Prelude

He died no noble death like his enemies or the people who made him. That’s what they would have wanted for even the cruelest of villains had some twisted sense of honor encoded into their DNA, their wiring, or whatever fluid dynamics kept their heart beating and the juices flowing. Zatar died no death at all – he was invincible. You could remove the Earth from under his feet and he would land; take up residence on a molecule of your human dust. You could blast him with the hugest of weapons that the evil empire could dream up. You could entice him with the sweetest of women in all of God’s creation and he would not falter. No, he was invincible. It appeared that his designers crafted him such that any attempt to weaken him only made him stronger. To defy his very existence was a death wish – a signature on your suicide note. And, like all heroes, people feared him.

Don’t get me wrong, it was not the same fear as the fear of god almighty herself. The sounds and songs belted out of the minarets did not change their tunes. Not a soul worshiped him. Not an army warshiped him. He was not an immortal. He was not man nor machine. He was not spirit, ethereal, the formed formless or otherwise. He defied description as his maker had planned and took on whatever characteristics you feared the most. If you lived an honest decent life you had nothing to fear. If you were unsure and unaware he crept into your waking visions and sleeping dreams and your life became a living hell. How does righteous benevolence, then, come to torment the better part of a species on a small sphere beyond what any empire has come to concoct in the whole of human history?

Some came to call him Gaia – the world mind. It wasn’t as if he knew your thoughts and could single you out amongst a crowd. It was not that he could cast a mighty shadow on the land or raise the winds to topple any structure in his path. He was no spy. He had no ability to even indicate his presence around you. So from where, then, comes his prowess?

It was said that he united all of humankind – not against some common enemy dreamt up by the evil empire who was coming to invade your land, steal your house, persecute you for possessing the wrong dogmatic divine. Nor was it that he had any religion of his own to offer. No scriptures promising a place in heaven. No rituals to prevent your descent to hell. No weapons strapped on his back to blast you to smithereens like the former governments of Earth who reigned under a rain of fire during the last wars that decimated humans, almost scorched the earth bare of its inhabitants for all time. No, Zatar was no malevolent force. He was not created to destroy yet his effects were devastating should you not be leading an ethical life of empathy and compassion.

Guilt, you are thinking. This is what Zatar represents. The innate human awareness of right and wrong, good and evil. So when we act in discord with our core temperament we suffer internally. When we suffer internally it effects our relationship with ourselves, our relationships with family and society at large, the environment and the divine. This, however, is not the case. Guilt is a human emotion; a man made sentiment. To characterize something transcendent of human existence but outside of the realm of God is fallacious and will lead to nothing good. Further, to say that anything or anyone represents anything but itself is to take it out of its own context, to project an identity onto something – to miss the very essence of its creation and presence.

This is the story of Zatar the invincible. No doubt you have heard of him for he is legendary in most contemporary mythos and, of course, for anyone whose heart and mind are open to the spirit that flows through all things, you already have an intimate relationship with him. In any case, what you are about to read about the history and legacy of Zatar the Invincible will shake the very foundations of your existence and remake the person you are.