Lightbreaker

XXX

Devorah stayed with Antoine, the Seer supporting the Witness. She kept her back to the city, always turned away from the carnage that I had forced her to foresee, but in farewell, she turned her head toward the east enough for me to see the dark streaks of dried blood on her face. Her tears had stopped.

I left the tarot card on the river bank. This was one side-one path-and I was going to cross the river to take the other path.

I made the Chorus support me as I walked across the water to the dead city. The river was dark with ash, a turgid inkiness beneath my feet. There were no bodies and very little flotsam, just a continual pall of ash in the water. It got darker and thicker as I reached the western shore.

I stepped onto hard land again between the Freemont and Broadway bridges, just downriver from the Amtrak station. The clock tower at the depot was a crooked black finger in the empty field of steel rails. The cars in the parking lot beyond the station were coated inside and out with grime and soot. They looked like the cracked eggs of giant birds.

The storm of soul-death had blown through every structure, leaving every surface charred and black. The inhalation of Thoth's Key stripped all light, all color, from the world. Windows were empty mouths that revealed blackened throats; walls had been breached and broken like bodies burst in heat, organs exploded and crisped. Older buildings-the northeastern edge of Chinatown-leaned toward the shining tower as if made crooked by the vacuum. Their roofs were torn off, shingles and strips of tar paper littering the street in long patterns.

The skyscrapers were monolithic trees caught in the dead of winter, their external layer of marble and chrome peeled away like cracked bark. They were dead husks, a forest of hollowed-out sycamores. Blighted. Devoured. Empty.

A black forest in a black land. With each step, I stirred up ash and filth; the detritus clung to my clothes and skin, making me a black wraith wandering through a nocturnal landscape.

As I approached the spire, I knew who would be waiting for me. The circle was closed. This wilderness was a hollow vacuum, filled with death and shadow. He would come to this place. One last attempt to lure me astray.

I started to hear a whisper, like the rustling of dry leaves, as I crossed Burnside and entered downtown proper. They were nearly invisible against the landscape, covered in ash like the rest of the city, and they gave off no signal the Chorus could find. They were darker holes against a dark backdrop.

Soul-dead. Following me.

I was a beacon after all. Even under the layer of soot and filth, I was the single source of light in the city other than the bright point at the top of the tower. They were denied that light. It was the other side of the Abyss, after all. The soul-dead were trapped in the black crack between worlds. Trapped by the eternal hunger of the Qliphotic master of this place.

He crouched in the ruined entrance of Eglanteria Terrace, resting on his haunches. His gray and yellow robe was spattered with dark stains and the back of his head was open like a burst piece of rotten fruit. His single eye was a milky cataract in an otherwise dead mask. A pearl lost in the black reeds.

He had been Julian once. But, after I had infected his soul, something else had taken root in him. And, as his body had lain on the grass outside the building, that root had grown. Had grown into a dark flower that made his shell walk. The flower had many names: Choronzon, called "Coronzom" by Dr. Dee; Asmodeus; Yaldabaoth; Shemal; Yog-Sothoth.

"Samael." I bound him to the name I knew, the name I had learned so long ago in the woods and which I had sworn to never repeat again.

He raised his head and smiled at me, black teeth against black skin. His tongue was red, vibrant and wet like his pearlescent eye. "So bright, little worm. So bright and tasty."

"Your work, Archon. Your hand upon this world."

"Ah, it is. Yes, it is. I Know you. I Made you." He raised his face and sniffed the acrid air-inhaling my living scent. "Lost in her hair, I found you." He made a chattering noise with his teeth. "I came when you called."

I grimaced and looked behind me. The street and the plaza were filling with soul-dead, silent sentinels. Witnesses to this final conversation. They were the still breath of Death, waiting. They crept closer, their rank deepening. Those in back slowly pushed the ones in front forward. They quivered and shook, dead inside but still suffused with a terrible need.

"I no longer carry your lies. Your poison is gone."

"Never gone," he said, waggling a finger. "The flesh never forgets."

This was the fear that tore at our hearts and could never be purged from our brains: the intractability of the flesh, bound by passion. While our brains might lock away the memories and our hearts might burn out the emotions, we were just hiding from our Egos. We made our own personal Pandorian boxes and tried to lose the key.

And thee claim my other half. The lost part of myself that I spent years blaming on Katarina. I had chased her for ten years, thinking there was something she could have given back to me. Something lost which could be found again. It was just an excuse I used to hide the truth from myself; the truth I knew, but had locked away.

Denial and obscuration: that path chosen in the wood, the way that took me further into the dark trees. It had led me to blame Katarina for something that had never happened. I was a victim, a gullible scapegoat who walled off his entire heart to hide the hurt sustained there. The Chorus had become my validation, the voices who kept me from the wall I had built. They gave me reason to not look within. And, with my eyes turned outward, the wound in my heart festered and turned black. By raising those walls, I had given it permission to poison my core, to grow its deadly fruit.

Nicols had drawn the Three of Swords, the pain that must be endured. The trial that must be undertaken. All adepts must cross the Abyss; they must face the demon of darkness-the incarnate foulness of their own Ego-and dissolve it. My devil, born in a moment of fear, had haunted me for a long time.

He haunted me still, standing here on the threshold; he blocked me from my goal, from crossing the Abyss.

