The Chronicles Of
Morpheus Phoenix

Prelude

Book One

The Child Harmony

Lights flash in the windows of the apartments above an antique shop on a foggy London street in Victorian England. A gust of wind forces open the door on the street. A staircase leads up to apartments. The door to the upstairs apartments is slightly ajar. Flashes of light burst out from the room. The wind pushes the door open to reveal that the Transformational-Abstractor-of-Signatures-Machine (TASM) is in operation. Sparks and electrical energy flicker throughout the room. After a few moments, all the electrical activity stops. Marcus Holeman, the Collector-of-Worlds, opens the door to the TASM and removes the body of an old man. The old man is still alive but semi-conscious. With the help of his assistant, Joel, the Clock-Stopper, Marcus carries the body of the old man to a chair in what appears to be a wooden closet on the other side of the room. They close and lock the door to this closet, which in reality, is an Inter-Dimensional Transmission Device (IDTD). The Collector-of-Worlds goes to a control panel in a corner of the room and activates the IDTD. From within the monitor connected to the control panel, the image of a distant planet in galactic space appears.

The Collector-of-Worlds stares into the space of the galaxy as the view from the monitor descends onto an earth like planet. An elderly couple can be seen playing with their grandchild in a park. Suddenly the old man who had been placed into the closet materializes. He staggers, then leans against a tree. He tries to walk, but his body stiffens and he falls to the ground. Electromagnetic waves emit from his body and flow into the surrounding objects, which all become distorted in space-time. The people in the park watch this development, then suddenly they too begin to stiffen. Even the child's movements begin to slow down. The parents, from a distance, see that something is wrong and run towards the old couple and children, but they too become frozen. The objects in the park become crystalline, as a solidification of form and matter occur.

A shadow flows across the people as an enormous hand moves across the sky. Then a pair of eyes appears in the sky. It is the eyes of The Collector-of-Worlds. From galactic space a coupled hand surrounds the planet. The hands pull the planet out of its orbit and up into the Inter-Dimensional-Transmission Device. This process miniaturizes the planet. A force field is produced by the IDTD in the center of the apartment, and within it appears the miniaturized planet. The Collector-of-Worlds, then takes this world into his hands and carries it into his study. In the corner of his study is a crystalline matrix, the nodes of which are planets. Marcus places this new planet, with all its life forms frozen, on a node of his matrix. He adds it to his collection of worlds.

Marcus desires to enclose worlds within his own domain, and control them from his matrix, to redesign them to his own satisfaction. Once a world and its inhabitants become part of his collection, they become prisoners; access to other worlds is eliminated. This lack of accessibility leads to crystallization; a form of death, for the world can no longer evolve and transform due to its loss of contact with other worlds. This prohibits the pre-established cosmic harmony from manifesting. Marcus personal quest is for immortality; he wants to be known as the creator of new worlds and new galaxies.

Positions within space-time are relative. Marcus understands this, and learned how to transform himself so that he could be as large or as small as he desired. Size is not important. What is important for Marcus is to be centered at the core of the transformational power.

Therefore he controls the size and shape of himself within the specific environment in which he chooses to reside. This enables him to assume the size of the humans in London, England, yet also appear to be a giant in other worlds. London is where he chose to focus his energies and to design his matrix of collectible worlds.

Long ago Marcus discovered that some worlds block access to other worlds. These worlds are not important in themselves to The Collector-of-Worlds, but become only obstacles in his way to obtaining the world he desires, which may only be accessible through that specific world. The obstructing world must then be eliminated. Of course, this breaks the path-patterns and disrupts the pre-existing harmony of the balance of all the worlds, but so much for the worst, or for the good, as it may be, decided Marcus. The order found within nature is of less value, for Marcus, than the order found in his designs.

Marcus learned that each world has a unique genetic algorithm, which he called "The Signature-of-the-World". This is very much like genetic DNA code found within living organisms. When Marcus finds the algorithm that lies within a dynamically changing world, he is able to reverse that evolution, thereby disrupting its developmental processes. He uses this algorithm to destroy that world. He destroys it by the use of its own "logic". In each world, an evolving creature of that world is the unique bearer of its signature. The essential being of that world, that embodies the world's code. Through experimentation, he discovered that by destroying that being he could efficiently destroy that world.

