They were curious, faintly amused by everything, entirely without cruelty, and so unguarded that it made your chest ache. They had lived six thousand years, some of them, in the same body, and they still asked questions like they were children.

My mentor was Sha-Iren-Ra of the Temple of Knowledge. She was of the Golden Race, nearly twelve feet in height, and she used to fold herself down onto the low steps to talk to me at eye level, which I have not stopped thinking about, at least once a week for twelve thousand years. She knew I was ambitious. She had told me so, without judgement or criticism, in the way you might tell a man he was left-handed.

The Wound

Here is where they had built the hidden door, and I did not see it, and so neither did she. I could never become Atla-Ra.

Not because of any malice or superiority. The Sect was not a reward for merit and never claimed to be. It required the Mer-Ka-Na field at a level that came with lineage, embodied within the Golden Race, with a physicality that was already half light. I was Bronze. I was dense. I was, in the most literal and logical sense, a lower frequency, and no amount of study was going to change the substrate.

They were kind about it and that was the worst of it. They were so kind. They gave me everything else, every honour available to one outside the Sect, and they gave it warmly and without condescension, and every single time they did so, they confirmed the ceiling that I carried above my head. I would go home to my rooms in the outer ring, and I would think: “they will never let me in”. Not “I am not suited to it”. Not “the work I do is what matters and needs no seal”.

Only:

They. Will never. Let me in.

Do you see what has happened there? Do you see how the sentence arranges itself? Nobody planted that thought. It was mine, entirely my own, grown in my own soil out of my own ambition, and it was worth more to the Sons of Belial than every hour of conditioning they had ever spent on me. They had not needed to build a weakness in me. They had only needed to find a single seed and wait for it to grow. That is what their recruitment was about. Not the purchase of a man – the identification of the ache he already carries, and the patience to be standing there when it grows to become unbearable.

The Congress

I rose quickly through the civil ministries. I was a negotiator, and I was very good at what I did, and the reason I was good was because I meant every word. I brokered the settlement of the Og fishing rights. I sat between the Temple guilds and the engineers for two years over the Poser allocations and got them finally to shake hands. When the Aryans proposed the Unification Congress, the Law of One needed representatives who were not Atla-Ra, because the Sect would not sit in a political body. Who could speak to Aryans without hesitation and knowing how to address them in the formal manner – I was the obvious choice as I was genuinely the best candidate. This was not modesty in reverse. The Long Seeding did not put me in that chair. Forty years of my own honest work put me there and that is exactly why it could not be detected by anyone – except those that knew.

The Atla-Ra were wary of the Congress from the first day. Sha-Iren-Ra told me privately that she could smell the shape of it. But they were wary in the way that people who live above polarity are wary. They registered the danger, noted it accurately, and then declined to descend into the mud to fight it. They believed that error corrects itself because Light, being Light, would prevail without their needing to reduce to something less in order to defend it.

They were wrong – and that is the hardest sentence I can say in this account and I will not soften it. Detachment is not the same as wisdom. Sometimes it is only wisdom’s excuse.

Then came the great compromise and also the method they had been waiting to employ – The Council of Nine. Five of the Law of One and four of the Sons of Belial, majority given to Poseida, crystalline management federalised, no change without consensus. The population of Poseida celebrated. It looked like a victory.

Five against four looks like a victory to anyone who has not asked the only question that matters, not how many but who got the positions?

I was the fifth.

He came to me in the spring of the second year of the Council, in a public garden in the outer ring, and he was an old man by then. I didn’t  know him. He had been thirty years old when I last stood in front of him as a young nine year old.

He said eight words to me.

I will not write them. Not from superstition. Because they are not the point, and because I have watched people across many centuries become fascinated by the mechanism of something rather than the meaning the meaning of it. What I will tell you is what it felt like, since that is the part worth knowing.

It did not feel like an awakening. It did not feel like a mask being torn away, or a demon entering, or any of the dramatic things that would excuse my own responsibility. It felt like remembering where I had left something behind years ago. A small, quiet, almost pleasant click of recognition, and then the reclamation halls, and my mother’s hands, and my father’s breathing, all of it back in the room with me again and that was entirely undeniable, sitting there alongside forty years of Poseida, which did not go anywhere and did not diminish.

That was the horror of it. Nothing was deleted. I was both. I was Belor-Kaan of Meruvia and I was Kaleth of Og and both of them were completely real and both of them wanted things.