Read thy lot in yon celestial sign, Devorah had prophesied for me, where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist. When the Egyptian souls were taken to the underworld, they were weighed by Anubis at the Gates of the Underworld. Their component parts-the physical organs of the deceased-were placed on a scale and considered against ritual objects. Those incorrectly weighted were thrown to the hounds that slavered and begged beneath the scales. Those who were in balance were allowed access to the Afterlife.

Who we are, in the end when our spirits are being judged and weighed, is a matter of the accreted substance of our choices. We chose the paths and those choices are inscribed in our minds. We may be able to hide our failures and missteps on the outside, but inside, we never forget.

Our hands betray what we have done.

I killed nine men yesterday. They weren't the first. In the last ten years, there had been blood and fire on my hands more than once. And yet, the apex of the Tree had never been closed to me. I was still in the Abyss, but I could yet see the other side. The light from the Tower still called to me.

God never forgets. Nor do we. Is that the pure irony of our existence? We have to kill the Ego in order to touch the other side; we have to lose ourselves in order to ascend. That requires a death of the flesh. Why? Because it can't forget.

Or is it just like Blake says: the "mind-forg'd manacle"? The prison built by the Demiurge and his archons, the black iron cage we trap ourselves with. The mind-thinking too much, thinking too often.

I stepped toward the door, putting aside my racing thoughts, silencing the too-busy mind. Samael shifted his weight and shook his head. Flecks of ash drifted off the back of his open skull. "Not this time, pretty. The light is not for you."

I looked up at the boiling sphere at the top of the building. It was perfectly round, a single furious dot. Ain Soph collapses into Ain. God expressing Himself in space so as to start creation. Thoth's Key had burned Portland in order to make a vacuum, a realm of darkness in which it would be the only light. Et tenebrae super faciem abyssi.

"Nor for you either, Blind One." My hand drifted up to indicate the east. Devorah, on the riverbank, showing me her face as she looked toward that horizon. "What happens when the sun rises? Are you allowed to look upon the face of God?"

He hissed at me, but didn't answer.

"I was a child in the woods. I was afraid. Afraid of everything: what had happened to me, what I felt, what I thought came next. I was scared of dying. I was weak when you crawled out of the darkness, when you whispered in my ear. I wanted succor. I wanted to know that I was going to be okay." I shook my head. "I was too willing to believe your words, to accept what you told me. I should have put aside all those tiny fears and just asked you if I was going to live long enough to see the sun rise."

I looked along the length of my arm, toward the coming sun. "Like now, you would have had no answer, and I would have known you then. I would have Seen you. True."

Just a shadow. My own shadow.

In my soul, I touched the Chorus and gave them a simple directive. They fought me but it was a hollow resistance. They knew I was their master. They knew they had to obey. They collapsed into a point, hidden in my chest. A mirror image of the sphere at the top of the Tower. Ain becomes Nia-Abyss becomes Eye.

"Every day, I see the sun rise, Samael," I said. "Every day I look upon God and He doesn't burn me, He doesn't condemn me. Because, even as bloodied as I am, I am still His child. I still have His Spark in me."

Samael shrieked, a grinding wail of fury that drowned out the question I had for him. He sprang forward-leaving the threshold-until less than an inch separated us. So close. His breath, dry and dead, on my face. His single white eye staring sightlessly through me.

I didn't flinch, nor give ground. My exhalation-filled with the humming power of the engorged Chorus, the children of Samael I had made my own-left dew on his chin and cheeks. Julian's shell was so desiccated by Samael's Qliphotic presence it was unable to absorb moisture. Arid dust shaped into form by malevolent Will.

Versus my body. Warm living flesh suffused with my light. Patchwork as it may be, it was still me.

It always had been. It always would be.

"You have no power," I whispered to the shadow heart of my soul. I was the Divine Spark-the Godhead-Samael was my khabit, my shadow-the Demiurge who thought the Universe was his. My prison was believing in him. "Not anymore."

He smiled, his red tongue hanging between his burn-blackened lips. "Maybe not." He nodded past my shoulder. "But I have power over them."

This was the signal the soul-dead had been waiting for. In a wave that was all pressure and no presence, they flooded over me. Their hands pulled at my hair, my flesh. Their cracked fingers tore at my skin, trying to rend my shell and reach the bright light of my soul.

I detonated the Chorus, a localized thermobaric exaltation that cremated an open space around me. Everything became white ash, infused with light. The greedy soul-dead became albinos whose flesh flaked off dry bones which, in turn, became pale motes dancing in the air. The ground, wiped clean of soot; the nearby grass turned to translucent ice. The air snapped, a crackling expression of exothermic change.

Samael staggered away from me, his face and hands rimed with twisted frost. His head tipped back and midnight-colored fluid drained from his open skull. The ichor steamed and sizzled as it splashed on the whitened pavement. He tried to stop me as I shouldered past toward the glowing center of the Tower, but his hands cracked as they touched my hot flesh. His fingers fell off like shards of ice, and the stumps of his arms banged my elbow and back like broken branches.

I was bereft of the Chorus. I had detonated their captive light, emptied myself of their influence and outrage. Their explosive burst had destroyed the mob of Qliphotic shells attacking me, but there were still more of them. More empty shells inflamed with hunger.

As the aftermath of the Chorus' immolation faded, another mob rushed across the plaza. But I was beyond their reach. They couldn't enter the wide beam of light within the shell of the Tower. I crossed into the light and gave myself up to its seductive gravity. My purified body ascending. A star, rising.