Once the Collector-of-Worlds captures the Bearer-of-the-Signature-of-the-World, he places it into the TASM, a vortex from which he can abstract the principles of the signature that is embodied within the being. Then through algebraic manipulations he can derive the negative contradiction to this signature, which he embeds into the creature. When the being is then placed back into its world it sets off a negative chain reaction which destroys the organizing structures of both the being and the world, reducing it to pure energy and matter in its most primitive manifestation; the raw material from which new forms of life can be generate. The Collector-of-Worlds wants to break the evolving chain of being, of creation, and initiate a new series of worlds for which he can claim to be the source...The Creator.

Marcus perverts logic, or the supposed logic of representations, that many have believed to be effective for interacting with the world. He believes that this form of logic and reasoning negates the foundational truth of creativity, which is the driving force underlying nature. And this mode of reasoning leads it advocates to lose many worlds of experience; those not capable of being expressed or revealed by this forms of inference and representation. Marcus intentionally quotes profound lines out of context, and with malice. He uses a perverted logic to justify vice and destruction, for no other reason than he can, and because it creates new states of being, both for himself, and for the participants within the discourse. Marcus is a scrambler of documents and written manuscripts. He enjoys deconstructing paragraphs into words, then words into letters, then rearranging them to his own liking. He does this for amusement and to be annoying, for he argues that the original authors intentions are irrelevant for his purposes. And his purposes, for a self-sufficient being, are all that could ever matter.

Marcus has an assistant, Joel, also known as the Clock-Stopper. He is a villain who has the ability to freeze time. Joel can send creatures back into time, and erase the memory of where they have been. Once Joel freezes a segment of space-time, all the objects in that segment become immobile. Joel can then move freely within that zone and steal whatever he desires. He has the heart of a petty thief, and he, in reality, is the cause of many things disappearing. Just to be annoying, Joel will enter into a persons frozen region of space-time for no other reason but to steal just one of a pair of a man's socks, or just one of a pair of a woman's earrings.

North of London, in the city of Oxford, lives Morpheus , the owner of a used bookstore. Morpheus is an explorer of possible worlds, an inter-dimensional space-time traveler. He uses Leibniz's Chair to travel. Morpheus encloses this chair within a glass case and displays it as an antique in his study. To the normal observer it appears to be an antique chair from the 17th century, but it is really an inter-dimensional alternative world travel machine. This chair was a gift from a mysterious benefactor, but that's another story.

Morpheus owns a loving golden retriever, called Athena. Athena is his furry sidekick, which also serves as his biocybernetic computation device. She has the ability to store, process and analyze information. Morpheus designed and created her, embedding within her neural networks self-adapting learning programs that allow her to grow and change. She has the ability to speak, remember, and interact with all types of objects within her environment. She accompanies Morpheus on all his travels throughout the multidimensional universe.

Morpheus's favorite world is the medieval world of alchemists and astrologers in the 16th Century Court of Rudolph of Prague, because within this world the intellectuals of the period were in search of a science of the transformations of souls which would allow all beings to live in harmony with the universe.

Morpheus also has one human friend, a sidekick he calls Sancho-Zen. This person, who values brevity and economy of expression, renamed himself SZ (pronounced "ess-zee"). He always prefers to be called by this name. In order to assert his dignity he never responds when called "Sancho-Zen", but only to the name "SZ", for that is the name he has chosen for himself.

SZ pursues research into paths of enlightenment, although often in a confused way. He once visited the bookstore owned by Morpheus looking for books on Tantric Yoga. Instead, Morpheus gave him a copy of Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu. After this, SZ became Morpheus's friend. SZ's approach to living is non-cognitive and passive. He always desires to be part of "the flow", even when the specific flow is not of his making and beyond his control. He is therefore always an object, and never an agent, in the course of events. Yet he is always optimistic, and believes that everything will work out for the best. SZ became a student of both Taoism and Western Metaphysics, especially the twentieth-century schools of deconstructivism and postmodernism. He often travels to Paris and wanders throughout the city, conversing with students attending the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he also visits used bookstores in search of out of print books and manuscripts on metaphysics that can be added to Morpheus's collection. Morpheus and SZ have many conversations, about philosophy as they journey throughout the multi-verse. Since they never are able to resolve any of the perennial philosophical questions, they are feel confident that they are making progress in their attempts to achieve sophistication and to be part of the mainstream of traditional metaphysical discourse.

