Dividing Canaan: The Journals of Canaan Quintanilla by D.A. Hernandez

CANAAN DESCENDING (PART FOUR)

2010-12-22T02:40:00.000-08:00

Days passed, far too many to keep track of and I became haunted and bereft with the stress of this reality and the other during the course of our travels. I succumbed to my dislocation and fell to my knees in the hot desert sand and screamed up towards the contused sun clutching at the keys on my gauntlet as though they were my albatross or the ball and chain of these angry twin world prisons.

Ember sank beside me and offered one of the last Oneiroion blooms, but I couldn’t eat. I held it in the palm of my hand and looked into the bulb as if the answer lay within its petals. I just kept saying over and over again that I wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t let me give up.

Ember kept saying, “We’re nearly there, Architect, we’re nearly there.”

Her eyes were green as moss over the surface of a pond.

They allowed me some time to collect myself, my brooding needing the chance to cool in Cloak’s shade. I felt so used up, all endurance waning, my body channeling all that energy burnt out in desperate need of a recharge. Lightning thrived in the clouds above us comparing tensions, igniting the sky in violet and blue, and in the distance the clouds flanked the horizon in dense blockades of suppressed pain. I groaned as I sprawled out on the hard surface. Cloak stood nearby, his long coat flailing like great seraph wings, allowing the flaring garment to sweep over my body like a blanket as the desert wind turned cold and moaned its despairing cries for the true night that would never come.

I had closed my eyes only for a moment before I realized I was clambering to my feet, shoving bulbs of Oneiroion into my mouth, Ember licking the juices of the fruit off her fingers. Cloak remained where he had been before, stoically holding watch, his shrouded face held towards the southern expanse we had come from, as if wary that something might have followed us.

We clambered to our feet and began the journey again, and though I walked beside them, I was still trying to come to grips with all of this. My destiny, my exile, my life. My reality had bled into the dream and become a reality itself. The sorrow for how I had treated Mother, my rage against THE BASTARD, the destruction of Lamia and the Omphalos, all of it came rushing at me, taunting me.

There are things in me that are so tainted, so poisoned and violent, and I’ve been expressing them so freely these days I don’t even recognize myself. Maybe it was Lamia’s manipulation of me, her placing things in me to distort me into a grim mirror of what her real self had been. I can’t seem to make any head way with any of this. Even after everything, the more I think I understand, the more convoluted it all gets and I’m lost again, roaming corridors and ruins and deserts trying to find absolution that denies me. I have the power, I know that now. I have the Threads, I have my freedom from THE BASTARD and my neglectful Mother, but it doesn’t erase it all, doesn’t dry it all up and set me down upon a gilded throne where I can rule happily.

I still keep trying to understand how any of this has anything to do with me.

What if I can’t save this world?

What if I can’t save myself?

But there’s no escaping it all is there?

It makes the journey harder, even as far as I’ve come. It makes it all so hard.

There’s so much to be afraid of. But mostly I am afraid of myself. These small displays of power have proven that I am far from ready to wield what is mine. Even soul intact, I am profoundly incomplete.

The change is coming I can never go back…

Maybe Lamia’s right. I am the Nourisher of Wounds. I don’t need to be made into it to know what I already am. Hell, maybe all messiahs are torn these ways.

I shambled up to Cloak, saying nothing, just wanting to be close to someone, something. Ember slipped her hand into mine and skipped along, attempting to coerce me to join her - as if we were skipping along the Yellow Brick Road. I wished I had her optimism.

And then one day, the rain stopped falling and an answer dawned. It may not have been the one I was looking for, but no one could deny that there dwelt a renewal of hope.

Ahead of us grew a vast, daunting network of overpasses, an entwining nest of steel and stone girders, far more industrial and myriad than the ancient city that lay in the desert fog far behind us.

We had lumbered across this apocalyptic Road Warrior desert only to arrive at a volatile juncture.

And yet, the nearness of the Citadel sparked a change in the Threads. Light emanated from its myriad plates like a beacon and as I stared up beyond the tangled nest of pathways, I realized how ominously similar it and the Citadel it is, both in majesty and intricacy. The only true difference dwells in the Citadel’s mirrored surfaces are cold and black.

It soared, tyrannous with no end and no beginning, a cosmic collage of black glass, bleak and gothic in its alien architecture. It rested regally despite its apparent ruin - fractures running up and down in a multitude of stained glass fractures upon a nesting network of warped overpasses at the high and threatening meeting of the lines. I can compare it to nothing in the world I know, for it is truly as nothing I have ever seen. The tips of each of the many parapets are lost under the oppressive gloom of the ailing clouds. A massive incandescent creature lording over the corpse-laden desert. A shining black beacon, true, but one intended to inflict trepidation to the viewer. Each fractured frame of glass were like eyes staring out, watching the world from all sides, but unseen till this moment. Only it seemed so sad, so alone in the desert wastes once thronged by countless rivers, valleys, forests, and a mighty sea. A forgotten monument of a past that grew out of its memory. Unredeemed. Unsung except by little girls in masquerade masks and walking shadows.

I hesitated to follow after my companions who strode forth with a greater ambition than my own. As we made our way up this winding maze, emaciated rats cringed by on their weak little rat feet. They stopped to look up at us, their sunken eyes, their wriggly noses examining our sun beaten faces, as if to question why we had stolen into their kingdom, and if we had anything to eat. Ember plucked the petals from her Oneiroion blooms, and scattered them along the path behind us like a flower girl at a wedding. The rats instinctively summoned their strength and lurched toward these, greedily, feasting on what my blood had sown.

Rhada Khar nudged me forward and I continued up the metal and stone chaos spiraling and stair stepping, suspended over the desert in an M.C. Escher nightmare. The rafters and girders were constructed like a trail of thought gone very awry, very quickly. There was a disturbing splendor about it, but my companions were not as impressed as I was. This was what it had always been to them. But what of before, when the walls weren’t breached and the glass cracked? Had they looked upon it with the awe that I gazed upon its ruin?

Little Ember sauntered up the paths enthused with miniature ballets in every step. She told us stories as we walked, but I can’t remember their exact telling now. They were filled with her poppy buds of laughter and colorful images of the rainbow fields the Architect before me had made for her, and something to do with a waterfall who believed it was an avalanche. It was all silly and childish, but it passed the time.

Along the girders huddled the chalky remains of several Revenants, dried out from the heat, their blades sliding from tired fingers, lumped to one side like animals killed by cars. They did not bother us, but I pitied them. They lifted pale shrunken faces, their eyes cataracts of pus crusting over their sockets, leaving them blind. It was obvious they had made many failed attempts to enter the Citadel, and despite the bloody handprints smeared on the glass, they were forcibly rejected.

“Are you able to recall anything this close to your home?” Cloak said following my eyes up the dark tower.

“I…I don’t remember…anything.”

His words became distant murmurs, lost in the swirl of the wind and machines whining somewhere dark and deep. I imagined a mechanical deity existing in the dark, forced underground by its own creations, suffering and slowly going mad, just waiting to lift its ghastly hand through the crust of the earth to wrap me up and squeeze me like a grape between its mangling fingers. My vision warped and we moved closer to the top of the demented staircases. The light of the gauntlet shone brighter than the haze of light straining under the dense black clouds above us.

So many mirrors…

I paused beside the Rhylian, both of us staring up the length of the Citadel; the height immense as its spires rose to puncture the sky, a fortified bastion of glass and steel.

“I’ve never been this close before,” Rhada Khar admitted mostly to himself. “She doesn’t shine the way she used to.”

The sweeping winds drew my eyes down coils of sandy drafts to the bottom of the Citadel, where I expected to find a grand entryway standing in wait, but as we drew closer there was no doorway, no great gates preceding our entrance to the wasteland’s towering warden. While tall and soaring, I realized the tower itself extended through the surface of the earth, driven deep, leaving it half buried.

Cloak stopped ahead of me and Ember, the hem of his dark coat flailing, dust snaking around him. The bellows of the machines rose with a deafening tremble, shaking the ground under us. Ember wrapped her arm around mine and pressed her face into my sleeve.

I asked her why she came back to join us after Icarus Canto had rescued her, and her painted smile seemed to spread wider.

“I wanted to see you make it, to know that this world won’t always be like this. I know you can’t see it now, but you are going to find your way. Believe me.” She squeezed my arm tight staying close.

Cloak beckoned. I met him in front of a pane of icy black glass, my companions reflections uncannily clear and visible, while mine remained lost and unseen.

My dark guardian placed a firm hand against the glass and sighed, “It has been sometime since I have been within my master’s home. Truly this is as much my homecoming as it is yours. How I long to venture to the many libraries, to walk the grand halls, as not a shade, but as the Theurgian I am.”

I listened, but my eyes were fixated on the lack of my own reflection.

“Many have tried, but none have been permitted beyond these walls since the fall. At least I had thought as much until a little girl found me in the desert wearing a sacred relic I thought lost.”

He directed his attention to Ember who touched the side of her mask, her eyes a shimmering cat-like yellow. She giggled lightly.

Cloak continued: “These pathways were twisted and reconstructed by the Revenants who sought to breach the walls, but the true entrance is now buried under the ground.”

Cloak reached into the folds of his black coat and claimed a black box covered in silver markings. It seemed insignificant, but Cloak offered it to me.

“It was not only power I obtained in the halls of the Black Gallery. This cube is a potent relic, a Gambit’s Doorway.”

I held the cube in both of my hands, examining its lacquered surface. I traced my gloved fingers over the markings, the gauntlet responding with a pleasant tingling of bells.

“What does it do?”

Cloak stood back and opened his coat, revealing a swirling vortex of lightning churning under the folds.

“It was intended as a failsafe by my brethren, but we soon discovered there were those among us who wished to use our inventions for selfish purposes. The benevolent of us destroyed the Doorways to prevent them from falling into idle hands. All save one. When Illmatar fell, I knew the Citadel would be next. To ensure the plague and the Trespasser would not gain entrance to the Summit, I invoked the power of the Doorway to conceal the entrance and hid it within the mechanism. It will only open at your behest.”

“What do I do,” I asked rolling the box over in my hand like a Rubik’s cube.

“An Architect’s blood. The vision of the world, remember?”

I understood. I took the sharpened metal fingers of my gauntlet and opened a cut along the underside of my right arm. Before the wound could mend I quickly brought the box under the stream of pearly blood trickling down my arm. The markings lit up like the digital face of a clock and the box leapt out of my fingers and rolled on the ground pushing up against the pane of glass.

It began to spin like a dreidel and the top and side corners opened up like small angular mouths. The doorway constructed itself through the glass, manifesting on the side of the black Citadel wall. The magic of the Gambit’s Doorway erected the entrance replete with an ornate archway of carved angel’s wings.

But it was not complete.

A perfect circle was carved out of the glass.

Instinctively I lifted my hand to my neck curling my fingers around the magician’s eyeglass dangling against my chest. Without a second thought I ripped the chain from my neck and held the glass at the edges between my index finger and thumb. Through the shard I saw myself reflected onto the black mirror doorway.

I stood as I am, a nondescript, average teenager who could slip into a crowd, get lost and no one would know I was ever there. Unremarkably ordinary.

I turned to Cloak enclosing the shard in my fist. “The magician said that he saw nothing when he looked at Baphomet, but all I see when I look…Is me.”

“The glass sees truth and truth is creation. It sees what we want to see. See yourself, not as you are, as you’ve been, but who you will become.”

I took the eyeglass and I turned to face the black doorway.

“Show me the real me,” I whispered into the black glass, my breath fogging the sleek surface. “Let me be a good person, please. I’m a good person.”

“Good. Evil. In the end it is all the same thing. Light and shadow. It is in between where the truth lies. You must see through the illusion. See through the lie.”

Shadows and mirrors…

I took a deep breath and pushed the shard of glass into the opening. It fit perfectly in place with a responsive click.

I stood back and watched my reflection waver into view as though I were walking through a dense black fog. I emerged fully formed, captivated and stunned by my new materialization. I was no longer just Canaan Quintanilla anymore. His face did not look back at me. His hand did not reach up to touch the glass as the Sigil of Truth drew itself in lines of light.

It was the Architect staring back at me, earth and glass, steel and flesh. Light and dark.

I felt my legs shake watching the reflection turn from the demigod I’d become into a child, curly-haired, innocent and then remolded back into my earthly incarnation, the me writing my secrets into the final pages of this book. I was all of these things now. They were all a part of me now.

But the reflections didn’t hold. Suddenly, the mirror bled like an exposed Polaroid, and a new reflection emerged. Then another and another; a multitude of images each bearing my face, too numerous to keep track of like the monstrosities in the desert.

It became too much. I couldn’t focus. I thought I might go blind in the face of myself. I rang my fists against the glass screaming at my ever shifting reflection. It wouldn’t stop long enough for me to focus on one single image. I wanted it to stop, willfully so, but my likeness flashed in and out of recognition faster and faster, reconstructing itself over and over. I struggled to control it the way it was trying to command fire from out of nothing.

I fell backwards, scurrying away from the glass entrance. The mirrored surface swirled with storm clouds over dark water. Eerie green phosphorescence bled into the rising clouds and spread out like industrial plumes of smoke. I watched crazed and shaking, drawn into a reflection of madness as the brutal face of Simu’la Re burst through the jet black sea, staring into my very soul. His face was a hideously deformed caricature of my own, a despicable double with a sniveling smile on festered lips.

It’s not me. I know that for sure. It can’t be me.

“I…I can’t stand this!”

Without warning a bright silver flame sparked from the ends of my armored fingertips and the tattoos on my body glowed in response to the spark. The fire didn’t burn me; it enclosed around my hand, an emblazoned outline of rich, warm light. I held my hand before the glass which reflected my blazing physical effigy in a blurry haze, mesmerizing and powerful. Simu’la Re smiled, his lips an open cut teeming with maggots and blood. I made my hand into a fiery fist and plunged it deep into the black glass. Silver fire consumed the Sigil of Truth and Simu’la Re’s face melted into a pane of despair. Ripples of light shot out from the blast, cracking the doorway and shattering the carved angel wings.

The length of glass lit up like the face of a skyscraper at night, powering on in a roar of illumination. The Citadel moaned answering my call from a long forgotten slumber. I could feel it awakening under my fingertips, welcoming me. I could hear life emerging beyond the glass, roused by the energies flowing through fractured black mirrors.

I twisted my arm in the doorway like a key, causing the black mirror to rupture, silver flames reacting and waving out in a cataclysmic overload. My hand fixed to the glass as if it were going to open a portal and suck me through, a magnetic pull siphoning at the ends of my fingers. The black glass funneled inwards momentarily before boomeranging back towards me shattering the pane of my obscured reflections into thousand of glittering slivers.

The shockwave of glass rocked me off my feet and I toppled to the ground at Cloak’s airy feet. His purple aura was strong again, his power emanating in waves of joy and praise.

“Do you know though perverse under the laws of the Devourer, Lamia’s ways held one vital truth?” Cloak whispered into my ear, his invisible lips kissing the side of my face, his hand twisting under my arm to lift me up. “Suffering is the Harbinger of Resurrection.”

When I stood, he withdrew with a windy swoosh and I stood face to face with a dark, stygian gulf. Black glass rained down inside the opening, and Cloak stepped forward examining the opening with a nervous musing. The closest thing he might have ever come to laughing. The mechanical frenzy deep below the earth erupted with a furious howl.

“Even now you must realize there is no way back. Those roads have dispersed and you have new realms to venture. Descend, Canaan Quintanilla…Descend and embrace Their blessings…The Divine Devourer Demands It…”

I knelt down and gathered several shards of black glass into my hands. A piece of one was a half moon split from the magician’s eyeglass. I clutched it in my human fist until it bit into my palm and my regenerating flesh grew back over it.

“From the moment I woke up in this nightmare I’ve been told who I am and what I’m meant to do. No one asked me. No one gave me the opportunity to remember the past they say I should, or give me enough time to accept it with my whole heart and an open mind. But I’m here now, Cloak. I took the Threads on my own and I stand here looking at my reflection seeing the powerful being I’ve become and I know with all my heart I can become even more. But you can’t make these decisions for me anymore. It is my choice now whether to walk through the door, hesitate or runaway. Be my guardian. Tell me who I was, but let it be my choice. Let me be who I am.”

He stared at me, the lightning in his eyes narrowed into a single pulsation. He turned preparing to enter the cracked doorway, the air singing beyond; sirens aloft their rocky thrones.

“Whenever you are ready, young Architect. I’ll await you on the other side. Make your journey well…”

He said nothing more and I watched him walk downward into the gloom, into the steep depths of the tower.

He disappeared, leaving me alone with Ember and Rhada Khar.

The winds swirled dust and bits of glass into my eyes, compelling me to the opening. The Citadel called, and though I hesitated, I knew I would have to crawl forward.

But why do I have to?

“It is such a burden you bear, but what are we without conflict.” Rhada Khar said stepping through the entrance, his senses alive with new scents permeating through the doorway. “The beautiful thing about destruction, you can always rebuild.”

When he had passed into the darkness, I looked back over my shoulder, but The Broken City seemed so far away.

“Lower…Lower…Lower still,” Ember said tucking an Oneiroion bloom into the palm of my hand. She danced, her glass moths shimmering and white, swallowed in the darkness.

It isn’t real. No matter what happens…

It isn’t real.

I took a step just inside the doorway, letting the dark nuzzle at my form. I could see a glass staircase unfolding under my feet. I clutched the outside of the portal, wanting to turn back, but there’s nothing to go back for. I took a deep breath, and I surrendered myself to a new door; a new opportunity…

Is this a beginning or an ending? Not much room left to write, Virgil. Your pages are full, and I’m so tired.

A change is coming and I can never go back.

I do not claim to know what my future holds beyond the doorway. In the real world, the world as I have come to know it, I exist as a mundane teenager, potentially a mental case, but in Nous I am the potential savior of a dying world, the avatar of a creative, benevolent power. Both have their destinies contrary to one another as they might be, but in the end I am still me. I am both Canaan and Baphomet. I am I. Even if I must go it on my own.

The world before me and no idea where to go.

Teresa was right afterall.

I see the split in the road.

I see my face in the mirror.

I feel like giving up.

I feel like I need to scream and pinch myself to wake up only to cry myself to sleep all over again. These dreams won’t last forever, but they aren’t dreams at all anymore. Maybe I am a savior, a hero. Maybe I am a madman.

I don’t know.

Still, I am reborn. I am one. But not yet finished. Not yet complete.

All I do know is that a new day is beginning to dawn outside my window and as the sun crests the clouds I feel a little tense. Maybe there is no other choice for me. No other solace than the sanctum of my Citadel of Fractured Mirrors. My endless, precious void.

I am descending, God help me. It feels like I’m falling. I am descending, grasping for the tyrannous stars. I can’t say with complete certainty I’m going to like how it all ends. But I know, whatever the future holds, it’s the perfect place to start.

End of Volume Two

The Journals of Canaan Quintanilla Will Continue…

CANAAN DESCENDING (PART THREE)

2010-12-22T02:33:00.000-08:00

I sat alone away from the others that night. We could only tell the divide between night and day based on the change in the air. The days were long and stifling with the heat, while night fell with a decrease in temperature, unseasonably cold.

I perched myself on a hill looking off into the distance at the walking dead; what few remained of them. I cleaned the blood off my gauntlet with an old rag Ember had stuffed at the bottom of her basket. I felt remorse at staining the armor, but it did not dull the gleam or power continuously radiating through the metal and glass. I tried to remove it, but I felt my skin pull with it and stopped fearful I’d have to rip the armament completely off my bone.

It was mine and has no intention of leaving me anytime soon.

I have to wonder though why it does not manifest in the other world. The scar Breeze left behind remained visible, but neither the mask nor the gauntlet transported to the otherside. Cloak warned I would be without my powers there, but I could open doorways and as he confessed, would no longer require dreams to come and go.

We journeyed on with Rhada Khar. The Rhylian did not speak much and made Little Ember uneasy. She kept to the opposite side of Cloak a great deal of the time, as I had shown my ugly side once too often. Besides, it was Baphomet she knew and admired, not me. I was just the guy with his face.

I slept very little and woke groggily to find Rhada Khar standing over me, arms crossed, watching me avidly.

“You were watching me?”

“Rhylians need little sleep.”

“Well, don’t. I don’t like it.”

“The others are concerned for you.” Rhada Khar said settling into the sand next to me, uninvited and unarmed.

“They have nothing to be concerned about.”

“You are important. It would ease their minds to know you care to be near them.”

“Did anyone ask you?” I snapped. “Why do you care anyway? Shouldn’t you be trying to kill me?”

He stared forward unflinching, but I knew I insulted him.

“You’re angry with me?”

“To say the least.”

Rhada Khar turned away from me, ashamed. “I do not pretend I am innocent. I did not believe you to be the One. I shame my father for my lack of faith. But if you demand greater punishment, I will not stop you. I will honor your deathblow if you will it.”

I didn’t want to kill him, just as Baphomet didn’t kill him in the Omphalos temple.

“Look, I’m sorry if I wounded your honor or whatever. It’s just it’s all a bit much right now. I’ve been through so much the past few days; I haven’t had much time to think about anything but trying to figure out how any of this happened to me, and why I’m the one who has to fix it. I know you fought with Cloak and Ember, but I am in no rush to trust you. You’re here, that’s great, but don’t think I’ve forgotten that you were an agent of the Lamia.”

“It was not her orders alone I was forced to fulfill.”

“Forced? By who? Baru?”

“The Alchemist is persuasive.”

I understood then. He wasn’t completely under their sway, just another pawn; another puppet dancing to the devil’s fiddle.

“What did he promise you?” I asked sitting up.

“Among my brethren, we call it ma’ii-kaanenh, but you would know this as brother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why? Totemo Khar lives.”

“How can you know that? Baru is a monster and a liar.”

Rhada Khar placed a heavy paw against his chest. “My heart remains whole. If he were beyond this world, I would know.”

