Lightbreaker

I dreamt of bees, honey bees circling enormous flowers. The stalks were thick with strange veins, and I could see the rhythmic pulse of these ropy conduits. The heads of the flowers were voluptuous circles of curling white petals with tender pink centers. Pulsating cores of limpid light that blinked a seductive pattern, a Morse signal read by the bees.

I lay on my back, cradled in a bower of thick grass, and I watched a fat bee with yellow sigils inscribed on its thorax fly past. Its face was pink instead of black, a tiny human mask fitted over its insectoid visage. Nicols' face, smooth like a plastic mold, like a cheap mask that captured shape but not personality. The human-faced bee buzzed in tempo with the flickering heart of a nearby flower, and as it approached, the white petals curled, encouraging it closer.

The Nicols bee kissed the pink center and the flower convulsed, its petals whipping inward. A pink creature broke through the dome of the flower's face, and its long pink proboscis struck the bee in the center of its plasticine forehead. Pink tendrils connected the ibis-hound with the flower and, as the tiny soul-sucker drew out the essence of the bee, these tendrils strained and pulsed with the vacuuming rhythm of the ibis-hound.

I fled the dream, fled the field of soul-devouring flowers, but the bee's buzzing panic followed me. The sound increased in volume as I fled through flickering spaces of stereographic visions. The sound became Nicols' death scream, a wordless cry of human frailty. It was the sound of abandonment, of fearful darkness, of failure. It resonated in my head, growing louder, even as I ran further and further from the field of hungry flowers. The echo of his voice grew stronger, becoming not one voice but the sound of a thousand throats shrieking, of flesh sizzling, of knives ringing off metal. Of a city's light dying.

I woke to the sensation of her wet kiss fading from my lips.

The sky overhead was gray and dead, like flesh that had been submerged too long in stagnant water. My back was cold and wet; the tips of my fingers numb. The scream was still in my head, a cry struggling to find voice in my throat.

My lips were warm, though; her breath was caught in my mouth. A hot taste on my tongue, bitter with a leached sourness. Tears.

Devorah.

She held a sharp edge against my neck. Bloody tears dripped from her eyes and her green irises were overwhelmed with swirling patterns of black and gold. "Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue thy lingering," Devorah said. "Or with one stroke of this dart strange horrors seize thee, and pangs unfelt before." She knelt beside my body, knees pressed against my rib cage, My right arm was flung out straight past her body. Her right hand held the blade against my throat and her left held my head back. Easier to cut my throat. "For proof look up, and read thy lot in yon celestial sign; where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist."

I swallowed, feeling the thin edge against my windpipe. The Chorus cowered in the deepness of my core, their rank broken by the wave of soul-death that had touched them. The screaming echo of the city reverberated in their silver strands. "What do you seek from me, Oracle?" My voice bubbled through a film of river water still in my esophagus.

"Be not diffident of Wisdom," she said. Her mouth worked hard on the words. The prescient vision I had brought upon her still burned her blood. "She deserts thee not, if thou dismiss not her, when most thou needest her nigh."

Wisdom. The bounty realized by the soul as it climbed toward its release from the flesh, as it reached for enlightenment. Devorah had been guided by her burning sight to save me from the river, but only to hold my life in her hands. After what I had done to her, was I worthy of being saved? What price was her innocence?

"Ask," I croaked. I could smell the river nearby, the damp of dead water, and, distantly, a scent of burned wood. Not fire, but soot, as if the flames had long gone out. I wanted to turn my head and look at the city, but I knew if I looked away from Devorah's face, she'd cut my throat.

"See, with what heat these dogs of hell advance to waste and havoc yonder world," she said. "Which I so fair and good created; and had still kept in that state, had not the folly of Man let in these wasteful furies." Each drop that welled from the corners of her eyes was an unconscious reaction to her Vision, to the sorrow I had brought upon her. Each drop was a little more of her life leaking away, forced out of her body by the passion of her Sight. Each drop was my responsibility. Who was I to force such sacrifice upon her? "Who art to lead thy offspring, and supposest that bodies bright and greater should not serve the less not bright?"

The rule of the mighty was not to serve their own desires, but to assist in the enlightenment of the rest. Plato's philosopher kings. Alfred the Great who drove the Danes out of England and spent the twilight of his rule attempting to educate his subjects. Solomon, devoting his wisdom so that his people could understand peace.

I remembered Nicols' crown card: the Hanged Man. The suspended magus who waits to have his vision realized, who waits to fulfill himself. The Fisher King who cannot save his kingdom until his wound is recognized.