One day SZ entered Morpheus's bookstore and told him about a new antique store that has recently opened up in London. Rumor has it that the owner, a man named Marcus Holeman, transported all his goods into the store over night. No one in the neighborhood saw him move in, yet by the next morning the store was established with all the antique objects in place. SZ had visited the store and met the owner, Marcus. He admired the collection of objects in the store, then had told Marcus about Leibniz's chair, the antique which belongs to Morpheus and is stored in a glass cabinet in Morpheus's study. Marcus displayed interest in this antique, and asked SZ for the address of Morpheus's store. Marcus told SZ that he would visit Morpheus the next time he was in Oxford.

The very same day, Marcus, the Collector-of-Worlds, visits Morpheus at his Bookstore. After friendly introductory conversation, Marcus requests to see Leibniz's chair. Morpheus takes him upstairs to the study in his apartments. He then removes the drapes that cover the glass cabinet in which the chair is encased. Marcus admires the antique and requests to touch the chair, but Morpheus refuses. Because it is several hundred years old, it must be sealed within the glass encasement in order to prevent further deterioration.

"Godel, the famous mathematical logician, once told a Princeton physicist that he believed Leibniz had discovered THE ANSWER to the Universe," said Marcus Holeman. "That somewhere hidden in Leibniz's unpublished papers is the philosopher's key, the magic way to find truth and solve any set of puzzlements."

"But Godel also said that this key would give a person who understood it such power that you could only entrust the knowledge of this philosopher's key to people of the highest moral character," replied Morpheus.

Morpheus leads Marcus out of the study and back down into the bookstore. There Marcus noticed authentic alchemy objects scattered about the store, and decides that he would like to buy one: an alchemist's mold into which lead was poured, along with other liquids, in the hopes of transforming this substance into gold. Morpheus gives Marcus the mold for free, as a gift, but only if Marcus promises not to sell it. Instead Marcus must only display the mold as an object in his antique shop. Marcus agrees.

Marcus returns to his shop, and places the alchemist's mold into his Transformational-Abstractor-of-Signatures-Machine (TASM) in order to identify the code of its signature. As the Collector-of-Worlds, Marcus wants to prune off the dead branches from the tree of history, thereby making a cleaner creation. He intends to redesign History in order to eliminate all the traces of its mistakes. The signature of any object, like the DNA found in the cells of all creatures, indicates a space-time coordinate path to it's possible world. Marcus searches for the signature of this world in order to reverse it through contradiction and thereby destroy it. After algebraically abstracting the genetic algorithm for the signature, he moves it into another section of the TASM and executes a multiverse search program on this code. After a few moments, the program locates the signature of the world of the mold. Marcus interprets the results and finds that the signature resides a child called "Harmony", the daughter of Rudolph II, who lives in Prague, Bohemia, 1598.

Joel, the Clock-Stopper, suddenly appears in the study, and looks over the shoulder of Marcus. They stare at the image of the child, Harmony, in the monitor connected to the TASM.

"The amount of matter and energy in the universe remains constant, but some is frozen within dead forms of life," the Collector-of-Worlds says to the Clock-Stopper. "I must prune these manifestations of being and return them into the core stuff from which reality can be constructed. I do this so that we will have a greater amount of future. I return the decaying matter of dead history to the compost heap so that it can be churned and plowed back into the being of the Universe, thereby prolonging our futures. In this work, I will become the Savior of Mankind!" Together they stare at the image of Harmony, the innocent child, in the monitor before them.

SZ and Morpheus walk into his study. Morpheus opens the glass cabinet and sits in Leibniz's Chair. SZ has a cold and sneezes. He wipes his nose in his sleeve.

"This chair allows me to explore domains accessible to this present world," Morpheus says to SZ.

"Why?" asks SZ.

"To search for perfection among the infinite realizations of the divine...to encounter the infinite manifestations of being and becoming...to experience the thoughts of the "Mind of God"... and perhaps, to find the best of all possible worlds," he answers.

"But not to escape from the present?" asks SZ.

"We can never escape from the present, for it is always with us. We can only perceive it from ever changing discontinuous points-of-view," responds Morpheus. "And to this world we always return, though never to the world with have left, even though with certainty, we can state that it is this world which we experience."

SZ sneezes again. "Like when I have a cold, it is always a cold, though never exactly the same cold, but with absolute certainty I can say that the cold that I have is this cold," replies SZ.

"Exactly", says Morpheus, as he hands SZ a handkerchief. SZ gets into the cabinet and stands next to the chair. Morpheus stands, closes the glass door, then sits back down in the chair. His arms rest on the arms of the chair, as his hands squeeze to wood. Together, Morpheus, SZ and the Chair begin to dematerialize until they eventually vanish, leaving behind an empty the glass cabinet.

