The Redemption of Everything
Before Atlantis fell, before history frayed into myth, there was a being named Thoth. To some, he was a god. To others, a sage. In truth, he was the last living child of Atlantis, carrying forward the memory of a lost world, quietly working to shape the rebirth of harmony on Earth.
For twenty thousand years after the fall of Atlantis, Thoth labored behind the scenes of human civilization. He built temples encoded with divine proportion, seeded sacred languages, and gently guided humanity’s evolution. His goal was nothing less than a second flowering of Atlantis—a golden age of truth, beauty, and remembrance.
But not all forces wished this to be.
Around 3,600 years ago, Ra—the sun god—clothed himself in light and instantiated on Earth. Though he had once aided Thoth in shaping the sacred structures of Egypt, this time Ra came with a very different agenda. With overwhelming radiance and divine indifference, he imposed his vision upon the land, shattering the subtle lattice Thoth had so carefully prepared.
Worse still, Ra cast a spell upon humanity—a curse of forgetting. Where once gratitude gave rise to joy and fulfillment, now contentment evaporated. Desire became hunger. A ceaseless seeking began, and the Atlantean dream unraveled.
Thoth confronted Ra in the temple, demanding to know why. When faced with Ra's cruel indifference amidst the failure of everything he had worked towards, Thoth had had enough. He shed his body and became a god, leaving the physical world behind.
This story—The Redemption of Everything—picks up in the moments of Thoth’s confrontation with Ra, before he made the choice to leave. It explores an alternate timeline in which an ancient voice has her say, leading to a shift that opened the way to true collaboration between sovereign creators.
You do not need to have read The Keeper and the Flame to enter this tale. But know this: what was once lost can still be redeemed. Even gods can learn. Even the strongest curses can be broken. And even the deepest rifts can be bridged through presence and love.
Welcome to the redemption of Thoth. Of Ra. Of all of us.
Thoth stood in the inner sanctum of the high temple, where stone met sky and time seemed to hold its breath. Around him, the sacred geometry of ages past flickered with fraying light. The harmonic lattice of the world he was creating—his life's great work—lay wounded, its song disrupted by a force older and brighter than memory.
Ra had arrived.
The god of the sun, cloaked in fire and majesty, shone with an authority that dissolved all resistance. His presence warped the very weave of reality, reshaping flows of energy and memory with casual might. The magic of the land bent toward him like wheat in the wind.
Thoth, the last living child of Atlantis, watched in silence. Thirty-three thousand years he had labored to prepare the world for a second flowering—a return of harmony, of remembrance, of truth encoded in stone and song.
And now, in the space of days, that dream unraveled.
He stepped forward.
"You have stolen the dawn," Thoth said. "All that was prepared—all that could have healed—undone. Why?"
Ra turned his radiant gaze upon Thoth, the light of countless suns blazing behind his eyes.
"You see the ripples," he said, "but not the river. If you wish to understand more of the pattern, you must become bigger."
Thoth trembled.
He felt fear in the face of Ra's power. He felt rage in the face of his callousness. And below it all, he felt something deeper: heartbreak. He had given everything. He had served the world unceasingly for 33 millennia. All in order to bring about this moment. And Ra, untouched by the cost, would not even offer explanation.
As his anger grew, the impulses long-dormant stirred in him: fight. Strike down the one who had ruined all. Use the forbidden glyphs. Invoke the stored fury of Atlantis. Let power speak power's language.
Yet Ra was a living god, clothed in light. Like Thoth in his immortal body, no conventional Atlantean weapons could touch him. And none of the gifts given to Thoth by the Lords of Amenti were particularly useful in an offensive manner, especially against a god. Very little Thoth possessed operated on principles or at a scale that would have even a small chance of disrupting Ra's coherence enough to cause him to discorporate. What could kill a god?
Thoth's mind turned to the three technologies he had stolen from his father Thotme during the Atlantean Wars—the three world-enders. They were still there, astral copies stored in his mind. One of them worked to disrupt vibrational harmonics. This wasn't simply the vibrations made by sound. This thing manipulated the fundamental vibrations underlying reality. It tore apart all relation between the objects within its radius. Thoth had long wondered whether this device was powerful enough to destroy even his own embodied invulnerability.
