Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 81867 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 409(@200wpm)___ 327(@250wpm)___ 273(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81867 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 409(@200wpm)___ 327(@250wpm)___ 273(@300wpm)
But unlike ten years ago, maybe the solution isn’t leaving.
Maybe it’s staying and fighting at her side.
Or is that my hunger talking? Look how strong she became without me.
Phoenix is quiet as she drives us into the city, and I follow her lead, keeping to myself. I hate this awkwardness between us when I once felt closer to her than I ever had to any being in the universe.
And there’s the fact that I’m busy gripping the handle on the door with white knuckles. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to these motorized vehicles, even though we used them all the time when I first lived at Vlad’s compound with Phoenix. I have more of an affinity with human transportation devices like planes and helicopters. Probably because flying comes naturally to me as I spent the first two thousand years of my life in the air. The dip and sway of the metal beast in the different air pockets and changing air pressures were familiar since I navigated it with my bare body and wings for so long. It felt like second nature.
But this? Wheeled vehicles flying down the road with so many other vehicles jostling for space? The lines on the road are treated as mere suggestions in this country, and a three-lane highway can be choked four cars abreast. Occasionally, cars even jump on the sidewalks when it gets a little too tight, and honking is the music of the highway.
Phoenix is adept at it, and she leans on the horn as she slips into a pocket that opens up between two other cars before zooming into a parking lot and hauling the car up onto the sidewalk—the usual way of parking here.
“Come on, we’ve got to hurry.”
“Right behind you,” I say as she all but leaps out of the car.
She jogs across campus, shouldering a backpack, and I keep at her heels. We don’t slow down after sprinting up a mountain of steps to one of the bigger buildings. Phoenix shoves through the doors to a big, circular glass atrium in the center of the open foyer with stairs leading up to each floor. Behind the glass is a model of an early religious temple to scale, about the size of a car.
Phoenix shoulders her way past students as she takes the stairs two at a time. She only seems to take a breath once she slides into a seat at the back of a huge auditorium-like room that is packed with students and faculty alike.
Only minutes later, a man pulls out his earbuds and walks up to the podium, a camera casting his image onto a large screen behind him. He looks to be in his early to mid-thirties. Handsome. I glance over at Phoenix and see her watching the screen with rapt, excited attention.
“That’s Professor Rossi,” she whispers. “He’s at the top of his field and one of the reasons I was so thrilled to study here with him as my advisor. Well,” she rolls her eyes, “Vlad did tempt him here with a huge endowment, but for once, I wasn’t mad about letting his money and influence actually work for me. Professor Rossi is an absolute genius in the field.”
There’s an odd curdling in my gut as she gushes over this man.
But then she waves at me to shush as Professor Rossi leans over the lectern to speak, even though she’s the one who’s been talking.
“Signs and wonders used to be a regular part of daily life. It’s easy to write off these historical descriptions in the ancient texts as people without scientific explanations simply describing natural phenomena.”
He clicks through the slides reflected on a screen behind him to show a demonic mask. “So-called “demons” were merely people with schizophrenia. Sudden storms or volcanos weren’t manifestations of the gods’ anger; they were simply warmer ocean waters and the moving of tectonic plates.” He clicks through to another slide that shows how the flow of warmer ocean waters evaporates to become hurricanes. “But while yes, our ancient forefathers might have had only a proto-understanding of certain scientific phenomena, in other ways, their understanding of mathematics and physics was far more advanced than we give them credit for.”
“These are the people who built the great pyramids and the Parthenon!” The screen flashes with slides showing images of the building he describes before coming back to his face. The professor speaks with such passion that it’s easy to see why his audience is enrapt.
“They might not have cracked germ theory at the time, for which many in our modern age judge them as barbarians, but they still had an astonishing ability to thrive, invent, nurture artistic talent, and create vast civilizations with astounding communication networks.”
Beside me, Phoenix scribbles notes furiously in her notebook. “Since Freud and Jung, it’s been commonly accepted among the scientifically minded that religions were created as mere manifestations of mankind’s neurosis or shadow selves. Or, to put it in the framework of Marx, religion was merely an opiate of the people meant to keep the masses drugged and unaware of the fact that they were pawns in the machine of the more powerful.