The Trion.

I want to retell a strange thing that happened. While I know I am old and sick and not much to look at, I have worked very, very hard in my life. I raised three children and I had three wives. They’re all dead now. I was an engineer and I made big decisions, but it’s all gone now. Everything’s gone. That’s how it goes. I’m old. It’s your world now. Take it. I am too poor and too sick to do anything with it. But listen to me. There is something I need to say to you. Don’t walk away. Look at me.

I told you, I was a father once. I had three boys. Look at me. Come closer. Maybe four. I don’t even know anymore. God damn my memory. Who are you when you lived your life and then forget everything? Have I already been erased? But listen to me. It started like this.

All I have is what I can remember; what I can hold on to. I may have nothing of value, but I have wisdom, and I have balls of dust and paper that scoot all the way down in my pocket. Here - pull them out, unroll them on the table. This is what I’m going to tell you. Because what’s left after you’ve spent all your money, when you’ve finished all your drugs, when you’ve gotten even with the evil in your life and nailed your goddamn note to the door, what’s left are these little things, the pieces of treasure that no one else sees the beauty in, because these things are like looking directly at your soul, like looking directly at the light, where they are both tenebrous and illuminating.

It’s exactly the same with the secrets of the Universe. After you’ve been here long enough, you pick them up, and you live your life like you always do but they’re still there, in your pocket somewhere, wadded up in the corner and you just know that the moment you’re out of stuff to do, the moment your pocket is getting close to empty, you can feel them in there, feel them crushed up in the corners and it makes you feel fucking alive.

You’re too young to be allowed to know this, and I have no choice but to tell you. I am dying and have rot in my bones. My children have abandoned me. My destiny, I’m afraid, is to die alone, but it is a destiny that I have had the good fortune to choose, so I can’t feel resentful for anything. Despite this, I have a mountain of regret. But forget all this. Listen to me.

The four elemental particles? Air, fire, earth and water? They are nothing! They are powerless in the Universe; because they are tied helplessly to our own plane of perception. They can’t even exist outside of our own little planet. There are other things which are far more powerful, that transcend all planes; all macrocosms and microcosms from atoms and their little quarks and gluons all the way up to twisting planets swinging around flocks of shooting stars spiraling through greater and greater macrocosms which they themselves are only a part of.

What we wanted to find, Adam and me - God I loved him - was a path to understanding what all this shit was. All this around us. Because we knew that anything that means anything - anything fucking real - couldn’t exist just on our own planet, or macrocosm for that matter, but must transcend every plane everywhere, and must exist and repeat in each one, every planet, over and over in differing gradients of size, but acting with identical properties everywhere, every single plane of perception, no matter the observer or the metrics.

But we searched and searched, we searched for whatever that was, the philosopher’s stone, the Higgs boson. And we got nothing. It’s trickier than all of us put together. For years I was stumped. And then I realized it, after having literally held it in my hands. After staring at it all my life. Are you ready? It wasn’t an object that was elemental - it wasn’t a thing - which is why I couldn’t find it - but a pattern.

It suddenly made sense why we could never find it - why, how we even doubted that it existed. These patterns are a secret series of hidden pathways that recur at every moment, in every environment, at every level of abstraction, in every place in life. These are the signposts to God. Once you are aware you can’t stop seeing them everywhere. They exist in all things, in every butterfly’s wing and every grain of sand, on every map of the universe. You see, God has put these down here to give us a path to follow. This is part of something bigger - I hope you get this - something we don’t even understand. An alphabet, perhaps? A language of patterns? A doorway of understanding and of transcendence. These are the shining opals I have found in my life, and I’m giving them to you now because you had the good luck to walk by me as I lay dying. Do you know what fortune you had? Listen to me now, because your whole life, you will want to be here again. You have to understand. This is about the Trion.

According to the most ancient legends, visions of Atar of Zoroaster, transcribed into archaic stories written down as historical fact by the demigods themselves, when the Creator had finished His miraculous creations, He recorded His works in a book which was then given to humanity. This gift was the Trion.

The histories of the Trion - the chronicles of the creationary process - predate every other holy book in all recorded history for the simple fact that it was created not by men but by God, and thus contains no time element, no spatial positioning on the space-time matrix. Its intellectual value was immeasurable because it was the only first-hand documentation of the miracles that effused both Earth and the Universe from emptiness. It is widely said that after performing all the mathematics and physics to create the fabric of space/time, and then after that when he created gravity, electromagnetism, sunshine and chemical reactivity; he wrote all of this down for us in the Trion. A timeline of the Holy Creation.

Because it was not of human but divine origin, it was written in a language of the gods and one which mere mortals could barely aspire to interpret. Its lexicon contained only symbols, for as alphabets - by definition - can only express a limited number of permutations, drawings and symbols are limitless, making attempts at translation practically impossible.

I first learned of the books during my University studies from my anthropology professor, when the earliest known mention of the Trion had been found in relics discovered in Hellenic ruins near the Acropolis. A second reference was identified completely by accident, just after my commencement from the school, in a cave somewhere near to Kerak, Jordan - bringing a parchment from nearly two thousand years earlier to scientific light.