The Rhylian warrior rested on the back of his legs and raised his head toward the sky like a wolf. He opened his mouth and produced a long howl that somehow transitioned into a beautiful lament. I had not anticipated such melody to escape the fearsome mouth of this tank of a beast, but the notes filled the haunted air, sending his song and heart across the broken universe.

When he finished, he lowered his head and withdrew the warhammer at his back, laying it in his lap.

“I know you do not trust me, but my hammer is yours should you have need. I do not assume to know what awaits us in the Citadel, should we reach it, but I would not have you venture its halls alone.”

He faced me earnestly, his stern features softening in the harsh light. Though he would never admit it, being a noble and proud creature, I could tell that he too was as lost as me. He needed a rejuvenated reason to fight.

We found the terrain unforgiving as we continued on. Our wandering led us to the farthest reaches of Nous and into the sea itself. Walking the dried up ocean floor was a major undertaking and we were met with various areas that required a great deal of alacrity. Climbing into the valley of an abyssal plain and routing our way up was no easy feat. Fortunately the same skill Baphomet inherited from the Craft was passed down to me. I moved with a clumsy elegance, but managed with claw and foot to ease up and over a series of submarine ridges.

Cloak, who could to some extent fly, did not use his abilities which I found rather odd and instead remained solid and corporeal moving up the sloping landscape like an amateur mountaineer. He looked silly trying to manipulate his limbs, an ancient spider trying to find his way up into his web. Rhada Khar moved as I did with Ember secured to his back.

I became apprehensive as we climbed the hill. Strange figures rose on the horizon, indiscernible at our distance, but wide, mountainous shapes rising toward the sky. Edging closer to the top of the hill we found ourselves overlooking a grim display.

Far ahead the husks of massive vessels sat sun scorched in the desert like skeletons in an elephant graveyard. Some were pitched on the ends of their hulls, or overturned like whales belly up. I pictured their crews trapped inside, long dead of course, but still waiting to be salvaged from their unfortunate tombs and properly buried. A disturbing thought, that anyone would want to be buried in such a perilous place Nous had so obviously become.

“The Armada of Kasteel,” Cloak said standing at the peak of the hill, his hood cutting low across his mask. “They were the ocean guardians of the Citadel. These mighty vessels mounted a defensive wall to bar the Trespasser’s path, only to find the waters that had been their livelihood were now their enemy.”

“So much death, Cloak. How can I redeem so many souls?”

“The brave require no redemption,” the Rhylian spoke appearing over my shoulder. “They seek only remembrance.”

A valiant sentiment, but gravity continued pushing down on my shoulders.

“Come on,” Cloak said, exasperated. I could feel the heat of his breath rasp on the back of my neck. “We make camp and rest ourselves.”

***

The winds were cold and shrill, a stormy sea breeze sweeping in finding no tide to roll along. Ember sat tediously trying to start a fire to keep us warm. She held the Spark Wood in both hands speaking to the dormant spirit of fire, but with each spark the wild wind descended to snuff it out.

She must have felt my eyes watching her because she looked up, her hair slashing across her mask. “You could speak to the fire too, you know?” She said tossing the block of wood into my hands.

I held the Spark Wood and studied its mystical engravings. “I’m not sure I know what to do.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I showed you before Baphomet, don’t you…?”

She cut herself off and clamped a hand over her painted mouth.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

She shivered and I could hear a light sob pass through her lips behind the mask.

“It’s okay,” I told her pulling her close. “I miss him too.”

“But you are him. I know that.”

“No worries, little one. I’m still getting used to it all myself. Now come on, show me how this works. Again.”

I concentrated on the piece of wood in my hands, speaking to the air, asking the fire to come into me. I drew in steady breaths, releasing them slowly.

“Good, very good,” Ember observed. “Just like that. Don’t be afraid. Fire keeps us warm, cooks our food. Gives us light in the darkness.”

I focused on the words warm and light. They became heat and blaze and I could feel a tingling in my fingers and in the air around me. I could feel the air gathering, the velocity of its gales sensual and effervescent. The wood in my hand crackled and flickered, humming in the net of my fingers. It gravitated towards me, currents of energy flocking to me and I was no longer speaking to the latent flame, but to elements far and wide. The earth responded with a low grumble and the air with a delicious sigh, and even the sweat tearing from my pores under strain and warmth ran across my skin like raindrops pelting down.

“You’re doing it!” I heard Ember exclaim.

I held fast to my concentration, but her excitement began to mingle with my own as I realized I was in fact gathering heat into the palm of my hand and focusing it through the piece of Spark Wood.

But then her small voice became raised with concern. “Wait, what are you doing?”

The world heaved under our feet, the skies rolling with whip cracks of thunder. I couldn’t open my eyes. The pull toward the elements was too strong. I was gathering the air and the water from my own body and the earth, pulling these forces into a single cohesive element.

“Canaan, can you hear me,” Cloak interjected. “You must relax, you’re trying too hard.”

He was barely audible; my ears a noisy wind tunnel growing louder and louder. The Spark Wood floundered in my hand and I felt my body rising off the ground, levitating in mid air, encased in a whirlwind of sand and debris. I could hear them calling out to me, trying to rein me back down to earth, but the wind and the fury of primal forces swept through me, communicating through my cells and blood. A confusing, but intriguing conversation I was unable to interrupt.

The interior of my mind began to glow, brilliant light expanding from a single point of origin, like a single star in a jet black sky plummeting toward the earth. The force blossomed out like a boulder rolling down a hill and smacked right into me thrusting me off my invisible axis and shoved me against the ground with the burst of celestial fireworks.

I felt the Spark Wood pop out of my hands and opened my eyes in time to see if fly up into the air and burst into flame. And as I came down hard against the surface, I watched as the white moths flittering nervously around Little Ember burst one by one like incendiary shells and fell to the ground.

“Hey!” Ember cried. “What’d you go and do that for?”

I sat up raggedly and groggy, shaking the sand out of my hair. I looked around finding Cloak and Ember huddled over the remains of her moths and

“What a thing to do!” Ember yelled hammering her tiny fists into my stomach. “You didn’t even ask them.”

“Em, I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t know what I was doing. I got carried away.”

“An understatement,” Cloak cut in, bemused. “Perhaps you should keep practicing with your glass animals. Hone your focus before you accidentally crack open the world.”

“Hey now, that’s not funny. Beginner’s…”

I stopped mid sentence realizing that Ember’s face was melting. Colors were running down over the cheeks, washing away at the corner of her mouth. Not the paint itself, but the dirt and dust collected over the past several days. Something began pelting me on the top of my head. Tiny pebbles coming down faster and faster. I opened the palm of my armored hand and stared tearfully at the reflection of the sky in the polished surface.

It was raining!

Cool, cleansing rain spilling out of the tortured skies. It came down heavy and strong, and Ember forgetting all about her dead moths began to dance in the downpour, laughing and washing her dirty little arms in the natural showers. The sun and the moon remained in flux and the sky its blistered purple, but there was rain once again in the wasteland and though I did not know how I produced such a miracle, it was good.

We took shelter in one of the overturned boats. It lay on its side and was bowled like the inside of a turtle shell. I continued to practice my newfound abilities, first replenishing Ember’s basket with fresh Oneiroion flowers. It was simple enough and with the rain coming down, they required very little of my blood. It was all very Last Supper with my blood giving nourishment, and though I was unsure if I could turn a stone into a loaf of bread, the flowers were sufficient for now.

To make amends with Ember, I gathered the moth corpses and compacted them into a glass orb like insects frozen in amber. I then began the arduous process of reshaping the wings and their tiny limbs cast in glass. I offered them to her, but she didn’t seem amused by the gesture.

“They are gone, never to shine again.”

She rolled over on her end of the boat and went to sleep listening to the melody of the rain. Rhada Khar stayed outside. He removed his chest piece and sat out on the ground like a watchdog, his silvery blue fur soaked into a deep purple.

“Don’t worry about the girl, Canaan,” Cloak said sitting down next to me. “Every living being must learn folly, or face a lifetime of ignorance.”

“I really thought I had it. I could picture it all in my mind and the fire was there, but I got distracted somehow.”

“It’ll happen. But to be fair you did make fire. The rain however was unforseeable.”

“I have a lot to learn, don’t I?”

He nodded. “But you have the yearning, so it will come.”

“Patience, right?”

Though I couldn’t see, I knew he was smiling.

“Look at it this way, my young master. If the rain doesn’t stop soon, you might’ve made yourself an ocean.”

When the others, including Rhada Khar who found a sleepy serenity at last, were fast asleep, I continued playing with the glass moths. I dedicated long hours to uncover how to make them live again. I tried and failed to use my blood to revive them, but it did not have the same effect as it had on the land.

Frustrated, I picked one of the figures up and balled it into my fist. I reined back my arm like a pitcher about to launch a fast one, and gritted through my teeth, “Why won’t you live!”

I released the glass figurine into the air and it flew through the continuous downpour vanishing out of sight.

I hunkered down into the belly of the ship and sighed. “I guess you can’t have it all, you big dummy.”

Just then I saw a light zip through the air in front of the ship. At first I mistook it for a flash of lightning, but then it zipped back again and then stopped and hovered in front of me.

It was ablaze with radiance, but it didn’t simply shine, it was made entirely of light.

The sound of its wings made sweet music and flittered and danced happily in and around the droplets of rain, the light catching giving the impression of diamonds falling.

Sometimes, just for a moment you can find beauty in the most unlikely of places.

When Ember awoke the next morning, she found a halo of her beloved moths singing and dancing like pixies over her head.

Her shifting eyes had never shone so blue.

When I learn the secret of the Threads, I’ll be sure to paint the sky that shade, just for her.

I prayed through the night that the rain as Cloak had jested would make an ocean, but there were only puddles. It was a start at least, but would carry us no faster toward our destination. The long journey resumed and we were on our way.

***

The trudge through the rain proved a hindrance as time wore on. Had I busted a water main in Heaven or what? It cooled the wasteland heat and gave us clean water to gather, but in the end it hindered us, with every mile taking longer than the last to traverse. Over time I realized Cloak was not himself. I could see that the journey was wearing on him as much as any of us. His powerful aura was different. The threads of energy that outlined him remained flowing constantly, virile as ever, but his demeanor to carry it lacked the luster I had known. When I confronted him, he tried to derail the conversation, telling me to concern myself with the journey ahead, not his state of being.

“There’s something you’re not telling me. You were gone such a long time and then you come back going all Gandalf on everyone in the temple, but now you’re I don’t know. You look tired.”

“My ailment is none of your concern.”

“Aha! So you admit you’ve got an ailment.”

“Insolent boy, go entertain the child, leave me be.”

I persisted much to his chagrin.

“I just need to know that you’re going to be beside me in this, Cloak and not run off again. I still need you. Even if I say I don’t. I do.”

“I know, young Architect. It was for that very reason I did what I had to do to ensure we stand a chance inside the Citadel.”

“What Cloak? Tell me. What happened to you?”

Cloak rose up and drifted out onto the earth. He threw back his hood which receded from over his head in a haze of black vapor. A mane of jet black curls draped down over his shoulders and back. He turned to face me and as the curls fell around his masked features his eyes flashed two brilliant orbs of blue lightning.

“Do you doubt my power,” asked Cloak, his voice of many rising from somewhere deep and unknown, filling the wasteland with its gigantic immensity.

“No,” I replied, my heart leaping into my throat.

He could be quite terrifying when he wanted to be, his shadow long and spreading like the wings of a great bat. His aura emitted a low drone, like the whir of a wind turbine.

“Then leave it be, and get some rest. We are so close.”

I swallowed my heart back into my chest and stood in front of him. “I can rest later. I want to talk about this now.”

He heightened the intensity of his glare at my persistence.

“The bargain is done. We should not dwell on what has past.”

“What do you mean? What bargain?”

He wouldn’t answer me.

“Cloak?”

Silence.

His evasiveness began to frustrate me. I could feel my fingers curling, my muscles tensing. A stiff breeze raced through my hair. The world shrank around me, closing in around Cloak and Cloak alone.

“You ask me to trust you, but how can I when you conceal so much from me. You once told Baphomet you had so much to tell him, well tell me.”

He twisted his body and began to walk away from me. Fire burned in my belly at his indignation.

And then it began to spread.

“I demand to know!”

A flash of light lashed out of my mouth and smashed into his corporeal form like a sledgehammer and sent the living shadow flying a few feet into the sand. He landed with an audible boom and I stood back agog at what I’d done.

I couldn’t believe it. It took Lamia every ounce of her power to duel with the indomitable Cloak and all it took me was a roar. I charged over to where he landed afraid I’d just killed my dark guardian.

Cloak was on his feet in an instant, but the light raced over his form in fluctuating belts conforming to restrain him in place. He shook frantic and wavered like ink in a vase of water before reassembling himself into a solidified and elegant shape. Eventually the bands of light dwindled like shrinking starlight and he took a moment to regain his composure.

“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, young one?”

“I’m serious Cloak. We’re more than equals now, remember? You have to level with me.”

He took a moment and readjusted his mask, drawing his hood back into place, dark smoke rings clouding over and concealing his lustrous curls.

“Power, Canaan. I bargained for power, an immeasurable reservoir of power and knowledge done to assist you and to ensure our inevitable journey to the Summit of Pleromabraxas is successful. But a sacrifice was demanded and I offered myself, my immortality. So yes, we are more or less on level ground my young master. We are both powerful beings, but alas mortal.”

I understood now. His exhaustion, his weakened aura, it was mortal limitation on one who had known none before.

“I retain all my gifts, but they are costly and require more meditation to replenish them. It is not easy for me to show weakness. We were not…You did not create my kind to fall, and we have fallen many, many times. I’ve done all of these things against my better judgment; my dealings with Baphomet, my sacrifice, all in servitude for your journey. I am forever and always a Theurgian and your faithful guardian.”

“But mortal? Why, why would you do such a thing to yourself?

“My oath; my vow, Architect.” Cloak said placing both hands on either shoulder. His lightning blue eyes peered into me and for a moment I thought he might wrap me in a fatherly embrace. “I am with you until the end of one or both of us.”

CANAAN DESCENDING (PART TWO)

2010-12-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

How long we walked the next several days I do not know. It could have been an entire continent. At one point, I remember turning to look behind me to see the city, but there was nothing beyond but the distorted ridge of the horizon, the city swallowed in heavy clouds of dust behind us. Time moved differently than in the world I knew, but I could feel the wearing on my limbs. We rested only when necessary, and when I tried to speak to either of my companions they remained resolute in their silence. The unknowable comings and goings of the hours, the disguised nights, the days didn’t bother them. We simply kept walking. Walking along the longest tract of desert road occasionally passing skeletal remains lining the sand like highway signs. At times it felt we were moving steadily downwards, and I was sure the dunes would fracture off into the edge of the world, but then we’d slope upwards and over a steep hill and the road heading into forever grew ever longer, every step one more on a path of crossroads.

The caravan of Revenants pursued us like a monstrous Trail of Tears. Without their priestess or their savior, the dead things had lost their way. One by one in the days that followed they succumbed to the desert, sinking into the sand, living dead monuments collecting on the wayside like garbage.

They were not the only stragglers on the road to nowhere. The cunning Rhylian, Rhada Khar was seen some yards back keeping close, but far enough to avoid conflict. We set up camp thinking he might join us, but he would only pause in his pursuit to do the same, resting and meditating.

“This desert, it was once a sea wasn’t it?” I said standing in front of Ember’s magical fire, warming my hands. It burned softly from the focus of her Spark Wood.

“An eternity ago, yes,” she replied splitting an Oneiroion flower in half; one part for me and the other for herself. She thrust a sliver into her mouth and chewed. “Silver waves lapping at the Citadel’s shores.”

“I remember,” I said stopping and walked a path in a semicircle. “I can’t explain it.”

As far as my eyes could see the desert expanded, but behind my eyes the dunes ruptured like stomped ant hills, silver water pooling forth, quenching the wasteland’s parched landscape.

I knelt down and enclosed my armored fingers around a handful of sand. I let the grains pass through my finger and observed the swift hourglass effect funneling down to rejoin the mass.

“In a single grain of sand,” I said recalling the glass boy. “An island. In a piece of silver the light of the moon. In an Architect’s hands the vision of the world.”

Ember and Cloak watched as I plucked a single grain from the limitless spread and held it between my gilded fingers.

“I should know what to do, shouldn’t I? I should be able to take this grain and drown us in water. What does it mean that I have no idea how to begin?”

“You will remember, won’t he?” Ember asked Cloak, tugging at his coat. His aura fluttered warmly.

“In time, I imagine. Don’t force it. You’ve been through a great deal, it’s likely-“

He didn’t finish.

My fist slamming into the sand robbed him of his thought.

Both he and Ember stood entranced as the impact of my fist turned my target into a cracked plate of glass, the sand kicked up in a frozen uproar of crystal. It was as though a bolt of lightning had shot out from the sky and blasted the sand into a marvelous and natural work of art.

I stood up and flexed my hand, flecks of dust and grounded glass running over the gauntlet.

“Okay,” I said prideful like a child learning to tie his own shoes for the first time. “That was something.”

Ember clapped her hands together, eyes beaming and all teeth. Her white moths danced around my head.

“Not exactly what I was hoping for.”

“And what did you expect?” asked Cloak.

“An ocean.”

“In time,” he mused. “Simple things I suggest until you better understand the nature of your gifts.”

After we had made camp for the night, I sat with Ember and crafted glass animals from the bounty of sand surrounding us. It seemed second nature to me as though it were little more than clay of Play-Doh. The magic simply rolled off my fingers turning my imagination into the shape and formation I willed it into. Seemed a waste of power, but Ember enjoyed the birds I carved from a solid ball of compacted sand. I could take a handful and crush it into crystal rain drops or draw the crystalline outline of her face in the sand.

By morning I had littered the ground with a full night’s worth of tiny glass animals and buildings. I was consumed by the act, but at no point during the evening was I able to give any of the creations life as I had seen the glass boy do. The knowledge of that gift eluded me, a lesson I hadn’t learnt myself or had yet to unlock.

Cloak assured me I’d learn how to use my powers, but I needed patience. I had achieved the title and powers given by the binding with the Threads, and yet I remain a student and not a master over them. The Collective could have told me that.

***

The wasteland proved to be an inhospitable place as the days rolled on. The ruins of war and the remains of the civilization existing before its fall lay rotting on all sides. It looked like the fake towns they build in the 1950s to examine the effects of radiation after nuclear war. The devastation grew toward the shoreline and stretched beyond into what was once a silver ocean. The waters had long dried up leaving a corroded, pimpled terrain of scorched coral networks and animal remains.

Lying among the ruins and bones of large aquatic beasts we came across a dumping ground with over a dozen or more of the soulless doppelgangers Baru and Lamia had created to forge their god, abandoned and left to rot in the desert. My stomach turned and my head ached from the sight of them confined to their wretched existence and left unburied, possibly in hopes that the unforgiving heat would reduce them to ashes. They flopped about in the sand like fish out of water; mindless fiends moaning under the contorted sun.

“Come away Canaan,” Cloak urged. “Let them be.”

I stared at the unfortunate creatures, volatile with pity and disgust battling for domination over the other.

“They look just like him…like me.”

“But they aren’t you. They never were, only shells.”

I couldn’t look at him. It was vile of him to call them shells, when he had manipulated their unnatural creation and housed Baphomet into one of them. But in the end, were any of us innocent in the mishandling of my soul?

I had to forgive Cloak. He did what he had to do. I understand that.

But it was not only the soul that had been distorted, but my very image. These effigies, crude and duplicitous were the lingering reminder of how easy it would be to replace me. And given the opportunity, I have to wonder if one among them would be a better version of me than I’ve been.

One of the seething doppelgangers crawled along the sand cupping its hand around my foot. I went to kick it away, but it opened its eyes and gazed up at me. It had my eyes and though it was unable to form words, I understood its pain. It begged for deliverance and release from its own self ignorance and emotional captivity.

“No,” I said backing away from it. “I…I can’t.”

“Canaan?” Ember said drawing close.

“Stay back, Ember. Don’t go near it.”

The mirror image reached out, stretching its wiry limbs, dragging its putrid frame across the hot, rough surface, relentless in its aim to be destroyed.

“Please,” I begged. “Don’t make me do this.”

Soon the others mimicked the demeanor of the one at my feet and one by one approached me, slow, silly things spilling over each other like pale slugs.

Cloak and Ember remained silent, both waiting in anticipation to see what I might do.

I saw myself in their eyes, pathetic reflections of myself abandoned and abused. I knew their pain and so it was in that knowledge that I succumbed to my own desperation and set upon the poor creatures dismantling them one at a time until they whimpered no more. Cloak didn’t dare try to stop me. And Ember she averted her eyes as I made a mess of their horrid shapes. I tore them apart like a lion taking down a wildebeest. It was the only mercy I could provide them. It was the only thing I could do to make them stop crying.

I pummeled their bodies into the ground, turning flesh to glass and bone to dust. My strength was enhanced and my hatred an overheated engine wailing into my mirror images as though I were breaking numerous mirrors with my bare hands. I wanted them dead. I wanted them gone. I couldn’t stand the look of my own face anymore.

The Revenants longed for death as part of the Lamia’s sick and twisted indoctrination, but my grim doubles only craved mercy.

I cannot say with a whole heart that it was mercy I delivered to them.

It seemed impossible to erase myself. So I found catharsis in their bloodstains and silence.

A hand reached out behind me and pressed against my shoulder.

“It is enough,” a husky voice said. “Toil no more.”

I looked up to see a great shadow standing over me.

“Got tired of skulking off behind us?” I breathed snidely.

Rhada Khar pulled me back onto my feet, his massive arms enfolding my chest. I felt myself reclining against him, his armored chest supportive and strong. The beastly warrior held me firmly in his protective embrace until my body relaxed enough for him to be sure I’d not endanger the others or myself.

I stepped away from him and looked at the blood coating my hands, thoroughly staining my gauntlet. I lowered my eyes then and gaped at the massacre at my feet.

