End Manifest, p.7

One would expect much ado about a space ship crashing in the middle of the Eurozone, but even when weather conditions do not preclude human surveillance sattelites from detecting abnormal activity, very little information about alien and human extraterrestrial travel reaches beyond the Hierarchy’s grasp. Although some technology (e.g., Digital Image Processing) poses problems, generally speaking it is what happens with information, not whether it is collected, that shapes human history. Although Earth’s orbital reconnaissance technology and military area-surveillance platforms are advanced, whatever successes they may produce are ultimately nullified by the Hierarchy’s ability to confuse and conceal. What little does pass human censorship is swamped by a glut of fake UFO sightings and, more importantly, top-down bureaucratic “mistakes”.

           Approximately two minutes after Mourad and Fabrice drove off on their motorcycles away from the burning wreckage in the fields, a glowing glyph slowly appeared on the ground near what used to be the crashed space ship’s frontal lobe. Fifteen meters away, in a slope darkened by the night, another glyph appears and pulsates. As a human female in her seventies sprouts forth from the glyph, another woman appears in the sky above, floating fifteen meters above the crash site, slowly floating downwards as if standing on an invisible anchor. She is in her twenties, dressed in black like a gothic witch. In the slope, a half-naked bald muscular man in his thirties bursts from the ground, ejecting mud and rocks onto the field.

           Two witches and one warlock—they are known as Haffi, Yasmut, and Orlat. Haffi, the youngest, is the most powerful, both by talent and rank. In her hand she summons a black wooden staff from which protrudes an ancient bladeless fasces—a military symbol—that from afar could perhaps be mistaken for a dried up broom. Yasmut looks like a fat old woman of British descent, although she is German, dressed in a rural grandmother’s skirt. Yasmut’s garment’s outdated somewhat faded flower pattern is as plain as it is old-fashioned. Orlat looks like a cocky ballet dancer, dressed in the Eastern European rural style. He is the lowest in rank and experience, but respected because of the ease with which he learned the occult art and discovered the existence of the Kraey.

           Although it is perhaps useful to explain more about the Hierarchy and the way it recruits ordinary humans like Haffi, Yasmut, and Orlat into its occult extradimensional and scientific extraterrestrial politics, doing so here would require too much revision of conventional human history. What matters is the fact that three hundred individuals rule the planet Earth. These became known in some traditions and heresies as halfbloods because someone discovered that they were biologically augmented by the Kraey on Mars. The three hundred manage Earth’s history, but their political and cultural influence is merely a byproduct of their goal. They do not rule because the Kraey wish to push the human species towards some ultimate endgame. Only if the Kraey’s goals are threatened by developments in ordinary human affairs, does the Hierarchy step in to manipulate humanity away from a technological breakthrough or cultural rediscovery of humanity’s psionic abilities. It is the suppression of humanity’s psionic powers, deluding us into believing that we do not have such talents, that these conspirators manage. Does the Hierarchy and the three hundred by which it is ruled abuse their clandestine power for personal benefit? Certainly. But in the grand scheme of things, their function is to prolong the Kraey’s farming of the human being’s sixth sense and allow a continuation of manna exploitation by Mars on Earth. In other words, the three hundred sit atop of Earth’s food chain and in exchange for that privilege they manage a clandestine network known to some as the Hierarchy. When something does not go according to plan, the Hierarchy appears—as three of its members just did.

           The witches and warlock walk amid the burning remnants of the sabotaged space ship. The alien craft from Mars was supposed to land in an invisible space port near a Belgian Air Component military airfield in the municipality of Peer, Belgium. Why the space craft exploded before it could reach its destination, the Hierarchy does not know. The fat German woman, Yasmut, takes pictures with a photo camera, making her look like a clumsy tourist. Haffi pokes the corpse of a human clone untouched by the flames. She frowns at an empty pod. “We should check the flight manifest,” she tells Orlat. Apart from a snarl, he doesn’t really react. He walks over to the extraterrestrial’s corpse and utters a magick spell, Pahliiw. The mud begins to stir and slowly grabs onto the alien corpse, as if a void underneath creates suction. While the alien body gets sucked into the earth, Haffi comes over to cast a second spell on it, Falluncqag, that causes a rapid deterioration of the alien’s body. Shrinking and collapsing due to necrosis, the body disappears and melts into the field. This concludes the main priority—destroying all evidence about the Kraey. The coven walks a few meters away from the burning wreckage and stand across from each other, forming a triangle around the crash site. Haffi shouts a word, they count a pace in their minds to get the timing right, and then begin a more complex ritual to conceal the entire crash site from human eyes. “Hlunafaltveyqeqh!” the young witch yells, raising her black staff. She smiles, because sight and sound have been replaced by a seemingly translucent pyramid under which actual reality continues to burn. Outside the illusion, apart from a shimmer in the sky, everything looks and sounds as if nothing ever happened on this field.

           The sorcerers walk into the barrier and thereby disappear from sight. They are now underneath the spell’s psionic illusion, temporarily hidden from the prying eyes of ordinary humans. Instead of extinguishing the fire, however, Yasmut fans the flames and Haffi speeds up the decay. Meanwhile Orlat manipulates the earth by gently waving his arms. His motions sculpt the mud and mold the ground to concoct what should resemble an undisturbed field. The whole process takes less than fifty minutes and the result is a burned rotten buried carcass hidden from plain sight. Apart from a few metal and crystal shards, a femur, and a few broken shells, which they collect and remove, all evidence has been destroyed and buried. The coven teleports away from the area and the pyramid’s pseudo-translucent walls flash away from reality. Nothing but a disturbed less fertile patch of beet field remains, as the wind carries off into the night what resembles the faint smell of burned oyster.