The Final Tale – Archon of Elements
I’m swiftly wrapping up book 2, Vaengr, the final part of the story of the Archon of Elements. Whilst at first glance it’s a dark science fiction romance, it also is meant to represent something deeper—the search for the meaning of life and the acceptance of death as the final, inevitable winding down of existence. Everything has a beginning and an end, even our universe.
As with all my books, the literal meaning is just one layer of the story, followed by the psychological truths and our shared human mythology and finally the examination of the underlying nature of reality. I’ve written about demons and angels, gods and fae-folk and now with my latest story of ghosts. For that is what the characters who populate Gage’s world are. They are like apparitions from another time and place, like memories he wishes to forget. So faint, they no longer seem relevant. But once fleeting quantum objects become real they can hurt him.
As I delve deeper into quantum physics, it becomes more and more mysterious. Any rational mind would find it hard to comprehend the nature of quantum existence. Everything is comprised of virtual particles which “pop” in and out of the quantum vacuum. Energy (particles) are said to be in a probabilistic state of superposition, only becoming classical (real) through a process called decoherence which only happens when something interacts with something.
We are quantum beings too, we interact with our environment, exchanging energy and basking in the residual warmth of an eventually cooling and expanding universe in a mysterious medium called spacetime which science has not been able to fully understand. In fact, it’s this leftover residual energy from the beginning of the universe that we borrow and expend as heat that typifies life as we understand it. One day, everything will be dark and cold, so far apart it’s no longer able to interact. But it’ll be a long time until then. I hope I have brought you in some small measure the heat and entertainment I sought for myself from writing. It’s been my pleasure to share my stories with you. I hope they will remain in the cache of human consciousness and its digital equivalent for years to come.