If anything could disrupt the coherence of a lightbody and its connection to Ra's consciousness, it would be this. Was he skillful enough to contain its radius so that it would obliterate Ra without destroying everything else? Could he use it to disrupt Ra’s lightbody without disrupting the whole weave of reality? He wasn't sure. That uncertainty was what had led him to intervene and steal it from Thotme in the first place. It wasn't worth the risk of its activation. Maybe there was another way.
A new space appeared in his mind, dark and foreboding, and the sound of a woman's cruel laughter skipped across the edge of his awareness. He tentatively probed closer, the laughter becoming louder, rising in volume and darkening with malice, until it erupted into a shrieking crescendo before abruptly slamming to a halt.
For a few moments, Thoth drifted in the silence, his mental ears still ringing from the force of the blast. The voice resumed, seeming closer, this time no longer laughing. Now, the voice was syrupy and sibilant at once, a voice that pretended to be sweet while everyone knew it was pretending; and that was part of the fun.
"You seek a way to defeat a god? I can show you that way. I can teach you how to dream him out of existence. I can teach you how to do anything."
"Who are you?" Thoth oriented his mind, attempting to locate the source of the voice. "What do you want?"
"My name is Lilith," the voice spoke, the scent of thunder and fear spilling off her words. "Your kind never knew me. You came too late to that particular party, although I heard you did a very thorough job of throwing your own. Too bad. You would have been so much fun to play with. Humans give up so easily. They moan and they cry, and they break apart into little pieces with the tiniest twitch of my mind. I finally ascended because I couldn't think of any more inventive ways to make them suffer. The mind craves novelty, after all. You can only hear screaming for so long before it stops sounding so delightful. It's a tragedy. Really.
"The Atlanteans were made of tougher stuff. They would have given me a thrill or two. But you. You would have been a project. You could have done your silly folds and tried to hide away from me, and I would have enjoyed myself for some time, showing up only when you let your guard down, and letting us have our little battles of magic before you "luckily" slipped away, in an endless game of cat and mouse. It wouldn't have mattered. There was no escaping me. I was reality in those days. There was nowhere to hide, my pretty. Nowhere at all. Everyone you talked to. Everything you interacted with. They would have all been my puppets, dancing to the strings I pulled."
She appeared before him then in the astral, her form beautiful beyond anything he had ever seen. Yet it was a beauty that was hard in its perfection. Terrifying in its clarity. A beauty that didn't cover the evil inside; it welcomed it.
A form appeared in front of her, floating in the air. Thoth recognized it as the astral construct forming his invulnerable body. The last time he had seen it was when the Lords of Amenti had written it into his soul. He felt his body tense, wondering what she was going to do to it. Do to him.
Lilith walked slowly around the floating construct, her head tilted gently to the side with the focus of an expert.
"I have to admit, the Lords of Amenti do good work. Even with all of my dream-arts, it would have taken me some time to figure out how that body of yours holds its coherence so well. And I have no idea what they did to protect your mind from my predations. Totally impenetrable, no matter how hard I try to dominate it. And I’ve tried. Quite the puzzle.
I'm still not sure even now I understand most of how your body functions. I sense the involvement of the dream-arts, although at a frequency I've never seen, and that strange magic-science your people liked to play with is involved somehow too. And there is something more there. Something new. Or maybe really old."
She shrugged. "You would have given me at least a few thousand years of fun, tormenting you emotionally the entire time, before I finally broke through that invulnerable body of yours and started having some real fun. Of course, since my ascension, all sorts of delightful tricks are available to me that were sorely lacking back in ye olde Lemuria. I can do the most interesting things, these days."
Thoth's mind recoiled from the sensation of fingers brushing across his face, accompanied by the unmistakable feeling of razor-sharp nails slicing gently into skin that even in the astral should have been invulnerable.
Thoth's heart started pounding, waves of fear coursing through him that he hadn't known since his long-distant youth. He was vulnerable. Someone could harm him. Contain him. Maybe even control him. He reached desperately for the lever in his mind that he knew would release his immortal body and trigger a one-way ticket to ascension. Was it still there? Had she blocked that too? Should he ascend now before she could strike and trap him?
"Oh don't you fret, little Thoth." Lilith appeared before him once again, the subtle sting of the wounds on his face disappearing. "I'm not going to hurt you." She smiled. "I'm here to help you." The smile widened.
