The Visionary emerged from his cave into the light of the day. He began his descent into the lands of amber wheat and through the chorios to the beating heart of the Land. His hands stained with the hard work of his fathers, and their fathers in turn; his tongue stained with the rough syllables of Doric. Such was his dishevelment that nary the lowest beggar gave recognition as he passed through the gates of humanity and reason. They did not know his name nor could they pronounce the place of his birth in the highlands where leprosy ravaged through the unclean and unlearned.

  His ankles, scabbed by nettles, and the stained blood underneath his fingernails, interrogated his worthiness. Yet he implored entry into the Agora.

  The patrons of government and commerce in the Agora delighted in humility. Its greatest lovers of wisdom would preach from the streets in sackcloth and bare feet; yet their humility was lined in golden worth, smelling of frankincense. Theirs was a dignity born of austerity, a principle that only those who have can afford— austerity as commodity. And as the greatest minds spoke wisdom to the city on street corner and from atop humble peaks of carrot boxes lining the markets, they thanked the gods in the same breath for their city and their lives.

  The Visionary was denied.

  He knelt and kissed the marble colonnade with praise for what it represented, but not a word in thanks to the gods for his journey, nor in curse or repentance for his exclusion.

  The white robed orator looked down on the pitiable man, and spat at his feet. Give the gods their due.

  Undeterred, he departed the forum and like the other great minds, the markets and the gutters became his pulpit, only without volition. Without notoriety, however, his voice was moot. He ventured outside the city walls to cry from the steps of the temples of the various gods. If all the city knew him, then the Agora could not deny the Visionary his wisdom.

  Days expired without patron or donation for his words—indeed, the respectable citizen heard no more than a singular idea before scoffing and proceeding about their business, youths the only one to hang on his sermon decrying knowability—he finally collapsed upon the steps of the goddess of fire.

  He slept fitfully parched and starving, his sleep thin but unyielding. Around midnight the clatter of wheels on the stone awoke the Visionary to find a jug of wine and three moldy figs at his feet. The priests of this honorable temple who carried the piety of gods could tolerate his pain and starvation but not the stain of his death. They continued to spy upon him from their lofty places with venom, hatred at the words he spoke of an unknowable world:

  The unknowability of the gods, of man, and of self.

  His words were the words of a magic, and contained within was a challenge to all that was solid underfoot.

  His subsistence continued to the pangs of winter as he, more than his words, became a known quantity in the mind of the citizens. And as the youths, not yet committed to military service and citizenry besieged his every word, two things grew simultaneously: one within himself and one in the minds of the Agora.

  Within himself, the Visionary began to seek a need for continuity. His ideas must not just outlast him, but grow past his fleeting life. It was not that ignorance, or the gods, or the feeble words of academics were an affront to his sensibilities, only that the city had taken hold of his inner being. It was a land carved into marble, fixated. His mind could reject the logic of what he considered a shadow before the flame, that his need was no more transient that what he preached, but his way was set.

  Thus he began to search for a student.

  In the Agora, the circle sat incensed at his words. So inflammatory was his nihilism against all that was good and true in every single man, that both contemplator and orator had spotted the essence of his being in the dirty gutters outside the city walls. His being putridly cloyed at their gates, clawing to get in. Abide it they did with gnashing of teeth and grumbling vexation until it became clear that the corruption may spread. The youth were not just enamored, but some had begun to learn from this blasphemer.

  So a writ was issued and the Visionary was called to the Agora. Not in the form he had first dreamed, but to answer for his crimes in the form of tribunal.

  The Four Hundred could levy charge against the Visionary for his corruption, for his intellectual filth, because to do so would be to legitimize his philosophy by way of sanctioned debate within the circle. No, the Four Hundred accused of criminal morality, and by morals he would be convicted.

  Free of manacle or armed guard, the Visionary was brought forth to answer to the crimes of rank blasphemy, for if nothing could be known, then neither could the gods.

  “Is goodness, not proof of the divine?”

  The Accuser was a crafty and artful politician trained by the masters in wisdom and by experience in statecraft. His modus within not just the Agora but in all aspects of his civic existence was the influence of his fellow man. He stepped forward with a lofty and prolonged introduction, his history laid bare before the voting populace who were acutely aware of every single fact. He did not deign arbitrate what was good and was not, only that it was.

  The opening required little thought for the Visionary. If the gods were known by goodness, how was goodness known.

  “Now, let us say that goodness can be experienced by the five senses. Tell me yiftos, can a man taste what is good for him and what grows mold? Can the dumbest differentiate between music and the screeching squeal as metal grinds?”