“Is this it? Is this the last of them?” I gasped, catching my breath.

Cloak moved next to me and shook his masked head. He didn’t know, not completely. But I was sure. I felt it in my gut.

“The desert has a lot of shadows,” I said watching the clouds drift overhead in the methane and magic poisoned sky. “But mine is my own again. I intend on keeping it that way.”

CANAAN DESCENDING (PART ONE)

2010-12-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

I woke up on the otherside of the mirror, inside a tent on a bed of desert sand. I opened my eyes to the distorted sky, the warmth of a fire outside stealing inside to chase the cold wasteland winds away. I placed a hand to my head and realized that the gauntlet remained on my left hand, an impressive armament of metal and glass. The keys dangled from their rings, each pristine and intricate in their design. I wonder what wonderful doors they open.

I touched my face to find that the mask was also set upon my head, molded so that it felt stitched into my flesh. There were raised surfaces in the construction of its features, some sharp, others smooth and delicate. I could only imagine what new and intriguing Beast I’d become. I was naked, and the tattoos given to me by the Collective remained, dark lines of runic threading marking my white marble skin. All that was missing was the Collective’s light. I could feel power radiating inside of me, but the sliver of the Collective’s omnipotent power they’d imparted to me to destroy the Omphalos was now gone, and I knew that the memory of that power was diminished as themselves.

But there was a light in me now and though it might not shine as brightly as the godly triad, I was a power unto myself. But oh to feel that love again!

I sat up adjusting to myself and this new, interesting means of travel.

Would there be more dreams? Or was this now my life now, traversing realms back and forth?

It is new and exciting, but all the more terrifying, producing only more questions when what I need are answers and understanding.

Folded on the ground beside me sat an old duster. On top of its cushion was Baphomet’s necklace, a single piece of circular glass. I reached out and instantly brought both items to my chest. The old cowboy’s scent still clung to the leather. It was patched hastily in various places, especially the back and shoulders with mismatched threads, but Fawkes’ coat was a sight for sore eyes. I slipped the necklace on first, letting it rest just above my new scar. I placed my arms into the coat next and realized someone had fashioned a hood to it. The left cuff was cut away so that my armament could express itself with little restriction. I enclosed myself in its warmth and security and drew the hood over my masked face.

I stepped outside the tent and found Cloak waiting for me. He sat behind a small campfire alone and silent.

Little Ember was fast asleep, snuggled in deep beneath heavy blankets. Her staff bit into the earth and there she hung her basket. I could see into the basket that she had among several flowers, cloth and a threading needle. I bent down and kissed her porcelain cheek.

“Thanks for the repairs, little one,” I whispered into her small, seashell ears.

I was pleased to see them both, thankful they were alive, but one was missing.

“Eos? Where’s Eos?”

Cloak did not speak, but continued to stare into the heart of the fire. His palpable aura seemed weaker somehow, fainter than it had been during the confrontation in the Omphalos.

“Cloak?” I approached gingerly. “Are you alright?”

He shifted where he sat and realigned his patchwork mask. In the firelight it appeared as though each patch of color were aglow. He seemed unnaturally human.

“Her wounds were too great,” he managed finally. “Her faculties were unable to support her broken form.”

No, I thought to myself. This was all wrong. I saved her.

“I…I’m sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say. She was the second casualty on this journey, the first Baphomet. The guilt chewed at my heart.

“Was she…I mean…Did she…Was there much pain?”

He shook his shrouded head. “She went quietly, unable to say much really in the end. Ember soothed her as much as she could with Baphomet’s flowers. They eased her suffering greatly.”

I looked back toward Ember’s basket. The Oneiroion blooms were all but gone, harvested in hopes to mend the broken Oracle back to health. The remains wafted the air from a small pot hanging over the fire. It was sweet, like honey-suckle and chamomile tea.

“I wish I could have been here. I should have been. I could have helped her.”

“Life and death are only states of being. They do not define who we are, for it is what we did with the time we are given that matters. Eos knew this and she had lived her life, following through on her own fate until the end.”

His sullen disposition was suspect. I knew his connection to the Oracle had to be deeper than he let on.

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

He looked up, head cocked to one side, stunned by the question.

“It was another life, in another world, my young Architect. We were fated never to be, decreed by our stations, but I have defied that barrier one final time,” he said pointing to his chest. “She is with me, always.”

I understood his meaning all too well. He had taken her into himself, into the sanctuary of his void. And though he wore the trappings of the shadows, I knew he had a special light burning bright for her.

“It is good that you’ve returned,” Cloak said shifting the subject and returned his gaze to the fire. “I had hoped you’d discover the way.”

“Cloak, if you need to talk, I’m here.”

“The transmissions…the dreams are over,” he continued, ignoring me. “It is on you now to act. I am only your servant now, not a guide.”

He made a simple gesture for me to sit. I took my place near him to ensure our conversation would not bother the sleeping pair’s comfort.

“What happened in the temple? You obviously were able to get them out.”

“You did that, young one. You saved us and brought the Omphalos down around our enemies.”

I looked at him puzzled in spite of myself. “I…I did?”

Cloak nodded.

“Lamia? Is she…?”

“I do not know for certain. One moment we were there watching the Architect express his power, and the next we were in the wastes, disoriented, but safe.”

“So,” I sighed. “What happens now?”

“We continue our sojourn to the Citadel. That is unless you decide to vanish again.”

“I didn’t expect to. I wanted to stay, to make sure you all made it out alive and clearly you have.”

“Not without a cost.”

“It’s not fair. Lamia stole her power and left her to die. I should have ripped the witch’s heart out and made her eat it.”

“You dispatched her justly in the end. But do not mourn Eos. She was never like you or I. She was made of flesh and bone and taken to the limits of the Lamia’s cruelty, even the strongest could fall.”

“What can I do? There has to be something. This isn’t just a fancy accessory is it?” I asked holding up my gilded left hand.

Cloak shook his head. “You should not concern yourself in this matter. To interfere now would intrude upon her fate’s significance. It is something you must learn, to steel yourself for what awaits you within the Citadel.”

“And what is that?”

He grew silent. In the distance a dismal wail shot out. I rose up like a wolf on alert. I sniffed the air, stale death wandering vagrantly.

“Revenants,” I murmured. “They’re near.”

“Yes. They’ve been following us. A pitiful caravan, what few escaped your wrath.”

“What do they want?”

“Remuneration I imagine. The true power of the land has returned. They are anxious to beseech your mercy.”

“Mercy? I’m not sure I’ve got much left to be honest. Feels like all I want to do is take this power back to the real world and use it on everyone who’s ever hurt me. Vengeance isn’t something a god should be feeling is it?”

“Depends on the god.”

Maybe it was the nearness of the undead on the air, the heady smoke from the fire, or Eos’ death, but my head began to throb.

“Something troubles you?”

“My head is buzzing.”

“Residual transference from the Forge. It should pass soon.”

Flashes of white noise shuddered in my head. My thoughts were broken radio waves picking up shitty signals and radiation burns.

“I’ve just been thinking. My head is flooded with thoughts, memories, and dreams. Both my own and Baphomet’s. I know what he knows. I’ve seen what he sees. It’s very confusing to sort through.”

“They are your memories too, you realize?”

“I know that. I mean I understand. It’s just with everything now in motion I just keep thinking about what it’s all for. And is it worth what you did to him?”

The folds of his rustling robes came to a static halt, and in that ceasing so it seemed the entire world around us came to a complete standstill.

“I did what I had to do to ensure the line would continue.”

“You lied to him. You fed him lies knowing how fragile he was.”

Cloak stood up, a teacher preparing to reprimand a disobedient student.

“You question my methods, my care of the boy when you were so quick to disbelieve he existed?”

“You made him into a monster.” I accused.

I was standing now, confronting him head on.

“I made him into the most elegant and important creature vital to our cause. Without the Craft you could not ascend. Without the Craft there can be no Architect.”

“But you didn’t give him a choice.”

I realized my voice was rising in volume. I heard Ember shuffle beneath her blankets and retook my place by the fire trying to choke back my anger.

“I have been forced to make many difficult choices. I do not expect you to understand my reasons, but I did what I had to because I believe firmly that you are the one to salvage this world.”

“Destiny?”

“Yes.”

“But why? Why did you do this thing to him? After everything I’ve experienced, I think I have a right to know why you manipulated my soul.”

“The Craft was dying. During its journey to the Fringe. Its immortal vestige was diminishing and a portion of your consciousness was astray. I salvaged one of the duplicates and fashioned a vessel to contain the fractured part of you. I gave it life and that life was to serve a much more important purpose in housing the Craft until I could acquire you and bring you to this world to complete the Forge as has been accomplished. I did not foresee that he would physically transform into the likeness of the Craft, but as the weakened Craft is essentially parasitic in nature, though that seems quite a vulgar definition, I have surmised that the form it was contained within was merely too weak to sustain the Craft and therefore was slowly being overtaken.”

“And how does this change what I am?”

“You are the true vessel. You were naturally born to contain its power.”

“But Baphomet…Now he…”

I could see him in my mind disappearing into me. I could relive it, the sensation of it happening over and over again. Our hands and lips pressed into one another in a sort of intimacy and then made as one pair.

“He is you as you are him. You now share dual experiences as one. It is like a book, torn apart, pieces removed. Apart they can be indiscernible, abstract passages, but placed back together the knowledge resumes its intended course.”

“But he had companions. People he cared for. Jasira and Eos…Fawkes.”

“They were your companions too and the feelings that he felt for them, especially Fawkes are now yours. In more ways that even I fathomed. You must stop seeing Baphomet as an individual. He was merely a piece of you and now you are whole. Do not lament the past when you can canonize the future.”

“And if I’m still not ready to face my own death, what then?”

“I cannot know how any of this may end. What I do know is that our fates are our own, and the world is what you create. All is not lost my young Architect. And there is yet so much still to gain. You have the power now, don’t be afraid of it."

“I don’t know what I want yet, Cloak," I said staring through the flames into his cowled face. "I don’t know if I’m ready to give up my other life for this one entirely. I think I have to have both for now. For a little while longer.”

"Traverse these worlds as you will, but know that one day you will have to choose which one you belong to. I cannot make that choice for you. It has always been your own.”

XLVII. MAY 30th - JUNE 1st

2010-12-18T23:44:00.000-08:00

SATURDAY, MAY 30th (HOW MANY MINUTES TILL I DECAY?)

“There’s not much left to love…Too tired today to hate…I feel the empty…I feel the minute of decay…”- Marilyn Manson

THE ARCHITECT OF NOTHING:

I watched the world from inside a mirror

A grand parade in fragmented glass

Beauty sustains, but the blood never lasts

Nothing goes as you plan

Clinging to a star that always

Appears quite close till you stake a claim

If only I could start again

As easily as it all began

I am the architect of my broken machine

SATURDAY, MAY 30th (LATER): (16 YEARS=90 IN A DAY OF THE LIFE…)

“I’m on my way down now…I’d like to take you with me…I’m on my way down now…”- Marilyn Manson

Dear Virgil, not staying long. Realized that my birthday is in 8 days. Think I’ll ask for a new journal. This one’s just about finished. It’s been a good run, Virgil. I’ll resurrect you soon, if I don’t kill myself before I have the inspiration to write. Not much to say. Dante’s collar makes a nice accessory around my wrist. It shouldn’t have been this way. I want to go back, why can’t I go back? Why is it always too late?

I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror this morning, running my hands over the scar on my chest. Such an insignificant wound compared to the last few days. I’m a stranger here. I know that. I don’t know where I’m supposed to belong, but I know it isn’t here. I’ve been dreaming of Baphomet the past several nights and sometimes when I’m just sitting there I feel myself slipping into a different train of thought and I’m visited by memories. So many faces I’ve never met and yet after a moment or two, they become mine, filed away accordingly. It’s not that I don’t mind the company. It’s just hard to keep a quiet mind lately. There are things I need to do, promises needing to be kept, destiny to fulfill, but I have to slow down or I’m going to cave in. I’m going to be seventeen in a little over a week, and I wonder how many more I have left to look forward to.

MONDAY, JUNE 1st (CANAAN DESCENDING)

“Fear not, for no one can take from us our onward way, by such a one it is given to us. But here await me, and comfort thy dejected spirit and feed on good hope, for I will not leave thee in the nether world…”- Dante

Dear Virgil, they say when one door closes another opens. I can testify that this is true. I was up before anyone else this morning. The sun wasn’t roused just yet, still drowsy under a copse of dark clouds, while I myself exceedingly restless. I stepped onto the front porch and walked to the center of the sidewalk. Across the street there’s a gas station sharing a building with the Dollar Store Cassie works at. The streets were quiet, only the buzz of the pink and blue neon Wine and Beer sign buzzing like a bug zapper.

I chose the path to the left of me and went for a long walk. I had no idea where the route would take me. I just knew I had to get out of my head. It’s getting cramped in here, not enough space to stretch my legs, you know.

I came to a cross street and veered to the right around the corner and eventually came to an old church. It was long abandoned and in disrepair, whole walls removed as though someone had considered pulling it down, but then got distracted and left it derelict on its own. I decided then and there that this was now my place. At least until someone came to finish the job. It sat at the end of a quiet block, with a football sized field between it and the nearest house. No one would bother me here, and so with my curious nature intact, I investigated further.

The pulpit was wrecked and the altar smashed. Rows upon rows of pews were overturned and I saw several bibles face down underneath and scattered about. And though it smelled of cat urine from the strays who sauntered along the support railings overhead, it seemed the perfect place for me. Afterall, I had just collapsed my temple in the other world.

I was careful, walking in the half-light, wary of rusty nails and other transients who might have come here to roost. Aside from a bird building a nest in the far west side of the church, and a stray here and there, I was all alone, left to the conflict of my own thoughts. The most constant of these, Home.

I imagined them happy at last. Free. Maybe this was the best thing after all.

How do you miss what never really belonged to you in the first place?

It was not unlike the days when I was small seeking adventure in dangerous places. I loved getting lost in the woods or wandering attics and deep closets. I found a door still intact into its frame leaning against a wall. I cleared a path, shoving furniture and planks of wood out of the way. I gathered the old door and pulled it into the middle of the room and stood it upright. It teetered back as though it might fall backwards, so I quickly gathered several pieces of wood and stone to secure it in place.

The paint was chipped away, dull gray with crude graffiti scrawled all over. I stood back and admired it as the morning sun ignited its first rays through holes in the roof.

What happened next might very well signify the end of my sanity, but then again, I don’t think I had much of one to begin with.

A sharp pain jolted in my chest. I felt my knees buckle and my throat seized up as though I were having an allergic reaction to something. I tried to cry out, but my jaw wouldn’t move. A second spasm echoed in my chest with an electric current and I went down in front of the door. I clutched my chest, the scar underneath my shirt burning. Hot and cold shivers of pain surged under my skin and I thought my chest might explode.

My head swam with fever, the pain excruciating and I could barely keep my eyes open. But in the pain I heard voices, whispers traveling back and forth across the landscape of my mind.

“You open the door, Riftwalker…You remember the words?”

I couldn’t open my mouth to answer. My teeth felt fused into the top and bottom rows.

Even had I known the words the voice suggested, the ruthlessness of the pain would not relent long enough for me to speak them.

“Breath meets air,” the voice spoke through the violence bending me forward. “Blood meets tongue. Bone meets end…”

A flash of light seared my line of sight and I saw myself as Baphomet in the Fringe with an old magician in a tattered tuxedo. I knew him, not on my own, but with the aid of Baphomet’s memories in my possession. Aurelius Fairweather, the traitor among the companions, exercised, reciting ancient words to unlock a door. The magic denied him, the words powerful to one who deserved it.

I forced myself forward and reached out to the doorknob. My fingers stung and my heart raced. It felt like something was cutting into it, splitting it in half. I remembered then the shard of Breeze lodged into my chest and how the mysterious scar manifested upon my skin where one hadn’t been before. It was alive inside of me, reacting somehow, needing me to react in turn. I closed my eyes and pushed up on my heels to stand. I pressed one hand to the door while the other prepared to twist the knob and I opened my mouth, whispering two alien words:

“Patefacio ianua…”

I pushed the door open and the world opened up.

I know now that I am changed forever.

A swirling rift awaited me, contained within the doorframe. I walked around the backside of the doorway and it appeared as a one-sided pane of glass.

This was not a dream. Hallucination perhaps, but no dream.

I expected Cloak to manifest as he had done in the field, but I had opened this portal on my own.

The pain melted away as I approached the door, but my heart thrummed rampantly in my chest. There was a surprising lack of fear however and I did not hesitate as I had before. I wanted to go this time. I wanted the escape of the wasteland and of the mystery of my otherworldly powers. Even if it could only last a short time, I needed to find the light once more and hope it would have me again.

I took a step forward, crossing the threshold and winked out of this reality’s existence, pulling the door closed behind me.

XLVI. MAY 28th - MAY 29th

2010-12-17T00:47:00.000-08:00

THURSDAY, MAY 28th (ROMEO IS BLEEDING SO THE WORMS CAN FEED)

Dear Virgil, I’ve called and left messages for Logan three different times, but still no word. The last time I heard him in the background refusing to take the call, and telling his Mom to hang up on me. I even tried to speak with Lara, but no luck. I never even got to explain to her what had happened. I keep telling myself that soon the past few days will be behind us, and it’ll all work itself out, but now I’m not so sure. I have to believe that our friendship is strong enough to survive my own stupidity. Logan will be my buddy again, and I won’t have to worry about feeling so criminal. It does feel like I’ve been shipped off to prison. Exiled anyway.

Teresa hasn’t called me back either.

I sat for an hour looking at Detective Clemens card. I considered calling him, to beg him to take me away from here. Hell, I even called Uncle Steven and asked him if I could stay with him for a few days, and all he could say was, “Canaan, the only reason I hung out with you was because you were my brother’s stepson. I’m not getting in the middle of anything. Sorry.” I know Fawkes wouldn’t do that to me, but my burden has been propriety for so many, I just can’t bear to bring him into more. Not right now.

It was stupid of me to think that I could shed fifty ugly pounds and feel like a brand new person. I’m just a thinner version of the thing I’ve always been. Doesn’t matter how I grow my hair, how I trim down my waistline or what my dreams create of me, in the end I will always be Canaan Quintanilla.

If only I never had to look at myself in a mirror, or catch a glimpse of myself in a pane of glass, then I wouldn’t have to know just exactly what kind of creature I am. With no reflection, I’m a phantom.

Barely existent, barely important.

Sometimes I think it’d been better I never was born at all. I’m too vulnerable in this flesh. Too exposed. I’m not built like the others that surround me.

Why wasn’t I given that?

Whatever little part it is, the switch in the human machine that allows people to be resilient to the affairs of the outside world. I want that. I yearn for it. Just a taste of what it’d be like to shrug it off in the wind and blow it all away. But I guess we are who we are, for whatever purpose that’s supposed to serve, but it doesn’t seem to sustain the worms in my guts starving for a real destiny.

Maybe there are those born for fame and controversy, and those destined for the grave. Meaty sacks of feed for the earth to sustain itself. That’s what I am, a nesting ground for maggots and cockroaches to lay their eggs and hollow me out with catacombs to build their empires. If such is the case, I wonder if I can request my blood that the embalmer will drain from me, to be poured into the soil I’m buried in. If I am human fertilizer, I can at least water the grave with my own nutrients. I’ll be a kind of Romeo to Mother Earth. Ain’t love grand!

FRIDAY, MAY 29TH (OUT OF MY HANDS AND INTO NOTHING)

Dear Virgil, I spent my last night curled up with Dante. I didn’t sleep a wink. He slept so soundly next to me while I stared up at the ceiling, seeing nothing but space. Darrel’s taking me to a pound in Kernville where we’ll drop him off and he’ll be gone forever. I begged them to let me keep him, but there’s no room. He says it’s better to get it over with now than have to prolong it. After everything’s that’s happened, how can this be happening? I don’t understand anything, Virgil. It’s all out of my hands and falling into the dirt. I keep thinking that if I made some effort that I could go home and then I wouldn’t have to give Dante away. He’s my baby. He’s part of me. I thought about asking Logan to keep him, but he still won’t return my calls. I’m losing everyone that means anything to me, and it hurts so badly. I could take a thousand of THE BASTARD’s fists, but this, this is the hammer that is breaking my heart. I need to go. I don’t have much longer, and I should really spend as much time as I can with my puppy. I can change the fate of a ravaged world and become a messiah in dreams, but in the real world I have nothing to save me. It’s all going to Hell and I can only waste away in the flames. My skin crawls at the thought of how sharply I will remedy this pain.

FRIDAY, MAY 29TH (LATER): (BE A GOOD BOY, DANTE, BE A GOOD BOY…)

“Why does everything seem desperate now?”- Stabbing Westward

Dear Virgil, I’m not feeling very well right now, but I think if I don’t busy myself somehow I will cry until I drown.

Dante’s gone.

I can still smell him on my blanket, that puppy scent of dirt and dried dog food. Jesus, I can’t keep this pen steady…

After I left you to go spend time with him, I took him for a walk around the neighborhood. I thought that if I walked in enough circles I could rewind time, and fix all of this that I’ve allowed to come undone in my guilty hands.

When I arrived back at the house, Darrel was already at the truck. He let me keep Dante up front with us, and Dante was very good, lying across my lap, nervous, but secure that my hands would not betray him. The ride there was silent. Darrel let me control the radio, but there was no sound in my ears. Dead space.

We arrived at this sterile cement block of a building, and after signing some release forms, took Dante around to the back where they keep the kennels. The entire time, Dante was skittish. He sensed something wasn’t right about that place. The other dogs no doubt. This tall gruff man with this thick ZZ Top beard took us to the area where they have the kennels, and that is where Darrel told me I had to say goodbye.