Leibniz's Chair does not always work as smoothly as desired, and Morpheus often becomes confused about how to operate the time travel mechanism. Every inter-dimensional transition and transformation is followed by a period of instability and weakness for Morpheus, for his body must adjust to the energy-matrix of the new world. Once they arrive at their destiny, Leibniz's Chair miniaturizes and becomes a very small icon on a ring worn by Morpheus. These inter-dimensional travels also have side-effects, analogous to the "jet-lag" experienced by plane travelers. Morpheus has memory lapses, due to traveling to so many alternative worlds and times, and participating in so many changes of self. He once said to SZ, "I have forgotten too much...much too much, of all the things that I once knew, and all the places that I have once been." Yet he is destined to continue to travel, not so much in order to find some final place, but it is in his nature and being to change and relocate.

On this visit Morpheus uses Leibniz's Chair to visit Medieval Prague where alchemy and astrology were studied as science. His benefactor is Rudolph, who introduces him to the alchemist's young daughter, Harmony. Harmony is a child of innocence, about seven years old, who has the ability to read souls. When she looks into the eyes of a person, her mind has the ability to abstract their complete individual concept. This is a dynamic set of structures and morphisms which determine the possible transformations of the person, their capabilities and tendencies of action when confronted with stimuli from the outside world. The set of all possible morphisms and transformations within an individual's complete concept determines the scope and limitations of all possible experience for that individual; if not their future, at least their character. Not their future, because all possible stimuli are not known; the objects and structures of the world are themselves in a continual process of morphing and change in a non-determinable manner. The stability found in the individual complete concept is but a relative stability based upon the set of known past determinable stimuli...but things do change. Yet when Harmony looks into the eyes of a stranger, she immediately knows all of his capabilities for possible experience. When she meets Morpheus, she smiles, as a breeze of fresh air fills the room. She takes his hand and leads him to a window which overlooks the Kingdom of Bohemia.

Suddenly disruptions begin to occur, disturbances which could destroy this world. The forest begins to change. The trees begin to freeze. The grass becomes brittle as a layer of ice moves up along the meadow and towards the castle. A force field materializes in the room near Morpheus and Harmony. Out of this force-field steps the Joel, the Clock-Stopper. He attempts to freeze space-time, and reaches out for the child Harmony. He grabs her arm and starts to pull her into the vortex. Morpheus and Joel struggle. Joel is surprised that Morpheus is capable of movement, since Harmony and the other people are frozen by Joel's powers. Joel tears the pocket from Morpheus's shirt. Morpheus suddenly pushes Joel away, back into the vortex. Before he can grab Harmony, Joel himself is sucked back into the force-field and pulled away. The Clock-Stopper leaves a lime-green color trace of his path behind him as he is transported back into the future. Since Morpheus is also a time traveler, the powers of the Clock-Stopper do not effect him. With the permission of her father, Rudolph, Morpheus takes Harmony back to Oxford with him in order to protect her from future harm, while they try to discover the cause of these disruptions.

Morpheus's objective is to save his favorite world from destruction. Marcus, the Collector-of-Worlds, wants to destroy it because it doesn't fit within the scheme of his new design. Medieval Prague destroys his symmetry; it is a design anomaly, best to be deconstructed into raw matter and energy from which Marcus can create a more "perfect" world.

Joel returns to Marcus, and explains how he failed to capture Harmony. Marcus laughs, and tells him that he has another assistant who can achieve this objective. She is a woman, Sara, the Clouder-of-Minds. As they wait for Sara to arrive, Marcus shows Joel a new device that he has just created: a text-deconstruction computation device. This allows Marcus to take any existing text and reconstruct it into anything he desires. Marcus picks up a piece of paper that was taped to an emerald padlock lying on his table. He separates the paper from the lock, and scans it into his device. The original text appears on the screen of the device. Marcus changes paragraphs into words, then the words into letters. He next randomly reconstructs the letters into new words, and these new words into new paragraphs.

"This device is only limited in its re-constructions and re-interpretations of any text by the number of letters in the original text. Therefore the original text can come to mean anything which I desire it to mean. I can choose from the infinite number of interpretations possible, the one that best suits my pragmatic needs. Then, by pressing this button, the new interpretation is printed on the original paper. The "original text" no longer in any way constrains the present text. The original author's intentions are irrelevant, for now each person will become self-sufficient in his ability to interpret documents. "

"Entertaining device," says Joel, "but just a toy for amusement".

