No Such Thing as Serendipity

by Dan Davies

In the faraway land of Flarce, in a faraway time long past, Gumbil Fig prepared himself for the ‘Trial of Wisdom.’ He would be the seventh and final candidate to be asked the question at this year’s convocation. Akashi always asked the same question; it was well known to be: ‘What’s Life?’

Gumbil tried to focus but he knew he shouldn’t be there. If his uncle hadn’t disappeared, if his Aunty hadn’t caught the fever, if his older brother didn’t have a boil in his ear – then one of them could have come instead. Gumbil knew he was here by default, but here he was, representing his clan, the chosen sacred leader of the Fellewyn faction. No pressure.

Way back over two hundred years ago, before Akashi came, the people of Flarce were generally united by their superstition and doubt. They invoked many different deities or spirits in hopes of a blessing or two. Crude magic, faith, philosophy and science were bound together in an emerging discourse of ‘what’s it all about?’

Historically, a council of elders had led society by a simple set of guidelines that encouraged freedom of thought and expression, though some limits were placed on expression. All in all, it was a very thoughtful, expressive society that shared its knowledge and resources in relative harmony.

Then Akashi appeared.

Akashi quickly became known by the people as the “Great Library,” the source of all knowledge and wisdom. Many people came to ask questions, most often the same questions, time over and over time. As it unfolded, some people began asking the wrong questions.

The Great Library housed no literature and was no building or individual, but an artifact. It merely appeared one day, its origins unknown, origins it would not discuss.

At first, everyone had access to the Great Library, and new laws were spontaneously founded upon its teachings, which were as follows:

What is good for the land must come first.

If you have plenty, you must share.

Do not take what is not yours.

For a few short years, people prospered with guidance from Akashi, but it didn’t take long for the cracks to appear that would eventually tear the council apart.

Akashi took the form of the carved face of a black owl, a visage of dense polished ebony, or so it seemed. It spoke to those who pressed their face into its cavity. It was said to be of alien origin, for nothing like it existed, and none could move it from where it had appeared, hovering in the middle of the huge stone circle atop Mount Severus.

Untouched by the weather of two centuries and more, unable to be burnt or cut, it sat in the air a few feet off the ground, as still as the stones that surrounded it. Its magic had the ability to transfer knowledge directly to the mind of those who would enquire of it. The only difficulty lay in knowing what to ask.

Sometimes Akashi’s answers were obscure and ambiguous, sometimes simple. Often the answer to a question would lead directly to a dozen more. Occasionally an answer would become a point of great contention or curiosity, giving rise to volumes of anatomization. Questions ranged from requests for remedies to relieve pustules, to inquiries into the nature of gods.

One famous question went like this, ‘How will I be remembered?’ Akashi’s words emerged from the depths of the questioner’s mind like the breaching of a whale,

‘Best if you forget yourself now.’

A young Ludician girl once asked, ‘What is Nature?’ Akashi’s reply instantaneous,

‘Nature is the law, obey the law lest you be ruled by tyrants.’

A renowned philosopher once asked, ‘What is Faith?’ Akashi’s response,

‘Believing what you can’t see, until you see what you believe.’

The Great Library sealed itself in its sixth year, but no one knew exactly why. Of course, everyone assumed it had something to do with the dissolution of the Elder Council, and each of its members blamed another. As the intolerance had grown, Akashi had become less accessible and began to withdraw, choosing to engage with fewer and fewer individuals.

The Council’s fundamental differences of orientation became irreconcilable. Based on information from Akashi, often misinterpreted, the once stable nation divided into atheistically and theosophically oriented denominations. Rather than adopting an interdisciplinary approach, as Akashi had suggested, friction caused fractures and factions formed.

The schisms saw the emergence of seven distinct groups that quickly forgot their similarities, becoming rigorously focused on their differences. Many strove to distinguish themselves, guarding their knowledge and discoveries like secret hordes of dragons old.

The Great Library remained in place but would answer no more questions. It now had a question of its own, a question it would ask elected representatives but once a year. If the question were answered satisfactorily, Akashi had let it be known that full access would be restored.

This became the one tradition uniformly observed by all factions, known as The Convocation, or the Trial of Wisdom.

Every year the seven factions would send their best candidate to The Convocation to attempt to answer Akashi’s question. The question had not changed in over two hundred years. The question had been heard many times by many candidates, but it had never been answered satisfactorily, despite the fact it was multiple-choice. Each year Akashi asked the exact same question of the candidates, it was the choice of answers that constantly changed. In two hundred and twenty-two years, no one had yet chosen the correct answer.