I buried my face in his fur, nuzzling his thick neck, while his tongue licked at me, his wet nose kissing the crook of my arm as I hugged him, telling him how much of a good boy he was. Darrel kept telling me it was time, that I had to let the man take him, but I couldn’t let go. I just kept hugging him, wishing again and again that I could keep him just a little longer.

Where was Cloak when I really needed him? He could take both of us faraway into his shadows, and we’d be safe.

“Canaan, we have to go.” Darrel said, his voice gentle, but urgent.

Go to Hell, I wanted to scream. I wanted so much to pick Dante up into my arms and run, run as fast as I could to escape both of our fates. I could hear the sound of the dogs in the kennels behind those cold swinging doors, their lonely yelps, angry howls like inmates in a prison calling out to the new fish. No place for my sissy little puppy, my blonde furred familiar.

I looked at Darrel, pleading with my eyes, hoping that the good nature within him would sympathize with me, and he’d let me keep him, but that was not fated to happen.

It was like death.

It was like when my great grandfather died. He was such a great man. We used to drink rootbeer and read Richie Rich and Archie comicbooks on Sunday afternoons when we’d visit him in Sweetwater in the summer. He died of throat cancer when I was 11, and I remember walking up to the casket, and I saw this man that had once hugged me, and played with me in his garden and those Sunday afternoon traditions, and there he was cold, shrunken, scarcely the same person I remembered. I never ran so fast in my life, never cried so hard. You just can’t ever run fast enough.

This pain is just as bad because, though Dante is not dead, I don’t know what will happen to him. That’s the worst part. I won’t ever know what becomes of him. Will someone take him in and give him a good home with someone as caring as I was with him? Could they ever love him as much as I love him?

The hardest part was when they told me to remove his collar. The surly man told me that they prefer the owners to take the collars. They have other procedures for cataloguing the dogs in the kennels. Cataloguing them? As though they are library books. I slipped the leather band from around his neck, and he bit at it as if to say “That belongs to me.” I wanted to give it back, but I turned and bit my tongue as I slipped it around my wrist, my armament to shield me from whatever would rise to break me, but I can’t imagine there’s anything left except death. I felt the sick in my stomach awaken and my intestines pinched as I gathered the strength to stand up. It hurt so badly, Virgil. The way he looked at me, those big brown eyes questioning me, asking me silently what was happening, but I couldn’t explain it, I just stood up and watched as the man wrestled a rope leash around Dante’s throat. He fought and yelped and that struck me so deep I was sure I had blacked out. Darrel steadied me, but I was so torn between my love and hate that his tenderness felt as acid.

The man had to literally drag Dante down that cold hallway and through the swinging doors into that corridor beyond where the dogs continued to bark, and Dante barked, and he fought the man, twisting around to look for me, but I wasn’t there, I was down the hallway, feeling my guts rising into my throat, and oceans streaming down my face. Darrel escorted me to the truck, but I couldn’t keep it in anymore. I couldn’t keep it down, and I hunched over beside the truck and wretched my insides onto the driveway. It had all reached a head, and as I puked my guts out, I prayed it was enough to drown out the sound of all those dogs barking, Dante’s own swallowed up in white noise. And it did. And he was gone. And I am alone wondering how I am going to make it on my own without someone or something to keep me company in the dark.

My mind’s in denial of the past few days and it’s hard to make much sense right now. I found one of Dante’s chew toys this evening that he kicked under the bed and I thought I was going to implode. It was staring me in the face, his little squeaky soccer ball. He loved that ball.

I’m such a PITIFUL FAGGOT BITCH!

People die in accidents and are killed by men in black masks and in Africa people are slaughtered by their own, but I’m whining over a dog. A stupid dog that licked at my heels to wake me up in the morning. A worthless dog that needed to snuggle next to me to sleep, to feel safe.

He needed me.

Something actually needed me.

I think that is the loneliest part about knowing he’s gone. He needed me and I needed him. I imagine him in his cage, all sides his barred walls with raving dogs screaming at him, while he shudders in the corner wondering why I punished him. I didn’t mean to, baby. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. God, let me take it all back. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

I don’t want to feel this way.

Losing Dante is my punishment. I know that. Reaping what I’ve sown, mourning what is lost. I’m just waiting for the final cut. Does she know what she’s done to me? Will she wake up tomorrow and the next and the next knowing well what she’s done? And if so, will she ever be able to live with herself knowing that she could have made different choices and saved us both?

Goodnight, Dante…I’m at the bottom of Hell with you, my arms around your neck.

XLV. MAY 26th (THE JOURNAL OF A TEENAGE EXILE)

2010-12-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

TUESDAY, MAY 26TH (THE JOURNAL OF A TEENAGE EXILE)

Dear Virgil, it’s been a few days since my last entry. The unforeseeable has happened and I am now writing to you from a new home. I don’t live in Holland anymore. They threw me out. I’m not sure how much more I can take. It’s all turning to shit in my hands. How did it unravel so quickly?

After I had finished writing the previous entry, I took a nap on the front porch swing. Teresa woke me with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pack Swisher Sweets in the other. I took both. Her dad wasn’t home, and her mom wasn’t coming into town until later this afternoon. We didn’t talk about the night before, but she did ask how my eye was doing. It was fine, puffy, but fine. No less than what I deserved. She went and caught a shower while I sucked it up and decided to call home.

THE BASTARD answered the phone, and I tried to sound as apologetic as possible. I told him that I was sorry for how out of hand everything got, and that I’d be home after awhile. I thought that things would have cooled down, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He laughed into the phone and said:

“We already worked it out. Come get your shit, you don’t live here anymore.”

I didn’t argue with him, couldn’t muster the will to fight. I was so caught off guard he might as well had decapitated me through the receiver. I hung up and ran to the bathroom door, banging for Teresa. She came out wet and in a towel, and I told her what had happened. she rushed to throw on some clothes. While I got my things together, she phoned Logan and told him to wait for us at the house.

I can’t even recall the ride home. I was so strung out from the day before and the dreams…and now this, my mind was racing at a thousand synapses an hour just trying to keep up with my breathing.

When I ran yesterday down to Logan’s, I should have kept running. I should have just kept running.

Logan was waiting on the corner when we arrived. He didn’t say anything to me, but it meant a lot to me that he was there. I didn’t believe any of it was real until I saw all my things lined up along the sidewalk, Cassie and Darrel there helping THE BASTARD to load them into the back of Darrel’s truck. Cassie and Darrel both had these disappointed expressions, while THE BASTARD gleamed like a razor.

It was all there, my CDs, my books, my comics, my posters being scattered across the yard, clothes, everything cluttered into boxes or just strewn wherever it’d lie as if it were a garage sale. It felt like I was attending my own estate sale and I wasn’t even dead yet. He had stacked all of my belongings alongside the walkway without care, hurriedly thrown into boxes, just wanting to get it all out.

Teresa and Logan held me by the arms on either side to keep me steady.

“There’s still more of your shit inside, clear it out.”

Logan and Teresa tried to walk in with me, but I told them to wait for me. When I walked inside the house to my room, it was basically empty, as if they’d spent all night boxing me up. It took some dedication on their part to do this. Am I that bad of a kid? How easy it must have been for my Mother to sell me off to someone else, moving me out as if I’d never been there to begin with. She stood in the doorway leading into the kids’ room, holding my sister in her arms, rocking her, tears streaming down her cherub face.

“I hope you’ll be happy now, Canaan. That’s all I ever really wanted was for you to find some kind of happiness in this world.”

I didn’t believe it when she said it to me. But it broke my heart anyway.

I told her she didn’t mean it, that she was just upset, that we could work it out, but she smiled dourly and shook her head and said, “Go, Canaan, you don’t belong here anymore.”

I don’t belong here.

“Talk to me, don’t do this. I’m right here, Mama, right here. Why can’t you see me?” I was shattering into a million pieces right in front of her, but she wouldn’t look at me, not directly.

“I can’t give you what you want, Canaan. It’s all gone too far this time, and I can’t deal with it anymore.”

“Then come with me, let’s leave here. Let’s start over far away from him.” It was a ridiculous notion, but it was my final chance to appeal to her.

I told her it was THE BASTARD. He was doing this to us. He was taking her further and further away from me, but she wouldn’t hear it.

“It’ll never end. You’ll let him do it to them as he’s done to me!”

The sting of her palm, thorny and numbing.

I grabbed her then, making her drop Heaven Lee who went sprawling to the floor crying. I clamped my hands around her frail arms, I could feel the bones under my fingers, never even thinking at the time that this was how he shook her, how my own father had shook her countless times in countless fights and now there I was doing it to her, pushing my hands into her face, breathing napalm.

“HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?”

I roared. Half fury, half in tears. Tears burning so hot in my eyes they could have been radioactive.

Fending me off, she looked into my face and uttered five words, “You don’t belong here anymore.”

Her words were a spell and my arms dropped to my side releasing her. I backed away feeling the air compress in my lungs.

“Mommy?”

THE BASTARD tried to come after me, hearing the ruckus, but Darrel and Logan beat him to the punch, pulling me off my Mother, my body convulsing so manically I thought I was going into a seizure. I could have killed her. I could have crushed the life right out of her. They pushed me out into the yard and Mother shrank behind the front door bawling, and closed the door behind her. I didn’t see her again after that. Logan and Teresa tried in vain to keep me sane, but the world was spinning off its axis and slamming into my face. I couldn’t cry though. As much as it hurt I couldn’t cry.

I watched as my things filled the cab of the truck, and my heart sank at the realization that I wouldn’t be coming back home. There would be no home to return to. They won’t change their minds. There’s no going back. This was the final solution they could prescribe to remedy my existence.

THE BASTARD brought Dante around and chucked him at my feet as we were preparing to leave. I gathered my dog into my arms and buried my face into his coat.

“Take that mutt with you. Leave it here I’ll make a coat out of the shithead.”

How had it come to this, Virgil?

What did I do to deserve this?

The dreams, were they a warning?

I thought I was going to shape the things to come in a way that would make everyone happy, including myself, but if that is so, then why do I feel betrayed?

I sat there on the curb with Dante, unable to process anything. I blacked out even though I was conscious of everything around me. The trees rustled. Crickets chirped and elsewhere down the road children played. I remember them laughing. I remember the smell of Darrel’s old clunker of a truck, the exhaust ballooning black puffs of smoke. I even remember catching the sight of the evening sun setting, a swollen orange ball sinking against purple canvas. Everything communicated in ways that were more brilliant and connected than I could ever be sitting there like Thursday morning’s garbage pick-up.

It happened so fast. One minute I was hugging Teresa and Logan, crying into their shoulders and the next we were on the road. Our eyes said as much as we could muster and yet it all felt left unfinished, everything happening so fast none of us could figure it out. As we drove away, I looked back at that puke green house, and I didn’t cry exactly, but I felt pain. I’m gutted out in their abandonment.

This isn’t fair! This isn’t what I wanted. I just wanted her to love me. Why doesn’t she love me? How can she choose a man who hurts her? What did I do that was so wrong? I just want to break things. I want to cut myself. I want to cry, but I can’t. The tears won’t come out. I want to go home. I can’t make peace with this. None of its real. None of it. How can it be? It’s all one bad dream, my whole life. In two days it’s all come tumbling down on my head. If only you had arms to hold me. Maybe then none of this would hurt so much.

KATABASIS (PART EIGHT)

2010-12-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

VIII. THREADBEARER

I drifted in a white ocean of fire, rising towards the surface.

Baphomet waded beside me, our arms locked around our shoulders as we swam to reach the other side of the world. We were like two children in the summertime losing ourselves in the cool water, hands outstretched towards the sun.

We held fast to one another, yin and yang, entwined as though we had never been separated by the Rites of Severance or any other mystical divide.

We were together at last. Not complete, but body and soul.

We were no longer in the Temple, but rising through frothy waves, drifting up through the surface of a white marble pool. Baphomet offered me his hand, emerging first, bathed in light, his wings heavy in the wet and radiance. The black and silver feathers the only splash of color in an otherwise void of light.

My wounds were gone, my neck on the mend.

I marveled at the water dripping off the gauntlet still encasing my left hand like pieces of glass.

Hard to believe this was the sacred relic of a demigod.

It was rusted and dented, old armor you’d find in a museum. The keys hanging from its underside were weathered and grainy.

I touched my face. The mask remained. I lifted it over my head and turned it over in my hands. It was plain, an ordinary mask, only made completely out of glass; dusty and cracked around the cheeks, almost as though someone had been chipping away at it. They were little more than thrift store trinkets stitched together trying to pass off as something unique or legendary, when they were the complete opposite.

And yet, even there in the room made of light, they were enveloped in incandescence, the outlines of their insignificance hinting at something wonderful, just aching to be known.

We had so much in common.

Baphomet splashed me with water shaking out his wings and hair, combing the long tresses back over his ears.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a coil of gold sprout up from the infinity expanding all around.

“Where are we?” I asked bewitched as the room literally built itself around us.

Gold and silver filigree snaked up from the sparkling recesses of the room building spatial and architectural elements of intricate moldings, partitioning walls, archways and columns and a flourishing high vaulted ceiling. A soaring menagerie of origami creatures decorated with rich enamels and precious stones sprang to life, constantly reshaping themselves into new and exotic instruments of flight.

They adorned the ceiling like its own version of the Sistine Chapel and we bore witness to the magic unfolding before our eyes staring into the distance where hallway upon hallway built itself within this gilded, gargantuan reliquary.

It was a shrine, demanding more admiration and praise than one man alone could possibly offer. It was greater than the Omphalos in terms of size and grandeur, possibly greater than all of Nous, the parts I’ve seen of it anyways. And to walk its myriad halls and floors that seemed unlike floors, but air, was like we’d stepped into the mouth of God.

Baphomet folded his arms over his chest, captivated, lost in the infinite splendor breathing harmony and life into an otherwise empty world. “We are exactly where we are meant to be.”

These were chambers of respite and peace, but at its heart it was more than that. It was an accumulation of power.

Together, we entered a large white room, the floor itself seeming to guide us along like some kind of cosmic conveyor belt toward a structure with three giant cubes suspended in the air, each engraved with strange glyphs that changed in every revolution on an invisible axis. These aligned like a pyramid and served as a sort of archway over the real spectacle building in the center of the area. It took shape like puzzle pieces fitting together, forming a picture that continued to grow upwards into the vastness of the room.

Come closer, a voice made of several said to me inside my head. You have come to a great awakening. Do not be afraid. You are safe with us.

Baphomet took a fearless step forward. I move slow, unsure about any of this, keeping a nervous curiosity safe behind his wings.

Stepping closer into the light of this being’s form, Baphomet’s body began to seize, rippling over him in pale currents.

I seemed unaffected, but apprehensive nonetheless.

To my awe and horror, I realized the light encompassing me wasn’t radiating from the room at all, but from the shape manifesting before us.

It grew brighter and brighter, and we were shadows in its all-consuming nova.

Cowering in front of its intensity, I could feel myself growing smaller. Or was it getting larger without any sign of stopping?

Baphomet was just a little sparrow under its gaze, and dwarfed by the sight, I was an insect - a minor inconvenience.

I saw a figure, impossibly gargantuan lift its mighty head, a being of such height and freight it could level the moon with a glance.

The voices did not lie. Despite my apprehension, I was safe; bid welcome with a hushing sort of comfort, as when Mother used to read to me when I was small and her voice was soft and kind. When there was no malice between us.

This close to the talking structure and the vapors of light emanating from its assumed form, it is hard to confirm any identifiable traits. But what I can see is enough to discern that this isn’t merely a living creature, but a conscious, structural impossibility.

Suddenly, a portion of its mass frame reached out and pulled Baphomet and myself up like an elevator to its point of view. Gravity did not apply the same way in the real world, not kinetically, nor physically. I did not see hands or fingers, but I knew that this platform of light was its palm.

At my new vantage, I could see the colossus’ face -- faces, clearly. It had three, sharing one neck, but three heads, each distinct and separate from the others. Its faces were not faces in the traditional sense. They were a complex network of architecture, cities upon cities forming the eyes, the nose, the lips and facial likeness of each: one man-like and brooding, one bestial and regal, and the central face feminine and immaculate.

I knew then who and what they were, but I couldn’t help to express it:

The Iamblichus Collective.

Welcome, half-ones. We are the remains of the Collective, and you are the Architect, it said, its three voices overlapping one another simultaneously in their own particular tones. We are the light, you have forgotten.

Massive headdresses of precious metals and stones were worn to define one from the other. The beast’s headdress was bountiful with the dark antlers of a hundred stags, and upon the ends like ornaments, hung feathers from noble birds; eagle, falcon, and hawk. The male’s was an orbit of brilliant spheres, each representing the varying phases of the moon, and these encircled a shining orb that shone as the sun. The female, the most elaborate of the three, possessed a mane comprised of white marble staircases that ran down her face like a nun’s habit, while on her brow of ivory towers she wore a circlet of angels wielding flaming swords, held aloft as though she were the Stairway to Heaven.

I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat flooded with white fire.

Speak through your mind, child…

Where am I?

Baphomet and I spoke as one.

This is the nexus of our memory, retained only by a fragment of our consciousness within The Threads.

Consciousness? I don’t understand.

The Threads were born of strife in our division from our combined powers during the war across the stars with Priaxura, the Fallen. Their intent remains immaculate, incarnate. As man came from dust and womankind from his marrow, the Threads came from us. They harbor a shard of our power in their composition, for we were broken and reunited long ago into our fixed form, as Devourer, and are not as you see us now. The Threads have been waiting in their chosen form, meant only by the one who can bear them.

Am I the one?

That depends on you.

I don’t know why you chose me.

Aha! The voices laughed together. You continue to doubt your lineage. It is only appropriate. You have resided in the outer realm for too long, like us fragmented, living as a mortal, away from the heritage that is your holy right.

What am I supposed to do?

Seek our ultimate attribute - find us within Noumena Pandemonium, upon the Summit of Pleromabraxas, where we slumber, unable to mend this world because we have no avatar to wield our justice. We need your skin, your flesh, your compassion. Be our living legacy, the evidence of our existence. Be the being to give our fury form. Be both Creation—

And Destruction…

You understand then? One cannot exist without the other, as dark cannot negate light. They depend too crucially upon one another. Balance must be upheld and the Devourer is that balance.

How?

Bear the Threads and reopen the Citadel.

I heard their words. They filled me with purpose, with an unrelenting drive to do good, to be the avatar they sought, but I didn’t know for certain if that was Baphomet or really me. I couldn’t tell from one moment to the next who really was in charge here. Me or them. And I still couldn’t accept it completely that any of this was happening.

Did a portal really open up in the middle of nowhere and whisk me away to meet my destiny? Can’t I just be crazy and be marched to my padded room now?

It’s all so heavy. Still, the weight of it, even then under the glory of the Collective’s light, the purpose of their words, their needs, my wants…all so much…A hill that keeps ascending.

The thoughts spilled out of my mouth, uncertainty and angry restraining me. I tore at the gauntlet and the mask trying to remove them, to throw them away and give them back, but they wouldn’t budge. They were frozen in my hands as dried concrete.

It’s impossible! I’m just a boy. You have no right to place this burden on me. No right at all to demand these things. It’s not fair!

What we ask is the impossible. It is likely you will not accomplish your task and fall. But whether you falter now or at the hands of your enemy, Priaxura is coming and he will not stop until every last vestige of our existence is diminished. This includes you, child. Is that not worth the cost to fight?

Why couldn’t you destroy him? Why is this left up to me?

Our failure was unprecedented. The means of his escape however are unknown to us. We look to you to discover the key to his release.

If I do this, what happens to me?

The cities that were its eyebrows shifted, rising thoughtfully.

We require so little of a soul. You will always be you, willful, brave, and passionate. We shall merely be the fuel of your fire, the cleansing sigil of justice branded beneath your flesh. We will be your voice in the dark when you cannot find your own.

It grew sullen then, bothered by its own burdens.

The bestial face of the Collective turned its antlered head slightly, but I could see its eye, engorged as a bull’s looking directly at me, and he alone said to me:

Threadbearer, make your choice…

Its tremulous growl chipped away my confidence.

I never like making decisions. I’m so afraid I’ll make the wrong ones, and usually I do.

I couldn’t scratch this itch. It was a dead weight crushing my neck. It saw me. It knew me. Every secret, every detail. One look and I was unfolded and revealed, like one of the origami animals floating on the ceiling.

What was I supposed to do?

Deny us and your journey ends here, while we become the memory to haunt your days in the outer world as the last to know we ever were.

I don’t belong here.

You don’t yet belong anywhere. You are a comet trailing through the vastness of space, alone and unable to find the peaceful afterglow, nestled in the heart of a world, any world where you can finally be at peace. We offer respite to you. Bear the Threads. Open the way into Pandemonium, and seek us.

The beast roared alone again, COMPLETE THE FORGE!

Overwhelmed, enthralled, senses overwrought with questions and choices and destinies, I could feel myself wanting nothing more than to wake up.

What if I fail you? I asked as though I had already.

Even a god makes mistakes, the united voice lamented. Yet, can any, divine or mortal afford not to try?

The light held me as though it loved me with all it could possibly give, nourishing me. The love I have been searching for all my life.

I looked to Baphomet, his eyes fixed on me, desperate to know my decision. For it was mine. Perhaps always had been mine to make. He had played his part. Cloak was correct. I didn’t come only to save him. I came to make a choice: To commit myself to these dreams, whatever they are, or to run the other way and put an end to it all.

I faced the Collective, the thriving kingdoms of their faces waiting in watchful silence. I didn’t want to believe in them, but I also couldn’t bring myself to run.

I was the Mountain King, remember?

All I want to be is a normal boy. Just a normal everyday kid. Is that so much to ask?

You will never be normal, Canaan Quintanilla. But you can be extraordinary.

I wanted to laugh. Me, extraordinary?

There wasn’t enough time to weigh out the advantages and disadvantages of becoming a demigod. Where had it all been heading, if not to bring me here? The silver lining in a thick black sky.

I stared into the Collective’s all-seeing eyes and sighed, If only I had more time. But there isn’t is there? It’s now or never.