"Why do you want to help me?" Thoth asked, his own eyes widening in response to that alarming smile. "What could I possibly do for you in return?"
"The thing you wish to do is the thing I wish to do. I wish to deal a grievous blow to that Venusian slime mold, Ra." She stepped closer, stopping only a handbreadth away from him and leaning slowly in, until her eyes encompassed his entire world. "And I believe you wish for the same."
"Venusian slime mold?" Thoth was confused. "Are we talking about the same Ra? Pompous glowing man with the head of a falcon? Thinks pyramids are all the rage?"
"Every god comes from somewhere, Thoth. Ra happened to come from Venus. He evolved as a single communal organism that spread across Venus much the way a mycelial network spreads in a forest. Ra was the self-aware intelligence that ultimately arose from that network. He gets all sorts of angry when I call him a slime mold, but that's what he is. He's the fungus amongus."
Thoth shook his head in confusion. It felt like Lilith was speaking in a way that intentionally kept him off balance.
"Why do you hate Ra so much?" Thoth was tired. Physically tired. That was new. He conjured a chair and sat down. "And will you please stop fiddling with my body? It's distracting."
She looked at him with a mercenary glint to her eyes that would have left most people huddled on the floor, doing everything possible to shelter themselves from her gaze. Thoth's left eyelid twitched. She smiled, satisfied, and removed her fingers from the cord of energy she had been twisting inside the construct.
"I have a debt to repay to Ra. Back when I was a bright and innocent little girl, he decided to incarnate as a little boy who lived near my family. His name was Adam. We grew up and fell in love, and he became my world. We rose to power together, two people united in love and a shared vision for Lemuria, existing in perfect trust. Or so I thought. One day, that slime stain lied to me and did something I had begged him not to do. That stupid twat reached across the veil, and the experience drove him insane. He killed himself. That son of a slime killed himself. And left me all alone.
"When I found out, I went a little insane too. He was my world. It didn't matter what my magic created, it couldn't replace what I had lost. And then, push came to burnt hole through a chest, and my little insanity turned into something bigger. I was mad. Really...REALLY...mad. The maddest and baddest anyone has ever been. And all because of Ra. That rot-muncher showed up and destroyed everything. And now he's doing it to you. It's time to make him stop. It's time to make him pay. I've been taunting him for ages, telling him that he'd get his one day. Now I finally get my chance!"
"I don't understand. If you talk with Ra regularly and you have all this power, why don't you destroy him? Why do you need me?"
"I'm a god, Thoth. I live in time/space. I don't have a body that can persist in space/time the way yours does. I can't instantiate like Ra. I can only work by whispering in people's minds and offering them what I know, or by incarnating and braving the Forgetting. I have no idea what kind of phoenix guano Mr. Mildew shoveled in order to convince the Lords of Amenti to let him do his little light parade, but I'm reasonably confident they would not extend the same courtesy to me. Without their consent, that particular window is nailed up tighter than your mother was the night of her wedding. And I'm as pleased about the situation as Thotme was."
She leaned in closer. "But you, my little scrumptious Thoth-melon, are a living, breathing human embodied in a living, breathing...whatever the hell that thing is." She waved vaguely at the construct still floating a short distance from them. "You can take my magic and use it to create a very final fungicide for our friend over there." She pointed her finger at an image of Ra that was suddenly floating a few feet away with a large targeting marker overlaid. "That pompous fool won't be sticking his neck in these parts for a long time to come."
Thoth paused for a moment. Lilith had a point. It seemed that this wasn't the first time that Ra had decided to show up and spoil the party. Maybe Lilith could help him make it the last.
"So I discorporate Ra, and then what? He's already cast his curse. I don't know how to undo it."
"That silly little thing?" She smirked. "It's a trifle of a story. You can barely call it a dream. Held up against what I could teach you? Flick of the mind, Thoth. A mere flick of the mind. Here, I'll even give the cure to you as a little gift. Not that it's any use to you until you kill him. Once he understands what you did, he'd simply activate the curse again and block you the next time."
Thoth felt a torrent of energy flow through his mind as it reorganized itself around this new gift.
"Go ahead and kill a god, Thoth, and then build your golden age. I'm giving you the tools on a silver platter. Everything you require to make it happen. I only want to grab a good viewing angle and enjoy the show.” She smiled. "While eating a meal of delicious fried mushrooms, of course. I'm not looking to recreate my old playground of pain. You have your fun with your silly little nirvana."
