The Transcriber Part 5
The Transcriber Part 5
Syro stood trembling in front of the beautifully sculpted Venetian masterpiece that stood at the center of his room. The facial features were sharply accentuated and the curvaceously revealing body reflected the essence of an emotion that Syro felt for all his statues. The signs of physical lust manifested whenever he caressed his statues, but this one in particular made Syro burn. It captured his very soul so that he was powerless to resist its grip. And so he sighed, and touched it. Gently, but longingly, treasuring every moment and losing trace of time and space. It was him and the statue. Together. Forever.
In reality, it was more like 5 minutes before Syro fell into a delirium caused by a light green mist. Slumped on the floor, he was unaware of the people who entered, removed the statue from his grasp and placed a note in his hand. When he was aroused, Syro felt cold, and alone. Seeing his other statues did nothing to change this. He had glimpsed something higher, something better, and like a drug addict who has tried high quality methamphetamines struggles to fuel his addiction with anything of a lower grade, Syro did not feel satiated. Incomplete and shivering, that was what he was reduced to. It took him about 14 minutes before he realised he was clutching a note, such was the impact of the statue’s absence upon his feeble mind. In most circumstances, they had never bothered to leave him a note with writing on it, because he had such a feeble vocabulary, instead opting to provide him with visual demonstrations of their message. However, this simple note had only four words on it, four commonplace words that he had managed to accumulate during his stay in the room with the red walls.
Stop what you’re planning.
Next to it was an equal sign, and on the other side of the equation, a rough sketch of his loved one. The statue. Syro would not have known what blackmail was but nevertheless he felt its grip over him. He also would not have known that he was about to face a choice that confronted many protagonists in clichéd literature or visual media that were the trademark of some cheap Hollywood theatrical production. Nor is this tale aspiring to be such a work; things are merely being recounted as they transpired, for what could this humble writer know about changing the course of fate or filling life with varied dramatic choices? Suffice it to say that these events were deeply troubling for Syro, and that he had never been so confused in his life, not even the time when he could not reconcile for three weeks why his hypothesis for some curvaceous passage to accommodate time travel seemed so plausible and feasible yet required the existence of a history student to think of the exact same theory and publishing it as his own many years earlier. As a physicist in his very own right, and mind, he never truly believed in the ‘many worlds’ theory about the universe, preferring to abide by the view that it was only this existence and this universe that truly mattered and if anything, this exacerbated the immense pressure that he was under.
Rarely did his scientific mind allow anything to be dictated by superstition or the metaphysical, but he was truly paralysed, caught between his very own Scylla and Charybdis. How could anyone be expected to choose between saving another’s life and being eternally happy for the rest of his existence? Syro was determined to make the right choice but as he remembered, Odysseus sacrificed six men to pass, and perhaps the right choice lay in not making a choice at all. Wait for fate to act for him. Fate waited about thirteen hours and then gave him a nightmare. When Syro woke up, he realised he had fallen asleep with his love, and in the midst of his passion, broken her into so many pieces that there was no hope for her ever being whole again.