Lightbreaker

XIV

The thin film over the magma pool in my heart broke at the sound. The poisonous fire filling me in the hotel was just a minor burp compared to the volcanic upheaval brought about by that voice. The Chorus, shredding the chemical barriers in my head, rode the cresting edge of a venomous Qliphotic exultation. Their soul-sense radiated from my skull, seeking Kat's light.

She heard me coming and scrambled against the door panels, trying to find some way to push them open. Instinctively, she started to pull energy from the ether.

The wall behind her lit up, a white line of words glaring beneath her hips. A whining chatter of metal against stone forced its way through the Chorus' noise. As the illuminated letters revealed my approach, she began to shout over the pitched shriek of the protection ward, frantically constructing a magickal defense. The shrieking sound rattled my back molars as a firestorm began to coalesce, the floor starting to steam.

The explosion would kill us both. Didn't she know what it was, what her spell was doing? She couldn't draw enough energy to protect herself from the ward's explosion.

The Chorus giggled, a chuckle of black humor magnified by the roaring echo of the erupting darkness. Fire, they giggled, she's not trying to protect herself.

My fingers closed on her throat. I slammed us both against the wall and she groaned from the impact. "Goddess, no," she gasped, her hands fighting against the pressure of my weight. Her spell fled, dying in the collision, and the warning glow of the ward died as well. Back into darkness. Back into the wood.

My face, so close to hers, was filled with her smell: the memory of charred lilacs, the verdant flush coming off her skin now, tinged with an acrid bite of fear. Her hair was in my mouth and against my cheeks as she struggled beneath my hand.

I pressed the length of my body against her, pinning her flush to the wall. She turned her head and our cheeks met, her wet face anointing me. "Please," she whispered, her lips straining for my ear. "Please."

Settle it, the Chorus hissed, their voices issuing from the angry smoke in my lungs. Kill the bitch, they implored, writhing with need. She's asking for it.

Another echo intruded through the heat haze of the Chorus. A stained memory of Nicols. Standing in the parking lot beside Piotr's trailer. "Guy's going to Walla Walla for ten to fifteen. You think that's going to fix the hole in his heart?"

My mouth rubbed against her jaw, my lips twitching against the shiver of pain racing through her skin. I felt it in my groin and stomach as well. Her heart, hammering in her rib cage, was a seductive rhythm. Just a handbreadth away. I could reach in and touch it. I didn't even need magick. I could do it the old-fashioned way: by ripping her flesh, by cracking the cage of bone about her precious organ. So close.

"Please," she whispered again. Her mouth was so dry the word was barely a husk of its letters. "I don't understand. Who are you?"

The question broke against the black wall of the Qliphotic infection. A phantom voice in my head-my own traumatized innocence-echoed the question. Who? The Chorus screamed, the interfering noise of knives against knives, attempting to drown the question. Drown the tiny creature trying to dig itself out of the muck in my soul.

The Eight of Swords. The eight blades of interference. My roots, sunk deep in the darkness of Malkuth-the physical world, the realm of the weak flesh. The Chorus had been goading me for years. Their need had perverted my desire. Had led me astray. Take back what was stolen from you, they cried, hurt her in the way she hurt you. Dominate her; break her Will.

Kat's stomach pressed against my hip, her shirt shaking against my naked skin like a banner blowing in the wind. The scent of her skin and her soul burned into my cortex-just as it had been seared there so long ago. Lilacs. A field of smoldering lilac bushes. Was this my desire?

I squeezed her throat, the Chorus burning my hands with an urgency of violence. They darted through my skin, tasting her flesh, licking at her fear. She struggled under my hand, twisting in my grip. Her face turned toward me, and I could see the Chorus reflected in her eyes. I could see how she saw me. "Markham?"

Her hand found my face, her fingers questing for my lips. Touching me as if she couldn't believe I was real. "After all this time." Her voice was barely a whisper, such little air as could be forced past my hand. "Why?"

She didn't know. The Chorus was in her, invading her mind, caressing her spark with their eager tongues. She couldn't hide from me; I read her pure. She didn't know.

My memory was false. She had never touched me in the way I had remembered. She had never broken my spirit. Her mind was bereft of the history in my head.

What world were they trying to force on me?

The Chorus reacted angrily to my hesitation, flailing against my doubt. Their eruption was a volcanic attempt to take control. Just a little tighter. Just a little more pressure. These scintilla of captive souls fought to drive me to the final resolution of their desires, struggled to make me close my hand. Complete this cycle of fiction.

Was I just a creature of their illicit design?

I let go, much like Nicols had dropped the gun instead of fighting for control. I just let go. As I retreated, the loss of her touch-of her presence-sent the souls in my head into full revolt. I fell, unable to stand, and my legs and arms spasmed uncontrollably. My fingers, unable to choke Kat, tried for my own throat instead.

My lungs were clogged with wet soot. Deep in my belly, the orphic egg-laid those years ago in a moment of panic-cracked, and its tainted alchemy spilled out. It was a poison meant to melt the ravaged splinters of my spirit, meant to melt me down so that I could be reformed as a Qliphotic child.

