Rolling Dice on the Map of Truth
The old librarian Elai had spent his entire life collecting words. His vast hall, the Temple of Signposts, stretched its vaulted ceilings toward the sky. On thousands of shelves lay scrolls containing the most beautiful truths ever discovered by humanity. There were treatises on Mercy, volumes on Universal Love, hymns to Brotherhood, and instructions for attaining Nirvana.
Elai cherished them, blew away the dust, and believed this to be the world’s greatest treasure.
One day, the heavy oak doors of the Temple burst open from a kick. A Warrior entered the hall. His armor was covered in soot, his sword notched, and in his eyes dwelt such darkness that the paper pages on the tables seemed to curl in fear.
The Warrior approached Elai, snatched an ancient scroll with golden letters reading “On the Sanctity of Life” from his hands, and hurled it into the fireplace.
“You’re a liar, old man,” the Warrior rasped. “And all your books are lies.”
Elai calmly watched the fire consuming the parchment.
“Why do you think so?” he asked quietly.
“Because I come from the streets. Out there, beyond your walls, people slaughter each other for a piece of bread. They betray friends for gold. I saw a man reading a prayer about compassion and then kicking a stray dog. Your ‘millions of beautiful words’ don’t work.”
The Warrior grabbed another book - “A Treatise on Eternal Peace” - and raised his hand to throw it against the wall.
“Wait,” Elai stopped him. The librarian stood, walked to a cabinet, and pulled out an old map. On it, arrows traced the path to a mountain with a spring of living water. “Tell me, if you lick this paper, will it quench your thirst?”
The Warrior frowned.
“You take me for a fool? Of course not.”
“Exactly. People have confused the Map with the Territory. These books are not medicine - they’re merely prescriptions. For centuries, humanity has been worshipping signs instead of following the arrows. They memorize the words, quote them, build temples and ideologies around them, argue about the precision of formulations. They chew paper menus, believing they’ve eaten dinner, and remain hungry.”
Elai fell silent, expecting the Warrior to grasp the depth of the metaphor. Silence hung in the hall. But it wasn’t the ringing silence of truth. It was the silence of a crypt.
The Warrior looked at the old man. And suddenly he felt like laughing, not hitting him.
“That’s it?” the Warrior asked. His voice cracked. “You think I came here to listen to your excuses? ‘They confused the menu with dinner’… They were eating that paper not because they’re stupid, old man. But because there was nothing else. You set up thousands of shelves with recipes, but in fifty years you never baked a single piece of bread. You’re just a junk dealer.”
The Warrior’s fingers loosened. The book fell to the floor with a dull thud. It landed crooked, pages crumpled. No grandeur. Just garbage.
“I’m hungry,” he said into the emptiness. “Got anything to eat, keeper of wisdom? Or do you feed only on letters?”
“There’s bread,” Elai replied, bewildered, and offered a piece of stale flatbread.
The Warrior bit into it. It was hard as a shoe sole. He tried to take a bite, nearly broke a tooth, and was overtaken by an absurd, misplaced rage at this cursed hardtack.
He spat the bread onto the floor.
“What did you give me, old man? You could kill someone with this!”
The Warrior’s right boot squelched. This squelching had been driving him mad for three days - blood mixed with swamp muck.
“Give it here,” he snatched that same map with the spring of living water from Elai.
“But that’s the map to…” the old man began.
“It’s paper,” the Warrior cut him off.
He sat on the floor and pulled off his boot. The stench hit his nostrils. The Warrior turned the boot over and shook out the dirty slush. Then he tore the map in half, crumpled the thick paper, and stuffed it into the bottom of his boot - as an insole.
“At least some use for your map,” he muttered, pulling the boot back on.
He stood in the middle of the hall. Sword in one hand, sacred path to wisdom in his boots.
He could burn down the library now. Could kill the old man.
But he suddenly realized he didn’t care.
“Elai,” he said without turning around.
“Yes?”
“If I finish this bread and leave, letting you live, I’ll be a noble hero. If I break down crying from catharsis - I’ll be a repentant hero. If I burn everything - I’ll be a villain. But you know what the problem is? I feel that nothing will change. The plot will change, but we won’t. I’ll remain the same chunk of meat in an iron can, and you’ll remain the same frightened old man.”
Elai slowly straightened up. He looked at his shelves, stuffed with thousands of versions of ‘how to live right.’ And suddenly the old man’s shoulders dropped. It was as if the air that had been holding him upright and important had been let out of him.
“You’re right,” he said in an ordinary, creaky voice of a tired man. “I’ve been sitting here for fifty years. I’ve seen hundreds like you. And every time I thought: ‘Now something important will happen.’ But then they’d leave, and I’d stay to sweep the floor.”
The Warrior snorted. He walked to the nearest table, carelessly swept the sacred scrolls onto the floor to make room, and sat on the edge, dangling his legs.
“So what do we do?” he asked. “There won’t be any drama. No transformation either. I’ve lost my appetite for dinner.”
Elai rummaged in the pocket of his robe and pulled out two small ivory dice.
“We could play dice,” he suggested. “Just for the sake of it. Not for souls, not for truth, not even for money.”
“What’s the point?”
“None,” Elai smiled. “That’s the beauty of it. If we play just to kill time, at least we won’t be lying to each other that we’re doing something great.”
The Warrior set down his sword. He pulled the crumpled map from his boot, smoothed it out on the tabletop - wet, dirty, torn.
“Let’s play on it,” he said. “So the dice don’t clatter too loud.”
They began to play.
Dawn was breaking outside the window. Somewhere out there empires were crumbling, prophets were being born, people were searching for meaning, suffering and writing new books. And in the center of the hall sat two men. One was covered in blood, the other in dust.
The Warrior rolled the dice. Two sixes came up.
“Wow,” he said indifferently. “Lucky. Your turn, old man. Roll.”
And they continued to play while the sun flooded the hall, turning the dust in the air into gold that neither of them cared about anymore.