Lightbreaker

Somewhere between death and dream, somewhere deep in the twilight of the nightside tree, I rediscovered myself. Eye within Ain. With that knowledge came a vision of how to find my way back. Separating light from dark-quod esset bonum-I dreamed how to fall and-it is done-did so, end over end. A skein of lights hung beneath the gray fingers of a layer of clouds arrested my descent. This net held me, floating. Like a leaf in the flow.

As I remembered how to breathe-as the mundane necessities of the meat came back to me-the sea of lights flexed and dipped in concert with the pulsation of my imagination. Was I breathing in time with them, or were they synching to me? Which came first: breathe or desire? With this synchronization came a dimensionality to the sea: valleys began to grow, peaks started to rise, and the lights began to enfold me.

Below me, coursing like arterial flow, was a torrential deluge of spirit lights. Feeding this massive tributary were small streams and rivulets of glowing light, tiny magma tracks that cut jagged paths through weighty darkness.

Distinct from the yellow-white glow of the streams were the peaks, detailed with red and pink and purple lights like stalagmites wrapped with strands of luminescent flowers.

To one side was a rotating light, a red eye that swept across the jeweled landscape. In a plain between two hillocks, the spotlight revealed a flat darkness, a negative space that held no lights.

I turned, and freeing myself from the tangle of lights, moved through the flow until I reached the black stain. The world became more real around me as I glided across the lights. Distantly, I realized this landscape was the spirit map of Seattle. The dark spot was the kinked bean-shape of Lake Union.

As I hovered over the transparent surface, the lambent cyclopean gaze-the light of the Space Needle-glided over the motionless water. Beneath the water, I could see the dim outline of bones-the tangled skeletons of giants.

A pair of bodies, locked in a perpetual embrace, turning slowly in the water. In their right hands were enormous cups, and their left arms were woven through the rib cage of the other, fingers wrapped around the spine of their bony lover. Their skulls were nestled together as if they whispered secrets.

The Needle's eye looked away as my outstretched hand brushed the surface of the water. I felt a cold kiss-phantom memory, ice in my chest-and my fingers were pulled into the lake. As I split the surface of the water, the spirit grid of Seattle vanished. Snuffed out as if they were candles drowned by a wave.

I sank toward the bone lovers. Their cups were identical-flat bases, hexagonal stems, rounded bowls with fluted edges caked with black rust. One held the corpse of a tiny lobster while the other held the coiled husk of a serpent. A lotus flower-petals sumptuously full-was caught in the chest cavity of each body and, as they turned, the flowers remained fixed in place. They were the axis points upon which the corpses spun. A universe founded by two positions in space.

Tiny rubies suddenly dappled the black dome behind me. The jewels blossomed, elongating into stalactites of fire. Hardened and cooled by the elemental touch of water, the fire became long swords, stained with blood.

Nine swords. Not behind the lovers, but above. The swords descended into the water until they touched the rotating bones of the skeletons. Their points cut shallow grooves as the bodies continued to turn.

Beneath the twisted lovers-the layers of the dream extending deeper and deeper into the wet twilight of the psyche-a churning froth bubbled. I fell further into the water, my way lit by the bleeding blades.

I came upon a flat five-spoked wheel. Along its edge were unfinished porcelain faces frozen with stoic expressions. A shrouded corpse wearing a death-mask of hammered steel was lashed to the surface of the slowly rotating wheel. It held a soft and vibrant globe of glowing seas and limned continents.

A rainbow-colored fish floated beside the wheel. A naked cherub, sitting awkwardly astride the fish due to its enormously engorged phallus, was goading the fish toward the corpse. He beat the fish on the head with the rounded knob of his heavy cock. The fish, stunned with every blow, swam erratically, veering to the left every time it was bludgeoned. The cherub, unaware of how his abuse was keeping him from his goal, only beat the fish harder.

As I floated closer, the fish faltered. Its fins fluttered more slowly; a thin ribbon of white ooze drifted from its gasping mouth. It looked in my direction, seeing me in my dream-state, and expired. The cherub furiously beat the fish harder, but this wasn't the way to bring back the dead.

In death, though, the fish drifted closer to the wheel. The cherub leaped from its back, straining to reach the rim of the wheel. Dancing along the thin width of one of the spokes, he minced toward the body strapped to the wheel. He clambered up the shrouded body, and threw himself upon the tiny earth, wrapping his short arms around the luminescent planet. Rearing back like a wild insect, he thrust his fat stinger into the curved side of the planet. Having pierced the earth, he started pumping away at the hole he had made. A priapic demiurge seeding his creation.

The wheel stopped its rotation, and the hands of the corpse came free of the globe. They spread outward until they rested against the curve of the wheel. The palms rotated up. As the cherub raped the glowing planet, a white fluid began to stream from the corpse's hands, like smoke drifting up from an extinguished fire.

I rose with the white ink of the smoke. The underside of the lake's surface was disturbed, the flickering distortion of a bent mirror. On the other side, these twin lines of smoke became substantial. The marbled stone of alabaster flesh. The pillars leaned together, vanishing beneath a diaphanous drapery.

She was a giant, equal in size to the corpses interred in the lake, standing in the water. As I reached for the surface-a reflection of my touch from a few moments earlier when I had been drawn down into the water-she raised her skirt and showed me where the pillars of her legs met. A single eye-a reflection of the lighthouse that watched over the city-gazed down. An inflamed eye-black fire in its iris, blood leaking from its ducts.

As my fingers breached the threshold, below reaching above, nine drops of blood fell. Nine tears splashed into the lake and floated, whole and round, down on the cherub raping the world. The child laughed, reaching with one hand to smear the blood onto his buttocks and thighs. He reached between his legs to slather the blood of the virgin eye-Nia, the inversion of Ain-onto his hard cock.