They did not say anything. Their silence told me all I needed to hear.

Trusting in their glowing goodness, I made the choice.

Do it then. Complete the Forge and make me yours.

The three faces smiled sincerely and satisfied.

It is done…

***

Suddenly, Baphomet and I fell to the floor in front of the Collective.

“It’s time,” Baphomet said pensively, holding out his hand. “There’s work to do.”

I knew what was coming. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but the audience with the Collective could only end one of two ways, each bearing with it, it’s own goodbye.

“I feel like there’s so much I need to tell you. We don’t even know each other, not really. But I feel like I owe you so much. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling.”

“It’s all shadows and mirrors, Canaan. Of each other; of the worlds we’ve known.”

“You never had a normal life, Baphomet. You haven’t even begun. I’m so sorry.”

He smiled and touched my cheek. “Make a new life for us then, Architect.”

I stared into the face of the boy who was my soul’s physical manifestation and I kissed both of his cheeks. It seemed so natural, the keenest of recognitions. My phantom limb right there in front of me, with a heart and a soul…

My soul stood in front of me winged and beautiful. And he was made of beast, angel, and man; my inner turmoil given breath and mind.

A parting and a reunion occurring all at once.

“Are you ready?”

I took a deep breath and gazed into his eyes one last time.

“Yes…”

He slipped his hands into mine and his wings expanded at full attention. The black and gold feathers shimmered, dazzling black rainbows like the onyx and gold of his gaze. The great wings draped around us, enfolding the two of us in a feathery womb.

“To Illmatar we venture,” we said in unison, our lips touching, speaking into one another’s mouth. “To Illmatar we become!”

A circle of white fire appeared between and then encased us. We had no choice but to let the heat rise and wash over us.

Our minds fused as one, a flood of memories engulfing each of us in a taste of another’s life –

A boy sits on a long white beach. He stares out across the waves of a silver sea. He takes a handful of sand and lets it fall between his fingers. Mounds of earth rise up like a topographical map shaping into small mountains and valleys. He digs his fingers into the sand and a small puddle of water bubbles up filling the valley with a stream. A woman in ghostly robes appears beside him and sits down next to him. He does not look up, but a smile spreads across his face as she wraps her arm around him, drawing him near to hold him, combing her fingers through his hair. On the horizon of both the sandy valley and the great ocean itself two suns rise to start the day.

We reeled against one another, each trying to control the flood of images overwhelming our intersecting consciousness.

The boy stands out on the deck of the S.S. Eurydice as it takes to the sky. He stares into his hands as though he does not recognize them. In the distance the city of Illmatar is on fire. A figure stalks her streets, large and monstrous, a rampaging God taking his revenge on innocent people. The boy cries and snow falls from the sky in heavy drifts, but they are not enough to drown the fires and soothe the screaming which follows him even as the airship ascends over the Pralayan mountain range.

Our hands fused together, our bodies drawn to one another, they very flesh on our bones reaching out to connect and splice together.

Cloak watching over me as a child while I slept. He places a hand to my young forehead and brushes back my hair when he stir, whimpering in the dark.

Heat, blood, fusion; a physical continental drift, tectonics and blood.

Baphomet as ambient energy spreading disembodied across the Fringe, a soul set adrift caught in flux unable to stop moving.

And then we began to slide into one another. Our vision blurred as our pupils came together, shapeless globs like runny eggs.

I am four years old and sitting on Mother’s knee. There’s a birthday cake and she’s smiling. I’m a little curly-haired thing and she loves me. She holds me. Love in her eyes.

Our bones shattered, each part of us from our elbows to our toenails pierced our flesh as we became one, bodies eclipsing one another and then oozing and melting into one form, one dismal shape.

Cloak in a dark chamber working terrible magic over a body that looked like me. A wave of energy flows into the room, spreading across the ceiling wildly. Cloak uses all his power to capture it and channels it into the body. The body rises off a stone table and begins to move, breath filling its lungs, limbs pulsing, nerve-endings sparked…Baphomet travels through the Fringe with his companions. Fawkes, a dusty cowboy kept the boy close, like his own son. They laugh together, a surrogate family on a brief sojourn through the unknown. I see Logan and Teresa and they are holding me.

We reconstructed our bodies amidst the extremis; scarlet, feathers, flesh.

The first time The Bastard hit me. I am six years old and I am jumping on my bed with Clyde. He storms into the room and jerks me by the neck and slams me into the ground. Blood forms on my He-Man pjs. Clyde kneels beside me and lets me cry.

I lost myself in the exchange. The memories come faster, mixing together with mine and his, his and mine.

Baphomet in the library deep within the Omphalos and his time spent with the Cortex Compendium, a stone wall installation that serves as an archive. The others there, Laelya a girl who speaks to dead books and Rajk, a soldier who lost his purpose, and the old man they called the Inkwell writing a life on the surface of the prison walls…Plates smashing onto the kitchen floor. The sound of screaming. I wake up, I go into the kitchen. He’s strangling her. He’s punching her and I’m small, a teddy bear under my arm. He sees me standing in the hallway. His eyes burn. I turn and I run.

I could feel him swimming within me, settling at the bottom of my chest like a sunken ship. But then he began to spread, filling out the empty parts, like roots in the earth, filling me with warmth and a thrilling sense of vibrancy as though I’d just swallowed a star.

I’m twelve years old and I give Mother her first snowglobe: a fairytale castle with a princess locked in a tower; a prince storming the gates far below. She adores it, but when I try to hug her, she pulls away…Baphomet submerged in the Lethe Vitae, lost in the blue. He drifts and is tossed about, screaming, but no one hears him. He fights, but the fight leaves him. Dead weight sinking to the bottom of nowhere. He is no one. Nothing. Gone…Mother sits at the kitchen table staring at the wall. There’s a long crack rising up through the foundation. She stares, never knowing I’m right there.

I was new again!

It was not our bodies alone that came together. Images and words passed through me once again, the contents of Baphomet’s short life emptied into my mind’s reservoir. It was disorienting this sudden deluge of knowledge.

He had companions, attachments, people who nearly gave their lives to protect him. It was very different from the dreams I’d had of him. There were things I hadn’t been privy to. Chapters unwritten and left me blind and ignorant to the full extent of this other boy’s existence. I felt him, the heart of him and the struggle that we shared. His had its own varying degrees of anguish, but it belonged to me now even as his visceral heart wrapped around my own like a fist.

His compassion for Cloak, his adoration for Little Ember, and even his affection towards the dusty cowboy…

Fawkes…

Oh God, I could feel his attachment to him and it hurt. I cried out this stranger’s name, wanting to feel his arms around me, to tell me everything was going to be alright.

I could even smell the scent of wearing his dusty coat when I had never wore it myself.

“Fawkes…” I sighed.

“Yes, kiddo?” I heard the cowboy’s voice swirl around my head.

“I’m scared.”

“I know you are, son. I know. But you know what? I’m scared too. But you listen clear, okay? Like I told you before, we all dreamt of you and all the incredible things you’re gonna do, so you don’t let that doubt keel you over, because I may not know what awaits the rest of us, but if all I’ve dreamt is gonna come to pass, you’re gonna be alright bucko.”

Baphomet and I were One.

Where I had found a certain refuge in his memories, he was on his way to finding one in mine. He curled up into our Mother’s lap and nestled in her arms, the first time he could ever recall doing so, and I welled with tears wishing I were still there, just a child cradled in her safe embrace, far away from darkness and gods and nightmares.

“The Forge,” we whispered in one another’s heads as we merged into one mind, twin souls united and nestled in one heart, the missing reels of each other’s lives restored. “… Is complete…”

I opened my eyes floating mid air in front of the Collective. Cascades of energy burst from their symmetrical mouths. The flood of their power lifted me up from the platform of their mighty hand, ascending to the center of the revolving cubes. They unfolded like a paper fortune cube, a deluge of power spilling from the triad, bathing me in purity.

I was possessed with their magic, their essence welling in me, inhabiting me; a fleshy vessel teeming with the immeasurable scope of their power.

The Collective’s light joined with the triad of cubes and formed a sharp beam. The blast from it seared my body, tempering me as steel. There was no pain, only warmth, and yet I was being fortified, shaped and soldered with new and immaculate flesh. My body was armored by living light, divine and organic sheathing me in glass and crystal, but hard as steel and the obsidian blood which once bound Baphomet.

The laser beam of mystical light fractured into whips of silver fire and lashed at my newly forged body, leaving in the wake of each laceration, strange and intricate tribal-like tattoos burnt into the flesh. I did not scream as the heat spread through the brands. I was too amazed to scream, honestly, too amazed to do anything but let them have their way.

I watched my own blood pool from my pores and rushed in pearly streams to cool the extraordinary new markings into my flesh, white gold against my newly restored skin.

The Threads of the Demiurge constricted around my hand and wrist, the mask tightening about my head, alive, responsive. The gauntlet, bathed in the Collective’s light, cast of its shabby guise like an animal shedding its winter coat and unveiled a sinister, but beautiful armament beneath. The leathery straps crept up around my arm tightening and melding into my skin, absorbed and fused to the bone, becoming new tendons and new muscles now part of me. I clenched my armored hand into a powerful fist and stared in awe as the rusty set of keys adorning the underside of the gauntlet were washed clean. Rust and soot flaked away, and beneath the grime a set of silver keys dangled, each one bearing a specific symbol on its face.

I witnessed my new form in the mirror of their eyes.

I was a living statue of white gold and marble, with fingernails of glass.

I am the Thread-bearer, my consciousness tells me. I am the Thread-bearer.

Deep inside, knowing this, confirming my union of Craft and Threads, a voice exploded with something beyond joy, more like exaltation:

“THE FORGE IS COMPLETE!”

Explosions of light and sound whirled around me. The Forge was complete, but now I began falling.

Be strong for us, shard of Iamblichus. Avenge our memory. Awaken the Devourer, our divine justice. Avenge us! Be creator and redeemer as one!

The sound of their voices drifted past me as I made my descent through shockwaves of reverberating power. The revolving cubes sealed away the silver floods, and the Collective’s mouths closed; their eyes vague and stilled as statues.

But as I descended, the three of them roared madly, their intricate mouths perfect O’s of fury.

Who dares interfere with our audience!

Before I could address the Collective, my body started to shake and spasm. Their light swarmed over me, ivory to garish gray, spilling into my mouth like dozens of hands and reached down into my depths. I tried to clutch my chest, fearful they might reclaim the power they had given to me, but as they searched, I understood what they were seeking.

In my joining with Baphomet, all he had been transferred over to me, including whatever darkness Lamia reproduced deep within him. An inheritance I had not anticipated. They sought Lamia’s nasty edifice of obstruction, pillaging through my organs to uncover the seed of destruction longing to take root.

My ribcage pulsed with a thousand frantic shudders, an earthquake in my heart.

I pitched forward, gagging, something slimy and offensive on the rise. It swelled and it fought to stay down, but my reflexes and the purity of the Collective’s power were urging it upwards with a jittery lurch. I threw back my head overwhelmed by penetrating beams of light and with a throaty cough started vomiting up a veiny, fleshy membrane too wide for my mouth. Slowly and gruesomely the sticky, egg sac-like emerged, slipping past my lips and expelled in a hard cold splat.

The world around me spun out of control as if caught and pulled by a whooshing current down a drain. The air rushed past and the glory of the Collective’s chamber tore away, clarity thrusting me back into the Omphalos temple at the very moment I ascended.

I opened my eyes and realized the world had changed around me. I saw with an architect’s vision, through a god’s eyes.

Time resumed, and without Baphomet’s arms lifting me up, I stood on my own suspended in the air, with Lamia in front of me and the blade, Breeze, sliding into my chest.

Lamia wavered in the air, caught by the light emanating from my new incarnation. Her bewilderment spoke volumes and she struggled to find words, but there were none to convey what it was she saw shining before her.

“No,” she whispered. “It cannot be…”

“He has returned to us!” I heard Ember exclaim, her jubilation filling the ruins like a sky lit up with fireworks.

Together we returned to the surface, her stunned eyes never leaving me, even as they bled at the corners, her face a brittle mask of gape and awe. She tightened her hand around Breeze’s hilt, the blade still cleaving my chest, but as she shifted to twist and push it deeper, a wall of resistance rose up in my chest, hard as steel.

I felt the Collective moving within me, taking possession of its new avatar and focusing its unyielding fury upon its enemies.

You seek to impede our intervention, by utilizing a tool of the Architect?

The Voice shook the walls, dropping all present to their knees.

Lamia froze, a strand of blood oozing from one nostril. The Voice of the Collective burned into her, damaging it seemed to anyone, but the vessel chosen to utter its words.

With my new vision I saw her not as a monster, but a scared girl, dethroned, depowered, a slight bookish soul lost in her own loathing, her own unending nightmares. I pitied her. I wanted to pull this girl away from the creature she’d become.

She cowered, no longer wielding the sword, but clinging to it to keep herself from toppling over. Tears and blood trickled from the corners of her eyes more profusely, the light enveloping me penetrating her pupils as the blade fixed in between my ribs.

“What is this,” she whimpered. “This isn’t fair.”

Under the sway of the Collective, I reached down and wrapped my fingers around her supple wrist in a crushing grip, sliding the blade from my skin with a gentle twist. The end of Breeze broke off in a crisp cold snap, the shard of blade retreating inside of me, contained behind a wall of mending flesh. Both Lamia and I stared amazed as the blade rose from our hands and floated above our heads, a singing, spinning pendulum.

With my new eyes, I could see the sword, not merely a blade, but its true essence, a glass dragon with grand, prismatic wings, swirling in a maelstrom of its wound and discord.

“Not fair!” Lamia howled. “I killed you. You should be spilling out before me.”

The blade was forged from the very artifice used to craft the Citadel, and thus made from the Architect himself. His implements cannot be used to hinder him. They are as a part of him as the skin over his bones.

The singing blade whirred and screeched high above, spinning faster and faster, the glass dragon a chaotic fervor of shiny wings. Cracks formed all over its body and its mad velocity kicked into high gear as beams of light broke through the fissures, rupturing the surface.

Breeze, the glass dragon, the sword that was given to me…to Baphomet by Jasira as a gift found and forged anew by her father…burst into white bursts of falling stars.

The force of the explosion thrust Lamia back into the ruins of the shattered table.

And only by its creator can it be reshaped, reconfigured into new embodiments, scattered as the stars.

My hands opened into a bowl and gathered the fragments like catching rain and I admired the shards, only they were not mere fragments, but dozens of tiny dragons nestled in my hands. They slept soundly, infantile celestial creatures no larger than a teardrop. Still at the behest of the Collective, I raised the bowl of my hands to my lips and blew out a soft breeze across my sleeping dragons, sending them out over the Omphalos chamber like the lofty heads of dandelions. The soft sigh of my breath sent them drifting as though pushed by a monsoon, cycling them out of the holes in the temple ceiling and into the bleak beyond.

The grimy hand of a Revenant enclosed around my ankle, the pathetic creature climbing up to pull me down into the mob and instantly, my flaming eyes turned to face its direction, glowering. My countenance changed from shock to abhorrence as I opened my jaws and felt the Collective’s light rush out to scald its face; the dead eyes melting in their sleepless sockets, the skin flaking away, and its slobbering mouth wailing from an agony even it couldn’t have desired.

The presence within its beam rose in the back of my throat and pushed its voice out of my mouth as one Collective consciousness:

No more! The blessed vessel shall not be exposed to the tainted!

The voice of the Collective drowned me with but an ounce of its limitless strength, using me as its conduit, its pillar of justice. I could feel Its wisdom; I could feel Its essence as if I were already within the walls of The Citadel Of Fractured Mirrors standing before Its true presence, whatever that It may be. I was a part of It and It was a part of me now, connecting me to a place deeper than the symbiotic nature of the Craft and Baphomet.

Your hopes to contaminate the Architect are at an end.

“No!” Lamia bellowed. “It’s not fair!”

Down below on the cracked temple floor, I heard her rising up, her tail sweeping across aggressively to scatter bodies and stone out of her path. I dealt with the Revenant, tossing its skeletal remains to the rest of the vile poachers watching as the body crumbled into a cloud of gold dust.

I turn my heated countenance to my would-be slayer her face shredded in trepidation.

“Who are you? Who are you to desecrate our divine purpose?” Lamia called out, daring to speak, challenging my god-like stance.

We are all that was, all to come, and you are but flecks of dust.

“You are nothing, a false icon wasting away in your black towers! Your legacy is lost!” Lamia screamed, her face twisting with a dour scowl.

Our legacy begins anew.

The Collective’s voice rippled on the air, jolts of power bouncing off the walls of the temple like a bomb exploding repeatedly. Lamia shriveled down to her former size and stance, shoved back into a far wall.

Defiant to the powerful Voice speaking with its many tongues through my own, Lamia hurled her body across the expanse of the chamber, a snake shaped Molotov cocktail, flaming with her energies darting toward me willing to die again if only to silence the definitive Us. She undermined our cosmic possession thrusting forward to stab us with her blazing claws, but our hands rose in defense becoming mighty shields to deflect her assault.

Using these hands, my Architect’s hands, we reached out and gripped her by the neck and tail like snake handlers clutching her tight, her fangs bared and snarling.

“You think this is over,” the Lamia called out to me shuddering in my hands. “Nothing you’ve done this day will lead you to understand what you are, what you hope to become. I’ve seen you. I know what’s on its way. I offered you a way out. He’s coming. He’s on his way. And nothing will stop Him. In the end you’ve won nothing.”

“Maybe,” I said breaking from the Voice of the Collective. “Maybe not, but it’s a place to start.”

With a giant’s feat of strength, we brutally dissected her clean in half, cleaving the serpent bound to her waist away with a vicious yank and tossing the writhing beast to the floor at our feet. Lamia screamed still withheld in our death grip, a writhing upper torso now, her lower regions devoured and lost inside of the glass serpent.

We brought her in close to our face, fear-dancing circles for dear life in her eyes. We opened our mouth and our holy light spilt out bathing her in its radiance, but to such a creature so dark and filled with hatred the light burned as if she’d been tossed into the core of the sun. It seared her flesh, bronzing her skin to a rusted iron shade, her hair singed, burnt away in sections, leaving sparse cancer patient tufts on her scalp.

Within the light, the Collective speaks again:

Your time is at an end, serpent.

Like a gust of air blowing through a burnt out house, carrying the last remaining ashes of what had once inhabited all those rooms on the wind, we released Lamia, tossing her scorched body writhing to the floor. She scurried along the floor with her mangled body, backing away from our almighty countenance. But it was everywhere, every corner, every black heart. She fumbled on her shambling crabwalk, a stupid looking porcelain doll fished out of a fire. In her retreat her hand brushed against the remains of her dark ritual.

The fiendish amniotic sack rested on the floor, a low pulse murmuring through its veiny membrane. I don’t want to even venture what gestated within it. It no longer belonged to me. The Collective had seen to that.

She gathered the sickly thing into her arms as her Revenants rallied loyally to drag her half body away.

“I’ve tasted your heart,” Lamia spat, cradled in her servant’s arms. She caressed the fleshy satchel, mewling like a childless mother. “I know what lurks in you. Did you really believe that you’d have to be altered so drastically? The change is already in motion. You will return. You will beg and grovel for my mercy, and you will find none.”

Wretched woman, the vanguard of your destruction is upon you. Alethia Es Demurgios. Truth is creation. By no hands save ours, shall the world come undone.

As soon as our mouth opened to speak these words, the light swelled like a bright torch in a deep cavern uncovering more and more, but then it ruptured in its expanse, a feral confusion of nuclear winter white exploding out in a mushroom cloud of pearl and ivory beams. The entire span of the temple erupted, the Richter scale spun discordantly and split in half as the purifying blaze of the Collective enacted their wrath on Lamia, on the Revenants, upon all. The power of our joint judgment spewed forth from my open jaws, the exhaust of a pillaging dragon. Their screams of agony were muted under the heavy artillery of the light fantastic perforating my every pore.

The energies swallowed the temple, pulling the walls down, toppling the Revenants into piles of writhing cadavers, combusting their sallow forms into golden ashes. I was the furnace of a terrible and righteous monster. The pulsation mutated me, transforming me, into a beacon of apocalyptic fury. My mouth of light consumed them greedily, their pigskin flesh peeling back, diseases cleansed and emptied like enema bags, and when I had fattened myself on my share, I belched their bones to make home for more.

The place intended to be the womb of my rebirth, was now a miscarriage of screams and blood splashed like bottles of wine against the collapsed walls.

Mercy flew out the window.

Chaos and retribution were 2-for-1 today.

I was a burning bush, a shining insignia, a god. I was all these things and anonymous without the need for a name, only the light.

Adrenaline gushed like water from a fireman’s hose through the length of my arms and legs and in the obscured blaze of the Omphalos’ razing, I shot up, awake in the middle of the field where Cloak had opened the portal to Illmatar. I rose up disoriented, searching the wide space for Cloak and the others, realizing that I was no longer in the Omphalos, but the real world. It took me several moments to accept this and when I had I clutched my chest feeling lost and separated, cut off as though someone had reattached my umbilical cord, only to sever it again.

As I caught my breath and pressed my hand to my chest, I felt something underneath my grass stained shirt. I reached under and passed my fingers down the center of my chest. The skin was raised in a jagged scar that hadn’t been there before. I examined it with awe and horror at the awareness that the scar marred the very spot in which Lamia had stabbed me.

Tears streamed down my face and I sank to my knees, clawing at the grass, digging my fingers into the dirt overwhelmed by the onrush of awareness. It was real, exceeding the texture of the earth under my fingernails, the dew on the back of my neck, or the tears and the saline salting at the corners of my mouth.

I was chromed in the first light of the morning sun when I heard a car pull up alongside the road.

“Canaan?” A voice called out behind me.

I didn’t turn around right away. I closed my eyes, praying I’d fall back into the other world and that arms would rise up from the field and lift me towards the sun. I wanted to be encased in the Collective’s light again.