If Kat was innocent, then I was not.

The tear in my soul was my transgression, a symptom of my failure. My fear, festering for years. The Qliphoth, the demons of the dark side of the Tree, made their children through despair and panic. All roads lead through the Abyss, and it is the fearful who are torn off the path. Those who think they are not worthy fulfill that expectation.

The Star, inverted, was me. I had caused this grief. I laid the seeds of what was exploding now. I was the cause. . I was a fallen star.

But. . still a star. Still a spark of the Divine Spirit, however gone astray. Even though I was nothing but a vessel filled with betrayal and deceit. . even though I was nothing. . no thing. .

I rolled onto my side and threw up. From my tailbone on up, flexing everything in one direction, I threw it all out of me in one enormous eructive heave. They wanted violence, blood and gore for their pleasure. Instead, I gave them a violent denial. Nihil non est. My throat and mouth strained to expel the vileness in my gut, an explosive decompression of a decade's worth of entrenched darkness. I vomited a second time and then a third, the wave of cancer lessening to a bitter trickle. By the fourth and fifth spasm, I had nothing left, but my body continued to heave anyway, finding some tortured revelry in this act of expurgation.

The Qliphoth extrusion hissed in the lightless room, a simmering puddle of viscous acid. It wanted to return to me, to swim inside the warm sanctuary of my flesh and to bathe in the hot nourishment of my blood. It wanted the delicious sweat of my fear.

But it couldn't have me. Not anymore. I was done with it, done with all that it wanted.

Still, its desire remained. If I was going to reject its tainted kiss, it would find someone else. The blood on my lips told me as much, the violent desire of the Qliphoth still lingering. It existed to consume. That was its only nature. It had festered in my gut and fueled my flesh's basal desires for that sole reason. These are my roots, sunk deep within the material world of Malkuth.

I raised my fist, lashed with lightning-the walls going white with shock, screaming and keening with near eruptive force-and brought my hand down in the center of the midnight puddle. I struck its core, touched it where it wanted me to touch Kat. I grabbed the vile heart of the Qliphotic essence-revenge, in its core-and blasted it with light.

The room hazed with steam, crackling with burning ozone. For an instant, I feared I had gone too far and had triggered the wards but, as the fractured droplets of the Qliphotic essence absorbed and contained my spell, the ward exhaled, losing light and sound. In a few heartbeats, we were in darkness again.

But it wasn't as black as it had been.

"Have you hated me that long?" she asked finally, her voice raw and tentative. "Ever since. .?"

I wiped my chin and spat, clearing my mouth of the nasty taste. Clearing out the last vestiges of that bilious venom. "Part of me," I said. "Yeah, a part of me."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I never meant for anything to happen. I never meant for. ."

This? I thought. Never meant for me to become what I am? The Chorus was silent and submissive after the explosive purge of their secret taint. Their strength had lain in the hidden egg of the Qliphoth, the psychic child planted in me by the darkness in the woods. They had been influencing me, their continual seduction ensuring that I provided nourishment for the offspring, for the demonic payload I had been tasked to bring to term.

This was why they had been driving me to find Katarina, why they filled my head with thoughts of her death. They wanted her blood on my hands, wanted me flush with the exquisite rapture of having taken her. That was the trigger they had sought, the act which would have breached the metaphysical wall that had hidden the black Tree.

They would have welcomed me then, taken me down into those roots where the egg had been hiding. This, they would have revealed to me, this is the secret of the flesh. They would have let me See what I had done, Willfully, with intent.

This is the Qliphotic promise of the body-the darkness' hidden, dreadful secret-this is the inheritance of the material passions. This psychic mind-bomb of violence and rage. This is the real promise of mankind, the only true enlightenment our species can ever hope to attain.

"Yeah," I whispered, responding to Kat's plea for communication. She reached out to me in the dark, reached out to touch someone else, to know she wasn't alone. "It's part of what makes us human, isn't it? The shame and the regret."

"I tried to find you. I did. But it all fell apart so quickly. We were separated. All of us. I wanted to go after you and bring you back-" She faltered, realizing how empty an excuse her words were. "We were supposed to show you the Way. You should have seen the Tree, seen the Ten and the Path."

She moved in the dark, slow steps along the wall. I could hear the sound of her palms rubbing against the steel. "Ah, Markham, we opened your eyes to the spirit world, and I am sorry that you had to find out about it in that way. I'm sorry I didn't tell you." She crouched down to find me. "But you survived. You've learned the Arts."

A hard laugh coughed its way out of me. "Kat, I saw the Tree." Now that the Qliphotic veil was gone, new images were surfacing in my head. The Chorus tried to hide them, but they were buoyed by a forceful insistence. A need to remember, suppressed too long. Yes, the Tree. I had seen the Tree of the Sephiroth.

But the ceremony had been interrupted at this moment of revelation, and we had been scattered. There, among the shadows of the pines, I had Seen a different Tree, a black reflection. "I touched the nightside. I Saw the Qliphoth."