Kether-the first Sphere of the Sephiroth-was the Crown. The ultimate goal of the seeker of enlightenment. Lights go up; lights go out. It is always to the crown they go. The Wheel grinds the kings down; the Wheel lifts them up.

"Ask," I said again, feeling the open emptiness of my void, that center that I had allowed to be filled with poison and anger, that I had looked inside as I had fallen in the river and found myself hiding there. Nicols had only asked one thing of me. One tiny thing. A decision I had been forced to make in the woods when he had put the gun to his head. A moment of divergence, paths to be chosen. One or the other. Like the dark wood where I had been born into the occult world. A moment of choice. A tiny thing. This final, fatal choice.

What do you believe?

"Ask," I said a third time, binding myself to this moment. "Query me your riddle, Oracle. Show me the way to the crown." Kether. The eye of God. After everything, the Way was not closed.

Nothing is ever lost.

"Last, with one midnight stroke, all the first-born of Egypt must lie dead," she said. "And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?" I realized it wasn't a knife she held against my throat. Just as I had slit her palm with a symbolic representation of her, she was threatening me with a similar psychic symbol. She held a tarot card to my throat. The answer to her riddle was the identity of that card.

Piotr's reading came back to me, the cards floating in my mind against the churning backdrop of the dream I had had later that night about the reading. Kat and I-the Prince and Queen of water, locked in our embrace-the wheel beneath us with the shrouded and masked body. I understood its mask now, understood it was meant as my death mask. My innocence hidden away beneath a mirror.

Bernard was the satyr cherub with the engorged phallus. The flesh rod was an expression of his priapic quest for knowledge, and his persistent efforts to fuck the world were an attempt to make it climax and give up its secrets. Above us had been the rain of swords, nine blades reaching down from Heaven to prick our flesh. Below, the wheel of five wands surmounted by the empty faces of the unborn. They were opposites, the routes a magus takes in his quest for the top of the Tree-the paths of Severity and Mercy.

Had not the folly of Man let in these wasteful furies? We thought we could Create, that we were wise enough to make changes to the course laid down by God. We thought we could change the world as if that was sufficient apology for failing to change ourselves. Who among us was wise enough to think themselves not beholden to the rest of mankind? Was not murder of another but a murder of self? Was the Qliphotic darkness that had claimed me for so long nothing but my own fear of the unknown?

Where was my faith?

And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?

There were two paths: the path of Severity and the path of Mercy. I was on the threshold, caught on the cusp of nightmare and daybreak. At the edge of the wood, there were two paths. I had failed to stop Bernard and Julian from their unholy experiment, but in that failure was there also not an effort to save someone other than myself?

Was the hole of Daath-the entire lost wasteland of the Tree's Qliphotic darkness-nothing more than a selfish mistake, a failure of Ego?

For proof look up, and read thy lot in yon celestial sign; where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist.

"The Moon," I said. "You're holding the Moon."

Devorah released her hold on my hair and sat back on her heels, lifting the card away from my throat. She held it in front of my face. Two pillars on the shores of a river that cut through the center of the card-separating the world. A pale crab, imperfectly drawn as if it were but a half-dream, crawled in the mud at the bottom of the river. Two jackal creatures-one on either shore-howled at the pregnant moon that hung low in the sky. This was the Moon, the deranged madness that came over the intelligence during the darkness when the sun was dead and rolling beneath the world. It was the card that came after the Star, and it was the gateway to resurrection-the Sun and the new Aeon.

She dropped the card on my chest as she stood. She had been between me and Portland, and her motion was permission to look. I put my hand over the card, holding it to my body, as I turned my head and bore witness to what had been done to the city.

It was a black landscape. I had been pulled from the river near the railway switching yard, a shallow bank bereft of any impediments. From where I lay, I could see the broken arches of three bridges-shattered fingers reaching across the stained river. The destruction-the absolute and empty darkness, autem erat inanis et vacua-stretched up the wooden hill to the west of downtown and across the river through the dense suburbs close to the freeway. More than a mile away, and still at the edge of the devastation.

A single spire rose from that bleak ruin, crowned by a flickering ball of pale fire. In the bowl of the metropolis that had been Portland, the only movement was the collapsed light of the thousands of souls that had been taken by Bernard's theurgic mirror.

The harvest was done. All that remained was the fixed point of the souls, the single light in darkness. The tower was the axis mundi and the pale light at its tip the signal fire that called out to God. "He isn't finished."

"No." A male voice intruded. Decrepit, it trembled with effort, but it was still a voice I knew. "Not quite."

Standing at the top of the embankment to my left were Pender and another man, a wizened figure wrapped in a brown trench coat.

Antoine.