“It’s okay, Canaan,” Detective Clemens said approaching, placing a strong hand at my shoulder. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I didn’t even really acknowledge him, captivated by the crown of sunlight streaming into my eyes from dark lavender clouds. I had never been so envious of its station. I was drunk and overcome by the feeling that I had risen above an obstacle so tumultuous, that I myself felt I had wings, though I could not remember how to fly.

He came around and knelt in front of me, his eyes fresh pools of morning dew and concern, the handsome face etched in a day or two’s worth of dark stubble. I had to restrain myself from rushing into his arms, a faint click of recognition sliding into place. I think he saw it too.

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

His eyes studied me carefully and a smile crept at the corner of his mouth. “I am and I’m not,” he replied. “It’s complicated.”

“Yes,” I sobbed. “I suppose it’d have to be.”

“There’s a lot I don’t understand, either, Canaan. Things I’m still trying to come to terms with. I know how you must feel, for I felt the same way, like seeing the world for the first time.”

“Then you know who I am and where I’ve been?”

“Not exactly. But if I had to guess…”

“Jackie wasn’t the first to speak of Illmatar, was she?”

“No,” he shook his head, standing up, facing the sun. “She was one of many, I’m afraid.”

“So all of this time, you’ve known what I’ve been going through? All this time you’ve…You knew who I was and you didn’t tell me who you were?”

“I didn’t know it would be you, exactly, but I knew that I’d find you, again.”

I couldn’t lift myself off the ground. Gravity hadn’t meant that much to me, but in that moment it was crushing me.

“All I know is that I’ve dreamt of you, before, and that I’m here now, to help you. To keep you safe once more.”

I looked at him, his familiar eyes struggling to piece together what we shared, but were unable to voice in words. Nonetheless the delicate rapport continued to build between us; intensity I had only come to realize transcending space and time.

He offered his hand to me. “Come on, let me get you out of here.”

I stared up at him, his head crowned in the rising sun. He was beautiful and heroic just standing there, and though I couldn’t call him by his true name, I knew him. He didn’t need me to trust in him. It was already there.

He drove me back to Teresa’s because I was not ready to take the long road home. We parked in front of the house. It was barely 6:30. It seemed like it should have been five years from now instead of just a few short hours.

We sat in silence, each staring out their windows. I needed to sleep, but there was no much I felt needed to be said, but neither could open their mouths to address it all.

Finally, “I should get inside. Teresa will be up soon and if I’m not there she’ll probably freak out more than she has already.”

I opened the car door and swung my legs out, hitting my feet against the moist earth of Teresa’s dirt driveway.

“Canaan,” the Detective said, tightening his grip on the steering wheel, his knuckles white. “If I could, I’d take you far away from here, but we both know I can’t. Not now. I need you to take care of yourself. I need you to be safe.”

“I will. I promise.”

“You know how to reach me, if you need anything. Day or night. I’ll come running.”

I nodded and lifted myself out of the car. As I went to close the door a thought struck me.

“What happened to the others? Jasira? Aurelius?”

The names didn’t click right away, as if he needed a moment to acknowledge their significance.

“I…I wish I knew kiddo.”

“Me too.”

“Hey, kiddo,” he said in a familiar drawl as I went to close the door once more.

“Yeah?”

“You’re gonna be alright, okay?”

I shut the door, smiling. He waited until I was on the porch before starting his car and pulling out of the driveway. I watched him as his rear lights vanished into the distance, alone again. I stepped around the side of the wraparound porch and entered a side entrance into Teresa’s room. She was still asleep, snug in the folds of her comforters. She always gets chilly, even in the summertime.

I couldn’t sleep and so creeping into the front room with the computer, I set about writing down all of this, striving to come to grips with everything I’ve been shown. I am the Architect. But what does that mean here, in the world I’ve known? What happens next? I’m little boy lost again, trying to find my way home, unable to tell which one needs me more.

KATABASIS (PART SEVEN)

2010-12-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

VII. AN ARCHITECT’S HANDS

I wanted to run into Cloak’s arms, but as I took a step forward, Baphomet landed in front of the living shadow, his wings drooping close around his body.

"Is it really you?" the winged boy said, his stern, wolfish face melting into his skin, leaving behind the face of an abandoned child. Tears filled his eyes and I thought he might rush into the Shadow's arms, but he stood fixated, in disbelief.

They acknowledged one another silently; master and pupil reunited and for the moment I the outsider and their scribe.

“I am here Baphomet. Not as I once was, but more. I have to tell you, to both of you.” Cloak said looking toward me for a moment. His eyes drifted back to the Craft and regarded him with a tilt of his enshrouded head. “I am proud of you.”

“I never should have doubted you, I’m sorry.”

I watched them, their interaction curious to me. It was Baphomet’s journey through Nous, afterall. I had yet to play my part. I envied him as I envied my own brother for receiving the affection from our parents I could never obtain.

Ember peered around Cloak's robes, her doll-face positioned in such a way I could sense her fascination. Her white moths nestled like little glowing braids up and down her hair.

“There are two of them!”

“It’s okay, Ember,” Baphomet said to her, releasing Cloak. “You can go to him.”

The little girl approached me and studied me for a long moment, her green meadow eyes turning bright tangerine. She rushed over to me with a light gait and threw her arms around my waist.

There was something of Heaven Lee in her touch, familiar and precious.

Would I ever see my little sister again?

“I told you, you were the one,” Little Ember whispered joyously under her breath with a little prayer. “I just knew it.”

Eos trembled against me and limped from my side. “That voice? Can it be? Is that you?”

Cloak stepped forward and steadied Eos as she fell under his gaze. “It is me, my love. I am here.”

My love?

Eos gasped and lifted her hands to his face, running them over his mask and hair. “I didn’t…I never dreamed I’d hear your voice again.”

“Rest easy, my star. I’ll keep you safe.”

She rested her head against his chest and his coat opened up like a set of doors, inviting her into his impenetrable void, hiding her safely within.

“So,” the Lamia said killing the reunion before it really began. “All the major players are here. What now?”

“I silence you,” Cloak said adjusting his coat. He strode to where Lamia stood keeping us at his back as he assumed the role of guardian once more

“Arrogance. Arrogance equal to that of cowardice. Baru was certainly a testament to your kind.”

“He is no brother of mine.”

“No, I don’t suppose that’s true anymore. Tell me, Remnant. How does it feel to know extinction is upon you?”

Lamia snarled from high upon her stony perch. Her lips leaned into a sharp bladed edge of a smile, the end of her tail shuddering as a rattlesnake.

“You don’t belong here, witch. I urge you to interfere no longer.”

“This temple belongs to me now. You and your kind are finished. This is not your world anymore.”

The Revenants shrank back from the four of us as Baphomet turned to the forefront of the group, his claws and face set once more to rend his victims. He hungered, the warrior within starved for serpent flesh.

The dead things whispered amongst themselves, holding their blades close to their frail bodies, torches at their sides. They were afraid, and with good reason. Cloak was not the dispelling shadow he had been in the caverns of Praylaya or upon the beach in my dreams. He was composed quite nobly, and even I was renewed of vigor at the sight of him, my eyes passing from Lamia to the Threads, desperate for my moment to rip the smile from her face with all I could muster. She had lingered in my mind far too long. It was time Jackie rested in peace.

“You were manipulated into coming here, and for that I am sorry,” Cloak professed. “But what you have done, what you aim to do will never bring you the peace you’re seeking. Lay down your arms and relinquish this sacred temple. Or I will do what I must to procure it from your clutches.”

“A lone Theurgian challenges me? How rich!” Lamia scoffed slithering around the statue, skirting along the ground to intimidate her enemy.

“I assure you, I require no legion to spar with the likes of you. The prophecy you claim to divine is of your own selfish making. You and these Revenants have no place in The Devourer’s plans.”

“He betrayed us! Simu’la Re is our way now!”

“You place faith and virtue in an entity yet to manifest? Your religion is flawed. Messiahs aren’t made, they are born and chosen. You will be very disappointed when yours does not arrive.”

“What good will yours be to you when I feed what’s left of those naughty boys to my servants?”

Lamia charged, her arms lengthening once more, claws extended with mad fury blazing maroon in her stolen eyes. Baphomet rose up to defend Cloak, but Lamia’s tail swished out and coiled around his feet tossing him aside effortlessly, the stabbed with her claws at Cloak with lightning speed.

He retracted, dodging her blow and returning it with a quick parry, hitting her hard in the chest with the shield of his hand. A black broadsword swirling and crackling with his purple magic manifested into his firm grasp. He wielded the heavy blade one-handed as though it were only the air from which it came and striked at the snake with devestating force.

The tip of Cloak’s sword slashed across Lamia’s left arm, honey-like blood oozing from the wound. She shook with anger and retracted her stance. Before she could respond with an offensive blow, Cloak landed a second at her right.

“This is nothing,” she grimaced. The pain. Your presence here. All of it is trivial. None of you are safe.”

A dangerous squint in her eye registered like a beacon signaling the Revenants to scatter, all at once raising their knives high at the hilts ready to bring them down and thrash at anything that happened in their way.

Her legions swarmed the Altar and Cloak and Ember stood back to back fending them off as they blew in like a hurricane to mow the pair down. A ring of fire leapt from the end of Ember's staff and rose up over the Altar in an ever-expanding halo that ensconced them in a protective perimeter. The opposing force formed a wall of bodies, flanking my companions at either side, threatening to pierce the wall of flame ignorant of its burn. The Morag Scavengers headed off an air assault. Baphomet took to the sky and wrestled against a dark cloud of the murderous beasts while Cloak and Ember contended with the swell rising over them.

I ducked out of the way, helpless behind a large chunk of the ceiling, while the true heroes of this tale fought wave after loathsome wave of monsters.

The Revenants exuded a degree of intelligence I hadn’t expected. They were communicating their maneuvers in their own way; meanwhile Cloak was strategizing his own. Globes of energy floated around him gravitating like planets about to collide forming a sort of barrier around him and the little girl, flowers tumbling out of her basket. It united with the fire strengthening the blaze with a fortified and audible thrum.

The Revenant assaults were met with jolts of energy, like an electric fence, only powered by the heat of a small sun, incinerating fingers as the dead things tried foolishly to climb the protective wall.

Cloak and Ember fought behind the barrier; flame and black steel. Cloak’s sword hewed flesh and Ember -- the tiny ninja -- spun her staff around stabbing with the spaded end into a Revenant’s chest while the opposite harnessed and unleashed a globe of living flame into another’s face, sending it screaming and flaming through the other troops.

I heard commotion then on the staircase. Blood and viscera flew up in nasty spurts and some of the Revenants turned to see what the uproar was all about, only to be met with the blunt end of a heavy mace, crushing into their blank faces.

Above the bloodshed, the Rhylian came into view, limping up the stairs but hammering his weapon one handed side to side like a broom sweeping the floor.

Baphomet lowered his vantage, ripping the wings clean from one of the carrion birds. Rhada Khar acknowledged him and raised his mace in a silent salute.

They did not exchange words, but the message was clear as Rhada Khar stepped into the fray and swung his mace into the crowd.

They battled the onslaught of Revenants and Scavengers as they poured forward with frenetic glee. Cloak held his own, clashing against their blades with his indomitable magic, and Ember with the aid of her living flame. Rhada Khar was there simply to make a mess of the Revenants, leveling their numbers with ease. When one fell before him, he wrung it by the neck and tossed it down the stairs.

Where his musculature and Cloak’s magic served them well in dealing with their numbers, Ember’s smallness gave her an advantage over the horde, ducking in and out between their legs and rising up with her staff to duel and flourish, jabbing with the spaded end.

One of the demonic vultures darted out of the sky and lunged for her. With a quick acrobatic side step, she thrust her staff under her arm impaling the frenzied bird at its chest mid flight and spilled its entrails onto the floor.

It was a chaotic ballet, blades roiling red with hate, Cloak’s energies flailing wildly. The conflicting forces sparked the air with a dazzling heat that fused in the air igniting the sprays of blood as precious rubies as trio ripped through the bodies of the damned.

It happened so quickly, their foes falling into heaps of rotted meat.

Cloak burned in a golden encasement of light, as if all light in the chamber were being drawn into and out from him. He twirled around casting bolts of energy a fierce sorcerer, spells decimating the Revenants shoving them back, but they kept coming by the dozens. Their roars filled the chamber with a deep rupturing as they reveled in their overflowing congregation.

A deafening war cry bellowed up from Lamia. She arched her back offering her breasts to the sky and stretched out her arms. Tremors flushed underneath her skin, running down the sides of her upper torso. Something was burrowing through her chest and abdomen, rising up and pushing against her flesh. Flaps of skin burst and the Lamia moaned, her pleasure thundering against the rumble of the battle shaking the temple’s foundations. Slender forms climbed out of the wounds, thick and strong and glistening as the shiny bodies of anacondas. They weaved and flexed with newfound life. Only they weren’t snakes at all, but delicately muscled arms and bursting at the ends like budding flowers emerged new fingers.

Three pairs of hands stretched and asserted their ferocity. Her head bent forward glowering with wild fury, her skin drenched in dark magic. Her moans became a valkyrie’s battle cry and she reclaimed domination over the room, a mad goddess ready to bring the heavens down on our heads.

“You only dared to understand the true meaning of death! But I am the Final Death! I know that now. I am the deliverer, the transformer of life into dust. You forsake my prophecy, so I have no choice. I will be the one you refuse to be. I will be the one to choose this world's destiny and I choose despair!”

She pitched forward crawling on the palms of her hands, her tail warped over her head like the curvature of a scorpion’s, and indeed she moved as a desert huntress on the prowl. She climbed over the bodies of her fallen brethren and in each of her six hands she gripped one of their fearsome weapons and shoved through a wall of her servants as they rushed to her defense, towering on the bend of her glass tail.

Lamia’s misshapen limbs stretched out, the cords of her flesh once again moving through to extend her size and reach, and she hardened upright on the end of her tail as tall and erratic as the branches of a leafless Sequoia. Several of the Scavenger birds soared upwards to rest their putrid black feathered bodies along her strange arms. With an unholy shriek accompanied by the Scavenger wails, her fury crashed into the three warriors, knocking all of them off balance.

Cloak was the first to regain his stance and within moments shifted from corporeal to vapor as her arms swung down to trounce him.

The Theurgian’s body swished out of the way, reforming behind her. She swung her blades in anger, hewing the necks of her servants. She whipped around, her tailing lashing out just as Little Ember stood up. Rhada Khar, quick-footed rose between the girl and the glass battering ram taking the full force of the blow.

Cloak, solidified and furious spoke, his voice tempered by enchanted steel:

“I am the servant of the Divine Devourer, High Scribe of the Iamblichus Collective, and guardian of the Demiurge. You will yield!”

The Lamia was unimpressed.

The titans clashed and the Omphalos trembled. It could not take much more.

Cloak pummeled her to surrender, his rush of energies consuming her, flickering in her glass scales setting her aflame. The Revenants were scattering, falling back while I entered the battle field to make sure that Ember was all right. I helped Rhada Khar to his feet and we watched Cloak’s powers illuminate the chamber with glorious flashes of light, but it could not compare to the gleam hanging in the distance behind the battle on Lamia’s throne, still waiting patiently for my hands to find it.

Though Cloak’s magic was stern and he bore his sword down to cripple Lamia’s figure, her resolve remained ever vigilant. She was amplified more and more by her own energies, her size expanding larger, the flames rising through her body so hot that the glass scales began to melt into a single mirrored plate down the length of her tail.

She resisted Cloak with a thunderous hiss, whipping back to tower upright. She held sway once more, making Cloak’s assault seem like the irritation of a fly.

“Don’t you see? Pain and anguish are my power. Hate is my armor.” Lamia boiled.

She loomed over Cloak, her eyes sweltering with lava, her size immense, an inscrutable behemoth unleashed. I had to restrain Ember to keep her from rejoining the fight, the Rhylian positioned in front of us to shield us from Lamia’s gaze.

I saw Cloak turn his masked face upward to Baphomet, his voice of many booming in both of our minds, the words unspoken; Get him to the Threads, boy. I can handle a single whore!

I choked back a gasp watching as Cloak opened his arms, offering his chest willingly.

The Lamia raised her many arms and drove them into Cloak before he could make himself incorporeal, pinning the Theurgian to the ground.

Craft and Vessel, are not enough, get to the Threads!

At the urgency of Cloak’s telepathic relay, Baphomet reached into my thoughts. I could feel him communicating not only with my mind, but through my body. Suddenly my arm shot up into the air and Baphomet did a scary Kamikaze swan dive and swept down overhead catching me by the wrists like members of a flying trapeze. He swung me into the air over Lamia and Cloak. I landed on all fours, and then rushed along the wall of walking dead, rolling under a gauntlet of swinging blades.

Baphomet flew overhead like a bomber plane holding a large boulder ready to carpet bomb the lot of them. He rolled it into the barricade of bodies and as piles of them fell and heaped together, I used them and crags of stone like a staircase and ran up toward the Lamia’s throne.

The untrained force of my leap propelled me past the dark goddess’ screaming countenance.

I landed as if by second nature at the brow of the statue, looking over my shoulder to see the battle raging down on the floor.

Lamia hunched over Cloak and caterwauled. Her servants rejoiced like a gospel choir.

“You’ve failed, Theurgian. This ends now.”

“Yes,” I heard Cloak reply. “It does.”

I watched, stunned by what took hold of Cloak.

He started convulsing, his shape taking on a heavier form, pushing up like an inflated balloon against the Lamia and her blades. He threw her off of him with one great burst of air and she was flung into a pile of stone, her glass tail cracking down one side.

He rose up into the air and his form evened out, conforming to his body as though beneath his shadows he wore a set of armor.

I realized then that Cloak had bought me time, using his apparent weakness and then his reprisal as a means to distract Lamia, but she was catching on.

I had to act fast. I turned back to the task at hand and eased up the statue, fighting through my fear of heights, my inability to climb a gym rope, but most of all the doubt I placed in myself which constantly held me at bay from rising above everything set against me.

The Threads were in reach, the light in my eyes.

As I ambled up the stone head, I felt pressure catch in my throat.

It was a tight pinch at first, like I twisted a muscle, but then blood issued from my lips. I looked down to see a Revenant‘s dark eyes gazing back at me, a dagger in its hand, buried in my neck. The nasty fiend removed it straight away and a wide arc of red sprayed over my shoulder. I could feel myself falling even before my body started to sag. I clutched for the stone, scrambling to hold on, but I was slipping, body and mind.

In that moment I felt a rush of air bite all around me. I thought it was my spirit leaving my body as I started the long way down to the surface, but my spirit had left my body long ago.

I could hear nothing but the beating of my own heart and it was slowing. I had come so far only to perish, to die in a nightmare, accomplishing nothing, while the real heroes fought below, facing the impossible just so I could fail, tumble and die.

The pumping of great wings rushed into my ears, and I turned my wounded neck to see Baphomet flying towards me, wrapping me in his sinewy arms and lifted me up into the chamber. My blood spilled through his fingers and he held me against his shoulder like an anxious child. He was speaking to me, but I could not understand him, deaf as though I were being held underwater.

I choked and I gasped, blood filling my mouth; blood spilling out of my body. My life teetered at the precipice, but my fingers grasped for one last ray of hope, resting on the statue’s crown. Baphomet flew in close, allowing my hands to swipe at the Threads of the Demiurge. I drew a deep gulp of ripe, stagnant air into my lungs and lunged for the ledge and to the tokens of power which lay just under my fingertips.

At first glance, I was unsure at what I was looking upon. The sacred tokens of power didn’t appear all that significant, but cosmic white light emanated all around me, the sensation impossible to resist.

I lunged for them as the last bit of strength started to drain. The light of the Threads spread over me, but not from the items themselves. It was an aura that housed them, glorious and flowing up the length of my arms tingling and warm like the sting and flash of sparklers. The light eased my senses with welcoming adoration as my fingers curled around a nondescript mask crafted out of scuffed glass and a gauntlet forged from a tarnished alloy, rusty and frayed leather straps trailing from the cuff. Shiny black keys were hooked on the underside of the gauntlet, without any clear indication on how to remove them.

I curled my fingers under the Threads and hefted them into my hands.

A hiss sounded at Baphomet’s back and he swung me around as I gathered the Threads close to my chest. The shift of perspective spun me around like a carousel and I felt my eyes widening in mounting terror as Lamia launched her blades through the air. Six swords came at us like missiles. Baphomet shimmied and dodged several, knocking two out of the way with the back of his free hand, but one sliced by his left wing during his evasive maneuver and he winced in agony. We were caught in a tailspin and in the milling of confusion Lamia heaved her body into the air, slicing through the pillar of green fire with the sword, Breeze in her hands, poised and ready to run it through my chest.

The edge of the immaculate sword sped towards me, and in the time it took to reach my pupils and filled them with diamond light, I had slipped my hand into the gauntlet and was pulling the mask over my head.

“Alethia Es Demurgios,” I whispered, laying my head against my angel’s shoulder, as the tip of the sword bit into my side, just piercing the first layer of tissue and muscle.

“In a grain of sand an island; in a piece of silver, the light of the moon. In the hands of an Architect, the vision of the world…”

The world turned white.

KATABASIS (PART SIX)

2010-12-04T00:21:00.000-08:00

VI. FIND THE LIGHT

The Revenants bounded up the staircase after Baphomet, blades lifted high fumbling over each other to get the first stab, but they like the Rhylian far below, underestimated the dark angel’s new incarnation. He lurched around and heaved himself into the air like a panther and with a quick jab to their backs, dispatched three like dominoes falling into one another.

He burned with power and had taken down the Rhylian, but there were still more of them, fanatical and unrelenting.

The Butchers made use of this fact and came at him in pairs, crisscrossing and cleaving clean through several of the disposable Revenants. They charged through the sprays of blood yearning to add another stain to their nasty aprons.