"How? That's impossible. We just opened your eyes. We didn't have a chance to guide you. You barely saw the Tree. How could you find the back pathways? I don't understand what happened."

"I fell through Daath, Kat. I met one of them in the woods. I met a serpent who walked like a man, and he stuck his tongue through the hole in my spirit. He told me shadows could get into my soul, and there was only one way to keep them out."

"Keep them out? How?"

I let her see the Chorus. I raised them up and lit them with fiery incandescence. The walls responded in kind and, for a second, the room was filled with a kaleidoscopic orgasm of moving light. The color bleached out of Kat's skin, her skull visible. Her hair was a black cloud about her head and her eyes glittered like diamonds trapped in ragged stone. She Saw me. I had no doubt. "Dear Goddess," she whispered, her voice echoing in the sudden extinction of light.

She was quiet a long time. "You've been lost ever since that night, haven't you?" Her hand touched my foot, and her fingers were so warm I almost cried out from the shock. "He touched you, and you listened to him. I am so sorry. You've been carrying this poison all that time."

Her warmth spread through my ankle and heel, melting the permafrost in my toes. The heat spread to my calf like sunlight warming the core of a rock. On the wall, the white line of letters began to glow, a faint luminescence that outlined the shape of her head and body. "Was it all his voice that you heard? Was there any of your own desire in your heart?"

"I don't know. I can't remember." My body began to shake, deep sobs rising up from some long-covered wellspring.

"Has this violence been the only thing you've wanted, Markham? Has there been anything else? Try to remember. There is still a void in you. Just because you've expelled him doesn't mean he can't come back. You have to fill the void yourself. You have to remember something that has always been yours. What have you been seeking all this time? It hasn't been me. What have you wanted?"

Peace, I tried to tell her, but my teeth were chattering too hard. As her hand climbed to my knee, I reached down and grabbed her wrist, pulling her into my embrace like a drowning man grabbing a scrap of flotsam. My mouth found its way, my lips tasting her skin. Her fragrance-oh, memory is such a shabby thing when confronted with the aroma of a living scent-flooded through the crust of blood in my nose. The inhaled aphrodisiac went straight to the cold part of my brain and started wildfires.

We had fucked a lot when we were dating, animal movements in the light and night of our lives. We fucked because we were young, bodies so easily inflamed by the desire to touch and taste. We weren't the type whose sexual encounters lasted for hours and broke furniture and annoyed the neighbors and left us dehydrated husks on the floor. We were just enthusiastic about putting our parts together in various rhythmic combinations.

The sex was the intersection of our lives, the common denominator linking us. Her friends were prone to discussions about mysticism and meditative states reached through pharmaceutical psychology. They tended to be nocturnal-lovers of libraries and dark coffee houses, wan and wide-eyed in daylight. Mine were outdoor enthusiasts: climbers, BASE jumpers, skiers. We loved the rain and the weather, the play of light on snow, the crisp emptiness found far from concrete.

There was some overlap in the pharmaceutical area but, for the most part, our relationship fed the aspects of our psyches unfulfilled by our choices in friends and companions. I was the philosopher among the climbers, the one most prone to wonder why we wanted to climb up to Heaven and touch the stars in the night sky. She was unafraid of rocks and trees and air untainted by the heavy pressure of burned fossil fuels.

We met at REI; I was working a summer job there, helping out with the climbing wall. She approached me, on a lark she said, and asked how the whole climbing thing worked. I had put her in one of the harnesses and let her try the first few handholds. She had caught me looking at her ass.

Later, lying in bed, she confessed she had only come into the store to meet me. "The Hermit at the base of the mountain," she had said, explaining in her way what sight had lured her into the store. It was years later, when I learned about the tarot from a scarred astrologer in Budapest, that I understood what she had been telling me.

Katarina and I had always made love like we were trying to bridge some gap, like we were struggling to complete a puzzle we didn't even realize we were trying to solve. We were frenetic in our movement: grasping, pulling, pushing, tugging-always moving in opposition. In the brief fusion brought about by orgasm, we experienced a momentary glimpse of the solution-the top of the puzzle box where the picture was complete-and the sight always left us on the verge of understanding. Always close; never realized. Our quest of the flesh eternally incomplete.

Both of us had been with other people in the interim. Now, in the steel prison, our histories showed in the tiny hesitations that interrupted our motion, in the instinctual manner in which we found and forgot our rhythms, in the familiar way we drank from the hollows of our throats and shallow pools of our collarbones as we became thirsty. She bit me on the shoulder, breaking the skin, and I dented the flesh beneath the high point of her pelvic arch with my thumb. She sighed when she came and I held on, greedily wanting to bring her to that point again. She laughed and gripped me tight, flexing her hips and back until I cried out.

When all the hate was gone, what was left wasn't love, but just the memory of presence. What was left was an imprint of connectivity. We had sought to be one once, and the failure of that quest held no negative connotation. It was simply part of what moved us. We fucked like old friends who finally figured out that physical touch was as intimate as we were ever going to be. With that realization came a certain amount of grace.