Faction members elected their candidates by popular vote, ensuring an even mix of the orders which were as follows: The Dingmere – Esoteric Philosophers; The Fellewyn – Anarchic Hedonists; The Pryksha – Mystical Occultists; The Mandikot – Metaphysical Scientists; The Ongords – Non-binary Spiritualists; The Sniffid – Conservative Pragmatists; The Ludician – Secular Animists.

Most of those attending The Convocation were spectators. The Trial of Wisdom was for the chosen seven only. Some were practicing wizards, priests, and sages, their skills steeped in deep traditions of ancient arts. Gumbil’s ancestors were the Bumwah, a branch of the druidic tree absorbed by the Fellewyn faction. They espoused nature as a sacred entity and saw themselves as its children. They lived in the forests of Pugwhey and were widely considered backward and resistant to structure, rules and regulations. Gumbil Fig was little more than a simple gardener, who occasionally had odd dreams, and was recently appointed spiritual delegate.

The other six candidates treated Gumbil as scholars do simpletons, either with condescension or indifference. He had a look of wide-eyed apprehension that marked him as one out of their element, which indeed, he was. Barely past his teens, he’d never been anywhere or done anything important. The rush to find replacements for his faction’s representative had been chaotic, consensus hard to come by. Gumbil’s family had provided Fellewyn candidates for as long as anyone could remember, but none could remember why.

In the end, it came down to a choice between Gumbil and his cousin Afelony. Afelony had twelve webbed toes, which meant she’d been blessed by the water spirits, but Gumbil had had several prophetic dreams over the years, and on this basis, he’d narrowly edged out Afelony to find himself the Fellewyn Convocation Candidate, standing atop Mount Severus at the two hundred and twenty second Trial of Wisdom.

As it transpired, Gumbil had experienced a peculiar dream the night before the Trial. All night he was visited by intense visions of owls, some of them clawed at his eyes and ears, and others pecked at his lips. Some just stood and stared at him with steel-moonlike eyes. One, an archetypal owl, spoke to him – it said ‘hoot-hooot,’ and it kept hooting at him until he felt he could vaguely understand it. Its hoots began sounding like words, not to his ear, but in his mind. The owl said in its hooty voice, ‘All love the above, all love the above.’

Gumbil woke agitated, only half recalling his fractured dream, dreading the task at hand. He felt somewhat encouraged by the fact that the Great Library’s question had been asked over one and a half thousand times before, and no one had got it right yet.

The Ongordian representative from Cthar, where the curly-horned, red-eyed priests practice blood magic by sacrificing virgin goats, brushed by Gumbil in a huff, she was the sixth candidate to have failed the Trial of Wisdom this year. Some of the crowd began to dissipate, confident of Gumbil’s immanent failure.

The reticent Fellewyn candidate approached Akashi and time seemed to slow as he sat on the purposefully placed and aptly named ‘sitting stone.’ He leant forward and pressed his face into the hollow behind the legendary, black alien owl. The last sounds he heard were the sneers and heckles from the crowd as they cruelly pointed out his obvious inadequacies.

Immediately he felt a vastly empty presence accompanied by a deafening silence. Then his body evaporated – and his consciousness floated as if suspended by thin fluid. As we know, the voice of Akashi was not audible, but came as fully formed thought, bypassing time, arriving within the mind, as though it instantly grew there, from seed to vine in no time,

‘What’s Life Gumbil?’

Gumbil’s essence floated like a warm snowflake as Akashi supplied four possible answers for him to choose from, this was instantaneous, as though it had already happened. The choices were:

The Paradox of Duality represented by Ontological Entropy with/in the Constant of Change.

The Omniverse getting to know Itself.

An Act of Being.

Expression Beyond Expression.

Thoughts rushed to flood Gumbil’s consciousness, like a whirlpool of oceanic energy spiralling toward some central concept obscured by a churning mass of spinning notions, the centre too dark and dense to penetrate. All was confusion and chaos, colour, sound, motion...Then he saw the owl, flying in smooth circles, counter to the spiral of tumbling thoughts. He tried not to panic, he tried to focus on the four possible answers.

Gumbil remembered hearing of similar answers to some of these. He knew that ‘Every Thing’ had been rejected in the past. Similarly, ‘All but not One’ had not proven satisfactory. Nor did ‘Chemical subjectivity’ bear fruit. Most of the answers the Great Library provided were of an esoteric nature, often tinged with scientific probability or spiritual potential.