Marcus laughs. "On the contrary, I predict that it will replace typewriters and computerized wordprocessors in all the universities throughout the world," says Marcus.

"Mechanized creativity," says Joel.

"Actually, I'm marketing it to the academic world not as a tool for creative expression, but a tool for generating a valid textual analysis of any document input into the device. That way I'm sure to get the endorsements of the chairmen of the academic departments," laughs Marcus.

The door opens and in walks Sara. She has many names, chosen for her by those men she has destroyed. Throughout history he has been called the Clouder-of-Minds, Destroyer-of-Dreams, Creator-of-Broken-Hearts. She is a temptress who works with the other two villains to enslave men and makes them slaves to her desire. She often accomplishes this merely with the promise of sex, but sometimes, for the most resistant, the actual experience of copulation. She confuses men, causing them to forget who they are and their objectives, so that she can obtain their possessions. Her mocking laughter, and the joy she receives at seducing, then betraying, her prey, is the foundation of her character. All the characters who have the ability to travel between dimensions also have telepathy, but this power is unreliable because the mental communications may be distorted by Sara, the Clouder-of-Minds.

Marcus leads Sara and Joel to the monitor attached to his Inter-Dimensional Transmission Device (IDTD). He takes a piece of cloth torn from Morpheus's shirt, and places it within the chamber of the IDTD, in order to locate the multi-verse coordinates of the original possessor of the shirt. After a few moments an image of Morpheus within his bookstore at Oxford appears on the screen. Sara looks at his face, then smiles as she licks her lips.

Morpheus is placing some books on a shelf when Sara enters the bookstore. Harmony is assisting him stack the books. Morpheus greets Sara. Sara tells Morpheus that she is interested in the Dionysius Cults of Ancient Greece, and wonders if he has any material on the subject, She tells him of her desire to travel through time; she desires to hear the songs of the sirens that sought to drive Odysseus and his sailors mad. She wants to learn their songs, and live on the Ancient Isles where only sensuality rules.

"Can you take me there?" she asks.

"If I had a way to travel into the past, perhaps I would." As Sara leaves she invites Morpheus to dine with her that evening, He accepts

That evening Morpheus leaves Sancho-Zen to care for the child Harmony, and joins Sara for dinner. She proposes that they have a late night picnic in a nearby forest. Beneath a star-filled night Sara entertains Morpheus as she pours him some of her homemade wine. As their talk of books and ancient mythic tales, a phantasm of Wood Nymphs, dressed in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, suddenly appear in the forest. Sara, the Clouder-of-Minds bewitches Morpheus as he watches the Nymphs dance in the moonlight.

While Morpheus is away in the forest with Sara, Joel, the Clock-Stopper, sneaks into the bookstore. He freezes this segment of space-time and kidnaps the child Harmony. As Joel accomplishes this, the Clouder-of-Minds simultaneously vanishes from the forest, as do the images of the Wood Nymphs. Morpheus, entranced, is left alone in the night.

When Morpheus regains his senses, he quickly returns to his bookstore to find Sancho-Zen asleep on the floor, with lime-green color traces of the Clock-Stopper throughout the store. Morpheus awakes SZ, and together with Athena, they run to the Antique Shop. They run upstairs in hopes to rescue Harmony. As they enter the apartments, the Collector-of-Worlds, the Clouder-of-Minds, and the Clock-Stopper are placing Harmony into the Transformational-Abstractor-of-Signatures-Machine (TASM). Marcus, blocks Morpheus from reaching the child.

"Why?" asks Morpheus. "Why do you do such things to people and their worlds?"

Marcus, the Collector-of-Worlds, replies. "Your world is but the world as empirical representation. It is simply the outward face of the world as will. Not, however, as a will that has perceptible reasons for its volitions, but as one that is a wholly blind and irrational flux of becoming. To this will, I bring order! Will, blind will, this thing men call nature...through the exercise of my will I bring structure and order to that blind will underlying nature. I create an order of my own design, and thereby triumph through my representations and re-creations."

"You impose your will upon others and thereby disrupt their course of development," replies Morpheus.

"I impose my will only on those who fail to exercise their own will...who treat themselves as mere objects within the flow of nature. Since they are content to consider themselves as a mere objects, why should I do less? To do otherwise would be disrespectful of their desires," laughs Marcus.

Morpheus tries to rescue the child Harmony. But Marcus then produces a champion who will fight Morpheus. Marcus opens the door to the Inter-Dimensional Transmission Device(IDTD) and out steps an older version of Morpheus.