In the chaos, I lost sight of Lamia, but she wasn’t far.

Even for little more than corpses, the Revenants and the Butchers were clever. They strategized and formulated plans to ensnare Baphomet, but he weaved in and around them, laying waste to them when he had the chance.

If only I could have shown the locker-room this much power. I would have left only jerseys and bone in my wake.

The Scavenger birds made their assaults in flocks of deadly V’s, arrow points of talons and feathers, and I crouched low with Eos in my arms. I could feel them as they flew over us and dove at Baphomet. I looked up under the torrents of feathers watching Baphomet roll to one side, losing balance briefly. Dodging the downward thrust of the Revenants’ blades, he bound to his feet, and with his own ragged claws outstretched, the Beast chopped the face and jaw of a lumbering Revenant and then ensnared a bird with his other hand, snapping its neck like a pencil.

Too many though. They crowded him, mounting the steps, rushing into overwhelm the Altar and exhaust his strength.

More and more of these ragged soldiers came barreling in, cackling lunatics catching the whiff of bloodshed.

“Canaan,” Eos whispered. “Baphomet is dealing with them. You must get to the Threads. Finish this before it’s too late.”

I stared off in the distance to the crown of the fallen statue. Eos was right. Baphomet held their attention. I had to act and fast.

“Stay here,” I said leaning her against the broken table. “I won’t be long.”

I didn’t know how exactly I’d accomplish this task, but I couldn’t hesitate any longer. I moved carefully around the table, trying to avoid the skirmish happening just a few feet away and harried by the sound of ragged flesh being ripped open and Baphomet’s growl, scurried toward the statue searching for a way up its massive head.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure moving in fast. It was Lamia, slithering up the behind me to divert my ascent.

Ignoring her, I crossed to her throne, racing faster than I ever thought possible to bridge the distance between the light and me. The wellspring of power awaited its bearer. I could feel it the closer I inched, an inheritance long denied.

I would not be kept from the glow of the Threads.

Four Revenants and several Scavengers lashed out on either side, moving hurriedly to assist the Lamia in blocking me from my path. The rapacious birds flapped and clawed at me, but I fought back swinging my fists to jar their advance. At my approach, the Revenants made a wall, but this simply spurned me to burst through them. I whirled around the pillar of flame and pushed myself up a hill of rubble. I reached out to latch onto the bottom edge of the fallen monument’s eye, scampering along for footing.

I kept slipping back to the ground, my hands slick with blood and filth while the Revenants hot on my tail closed in around me as one great scowling figure.

An anguished choir of screams echoed throughout the Omphalos. I stalled, turning, looking over my shoulder to see a Butcher heaving his large blade back and forth slashing indiscriminately through the Revenant horde. It barreled through Baphomet like a linebacker and pounded the earth beneath its feet heading straight for me. I pushed upwards on the throne, but bodies cornered me, leaving me pulled at by a second front of the living dead pawing at my heels. It was a sick sort of game and passed the time until the Butcher’s blade would find me and hack me and the others into grisly pieces, our lacerated limbs flying into the air in rich red fountains of blood.

I glanced up and saw the light shining brightly on the stone ledge above me, but the stampeding Butcher was already hauling me down into its massive hands by my neck and shaking me roughly, the cleaver inches from my jugular. I spat into its disgusting face, a mass of boils and maggots breeding in the flaps of its skin, its leathery hands sweaty, but not enough to wriggle out of its clutches.

No, not now. I am there. Just a little more…

Lamia laughed above me, cradled in the crescent moon of the crown. Her serpentine form proved quicker and she relished this moment with utter delight, her stolen eyes wide with a new, rosy light of impending victory.

“You’ll never be worthy of their power!” She teased like a petulant child.

Give me the chance and I will make sure this time you stay dead.

“Deny it all you want boy,” she said, dripping down over the side of the statue’s brow, her carnelian eyes level with mine. “You are just as we are. Waiting to die.”

I will live through this. I have to.

The Butcher nudged his blade up under my chin resting it there and expelled a grunting of incoherent words into my face, wafting up my nostrils like the sting of kerosene.

I will not die here, not like this. I must seek the light.

A sudden quake issued into the foundations of temple, rattling Lamia from where she lounged. She lurched forward and my own grip started to give away. The Butcher stumbled backwards losing his blade in the process. The cleaver plunged into the chest of one of a Revenant male as he caught hold of my ankle, impaled and dangling there, a slaughterhouse scarecrow. I turned my eyes down to the legion of decayed hands rising up to pull me into their dead embrace. The only way to go was down, but I prayed for my fingers to withstand the strain a while longer.

Another shudder throbbed through the walls, this time followed by a mad siren calling out across the wasteland. The temple fell into silence, frozen civilians awaiting the whistle of falling bombs. The dead things looked to one another for an answer, but each was as blank as the next.

An explosion erupted throughout the temple, knocking those present onto their knees. I tumbled to the surface rolling over a hill of naked bodies. A loud hammering burst holes through the top of the damaged ceiling with unseen fists. Large comets of stone and edifice plummeted from above pelting the earth. The Revenants scattered like vermin from a flood, some crushed beneath the heavy rock, others thrown aside from the sheer force of the stone hitting the ground.

I scurried back down the bodies and rock and rushed to Eos who sat cowering unable to see where the next rock would crash. Baphomet was soaring on the air, winding around the cave-in.

Lamia looked around in confusion, her glass tail rattling. “…Impossible…”

I clutched Eos tight and followed Lamia’s amazement. Her hands slid up to cover her mouth as a dark shadow fell over her stark visage.

Then Omphalos herself was swallowed in it.

The skies were alive with hundreds upon hundreds of purple and gold birds, funneling into the Omphalos through the gaping holes of the ceiling. The winged creatures formed a maelstrom within the temple, an electrically charged tempest of winds permeating and impelled by the pumping of brilliant wings.

The heavens descended, sweeping through the chamber, blasting the Revenants backwards with a seismic jolt. Currents of purple and gold energy flashed from the uproar and shot out like javelins into the undead masses. The static surge tinged the air in blood and magic, sending the filthy creatures in all directions.

I fumbled to stand upright, disbelieving my own eyes as the funnel of birds touched ground and began to draw inwards, manifesting itself into the shape of a man. The purple and gold wove itself into the mystical embroidery of a sleek black long coat, smooth and expertly tailored to conform to the figure’s lithe and leanly muscled form. Pale hands emerged from the sleeves, delicate fingers brewing with power.

The birds gathered at the figure’s neck and twisted into the shape of a shrouded hood. A masked head emerged from the darkness framed in feathery black hair. The mask the figure wore was the most revelatory thing about it: a decadent Petruccio carnival mask patchworked in burgundy, white, and gold and black. It lay across the figure’s face masking only the eyes, nose and forehead. The remains of the face were obscured in shadow with only the slightest indication of features beneath.

The eyes ignited in gold flames behind the bird-like mask.

And though he was much changed than the last time I saw him, it was still Cloak.

He strode forward, resolute and powerful on the exhaust of Furies. The remaining birds flittered about and steered their bodies into the folds of his coat, absorbed into the living shadow. Globes of purple energy orbited his form daring the dead things and the foul birds to test his patience.

Cloak stood before the amazed audience and stretched out his arms like a conductor preparing to lead the opening note of an overture.

Another figure peeked out from behind my shadow’s blazing coat: a familiar little girl with wide ever-changing eyes peeking from behind her own carnival mask. She toted an old, rusted wire basket full of Oneiroion blossoms in one hand, and in her other her monk’s spade humming and a glow with fire.

“Canaan!” Ember exclaimed, waving at me, white moths flittering around her small frame. “I found your shadow! See!”

I expected Icarus Canto to enter the fold with another dramatic entrance, but he and his tuning forks of doom were nowhere to be found.

“The time has come, my young Architect,” Cloak announced, his voice of many filling the temple with the command and presence of an entire legion. “You must claim the binds of your lineage, for I have arrived as promised, to see it done.”

KATABASIS (PART FIVE)

2010-12-03T00:53:00.000-08:00

V. WING & CLAW

Lamia swung her elongated arm down to cleave my face, and for a split second as the hot rush of air passed over me I thought I’d give in to her at last. But something within clicked into place and sprang to life. Baphomet’s hand shot out and caught her by her wrist. Honey trickled from the eternal wounds and gummed his fingers, but he was in charge now. He rose up and stood, renewed of resolve and purpose. She gaped frantically and swung with her other hand, but he deflected and rounded on her suddenly, spinning her and pinning both arms around her back in a whirlwind of glass and feathers.

A transformation began to take hold of him. And it wasn’t the Craft working the gears. He no longer required the black blood of the Craft to protect him. He was a living weapon in the flesh.

His hands and legs lengthened, lycanthropic and strong. I could feel these changes pulsing in my body, psychic echoes shuddering through my nervous system. His face reconstructed itself into a guise much like the Rhylian who stood nearby, his animal eyes hungry for war. I wanted nothing more than to join him and oblige them all with bloodshed.

Baphomet was a living monument of stone and steel. He was a winged mongoose strangling a snake. I felt the power of the Beast and Man churning within, amassed into one perfect being, stoic, and immovable as a juggernaut, much to the gathering’s dismay.

Baru, the coward stepped back, his lime green eyes souring with astonishment. He cowered behind Rhada Khar and slinked off into the dark before carving a path through the Revenants who surrounded the whole of the Altar.

“Baru,” the Lamia whimpered. “Baru, where are you going?”

He did not call after her and instead turned to run, the coward. His green eyes drained of their fortitude and lost in the dark.

Baphomet jerked Lamia’s arms up and pressed his lips to her ears.

“You wanted the beast, here I am.”

“It’s alright,” she wheezed. “I have one of my own.”

Baphomet anticipated her next move, but she proved more adept in her hideous form than he was yet in his. Her mosaic tail whipped out and ensnared Baphomet at the waist before thrusting him to the ground. I slid across the floor and gathered Eos into my arms as the two warriors clashed.

“Child,” she said stroking my hair. “I’m afraid I’m not long for this world.”

“Hold on, Eos,” I whispered into her tangled mane. “It’s nearly over. I can feel it.”

Baphomet staggered to control his new limbs as the Butcher heaved his blade over his head and hammered it down toward his heaving chest. I watched the blade’s arced descent and before I knew what was happening, Baphomet was springing back on his hands and kicking the blade backwards knocking it out of its bearer’s hand and thrusting his fists into the Butcher’s keg-like chest. He looked at what he’d done as the blade bit noisily into the stone floor, gazing at his paw-like hands riveted by his skilful execution.

Rhada Khar stepped forward, bearing his mace against his shoulder, his lips sly with a wolf’s grin. “A great warrior you might have made, Landwalker. It is a shame we will never find out.”

The Rhylian set upon Baphomet with a mighty blow of his mace straight into his chest. Baphomet’s body flew overhead and tumbled down the altar steps like a bowling ball rolling into the Revenant mob that looked on in unwavering confusion.

The angelic beast shook off the Rhylian’s lucky strike and hopped to his feet, bouncing back with surprising agility. Baphomet fumbled slightly, blood pooling from the wound in his chest.

He was stronger, that much was true, but still assuredly mortal.

The Revenant’s parted a path as Rhada Khar descended the steps, his weapon poised once more for a killing blow.

Lamia slid behind him, strutting on the end of her tail.

“Poor little Beast. The true Architect could never be bested by his own creations. Pathetic.”

“Don’t worry, bitch,” Baphomet roared. “When I’m finished with him, I’m coming for you.”

Rhada Khar charged forward, and suddenly the entire temple shook violently from a force outside. It rocked the Rhylian off his feet and seeing the momentary distraction Baphomet used it to his advantage and advanced on his enemy, charging up the steps with startling momentum and barreled into the beast like a shockwave. Baphomet struck home. Rhada Khar fell back into the hard edge of the step behind him. The Rhylian swung his mace in the fall, but Baphomet dodged him deftly, launching himself into a somersault that pitched the winged acrobat several steps above the warrior.

Powerful as Rhada Khar was, he lacked the alacrity Baphomet acquired.

His face bore a grimace of shame. Shame he would have to rectify, for he was nothing if not an honorable opponent.

When he had composed himself and assumed his warrior’s stance he clutched his mace with both hands.

“You only aggravate me, little one,” he taunted. “I encourage you to show me something new.”

Rhada Khar bounded up the flight of stairs exuding his authority with grand flourishes of his mace. The glass like quality of Baphomet’s nails extended into bear claws. He had little need for a sword to contend with the warrior beast. He was the weapon afterall. He possessed hands more than capable of carving Rhada Khar’s face from his body and make a mess of his noble form with all the zeal of a true, uninhibited monster.

But Rhada Khar knew something of battle and monsters. It was there in his eyes, studying his opponent, timing his attacks before landing them. He swung and parried and moved with greater speed and intensity. He had held back before finding the Craft easy prey, but now he was threatened. And the others, the lingering dead things offered him assistance, crowding Baphomet, pushing at him to keep him off balance. Baphomet shoved back, stealing one of their blades as Rhada Khar swung. Steel met mettle and brawn and Baphomet used the blade more as a shield than weapon, deflecting the Rhylian’s heavy handed thrusts in between utilizing the claws of his free hand to slice into the unprotected portions of his large body.

Rhada Khar was relentless, a machine of muscle and skill that Baphomet could barely keep up with once he found his stance. Where he was brawn, the Craft was quick and agile, more cat and wolf than man now.

I’d never experienced that kind of command over my body. So long I had been a corpulent sloth and now witness to Baphomet’s power, although untrained in its elegance, I was jealous. I wanted to make that power my own.

They battled up and down the stairs, dividing the air with each swing, nearly missing one another’s heads, but landing them here and there into the living corpses as they intervened. The blade drove into one’s shanks, severing a leg, and Rhada Khar’s hammer bashed one in the back of the skull, eyes and teeth flying.

They raged each eager to test the limitations of the other. It was becoming a game. He’d land a powerful strike and Baphomet would return it with as much force. One moment Baphomet was on top and the next Rhada Khar was bearing down on Baphomet with his heel into his neck. Blood rushed to Baphomet’s face as he fought to wrestle the beast from on top of him.

I had seen this position one too many times, pinned to the earth while someone else took control of me. But this was my soul. My soul and the Craft fighting for me, fighting so that I might live. Had I ever been that strong in all of my life? Had I ever truly known what it meant to be in complete control of myself?

“Is this all you’ve got,” Baphomet sputtered and snarled, gripping Rhada Khar’s ankle in an attempt to lift him off of him. “Made in the Architect’s image. What a joke!”

The Rhylian’s eyes widened, insulted to no end and lifted his foot to split his enemy’s skull against the white marble steps.

As the first free breath entered Baphomet’s lips, he rolled out of the way and sideswiped his armored heel. The Rhylian took a step forward to catch him off guard, but Baphomet was already clambering to his feet. He rounded on the beast-man, landing quick jabs, mostly at his snarling face.

Blood flew in all directions as Baphomet lashed out again and again, upsetting Rhada Khar’s supernatural prowess. It was all he could do to ensure the Rhylian did not get an upper hand again.

Rhada Khar lifted his mace with both hands and I caught sight of his exposed shoulder. A piece of plating around his pauldron had come loose during their skirmish, and I spoke through my mind to Baphomet, warning him of this advantage.

The thought clicked into Baphomet’s mind with a smile of recognition. He whipped around and lunged at Rhada Khar grabbing hold of his chest like a gorilla climbing a tree and ripped at the metal with his teeth, tearing the plate away. He drove his mouth into his thick, icy blue fur and Rhada Khar roared like a wounded lion. He grappled Baphomet by the back of his neck and used the pummel of his mace to punch him in the face before forcing the Craft to the floor.

“Stop playing with your food and end him, Rhada Khar.” Lamia called down after her servant.

Rhada Khar staggered, gripping his shoulder, blood spraying from the wound. His arm holding his mace fell to his side, the brunt of it bouncing against the stairs. With sword and claw, Baphomet darted around the Rhylian and pitched himself onto his back, sliding the flat end of the blade against his throat. He pushed it against his larynx, choking him. His mace fell from his fingers and he struggled for Baphomet’s arm, spinning him around in attempt to shrug the mad gryphon on his back off, but Baphomet reined back and found purchase under his breastplate. He clung to him, driving his knees into his back, slowly forcing him to submit.

The Rhylian budged against him, reaching back again to seize him, and as he did so, Baphomet dropped down the taller creature’s back out of its reach and caught Rhada Khar’s arm wrangling it around his back and brought it up with a nasty crack. Baphomet then let his feet touch the ground and kicked his foot against the back of his knee and I cringed as I heard a second distinct break cripple him.

Rhada Khar toppled. A weary Goliath. Baphomet claimed his mace from where it lay, unwieldy and awkward. He stood over him, the end of the mace dangling pendulous over his defeated face.

“Kill me, I am your quarry and will not beg for mercy. I am ashamed.”

Baphomet looked down at him, into the proud creature’s eyes and found his resolve steadfast. He would accept death because it was his nature, his honor and creed.

I understood then why he had been so stalwart in his fealty to Lamia and Baru. They were his lord and masters as the Architect had once been. He was simply doing what he was told, and to that end could not forsake his duty, be it for ill purposes or not.

Baphomet dropped the mace and let it clatter down the stairs.

“I will not kill you, Rhada Khar. That’s not what any of this is about.”

He stared at Baphomet curiously. He had not expected this turn of events.

“But you are my better,” he said almost begging, his wolfish eyes searching for some aspect of reason in the merciful Craft that he could identify with. “You deserve to end my life.”

“Not today,” Baphomet said taking the long walk back up the stairs, leaving his enemy to his cumbersome thoughts.

Jackie greeted Baphomet with fire in her eyes as he approached the top of the stairs. I took Eos and positioned us on the other side of the broken table letting these two gods face off.

“You’re all alone now, Jackie. It’s over.” I said holding the beaten, fragile Oracle. I could feel her singing into my chest, her little songs tickling my skin.

Lamia smiled and clapped her hands together mockingly.

“Have you understood nothing? I am never alone…”

KATABASIS (PART FOUR)

2010-12-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

IV. SONS OF FLIES

I looked into her eyes. Clever eyes plotting some new unthinkable horror all the while I lay there a goldfish awaiting the final flush.

She dismounted from Baphomet’s torso and slid onto the floor, her skin perspiring golden beads of sweat. Baru attended her delicately like a perverse rendition of a father to his daughter.

“You felt me too, didn’t you, Canaan?” She asked, her harlot lips wet and tinged in Baphomet’s blood. “I felt you, both of you, deep inside. Exceptional. I’d love to slither inside of you sometime and open you up.”

I didn’t answer her. I just looked upon her questioningly, trying to assess who she was. I didn’t recognize her anymore. She was no more the mousy girl, the sullen girl, eyes to the pavement, paper flowers in her locker than I was a little boy climbing pretend mountains.

I looked at Baphomet’s paralyzed body and I realized that I had to do something. I stood up and approached her, shrugging off the arms that fought to restrain me. The Revenants watched in amazement as I braved the Lamia’s wrath.

“This isn’t you, you know. I know who you really are. The more you try to hide, the more I see you.”

She tilted her head to one side and smiled. “What on Nous are you talking about?”

The Butcher at my back encroached and Rhada Khar steadied his mace in his hands, both calculating my distance to their mistress.

Baru watched uneasy, fingers atwitter and his attention focused.

“You don’t remember, do you,” I persisted. “You don’t remember what it was like before because they’ve changed you so much. The way you tried to change me.”

“Stay back,” she shuddered, a slow creep of fear on her tongue.

Baru drew close studying me.

“Lethe Vitae, perhaps? Snubbed you out good, didn’t they.”

She put her servants between us, watching me, fearless among them. “You know nothing about me.”

“I do. I was there the day it happened. The day you died.”

“That’s enough,” Baru wheezed. “You will trouble my Lady no more.”

He motioned for the Butcher behind me, and the creature lurched forward to claim me by the wrists. I let him, but did not relent in my attempt to call the Lady of Sores out of her skin.

“I read your diary. I know about the boys and the dreams. I know what you gave your life for.”

The Lamia hid behind the Rhylian, clutching at his strong furry arms to conceal her, like a little child hiding behind their parent in the presence of a stranger.

“Say the word, my Lady,” Rhada Khar announced from his baritone chest. “I will preserve your honor.”

“No need for that, Rhada Khar,” Baru said stepping forward. “His warden here shall dispatch the worm forthright.”

I felt pressure in my joints. The Butcher began to tug, his wind-up mechanics sputtering to life excited to dismember me.

“Jackie,” I said trying to wrestle my way from the shambling hulk. “What happened to you? This isn’t you!”

Her face twitched, peeking out from behind the Rhylian’s protection. I could read in her face a faint recognition of the name, but not its significance. She shook out her tousled hair and reasserted herself with a penetrating gaze.

“You speak as if you know me, but you are as blind as this wretched filth at your feet. You’ll find no reason here.”

I cast my eyes down to Eos who lay in a crumpled fetal position, a bloodied stack of bones.

Lamia turned from me and returned to Baphomet’s immobilized body.

“Jackie, please! Listen to me. I’m sorry you died. I’m sorry we weren’t friends. We should have been. I mourned you. Mourned you without even really knowing you. Clinging to a memory of us dancing. Don’t you remember?”

She looked back over her shoulder, her eyes softened. Her face was now a golden mask of wonder. She shifted her torso and searched for meaning in my plea, slithering through the wall of her servants. She approached me, a mousy girl with a frown on her lips, and the flames in her eyes soft embers.

She hadn’t always been this death goddess, she was a girl, and I could see her trying to break through the scales and the armor surrounding her.

“No one understood us. No one heard us when we were screaming.”

“No,” she said, her domineering voice losing its splendor, meek and fragile, staring around the room anxiously. “Alone, always alone in the dark screaming. Dreaming of dark angels and silver cities.”

“But that’s not true, my dear,” Baru said sneaking up from behind Lamia like an old spider and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “I heard you, didn’t I,” he asked, nuzzling his head against her dense curls. “I heard your cries and I answered.”