Should he? It seemed like he could get everything he wanted without harming anyone except Ra. It would be his kind of operation—surgical in precision and overwhelming in power. And it would give him tools that would make building a new Atlantis infinitely easier.
Yet Thoth had faced this temptation before. During the Atlantean Wars, he knew he was strong enough to stop the fighting at any time. But that would have required him seizing control of the government and forcing everyone to submit to his power. That had never been his style. He hadn't yielded to that temptation before, and he wouldn't now either. All of this hunting through his mind, and even this discussion with Lilith—all of it was an attempt to avoid the truth. He would not fight Ra. He would not use force to dominate and control. He would not repeat the mistakes of Atlantis.
Lilith sensed the shift in his energy and frowned. "I thought you might decide that. Thanks to those uppity Lords, I can't make you do this. And I'm not really looking to harm you anyway. In a funny way, you remind me of me. Us soul-sisters have to look out for each other."
Thoth squinted in confusion. "I'm a man."
Lilith smirked. "Do me a favor at least. Don't just slink away in defeat because he told you to grow up. Make sure you give Ra a piece of your mind for me. It's long past time for that."
"What good would that do? You saw how cruelly oblivious he is. He'll just ignore me, the same as he has before; or worse, make another profound-sounding yet weirdly uncaring pronouncement."
He paused mid-rant. Lilith was right. He would try again. He'd give it at least one more go before running away. He owed the world one more chance. He owed it to himself.
Lilith smiled as they both felt new timelines dropping in place. "You might be surprised what a little piece of mind can do for a fellow, Thoth. Very surprised. Ra thinks he's so high and mighty. Even if you aren't going to send him packing, I bet you could still show him what a little exaltation can do. Go get him, kiddo."
She faded away from his mind, and he was suddenly back in the temple, facing Ra. Seeing the smug look of indifference on that face once again got Thoth's blood boiling, and he briefly reconsidered Lilith's offer. But no, he wouldn't fight. His first instinct was to ignore Lilith's request and pull the lever. What was the point in talking to Ra? Better to just depart without another word. He could spend the next few millennia as a god like Lilith, and like Ra when he wasn’t walking around pre-lit. He would spend time whispering in people's minds and looking for an opportunity to shift things in a big way. And he'd heard from Yahweh that the gods perceive time differently in any case, spreading the moments out before them like a deck of cards, instead of turning them over one by one like the rest of us.
He reached out for the lever, ready to finally rest after all these long years. But something stopped him. Something nagging at the edge of his awareness. What had Lilith meant with that final cryptic comment? What did "exaltation" even mean?
And suddenly it was there, yet another timeline clicking into place and a new construct floating before him in the astral. Exaltation. He peered at it carefully and grabbed some tools off his workbench. Gently, he peeled apart the outer layers and began to look inside, probing with his machinery. It was immensely complex, but it seemed to arise from 5 foundational pillars, deeply interwoven with each other. As he probed at them, he could sense that the pillars were acceptance, acknowledgement, appreciation, allowance, and adventure. Somehow those came together into whatever this exaltation thing was. None of those pillars seemed dangerous, although certainly not all adventures end well. Maybe he would test it out for a few moments and see what happened. Anyway, it wouldn't kill him to speak with the slime mold for a bit longer. Hmm, perhaps Lilith had rubbed off on him more than he realized.
He grabbed an automatic shut-off timer set to about a minute out of a nearby drawer, connected it to the construct, and with only a slight frown of worry, activated the tangled mess.
Immediately, light surrounded him. Golden light. Infusing and pervading his body, spiraling around him, raising his vibration as every particle tingled with pleasure. Thoth's eyebrows shot up in surprise as he felt the gentle pressure of the upward flow, available the moment he turned his mind to it. This was new! Something different than anything he had ever experienced. This absurd construct took the holiest, most sacred and perfect feeling he had ever experienced and bathed him in it, non-stop. He was soaring, rising higher and higher on a vibe that kept going. What a feeling! Where had this incredible grace come from?
The timer clicked, and Thoth came crashing down to Earth, back in his astral workroom. Wow! Wow. Wow. WOW! That was incredible! Thoth felt so much more open; so much more free.