I came back, and found myself bound. My hands were numb and locked behind my back. Something covered my eyes, and a hard object was firmly lodged in my mouth. Breathing was difficult as my nose was clogged with dried blood. As the dream vanished, this was what remained: sore, tied, gagged, drugged, and deposited somewhere cold and dark.

I ached all over, as if every muscle had been pulled in the wrong direction. Prickly nettles ground in my joints as I tried to move. My back and feet were cold. Eight points of fire still danced on my skin.

Four Tasers, in the end. The memory came back with more than a little reluctance. Like an archeologist reconstructing the past, I followed the secret history mapped out on my body: four on my chest, two sets of sparking pairs radiating across my upper rib cage like a half-realized constellation; a pair on my right arm like freckles gone bad and cancerous; and a final set on the outward side of my left hip, aching like an old war wound that got stiff when the weather changed.

There was a ninth spot-unlike the others, but still part of this history. On the inside of my right arm, a weeping vacuum nestled in the fleshy valley of the joint. A needle, containing some pharmaceutical cocktail intended to keep me docile and pliable. How docile? I reached for the Chorus and it was like clawing through layers of muslin. But they were there, and I could feel them reaching back. The cocktail was wearing off.

I rolled onto my side, and pressed my face against the floor. I had been stripped down to my pants-no shirt, no shoes, no socks-but my face was the only naked flesh not completely numb. The steel was ridged, and in the valleys I could dimly smell the old taint of blood and oil.

I rocked back and forth, dragging my cheek across the ridge. It wasn't sharp, but it was rough enough to catch the edge of the blindfold. Nausea rolled through me, and I stopped. But it was enough. The blindfold had slipped.

The change in illumination was negligible but I had accomplished something. I had changed the situation in my favor. My Will be Done. A first step. The rest were easier. I scraped my cheek some more, and the cloth slipped off my eyes entirely. Yes, too dark to see anything, but I didn't need the light.

The object in my mouth was held in place by a heavy strap. The same method wasn't going to get that off. Wrists. I bent my fingers toward my bound wrists until they made contact with the bindings. So little feeling. Was that metal or plastic? I strained further, feeling like I was bending hardwood, and one finger managed to pluck at the edge of whatever was binding my hands. It flexed. Plastic, just an industrial-grade zip tie.

Fire. I tried to focus my distorted thoughts on the flame-that incendiary element of change, that alchemical burn. Fire strips away the old, turning the dead into ash and dust-grist for the eventual rebirth of everything. Washed away by fire. Mahapralaya. At the end of the Hindu Kali Yuga-this current Age of Iron-the world would be dissolved in fire. The Greeks called it ekpyrosis, and as it was translated into the Latin by the heretics, it became conflagratio. The World-Fire. When it burned itself out, God would start anew. Yes, fire, come to me.

A lick of orange flame guttered in my mind's eye, a spark catching in those dusty memories not yet thrown away. Nineteen, climbing in the North Cascades. Early fall. Nightfall, the temperature dropping quickly. Building a fire. I remembered nursing it to life, coaxing it with tiny branches and dry sticks, and I nursed that memory now in the same way, teasing it out with my Will. From spark to mental vibration to etheric manifestation. My hands grew warm as I directed the fire through my arms and into the bleak winter of my fingers.

A ghost light bloomed in front of me, an external reaction to my spell. Surprised, my focus broke and the tiny flame died. The ghostly lettering vanished almost immediately like a hibernating serpent returning to its winter slumber. But I had read the words. I had recognized them.

Protection sigil, keyed to the presence of magick. Just like the barn. Any strenuous magickal activity and it would explode. Immolation. Conflagration. It would have been funnier if I wasn't tied up.

The same spell as the one in the barn, though in this case it was meant to keep things in instead of out.

The ghost light hadn't been much, but in its brief glow, I had been able to pick out a few more details about my prison. The letters had been written on a metal plate attached to a wall that was as corrugated as the floor. A shipping container. I had been in enough of them over the years to recognize that ribbed construction. Just never so up close and personal. From the lack of ambient light, this one must be fairly well sealed. A firestorm would last just a few seconds before all the oxygen was consumed. The threat of such an explosion was a pretty effective deterrent: nowhere to hide, and not enough ambient force to raise a shield against the explosion. A cheap and efficient solution for those who wanted to hold a magus, or kill one slowly. Starvation worked as well as a knife, and it had the benefit of being indirect action. Like the way foreign diplomats in ancient Mongolia were wrapped in furs and rugs before being trampled, so that their sacred blood wouldn't touch the earth and allow their curses to take root.

I flexed my shoulders, pulling at the straps around my wrists. My fire had been hot, although brief, and it might have weakened the restraints. I strained, and the ties parted grudgingly like a string of taffy stretched to its elastic limit. As I kneaded cold skin with equally cold fingers, my hands came alive with the prickly resumption of unobstructed blood flow.

When the nerve endings in my fingertips were warm enough to feel something, I investigated the mechanics of the gag. As my finger slid off the rounded rubber hump protruding from my mouth, I realized it was nothing more than a ball gag. Available in any sex shop. I found the buckle in back, and wincing as I had to pull the belt tighter around my head, I undid the restraint and spit the rubber ball out.

I tossed the whole contraption aside. Not a souvenir I wanted to keep. The metal buckle clattered against the ridged floor.

In the death of that echo, I heard other sounds. A body moved and someone inhaled sharply. And then, a human voice. "Is someone there?"

It had been ten years, but I knew that voice.

Kat.