A few of us, of course, including the professor and I, were crazy or inspired enough to dedicate our lives to studying its mysteries. The pursuit of its salaciously impossible achievement - understanding the language of the gods - was unlike any other challenge known to man. The physical books of the Trion were handed down from generation to generation, each one leaving the intellectual footprints of their own noble attempts to translate the strange and archaic patterns. Ultimately the Trion was given over to the monasteries of Babylon, where they stayed for nearly two thousand years, until the ruthless conquest by the Byzantines, the bloody slaughter of Babylon, and the books’ subsequent relocation to Byzantium. Due to the incredible fame and honor which the books brought to the ancient gilded city, the hierophants feared its theft; indeed, the mere possession of such relics gave the entire metropolis a predisposition to invasion. It was widely known that any kingdom that held the keys to the books would also hold the keys to limitless power.

At some point in the eighth century, following the Icon of Christ’s removal from the Gates of Chalke by Emperor Leo, the hierophants made an irreversible decision to replace the Trion with a copy, and to make this copy by hand, tracing them from the originals, pattern by iridescent pattern. The original Trion, for its own safety, was buried in a secret vault, in the catacombs beneath the Church of the Holy Apostles. This was done in absolute secrecy, and still to this day - the Church of the Holy Apostles being decimated in 1461 - the original books, the ones written by God himself and buried beneath the church, have never been found. From then onwards, all interpretations were based upon these copies, the original Trion having been accidentally lost forever.

I pored over these copies, just like every scholar, every amateur sleuth who wanted to follow this impossible riddle. The ancient, hand-drawn copies were all we had. I studied them over and over, one by one, poring through photographs and written records, sketches of the sketches of the reproduction itself. I watched the loops of the symbols bend and curl down, tried to compare them to literally anything else I could imagine - which was useless of course, because everything I invented in my head were only products of human reasoning and experience, and for that I was overcome with guilt and frustration.

Yet it rained questions. For example: it would seem perfectly reasonable to assume that when God created the Trion with the intent to give to humanity, he would have written it in a way that could be understood, comprehended, appreciated - otherwise what was the point? Unless - and this is where I stumbled - the entire point was to invent a riddle so perplexing, that the process of understanding it transforms the person into total universal understanding and enlightenment, practically uplifting us into becoming demigods ourselves, which is the quite possibly real goal of such a book. It was not so unreasonable to think this, I thought, and so I started to invent ways in my head that God might have tried to transmit wisdom and enlightenment through these symbols.

The book, I further reasoned, was created at the cusp of creation, before any languages, alphabets, hieroglyphics could have developed - thus I logically surmised it must have predated the entire concept of a language. Indeed - it could not have been written in any language: after all, any given language lasts only a short moment of the timeline of humanity - something surely the Almighty was aware of. Even symbols, of course, were consistently tied to changing cultural concepts. It seemed impossible, even for the Creator, to find a symbol that would be consistently interpreted with the same idiosyncratic meaning in every time, language and culture.

Then it came to me like a flash. How could I have been so blind! I wasn’t looking at letters but pictures - not symbols but illustrations! I immediately understood. That was how the Creator made sure it would always be recognized - it was far simpler than anyone had realized. They were only simplified drawings of the object they were trying to represent.

I ran to my room to review my notes. I was right! They were not letters or words but abstract pictures of things. A castle by a river; a forest, a precipitous mountain cliff. I racked my brain to come up with comparisons. I marked them on a map; I had laid it out across the entire floor. And then, as I started to analyze and work through each symbol - there were hundreds of them - I saw a pattern, a path; and before long, another more urgent thought came to me. I didn’t dare to allow myself to approach it - I kept it away from my critical mind until I could prove its accuracy, but when I could no longer deny it, I realized that in my searches, I had somehow uncovered something I was convinced no one had ever noticed in the vast centuries of generations studying it.

I double checked myself, I triple checked. There could be no doubt, and I feared that a terrible trick had been placed on all of us. The holy Trion - and all the symbols contained within it - were in fact not the words copied from the original; - but were instead references to specific locations - which together were coded to provide the secret location of the buried books! They could only have been written by the monks of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Byzantium to provide future generations the secret location of the lost Trion. And no one knew it but I.

It finally made sense: in ancient times, copying the original pages would have been strictly forbidden; it is, after all, an attempt to imitate the holy which would have been condemned by all ancient clergy. It was much more likely that these were human designs, with the intent to guide only the worthiest to the Universe’s ultimate prize.

There was no one I could trust with this information - not even my old professor, for he - like I - would have gladly doomed ourselves to Hell with immoral acts just to acquire a smitten of the knowledge necessary to find the Trion. I took my coat and quickly walked out into the night to think. I knew in my soul that I was on the edge of an incredible discovery - not one of mere centuries but of epochs, and I was sure that anyone who found out about it would not only steal my idea, but take ownership of the interpretation, exploration and ultimate discovery. No, I realized as I walked through the city streets - I needed to find someone that I could trust, and of course there was no one.