Chronicles From The Future: The amazing story of Paul Amadeus Dienach

At the same time, however, I was proud that I was born human and that one of my peers had managed to speak to God thus, in his own language. With eyes and mind in the stars, I was listening with devotion to the perfectly harmonious voices that, at that moment, in my heart, seemed identical with the harmonic laws that govern the universe.

It was the first time I ever heard the glorious Mass and I truly felt it touched the purest and kindest side of me. I felt deep faith flooding my soul after listening to their own Bach of their 11th century. And I admit that they were right: he had surpassed our own...

The music was now over but no one from that sea of people moved from their seats for a long time. During those approximately ten minutes that passed, I wondered what they were waiting for. One could think that they had been petrified or that Ledestrem didn’t even deserve a single round of applause today… And those colours in the twilight...The women, all seven thousand of them, dressed in silk mantles, in different light colours, and the men dressed in black, wearing the traditional costumes of the Valley of the Roses. They even made us wear the short trousers with black, silk leggings that reach up to the knee. The women who had the standard for such circumstances strict, uniform hairstyle, looked like flowers of the same family, incredibly and equally beautiful! I realised that, inside the indoor auditorium, there were seven thousand different love stories!

In the end, I wondered whether Ruthemir’s Mass could still be heard up there, or rather if now there was a real, secret Mass going on instead under the moonlight that lit up the whole sky.

(Half an hour later)

When, after the concert, Silvia and I were alone, she pulled her favourite ring out of her things, the one with the green stone—one of the very few pieces of jewellery she possessed—and after she kissed it, she put it on my finger “to commemorate our joint prayer tonight”, as she said. She stood silent and looked still influenced by what she had heard. At that moment I happened to notice that on her left wrist she was wearing her one and only bracelet with the colourful gems. Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, diamonds and amethysts, ten in total, were sparsely distributed and set in gold.

After a while I asked her, “When do you think fate decided our union?”

But she, despite her deep sentimentality, is still an educated, down-to-earth woman with critical and positive thinking.

“Do you think that destiny has nothing better to do than plan our union?” she replied smiling.

I didn’t want to continue the conversation. I have never said a word about my past, my other self. Nor does she know about Anna, of course. She knows nothing about her life, our life…

I asked Stefan if those who are not young and in love have no place in this big anniversary, the Bigvirchsdag, like we do. Plus I hadn’t seen any of the great Ilectors and the Lorffes either. He told me that this midnight found the whole humanity kneeling down. Everyone throughout the entire land was praying last night. But the Temple of the Idea had been reserved for these seven thousand couples and only them. The rest of the world prayed elsewhere and the Great Leaders had their own congregation in the Valley.

That is where the first successful Nibelvirch

—Biglys and Storlys they call it in their language—took place, he said, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, at midnight. Volky was the first one who saw it and survived or rather who survived after seeing it. And after that came the redemption of human life. Such redemption could not have come unless humanity had gained consciousness and mastery over its existence.

(Very late at night)

The meeting with Stefan and Hilda before the concert—with a warm handshake and the girls kissing and hugging each other—gave me the opportunity to catch up on all the news of the past twenty days that we hadn’t seen them. Among other things, I was struck by Aria’s triumph in Norfor where her courses had sold out! You couldn’t even find standing room, let alone and empty seat even though bad rumours said that more seats were reserved by the admirers of her beauty than by the lovers of intellect.

Stefan had heard about all that from visitors of the North. He also told me that the top archaeologists and historians had paid tribute to her and that a great wise man —whose name escapes me— who had initially disagreed with her, recognised his mistake and actually admitted she was the one who was right. And that made her even more popular among the public. Aria told two of her friends in Norfor: “With great sorrow it was that he sent me the chain of rubies that he had possessed for four years, with great sorrow but also quite excited to get rid of it!”