And after he had spoken, the old man simply added: you understand now why they would never have let you in.

He did not have to say anything else. He had turned the key of my own forty years of resentment and I was unlocked.

The Vote

I did not switch on that day. I want that to be understood, not as my defence but as a clear statement, because the truth of how a betrayal actually occurs is more useful to know than the myth created around it.

There was no single moment of treason. There were eleven months of small motions. A meeting taken. A question raised in Council that seemed reasonable and it was. A concern about national security voiced with genuine feeling, because I did have genuine feeling about it. The colonies were killing people, my people and the Atla-Ra had no suitable response beyond requesting patience. Each step defensible. Each step arguable. Each step slightly further along.

And running underneath it, my story. Always my story.

I did not tell myself “I am betraying the Law of One for the Sons of Belial”.

I told myself: “The Atla-Ra have held this technology as a private inheritance for eleven thousand years and called it stewardship. I am finally opening it to all of the people. I am the one who is including the Bronze and the Red. They had locked the door and I am unlocking it for everyone who comes after me.

It was even partly true – that is the poison. It was partly true, and I polished the true part until I could no longer see the rest.

The vote was called on a grey morning. A meeting on National security. The purpose: Reprogramming of the Second Moon for defensive application in the colonial theatre. They each voted, one by one, Four were for, four were against, and the Council turned and looked at the fifth seat – my seat.

Sha-Iren-Ra was in the gallery. She had not spoken to me in four months – I know not why. When I raised my hand she did not cry out. She did not accuse. She put her enormous hand across her mouth and closed her eyes. I have seen that gesture every night since, and I would rather she had screamed.

Now, the part I am asked about most, and my answer has never satisfied anyone, including me. I never knew it would sink.

The Atla-Ra warned that overloading the Satellite would dissipate the antigravity field. The Aryan engineers said the margins required was enormous and that their warning was purely political. I chose to believe the engineers, not because I was deceived, but because I needed it to be true. By then I had made a firm choice and a man who has made a choice will believe almost anything that lets him hold onto that choice.

I watched them remove the Department Heads – I told myself it was an administrative shuffle. I also heard that Atla-Ra were disappearing but I did not ask where, and I want to be very precise about this: I did not ask, and the ‘not-asking’ became the crime. Not the vote. The vote was just one morning. The ‘not-asking’ was the next two years.

When the Second Moon began to swerve, I went to the Council and argued to incinerate it and I argued well, and but it was not enough. I lost my argument for reason to an excuse driven solely by newly acquired power that I had given them. I have occasionally caught myself using that fact to try and find a position of comfort. But it is two sides of a dirty coin that produces the same result no matter how it lands.

I was on the terraces of the outer ring when the Second Moon crashed downwards. I saw the sky over Og turn white. Sha-Iren-Ra was already gone by then, she had left through the tunnels along with the Knowledge crystals. I was not aware at the time and for the four weeks that the Earth shook and the people left for the Yucatan bridge, I believed I had killed her personally.

I didn’t leave and I didn’t survive the collapse. I was not permitted the mercy of dying in the first hour either.

I have had twelve thousand years to contemplate the exact moment where it went wrong, so that I might hand you the lesson cleanly, and here is the difficulty: there is no single moment.

It was not the vote – by the vote it was all over.

It was not the eight words. The words only unlocked a door that was already there.

It was not even the compound outside Meruvia, though that was monstrous and I will not pretend otherwise.

It was a small room in the outer ring of the Emerald City, forty years before everything we knew came to an abrupt end. Where a man sat alone, told himself something about the people who loved him;

They will never let me in.

And then told it to himself again the following week, and the following year, and never once turned it over to examine whose voice was actually speaking it, or what soil it had grown in, or who benefited from his believing it.

So when you find such a sentence in yourself, and you will, because every person alive is carrying one, or maybe more: stop. Take it out. Look at it in the light. Ask where it came from, and who profits from you holding onto it, and what it is quietly preparing you to justify.

The great betrayals of this world are not always committed by monsters who have decided to destroy something beautiful. They are more often committed by decent and capable people who have been telling themselves one flattering sentence for a very long time, and who arrive at the morning of the vote having already prepared, in complete sincerity, the reason.

I was the fifth voice. I was not seduced by power in a single hour. I was seduced by an explanation, slowly, over half a lifetime, and by the time it was needed it was not even foreign to me. It was mine. I had made it myself, and they had only watered it. Do not wait to be tested.

On the day of the test, the answer is already written.