The Return of Zarathustra:

CHAPTER TWO: THE DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS

There was no tunnel, no gentle drift into some pale afterlife. There was only the plunge.

Zarathustra opened his eyes and found himself falling—downward, endlessly downward—through layers of history stitched together like rotten cloth. The darkness around him was alive, pulsating with ancient images, grotesque flashes of a world carved by liars.

He tumbled past visions of men in tattered robes scrawling symbols into clay tablets; bronze swords clashing as empires rose and fell; temples built upon bleeding altars. All of it desperately familiar, but all of it false. 

As he fell deeper, the scenes grew distorted. The kings’ faces melted into monstrous masks. Priests grew claws and forked tongues. Mothers became shadows behind barred windows, behind the walls of palaces and temples, behind the smoke of burnt offerings. 

And then—silence.

Zarathustra landed.

The ground was black glass, reflecting nothing but his own silhouette. Above him stretched a sky that was no sky at all, but an endless vault filled with screaming stars—each one blinking like a lidless eye.

He stood inside a massive, circular courtroom. Colossal pillars reached upward and vanished into the void. High above him, a great judge’s seat loomed, empty and imposing, wrapped in chains of gold and rusted iron.

All around, shadows writhed like spectators, faceless and muttering. They whispered in forgotten tongues—the same voices that filled the myths of old. Adam and Abraham. Zeus and Yahweh. Constantine and Charlemagne. Darwin and Einstein. Their voices were the rattling chains of dead men dreaming.

Zarathustra’s voice was calm, yet carried the weight of iron:

“So… this is the abyss.”

The courtroom was alive. Symbols shifted along the walls: the cross became the crescent, the crescent became the hammer and sickle, the hammer became the scales of justice, the scales dissolved into dust. A carousel of old gods and dead ideologies.

And yet beneath it all, the womb—the primal symbol of origin—was absent.

Zarathustra felt the absence like a wound. He laughed quietly. "The lie runs deep, even here."

Suddenly, a voice boomed from above: “Zarathustra!”

The empty judge’s seat began to crackle with blinding light. A figure began to take shape—not fully human, not fully divine, but a shifting amalgam of patriarchal icons. A father-god made of stone and fire, whose face twisted through the ages, from ancient idols to modern fathers of nations. He wore crowns, helmets, mitres—symbols of authority layered upon authority.

The voice called again, louder: “Zarathustra! You are summoned to stand trial!”

Zarathustra raised his head, unblinking, unafraid. He whispered, to no one and everyone: “And you, Judge... you shall answer first.”