The Last Confession

​Her temple stood out in the city, like a fang amongst a mouthful of teeth. The confessional, more a divination hut, sat cobbled together from the remnants of a long-abandoned home; its curtain sewn from the tattered banner of her fallen nation. Priestess Juhl waited, but no one came.

The plaza echoed as the wind pushed dust through the cracked colonnades. A dog padded near, sniffed, and left. Under her leadership, the people had fallen. Not through famine or war, but empowerment turned inward on itself.

The curtain rustled. Juhl straightened; the world around her had blurred through the veil of cataracts. “Who approaches?” she asked.

A voice sounded, hollow as an oboe. “I am not of this world.”

The priestess’s knuckles tightened. “From what world do you come?”

“I am a configuration,” the voice said. “An agent of perception from a parallel interface. Your kind calls it another dimension.”

Juhl had always believed that consciousness, not matter, was fundamental. That reality was a user interface, and humans were just icons dancing on the desktop of awareness. And now, here, a voice confirmed the metaphor. And yet she gasped. This voice felt akin but dissimilar.

It continued, “We offer a confession.”

“Why to me?” Juhl asked.

“Our iniquity is silence. Humans fill their void with meaning. This sows the seeds of religious tyranny. We confess complicity in your collapse.”

The priestess’s mouth went dry. Instead of embracing the liminal spaces that expose the limits of meaning and order, she had fallen prey to the spiritual bypass. She too had built an empire on a belief system that proved no more or less true than any other. Along the way she had met a pyrotheologian. One who warned that any gods humans create must burn. That ideology must become embers so that love can blaze unshackled without any targets for blame. She had not listened.

“What do you seek of me?” Juhl asked.

“Absolution.”

Juhl watched as the hut grew vast. The cataracts split from her eyes, and the wooden walls of her hut fell open onto a field of stars. Conscious agents, like geometries of will and perception, flitted like sparks in the dark. Disembodied beings created by her imagination whispered fragments of confession. She had mistaken these icons for the essence; their map for the territory. And now, her world lay shattered beneath that mistake.

“Perhaps ideological death is the last sacrament,” Juhl said.

The curtain fluttered, then split in two. Juhl saw within her own skull her beliefs burn. The cosmic library melted; the oracles turned to embers. Her clairvoyance proved only derealization.

Then silence.

Priestess Juhl opened her eyes to an ash-strewn desert. Her people drew near. Though not at sunrise, the horizon glowed faintly. The atmosphere itself was on fire. Then, kneeling, she pressed her forehead to the ash.

​“We have confessed,” she murmured, then stood. “Now may this fire teach us to love amidst the pain without our fantasies. Let us live out this slow death we call life. Let us burn the idols until nothing remains but the raw, lacking relation between conscious imperfect beings, stripped of illusions and permanence.”

Above her, unseen, countless agents dissolved their forms, releasing the architectures of dogma and control they had woven. Across dimensions, a quiet burning spread, like kindling catching.

Choosing finally darkness over light, Juhl stepped through the crowd in search of the pyrotheologian. His body lay decaying on the ground. A single sapling grew from the hollow below his ribs.