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What is the truth, you ask?
It is a question that has been asked for tens of thousands of years. It is a question that has brought suffering and war, famine and extinction. It is a question that has saved nations on the brink of ruin and enriched countless lives. There is, in all likelihood, no more powerful question one could ask. For a question that has toppled centuries-old kingdoms, upending tyrannical blood reigns and rebirthing entire civilizations; demolished an entire space station and nearly destabilized its parent star; incited the spread of nuclear wastelands the size of a small continent; is not a question to be asked lightly. For some, it is the chariot of love and wonder and the door unto the utmost spiritual quest. For others, it is a powerful instrument for inflicting pain, effecting madness and outright terror. Whatever the actual case may be about the true answer if any, it is, ultimately, a question that begets more questions.
Yet, it is no less real to those of us who live in it and by it. It is exactly what we mean when we imagine that there is a place or a being with all of the right answers—with all of the true answers. It is present in all physical things, for if it were not then the flows would have been impossible. More, it is said that all things true converge together in a Realm—a place where all truths shall be revealed. Many have sought after this sacred dimension but to the best of my knowledge, all have failed. Whether or not this is proof that the Realm exists is not a contention that I hold. Rather, I like to imagine that this very elusiveness is at the heart of what drives those truth-seekers continually onward as if the Realm were some kind of…legendary artefact. And if the Realm is the door then the Book would most certainly be the key.
And so, this brings us here, with the Book before me. I must admit, it is a voluminous tome the likes I have never seen. But it is this way necessarily so, as the book contains all of recorded time. At least, all of the recorded time here on Rynn. I concede that there must be more, out there in the great expanse of the universe but this is only one book. And while it now sits inert in my claws, it wasn’t always this way. This object has authored the entirety of a planet’s history; all of its joy and suffering. All of it. That is an unfathomable cost to pay for peace and one that any holder of this book must pay, should they dare to ever read it and make sense of it all. You can imagine, then, how shocking it was for me to find that, where many masters had failed in the past, all salvation would come to rest in the heart of a mere boy. While I would not meet him for many, many centuries to come, I could feel the story forming long before we would ever cross paths. It was a day, not so long ago, when the flows aligned in a very specific way, like great gears in a vast, invisible machine slowly turning over the engine of time. Why the book had chosen him I cannot say but, after what I have seen, I like to believe that it had chosen him long before then.
Perhaps it had always known.
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