  Indeed so, the Visionary said. The Four Hundred nodded with the words of the Accuser and to stage a combat of wits at this point would be a mere distraction from the greater truth. A truth they were already near to: And where derives these senses?

  The Accuser sneered. “The mind.” He nodded to the Four Hundred, currently three hundred and ninety-ninety in the circle, “Of course.” The Accuser held a finger aloft, silencing the overly eager Visionary’s anticipation. “And now you ask where the mind derives from. And from a city replete with knowledge of medicine, we can say it is the brain.”

  So sure of himself, so unable to interrogate his own ideas.

  The Visionary said: Does the brain proceed the mind? Could you see such an organ, dissect such a tissue without the mind? Outside the mind, can you offer any evidence for the brain.

  The Accuser frowned, halted to tower over the murmurs that lapsed along the circle. “Of course you are correct and I have misspoken. I suppose that it is the mind that comes first. My thoughts, reason, and passion could not exist without it.”

  Just so. For the first time, the Visionary paced, letting himself be seen in his largeness before the lovers of knowledge who, for the first time, heard his words. Truly then, you have no basis for the mind from whence all understanding derives?

  The silence drove a tense satisfaction through the circle as the Accuser mulled the words. He began slowly, with carefully selected words and drove forward until his ideas became a cascade. “Some truths, yes, likely indeed, are so obvious to the mind that a man only need open his eyes to see them. Being is to be perceived to be known. Yes, perceived by myself or by any other. By an eternal spirit high above us.”

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  The Accuser’s argument was surely more relativistic than he had intended to concede today, but the Visionary could do far more. What of the deranged or the psychotic who’s perception disagrees? If perception not only drives reality but defines it, as you have thus admitted, then we must then admit that reality is and cannot be absolute.

  The Accuser did not allow his words to lapse so long this time, for fear of losing the crowd. “And there you are mistaken, your eyes blinded by darkness. For within this circle, we are a democracy. Perception and thought as fashioned between wisdom the anvil, and knowledge the hammer. All questions can be solved by inquiry and so too shall yours by vote now: if there is a man who will not stand by his reason of the past, they may now vote for your unknowability. But if any other of the Four Hundred, as I do so know, believe in reason, believe in the ability to separate truth from chaff, then the vote result is clear. You have asked whether the greatest minds of the world can think and be rational, and the answer is yea.

  The Accuser’s words were the very chaff he railed against. The white robed fool had sidestepped true argument and had appealed to emotion, to hubris. He had asked for a vote based solely on self-importance within the cosmic scope. The Visionary saw now that his own argument had been transformed into an attack upon the political and intellectual capital that lay at the heart of this society, and no argument could save him from that.

  The Visionary would not plead for mercy before the vote, but fostered small rebellion. He offered his own exile in lieu of a final rebuttal. His scabbed feet would not darken the gates of the city, his tongue would never again speak their language so as to corrupt those with incorrect perception.

  He walked disheveled beyond the city walls flanked by a crowd jeering and using the words of his sermons as barbs; and yet, the Visionary saw little insult there as he could not know if there were really words at all. His mind, he was sure, was not absolute.

  Before the temples of the goddess of hearth, the Visionary contemplated a return to his ancestral home, yet he had not achieved what he sought. His goal had not just been the hearts and minds of the citizenry but continuity. He would continue on, but in an entirely new manner.

  The Visionary effected a transformation and became the Mason in the minds of the people. Using the skills of his youth, he took up respectable work with hammer and chisel and great exertion of the blood. True to the terms of his exile, his voice did not scathe the steps of the gods or the screeching clamor of the market.

  He began work on his true project with haste and bedded a slave of the crafting guild who bore him a son. His influence as a craftsman was only just enough to accomplish the feet and with as of yet so little funds, he lacked the sway to make the slave his wife or keep her by his side. As their son grew with his name and under his teaching, she was sold to a distant city state and never seen again. The Visionary cherished this son, imbued every piece of knowledge that he had at his disposal and set upon the son a task, to grow up and bring those ideas to the Agora.

  On his sixteenth birthday, the son enlisted into the military as all his age were required to obtain citizenship. His path was set and the Visionary panged for an end to the few short years that must pass before his son could walk into the Agora as an equal.

  But shortly after his sixteenth birthday, a war broke out between the great city of thinkers and those of lower intellect. Upon his honor, the son marched to war with every intent to return and do the father’s bidding, fulfill the purpose for which he was given life.