The seventeenth sage of the Mandikots, Blithen, had made his forty-third attempt this year. He was as bald as an egg, having torn out the last of his hair many Convocations ago. He’d studiously continued to record all the answers Akashi offered, analysing each in great depth to no avail. The greatest minds were at a loss as to why no one had cracked it yet, even if only by luck. Many suspected the Great Library was somehow broken, still, the question of what life is, dominated modern science and spirituality, influencing the narratives of the popular cultures of the times.

Again, Gumbil felt Akashi’s words enter his field of perception, larger now, with potent force,

‘What’s Life?’

Gumbil was deep in confused contemplation, still watching the whirlpool, wary of the owl. The owl looked at him, its eyes dispassionate orbs of golden light. It hooted once and dove into the black centre of the vortex of twisted conceptualisation.

‘What’s Life?’ boomed Akashi with the volume of a snow-covered mountain, and again the multiple-choice answers ran like a mobius strip through Gumbil’s scattered psyche.

The hoot of the owl continued to echo within his essence, quivering like heat’s haze. Suddenly, his dream of the previous night burst upon him like a thousand facets of diamond lightening, and he found his mind expressing, almost blurting out,

‘All love the above all love the above all love the above.’

The whirlpool slowed and faded. The deafening silence subsided. There was a long, still, timeless pause, as if the ocean had sighed...

‘What did you say?’

‘...Um, all love...the above...er, well...the owl said it.’ Gumbil’s mind sounded a little hesitant as it spoke.

Another pause ensued, which seemed like all eternity compressed into one heartbeat, one endless instant moment...

‘You saw The Owl?’

‘Yes, I saw the owl.’

‘What did it say?’

‘All love the above.’

Akashi hummed with emotion, something akin to surprise, something not unlike wonder or amusement...

‘Close enough.’

Those words, close enough, unfolded and radiated with the beauty of a fresh flower, and Gumbil was filled with an almost overwhelming sense of immediate connection, bound to an infinity of minuscule things whilst being wholly one thing, the everything, the only thing. Indescribable imaginings flew through Gumbil, and he through them. In mere moments, Akashi revealed things that should have taken years to tell.

Observers of the Convocation were still unaware anything unusual had occurred, some were still mid slur against Gumbil who had only just sat down. After a few minutes, a far longer time than usual, those who’d remained at The Convocation saw Gumbil stand, and it was plain for all to see, something extraordinary had happened. The Great Library, Akashi, had vanished. In its place was Gumbil Fig, glowing like polished silver, eyes wide and powerful, like an owl’s, positively bristling with intrinsic potency and focused energy.

Gumbil’s ascendancy caused quite a stir. It wasn’t long before the question arose, what was the correct answer? Gumbil now knew the correct answer had been ‘All-of-the-above,’ but Akashi had warned him not to bother trying to explain it, so Gumbil simply replied, with a warm grin, that the correct answer had been ‘serendipity.’

Akashi also warned Gumbil not to answer too many questions in general, lest he become beset by those wishing to cure their infirmities and wretchedness, or worse still, those wanting to manipulate others for personal gain. Gumbil still enjoyed his gardening, but he took the time to nurture a new story for the people of Flarce, one that encouraged them to embrace their differences and reunite.

His first unchallenged act was to reinstate the three laws Akashi had originally helped to develop, stating that they were ‘perfectly good for a start.’ He then facilitated the development of a new mythology for the continually curious and doubtful people of Flarce to follow if they chose to. For those people, Gumbil provided an allegory that Akashi had recommended due to its wide regional appeal. It went something like this,

The Sun is the Father of All

There is no life without His light

His fury is great, revere Him

The Earth is the Mother of Us

There is no Life without Her fertility

Her Love is Great, Worship Her

The Sacred Seed of the Soul is transmitted through light

Water is the Receptor, the Ocean is the Womb

The Soul manifests Itself through Matter

All Matters to Life.

Gumbil could have gone further, but there are things people can only find for themselves. Life is a journey of discovery. It’s like an endless game of hide and seek. When consciousness manifests as matter, it forgets itself. Like how your shadow is absorbed when you move out of the sunlight, temporarily lost. Like plunging into a pool, suddenly the air outside you is gone and there is only the air inside you. Like dreaming. Like a butterfly doesn’t know there’s a caterpillar inside it. Like chickens aren’t sure if they came first. Like we once lived in water, blind in the dark, nameless, wordless, careless, inseparable.

Life is a gift, full of surprises, full of the unknown, full of discovery, an experiential game of chance. It is all these things and much, much more. What it is not, what it is never, what it continually refuses to be, is an accident – of that, there is no chance.