Prologue — Dragons and Butterflies
A dragon was unleashed in the sky high over the Earth, a dragon of red and yellow that writhed and raged, breathing gouts of flame that would scour the planet.
The sky was the mirror of our shame.
This dragon was built with savage alchemy. More than a century of pollution left the sky unbalanced even before we began to intentionally toy with atmospheric chemistry. Our scientific conceit did nothing to improve the situation. We were engineering ourselves for disaster even before our sociopathic nature took the helm, steering us toward a cataclysm of our own design.
Our domination and abuse transformed the sky into a seething dragon of toxic pollutants, volatile chemicals and pestilent organic matter. This dragon was set to erupt on us, vomiting our shame in a global orgy of death, destruction and madness. All to accommodate the occult schemes of our sociopathic elite, masters of the dragon.
These dragonmasters knew we had far exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity; a crash was inevitable. They knew this crash was unlikely to occur before we reduced the planet to an entropic wasteland, incapable of supporting technological civilization.
These dragonmasters viewed the human population as another resource for them to exploit in their quest for power. The coming die off would be a waste, when they might direct all of that expended life energy to some higher purpose.
The study of esoteric arts revealed to them the secret of how to harness the power of archetypes through the use of sacrifices. Immortality and omnipotence were within their grasp.
The crash was inevitable. Better to bring on the die off all at once and use that expended life energy to make a monumental leap to the next step in human evolution.
The die off would give them the ability to harness the most powerful of archetypes. And the remaining population, unhinged by grief and turning to religious, authoritarian archetypes for salvation, would be molded into a hive mind with these dæmonically enhanced dragonmasters at its head.
Yet they were wrong. In their sociopathic conceit, they could not understand that everything had a right to exist and that even the most insignificant microbe had its effect on the future of all. They could not see the butterfly’s wing that would stir a hurricane. Nor could they appreciate the effect of millions of insignificant butterfly wings all over the world.
On Ridgepoint Air Force Base, near the town of Heater, Arizona, the flapping of butterfly wings upset the timing of their plan, sending them scrambling before they were prepared.
In the town of Heater, butterfly wings were flapping even as religious fervor was giving birth to the hive mind, and ignorant fear and hatred were sending the rest of the population rampaging against each other.
Butterfly wings were flapping at Loveland Manor trailer park, where the residents prepared to stand up to Homeland Security.
Butterfly wings were flapping among the refuges assembled at Saint John’s Catholic Church, as they stood up to the violent attacks of bigots and their own fear.
My own butterfly wings carried me back into my past, approaching the traumatic events that eclipsed my true identity and drove me to hide behind a priest’s collar.
Butterfly wings at the police station brought deputies closer to the truth of what was happening in their town and at nearby Ridgepoint Air Force Base.
Butterfly wings were flapping in the hands of an autistic boy, his mother, and the deputy assigned to protect them from an abusive husband and father.
Even in the Reverend’s Salvation Hall, butterfly wings were flapping. And, though they were unaware of it, butterfly wings were flapping on all of the minions of the dragonmasters, even on their primary agent at the air force base.
Out in the desert, butterfly wings carried the sheriff and a teenaged boy to rescue another boy, injured and stranded on a ledge.
And somewhere hidden from all, the most insignificant and yet most influential butterfly wings were beating over a young woman and her newborn daughter.
And now it is time to measure the beating of butterfly wings against the breath of a dragon. As the skies shatter in conflict between the two, there is no way of determining the outcome.
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