  But the son did not return.

  The Visionary remained undeterred.

  The craftsmen were valued by the city and even one without citizenship garnered an amalgam of respect and a comfortable amount of money. From this capital of the physical and social, the Visionary married the oldest daughter of a floundering merchant house. The Visionary achieved a pregnancy shortly after nuptials and a new son was born unto him. And yet not without its cost. His newest wife died in childbirth and the Visionary was once again left alone with an infant son.

  This did not deter.

  No, the Visionary began his work anew. He was older, wiser, his ideas even more developed and more likely to bear fruit at the inevitable harvest. He poured his entire essence into this new son and used any funds left over after household maintenance to help the boy grow stronger. He was trained not just by the Visionary in wisdom, but received a tutor in the martial arts.

  At age sixteen, the second son enlisted in the military and on this same year, a war broke out between the city of enlightenment and the savage barbarians across the sea.

  The Visionary tore his clothes and shouted at the sky every night, calling for his son’s return, but not a prayer was offered. His work faltered and the household fell into disorder. Finally, news of the war’s end came and with it, his son.

  Now with the full title of citizen, the second son was prepared to meet the Agora as its equal, one who must be heard.

  But on the morning of the Visionary’s triumph, he discovered his son sickly in bed. The physikers were called, the house was put back into healthy order, but the second son’s condition only worsened, and after sixty days, he perished.

  At an ailing age, the Visionary was undeterred.

  It was only when his attempts to sire a son failed, that he proved himself without seed that he fell to his knees and wept. He cursed the world, his life, the people of the city with idle promises of retribution.

  The Visionary was now as thin as the ephemeral world he sought. He contemplated melting into the shadows the he once preached and to join the greater truth that lay beyond, but that rote obsession of his mind spoke to him. The solution to his continuity could be a circle—his own philosophy.

  So the Visionary, then Mason, became a new thing. He became a Dreamer.

  Every night he moved into the half-light of existence and focused intently on the creation of the unreal. If his existence was merely the ill-refracted flicker of a candle, then so too was all of existence. If nothing was true, nothing was false either. So he dreamt in specificity with the utmost longing and intent. Night by night, his fever dream intensified. The large became small. The whole became component.

  He dreamt of the human heart in all its finest detail. In truth, the heart his brain envisioned was finer and truer than even the healthiest of human hearts. And on his second week of greater and greater tenacity, his dream came into being.

  And so it went for the next years. The Visionary spent flickering twilight of his life in the deepest meditation, creating one part and then the other. His waking hours waned and the closer the ephemeral being came to completion, the longer and longer the Visionary slept.

  Under a full moon in his ninetieth year, the visionary cried out not in anguish but in ecstasy as he awoke from his dream. His third son had come into this world not through birth but imperceptibility. And every detail was perfect. The Visionary had dreamt of eyes keen and able to pierce the hearts of man. He dreamt of a brain replete with every truth the Visionary knew. He dreamt of a history; this third son was born a citizen and already and already prepared for his purpose—accepting and eager to fulfill it.

  The morning finally came for the Visionary a lifetime of preparation and he sent his third son away into the city, more prepared, fuller of promise, more complete than either of his other sons.

  And with this achievement came a final damning realization in the Visionary’s continence because there was a flaw in his plan. His third son was perfect with a true and undeniable history; not a person in the Agora would be able to deny him his place among their ranks. But while the Visionary could dream deeply and truly a thousand contradictory things completely true, in the light of day he had full knowledge that the third son was no true citizen and nothing more than the shadow before the flame that the Agora despised.

  The Visionary’s own mind and memory were that evidence.

  With a content heart at what he must do, the Visionary picked himself up painfully from his home and made the final slow crawl to where his words began, to the temple dedicated to home outside the city’s walls.

  Upon its steps he doused himself in oil and set himself alight.

  The priests worshiped in the glow of the Visionary’s immolation. A blaspheme had been corrected. And injustice in their world set right.

  The third son spoke eloquently before the Agora, with his father’s truth, but in the words of the people, and in sensibilities they could understand. As he spoke, word came to the Agora of his father’s immolation, the third son’s credibility only further heightened; he was now a man from a penitent family.

  In his final moments, the Visionary knew nothing of the priests or what occurred inside the Agora. As his form drifted into ashes, as the final motes of consciousness left his body, the Visionary discovered his final, greatest truth: In panic, in terror, in ecstasy, in abject confusion, the Visionary realized that he had been correct all along. He was nothing but a shadow on the cave wall and another man was dreaming.