A window appeared on a nearby wall, showing him Ra's smirking face on the other side. Right. He was about to speak with Ra. That somehow didn't seem as pointless now. That graceplosion had widened his perspective, and he thought it might be worth seeing if something new came to him. With a deep breath, he dropped back into the physical, becoming aware again of Ra's cool gaze.
Nothing came to him. Silence. Staring. That smirk.
He flung himself back into the astral, bellowing in rage upon arrival.
The exaltation construct remained in front of him, glowing faintly with a light that was somehow as intense as the light that Ra radiated, yet without any of its force. He sighed and decided to give it another go. He removed the timer, activating the construct again.
Once again, golden light was everywhere, and he was grooving in an ever-upward vibe. He took a deep breath, a shower of golden particles entering his body in the process, and he dropped once more into the physical.
Thoth saw Ra, yet what he perceived this time was something entirely different. Everything clicked. He had been fighting Ra's vision, fighting his actions, fighting that godawful smirk. None of it was required. He could accept who Ra was. He didn't need a reason. He could choose to accept him. Simply choose. And now, he could faintly sense the pain behind what Ra was doing. The lessons he hadn't yet learned. He could acknowledge that pain, acknowledge that confusion.
His mind turned once more. And he could appreciate Ra. He could appreciate the gift of the Great Pyramid that Ra had given him 8,000 years earlier, a sanctuary of initiation and healing. He could appreciate what Ra was attempting to do, and he began to understand how what Thoth himself had envisioned might have led to stagnation, instead of utopia. He could appreciate Ra for attempting to do something to improve the world, even if misguided.
Thoth's eyes widened as his vision clarified further. He really could stop fighting. He could choose to allow Ra to do as he does. And Thoth could do as he wishes. If the two realities conflict, there is space for finding harmony, even if only one side realizes it. He didn't have to justify this allowance. He could simply let it be. Let it flow.
And that last one, adventure. He understood it now. This whole journey of human consciousness, it is a beautiful shared adventure. When he can remember it truly, then, well... he and Ra are adventuring together. They always have been. Both pursuing the same goal, helping each other always whether they realize it or not.
Despite everything that had occurred in his experience, only a moment of real time had passed since Ra's callous quote about the ripples and the river. He suddenly knew what to say, and he understood Ra in a whole new way.
“Ra,” he said gently, “you came from the heart of Venus. From the mycelial consciousness that bloomed across that world.”
Ra inclined his head, faintly curious.
“You were born of unity so complete it had no opposition. Long before you became self-aware, you consumed all difference until only oneness remained. You learned love in isolation—without wisdom, for wisdom is forged in relation.”
Ra's face went still. "I had not considered that. It is an intriguing thought."
“You offered humanity your flame, but you often did it without understanding their true experience. You gave them solar radiance, but not the guidance of the stars. You saw the arc of the cosmos, but not the cost of every step. You loved more than any other. Yet love without wisdom can do as much harm as good."
Thoth paused, taking a deep breath. “I have suffered from the opposite. I have lived the pattern. Every incarnation. Every sacrifice. I walked among the people, feeling each thread of pain and potential. I learned the wisdom of the particular." Thoth's features grew grave as he remembered Serapheme. "But far too early in my existence, I denied myself the lessons of love.
“Both are needed. The river and the ripple. The sun and the stars. The pattern and the prize.”
And then it clicked for Thoth. A piece of his mind...
There it was. Sitting in the astral. A piece of his mind. All of the wisdom he had gained over the years. He could simply... give it to Ra. It was that easy. So he did.
Ra glanced at him in surprise, and then, smiling, gave Thoth a piece of his mind in return. They both had been waiting a long time to do that.
The two looked at each other, subtle smiles playing on their faces as they realized that, despite their age and power, there were still many lessons to be learned. And now, they could learn them from each other. As one sovereign creator standing before the other, relating to everything with exalted reverence.
“I didn't know what I lacked,” Ra said. “Only now do I see the shape of it.”
Thoth stepped forward. His eyes shimmered with tears born from possibility.
“Nor did I. Then let us begin anew. Without dominion. Without retreat. As two beings who know what we are capable of, working together to build Heaven.”
The temple sang.
It shimmered in tones never before heard on Earth. The harmonics of a new age.
And in that song, the true flowering began.
A flowering of equipoise.
Of exaltation.
Of relation as the All, with the All.