"I had anticipated that you might come to rescue Harmony. Now you must fight a future possible manifestation of yourself, without destroying it as one of your possible souls," says Marcus.

The Older Morpheus approaches the Younger Morpheus. "I am your future, destroy me and you destroy yourself...but I can destroy you, because you are my past. This I have often done, and then denied you as I reconstructed myself into another mode of being. You, as my past, are dead and gone and of no use to my future. This moment is just an awkward crossing of our space-time paths, and already for me you are but a fading memory."

The Younger Morpheus responds. "Since you admit that you are but a possible manifestation of me, then by the laws of metaphysics and logic you cannot be considered a real existent of this world... my world. It is then impossible, by contradiction, for you to be an object, or an agent, that can enter into any causal relationship with an existent of this space-time segment. Therefore, you have no causal efficacy here; you are powerless, and can only be considered as a construction of Marcus' imagination."

Morpheus then walks through the image of an older manifestation of himself, which thereby vanishes. He takes the child Harmony from the Signature Transformer, and pushes The Collector-of-Worlds into the Inter-Dimensional-Transmission Device. The Clock-Stopper and The Clouder-of-Minds quickly escape to another dimension. Morpheus then reaches for the emerald combination lock laying on the table and locks the door.

"Release me!" cries Marcus.

"No, I don't think so, not after all the damage that you have done," answers Morpheus.

"Imprisonment for multiple eternities should be appropriate in your case."

"Release me, and I'll tell you the whereabouts of the Lost Angel," replies Marcus.

From within his prison cell the Collector-of-Worlds retells Morpheus the legend of the Lost Angel. This is the angel who had a chance to return to Heaven after Satan was defeated and banished to the Earth, but instead decided to stay on Earth to challenge the "Great Deceiver" for the souls of humanity. Having stayed among the humans for too long, his memory faded and he forgot his origins. This doomed him to wander forever in the lower spheres of creation, searching for that place he would feel is home.

"This is an ancient myth," said Morpheus.

"It is not a myth, for in my travels I have seen him. He exists. Set me free and I will help you find him," answers Marcus, the Collector-of-Worlds. "Let that be your mission in life: to help the Lost Angel get back home. You may have the power to stop me from escaping now, but you cannot hold me long, for we are of the same kind, a kind that values freedom."

"I don't know the combination to the lock," replies Morpheus.

The Collector-of-Worlds had deconstructed the combination to this lock, his only means of escape. He had so little respect for the intentions of the originator that he never bothered to record the original text. Now he no longer knows how to reconstruct it. Marcus had become a prisoner of his own arrogance. He writes a combination that he believes will work, and gives it to Morpheus, who in turn gives it to Athena, Morpheus's BioCybernetic companion. Marcus' message is randomly scrambled by Athena, who rejects it as being "Human, All Too Human", for her liking. Athena then eats the paper, for this better satisfies her needs and pragmatic purposes.

Morpheus laughs, then breaks open the lock and releases the Collector-of-Worlds. Marcus quickly vanishes along with all his possessions. Morpheus's cherished world of Medieval Prague is preserved, but the Collector-of-Worlds escapes into another dimension with his matrix of worlds.

"He is gone," says SZ. "He lied to you just to escape."

"No, we will meet again."

"Then are you two so alike, as he said?" asks SZ.

"No, I'm a Leibnizian Metaphysician, who endeavors to understand the reasons and causes for the complexity and transformations experienced in life. I desire to free the worlds that have been bound by The Collector-of-Worlds so that they can continue on their natural course of development. I want to return them and the linkages from which they were torn. The Collector of Worlds is a Schopenhaueran Metaphysician, who has chosen the "aesthetic" solution to the problem of life. He seeks to create the world as only he envisions it to become. A project doomed by his limited capabilities and the finite nature of his powers and being...as if one wave alone could determine the flow of an ocean."

Morpheus and SZ returns the child Harmony to her father Rudolph in Medieval Prague. That night together they all watch a galactic formation in the skies, as a new star is born.

In the morning, the next day, SZ walks up a street in Oxford to the entrance of Morpheus's bookstore. The door swings open as the bell over the door chimes to announce his entrance. SZ enters carrying a package received in the mail for Morpheus. Morpheus is sitting behind his desk reading a book on Mathematics. SZ hands him the package. Morpheus opens the package to reveal a book, which glimmers and sparkles as Morpheus holds it in his hands. The title on the cover is "The Legend of The Lost Angel : The Story of Rhamiel-The Angel of Mercy"