Lamia’s eyes flashed vacantly. “You did….You saved me….Brought me over…”

The light behind Baru’s monocle flared like a flashlight beam in a dark hallway. And I knew then who the real snake was in this dark Eden.

You and Baphomet are not the only puppets here.

I pushed back against the Butcher and jammed my foot into its booted stubs, breaking free. I pitched myself forward, stumbling over stone and flesh to reach the girl before she vanished back into the guise of her shadow.

I fell to my knees in front of her and gripped hold of her waist like a remorseful lover who had scorned her. “I know you’re in pain. I know you’re still in the dark, but it doesn’t have to be this way. We can make it right again.”

“Foolish boy,” Baru snarled, sliding out from behind her to thrust his foot in my face, kicking me backwards. “She is mine!”

Jackie startled by this interaction moved aside, her face twisted with grief.

Was I breaking through?

Could I have done more?

I sprang up to challenge the wizened monster, but he was quicker than his frail body suggested and fell on me. He lifted me up by my throat with a surprising expression of strength. His dark smock turned misty, the airy form of his shadow self manifesting, exalting before me with an arrogant display of control.

“You do not comprehend what is set in motion. I have waited for this moment longer than you can know and I will not be denied by an ignorant child!”

I hung there in his clutches, kicking at him, flailing my arms in between motions to unhinge his fingers from around my neck. He could snap me apart without a second thought; bend me into an unrecognizable shape with sheer will alone. I waited for it, listening for the crack of bone and the tear of flesh.

“You did this to her, you monster,” I sputtered. “Her blood is on your hands.”

“Yes, but do you really think it was that hard to manipulate the damned?” he asked pulling me close to his face.

I could taste his putrescent breath through the cruel mechanics of his breathing apparatus. He pulled it aside and grinned through a horrid mouth of slimy icicles.

“She’s not the first fly to stumble into my web…just the first of them who decided to stay.”

Like snapshots tumbling out of a photo album, I saw a flash of images slide in my mind with a dagger’s ease. They revealed themselves to me, others, like me, like her, huddled in dark corners, some of their names running off my lips:

Devon Sammon, 15. Colorado.

He took pills behind a church.

Violet Isley, 13. Arkansas.

She was found hanging in her parents’ garage.

Paul Barnes, 17. Wyoming.

Slit his wrists in his bathroom tub after his father had beaten him so hard one half of his face was beyond recognition and required facial reconstruction, but he never looked the same.

Susan Savage, 15. Louisiana.

Shot herself in her father’s car.

Charlie Rice, 16. Oklahoma.

Took a gun into his school and slaughtered 14, including two of the football players who had bullied him to insanity. He took his life in the school cafeteria after writing the words: To Illmatar I venture, to Illmatar I become…

Jackie Phillips, 15. Texas.

Took her life in the girl’s bathroom of her highschool. She kept a diary littered with the phrase: “Take me to Illmatar. Take me to Illmatar…”

The list went on and on, names and faces and aftermath. Baru had visited them, manifesting through some form of transmission or another, calling to them in extreme moments of doubt and fear. He fed upon their nightmares and trapped them, little rabbits all; the wolf at their doors.

Through a dense fog I heard the flutter of wings and a man surfaced on the other side, appearing at each of these horrific scenes. I witnessed Detective Clemens at the scene of these crimes scouring to make sense of the senseless deaths. Murders for they were murders, instrumented by a madman and set into motion by preying on the weaknesses of innocents. I saw him in hotel rooms fighting sleep, losing sleep. He spent hours searching in different cities, on different streets struggling to understand the deaths of children and how they were connected and intertwined.

I saw him at a desk covered in photographs and maps and books. I saw him asking me questions in a classroom. I saw him holding me outside of a football field.

Detective Clemens, the handsome collector of case files and photographs. It was as though I were at his window, staring into his life.

A dollhouse perspective.

And then I saw Jackie in the girl’s bathroom, facing the mirror. Her hair was tied back into a long ponytail. She looked beautiful, in a sad, desperate sort of way, but she was smiling. A smile that suggested longing. But it was not her reflection she saw staring back at her. The city of Illmatar in all its former glory appeared to her, calling out to her in a song of light and glass. Her living shadow was there waving her on, coaxing her to take the box cutter to her wrists, to cross over to the other side of the world.

Baru had tricked her, used her for his own dark purposes and I couldn’t know to what extent those purposes would lead, but there with his hand at my throat and the awful truth glaring at me within his eyes, I felt guilty. A guilt that choked me harder than his scaly hands. She fell into my world like Alice, and this was no longer the Wonderland this wicked Mad Hatter had offered her. She was trapped, a Queen of Hearts; a Queen of Blood.

Baru shucked me to the ground, pulling the plug on his revelations.

I clutched my throat, sore and hoarse, and shambled back out of the reach of his grimace.

“Baru…Why? Why would you do this to those kids?”

“Death is such an easy thing to come by when you’re mortal. A Theurgian is forever, even beyond the life of an Architect. And for what? To serve? To sing praise to a being of such power that he eventually dies off anyways, only to do it all over again? Bah! I’ve had enough of eternity. I’m ready to know how it all ends. Make me dust and send me across the black of space.”

I stood up and dared to walk past him, my eyes darting to Jackie who stared blankly into her own hands. She removed her gauntlets and threw them to the ground. She ran her long, clawed fingers over her wrists, the open cuts continuously flowing with rich honey.

“Help me, Jackie. Set Baphomet free and let us leave this place. Please.”

“Enough!” Lamia protested, balling her fingers into a tight fists drawing blood.

Her armored hand shot out and a blast of energy shuddered through her body and sprang out from her fingertips, knocking Baru and myself off our feet.

She appeared before the two of us, reclining on the length of her tail, eyes dark with fury, the innocence piercing through the golden mask, lost again under a scowl of an angry Valkyrie.

“I am the Lamia Thanatas, the Lady of Sores, and I will not be compelled by lies. Whoever I might’ve been before is nothing compared to who I am now. Nothing! The hour is mine, my destiny. And now it’s time to give over to yours.”

She opened her mouth, unhinged in a frozen scream, but made no sound. Her eyes bulged, insanity filling each pupil in dilated frenzy. Her head flung back, hair flaring black fire, her fangs exposed like tiny daggers. She spread out her arms casting them aside as an angler does his pole, and widened the width of her fingers. They did not stop stretching until they spread like the pleats of a Chinese fan, the length of the limbs extending grotesquely. Her arms craned upwards, the bones sliding like a fireman’s ladder beyond their limits. I could see the constrictions under the skin, rapid convulsions trembling to pronounce her reach. Her veins climbed the length of her tree-branch arms, fleshy ropes moving visibly through her pale flesh and clotting into the ends of her fingers. She spread them out above her head a malevolent canopy glistening with the glossy foliage of long, savage claws.

Tiny spirals of tempered gold and red curled around her hands in sheens of painted, autumn leaves set on fire.

The dead girl was now a snake with the arms of a mantis and the face of a mad goddess, bent and sliding her long claws together in a macabre flutter, like the hum of cicadas carving out of their summer shells.

She purred like an engine as she thrust her elongated arms downwards, the flaming hands darting straight for the black hole in Baphomet’s chest.

There was not enough time to brace myself against the assault. I pitched forward, cringing from the pain. My insides filled with heat shocking my nervous system to the core with wave after wave of fire. The same fire that spilled into Baphomet’s chest cavity like a match struck in a gas main.

The hole in his chest was now an inferno, a black vacuum scorched open, receiving every inch of her in a twisted form of intercourse.

My eyes welled with blinding, burning tears as she weaved inside of Baphomet – inside of me - smiling all the while, her face blurry through my tears.

This was fun for her, a game she would not easily lose. Her flaming fingers burrowed deep, searing new wounds, singeing my internal organs in a slow burn with all the flowing, pumping pain of a lake of fire.

I wanted anything just to scream, just a single yelp to express the anguish under the persistent heat ripping through me and Baphomet. Her fingers dug and pillaged, excavating new canals in his body, baptizing my living soul in her unholy fires, preparing him for her version of our future. I could feel the healing blood boiling, threnodies of steam blasting inside as it strived to coagulate together and mend what she sundered with nuclear power under the skin.

“Pain is inevitable. It is an unavoidable side effect of truth. So thrive upon it now. A thousand tomorrows of searching for peace, can never compare to an eternity of sensual screams.”

She was not speaking to me at this point. She was commanding her voice to reach the Craft like a talented songstress deep into the acoustics of Baphomet’s body.

“Awaken, sweet Beast…I bring you the kind of serenity you’ve never known.”

I could feel the creature inside of Baphomet, its very cells somehow connected to my own. It was not simply resting inside of him, a slumbering animal in his bowels, but beneath the skin he wore. It was the muscles and the veins and the blood and tissue. It was visceral down to the very marrow of his bones, and it would always be down to its last speck of hair or sliver of fingernail. And it was yearning to come to life with all of its ferocity intact to exact the same heated power that had possessed Baphomet when he nearly killed me. I could feel that power now and though Baphomet couldn’t move, it continued to build through me.

It spoke to my blood. It knew me and stirred in the ends of my fingers. All around me a cacophony of chanting and Scavenger cries tried to push into me and annihilate me utterly with their shrill, repugnant cries, but my body - the voice in my blood and the fire would not let me go.

My eyes darted to the roof. More and more of the Morag Scavengers flew down into the gash in the temple, trumpeting their mad arrival into this sacred place; dozens of sallow beaks perched on their flamingo legs along the outside projections of the grand altar like grackles on a wire.

Pull the trigger, I told myself. Just pull the trigger and let it all go. They are going to do what they want. There is nothing I can do to stop them. Let me incinerate on this upheaval of stone.

But I couldn’t give in, not after all of this. Baphomet had not journeyed this far for me to fail him now. I had to fight, for the both of us. Even powerless to move, I had to will myself to shut out the pain, to find some way to conjure the power laying dormant within Baphomet and wake it up. But the mental paralysis remained dominant with no equal in his mind. I pushed against him a simple twig battering against a wall of stone.

I fought through the pain boiling my innards, the juices rupturing and scalding the lining of my stomach and in between the gnashes of pain and my own indescribable torment as I weathered against this shared immolation, I heard a voice sneaking through the white noise:

“We will do such wonders together…you and me…”

Baphomet?

“Brother…let this happen…No one has to know…Let me come alive…”

No, I thought to myself, the outside of my skin crawling with chills, while inside I burned. Simu’la Re!

It was in the snow of my mind, a new stronger symbiosis stirring in a fusion of glass splinters and rusty nails churning in a blender. He, if personification is appropriate, moved from some dark vault inside Baphomet and rose up inside of me.

I could feel both myself and this new entity undergoing some fit of rearrangement like the shifting of a fetus in the womb, but Simu’la Re was there, making contact. He pushed his way through my thoughts with mass reserves of strength.

The more the Lamia roamed deeper with her sick crane game, the more room Simu’la Re had to infiltrate my body, intruding upon the tiny spark between me and Baphomet, using it like a bridge. I could feel the cold twinge of his essence, an abhorrent chill fusing to my heart, my mind. A torrential deluge of awful thoughts and morbid urges flashed before me as he bubbled to the surface of my being.

He lurked inside of Baphomet stretching his influence over his limbs like arctic floes, swooshing down to take over what was so recently fortified. The influence spread infecting me as if I were a body within a body within another. Jekyll and Hyde sharing the same skin, but that skin housed three distinct skeletons now.

“Let it happen…Brother…Sons of flies we are…we are…one and the same…”

As the entity spoke, Lamia’s fingers pierced some sacred seal of flesh concealing the Craft and wrestled it from its niche, tugging at it voraciously, her nails becoming like hooked prongs towing it up the burrows of Baphomet’s chest cavity, her indomitable heat stinging my insides like swarms of wasps. It was jerked up his belly and I was sure that upon its emergence one or both of us would implode or be flayed inside out.

Imagine a sheet being pulled back from a newly made bed or if that sheet were your flesh on your bones and someone came by and began to tug at it, slowly peeling it up and away from where it was meant to remain. It was like that only worse, because I knew how excruciating it had to be for Baphomet, but feeling the pull inside my own body, watching the skin rise on my chest…

This was rape on a whole other level, a violent thrusting in reverse, pulling me inside out, outside in. I was being unearthed, roots and all pulled by meddling hands out of the gaping hole, peaking through the brim of my battered chest.

I saw it.

I watched it writhe knowing its face fixed with horror, the same as my own. The creature erected from the fissure gnashed wildly at the air, while the whore gleaming above me choked it at the neck, wrenching it loose little by little. Her obscure arm began to retract, slowly resizing itself and returning to a normal length, but her strength did not wane. The creature appeared as I had seen it in other dreams, but an infantile version of the thing that had stalked Baphomet in the forest of bones. It wept like a newborn, covered in muck and pus, and on its back thick ropes of flesh wound into its spine connecting itself somewhere inside Baphomet. The union was indeed an umbilical forging of host and symbiote. It was mine as Baphomet was mine. A part of me I could not be without, made flesh and visible, and it was in so much pain.

Baru approached this sick display touting a decanter of the Lethe Vitae, its eerie blue substance pulsating in sinister neon. He ladled the mess over the Craft, bathing it and Baphomet in a lithium flood. The cold chill of it seized the Craft and it shrieked, ripping through my heart.

“I’ll erase you my love,” Lamia said throttling the Craft’s neck. It choked, forced to swallow the liquid and it flowed into me, running over my insides, taking residence into my veins like Drano flushing out everything that was me.

I couldn’t take it. The way it cried, like a baby, a child inside of me, fighting for its life, rejecting its abortion, and I the powerless mother/father allowing it to happen.

I am useless. I am insignificant to believe in a destiny as easy as this.

But then, I heard my voice in the icy blue sea calling back in response:

What if wasn’t? What if we don’t have to feel this pain? What if just this once we truly believed in all of this?

Baphomet….

I could hear him. He was rising, even as the witch and her gremlin sought to silence him again forever.

Both his and the voice of the Craft echoed into my mind:

One day you will bleed fire.

And I believed.

Against all other intrusions, the cries of the Craft, the corrupting of my soul and the smiles of Baru and Lamia, even the perversity of the mob at my back, I pushed my will into Baphomet’s and stabbed into each other’s mind and with our honed focus we formed one single thought:

THOUGH THE DARK IS DEEP I WILL PURIFY WITH WHITE LIGHT!

Simu’la Re was the first to respond, enveloping our insides like a blade into a sheath, but we concentrated.

We couldn’t afford not to.

We had work to do.

Think! Think damn you, stupid, fat fuck, think! The anger fuels me.

It gave me coal to stoke the flames.

Bleed fire, Baphomet roared. Bleed fire.

Yes, I replied. Fight fire with fire. Show her how to really burn!

I envisioned flames. I pictured houses burning down. Photographs of my family, of my friends, of everything I could lose if I didn’t survive this and burn inside myself. Take that fire which spurns my hatred and turn it inward, make it mine.

I saw THE BASTARD raping me. I saw the boys at school calling me The Beast, and I was a beast, a mighty, flaming behemoth set to crush all under my trampling feet and the shadow of Baphomet’s black wings.

I am the fire, we thought as one. I am the kindling flame. I am a volcano, ashes, lava flows, consuming everything within.

Lamia’s ferocious eyes met mine with grave surprise. I was smiling. She witnessed it in my eyes. And she was afraid.

“No.” she winced. “Baru? Something’s wrong. This isn’t what I saw. This isn’t my prophecy! Stop this! I am so close – must have more time!”

“You saw only what you wanted to see, you black hearted she-beast,” I heard Eos call out, her weakened voice summoning up from the floor. “Did you truly believe the stars would commune the future to the corrupted likes of you?”

Lamia’s screams sent the Omphalos into an uproar. Her intrusive hands fixed inside of me, and together Baphomet and I sent out a wave of white fire through the ice and flame she unleashed and sent it crashing back at her. Our thoughts rushed into a single stroke of fire and retribution, and the instant it stabbed into her monstrous hand, she howled madly, true pain crippling her lust for agony.

Thick white tears coursed down my face, the powerful blood of the Craft boiling inside like vats of acid. Baphomet foamed at the mouth, the blaze channeled up into his throat bursting through the binds of her honeyed muzzle like a rabid dog.

But it was not enough. Lamia’s resolve was relentless. She defied the anguish and continued to wrench the creature from Baphomet’s chest. The Craft, sly and quick recoiled, slipping from her burnt fingers, but she wouldn’t give up the chase. She’d burn her fingers, her entire arm to a withered stump to sever the Craft from me if she had to.

Rhada Khar and the Butcher drew in close to their ailing mistress, raising their intimidating weapons steady, prepared at a moment’s notice to enact revenge.

Baru stood over the Craft continuing to pour the very last ounce of Lethe Vitae into the opening of Baphomet’s chest. His cold green eyes were closed and he was murmuring under his breath. Magic flowed under his fingers, and his form grew dark with clouds of smoke rising to assist the Lamia in her deed.

Already the cascade of Simu’la Re’s life force was seeping through Baphomet’s chest like a busted cyanide capsule into the casks of his lungs choking him, disrupting our psychic connection. He evaded the flame, a sneaky sort of spectre, and though the Lethe Vitae evaporated in our living blaze, I could feel Baphomet’s awareness being swallowed.

I closed my eyes and funneled my mind into Baphomet, pursuing him with fire through the corridors of my soul, making it harder and harder for him to manifest. But for all my willful fury, my hold was weakening. The strain of keeping both of them at bay proved too much.

Unable to rage with our cleansing wildfire any longer I stifled back against the rocky wreckage, staring at Lamia’s radiant face beaming with hungry victory as she plunged her fingers once more into Baphomet’s body to wrench the Craft loose.

I had become impotent, disappearing into darkness.

Numb to the world closing in around me, my stare meandered towards the great statue’s severed head. I could feel both Simu’la Re’s and Lamia’s fingers crawling all over my soul, molesting me in their desperate frenzy to regain control over Baphomet.

My eyes clouded in a fog, drifting to the pillar of green fire and the dancing sword at the center tirelessly spinning. Breeze was growing dark, the surface of the shining blade shifting from diamond to onyx. The stronger the darkness seemed to gain precedence over Baphomet, the darker the gleaming blade radiated.

Was this how the Citadel’s mirrored walls were corrupted, suffused in shadow like the glass boy’s diorama and then his own flesh before it turned to dust in my hands?

As my eye lids descended, something glittering in the distance caught my eye.

I turned my gaze to the statue beyond the pillar of flame, lingering on the statue’s immense former beauty; its sculpted cheeks and polished eyes now cracked and weary by its crumbling disfigurements, and up onto its enormous crescent shaped crown.

A second glance seared me with sheer astonishment.

Upon its highest diadem, I saw the face of the glass boy and his mask of light glimmering on the statue’s crown. At the light’s first distant touch glinting longingly against my eyes, the quelling fire within me stoked ablaze once more, furious as ever.

There caught between light and shadow, the boy glimmered, a radiant jewel shining only for me.

“My light has shattered. You must find your own now. Find the light…”

There upon the mantle of the shattered statue, the light lay right above my eyes.

And it wasn’t just a boy made of glass that I saw peering down at me, but the very thing I required to end the Lamia’s tyranny:

The Threads of the Demiurge.

And the little glass boy was showing me the way.

They were hardly within reach, from where I lay, but there, gleaming and waiting for my hands to embrace their power we discovered one another. My hand rose from the rocks stretching out to wrap my fingers around that distant glow, straining to nourish its light in my palm and never let it go.

My heart expanded with such warmth.

Somewhere in the vacancy of this significant moment I heard the Lamia groan, “This must not be! Why is this happening?”

I rose up off the floor watching as fire blazed, spilling out of Baphomet’s body. Tidal waves of flame crashed into bone and spirit.

He could no longer be denied.

“You can’t do this…” Simu’la Re blubbered like a child somewhere within our mental crawlspace. “It’s not fair, so close…Do you think you can hide from what you are?”

I heard him, but I did not concern myself with his ranting. My eyes, Baphomet’s mind, and our outstretched hands sought only the light shoving the squealing voice of Simu’la Re back down into the oblivion from which it was wrought.

The white noise clouding my head lifted, shrinking back somewhere in my brain like wisps of smoke twisting into vapor.

Suddenly, Lamia in a fit withdrew her sizzled hands and snaked around the table where Baphomet lie rearing back to swipe down at me, her face twisted with hate. Her unexpected departure allowed a calm to break the numbing freeze around Baphomet, forcing it to withdraw. His energy was returning, the equilibrium in his limbs and mine flooding to give them back their nerve.

“So be it, little Beasts! If you won’t give me the end I crave, then I’ll just have to do it myself!”

KATABASIS (PART THREE)

2010-12-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

III. THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE GOD

I stirred, eyes opening, restless in the dark, my face to the sky. I could feel the wind streaming through my ears like airy leeches attempting to suck out the last vestiges of my mind with every wag of their tongues.

I was slumped into Baphomet’s throne. For how long I had lain there I could not account for. I had fallen into a dead faint and even as my eyes flickered with life and a foggy awareness, days or weeks could have passed and I’d not known it. I could hear voices far behind me on the highest point of the Altar of Seals. Gradually strength ebbed into my limbs and I picked myself off the throne, sluggish and dazed. Whatever Lamia had done to Baphomet and me, it was caught like water lodged in my mouth and nose.

Still, I persisted, pushing past the onyx throne and toward the edge of the landing where the main terrace would greet me and the horror I knew lay in its wake.

When I reached the top I discovered Baphomet bound to the remains of the large table that bore the runic sigils upon its once proud surface. He was alone, but I crept up slowly and place my hand against his pale shoulder. He did not stir, but slept, inert and immoveable. His black and gold wings spilled over the sides of the table, listless and limp.

Wake up, I begged. But he was deep in his submission again. Our brief epiphany in the Void was not enough to relinquish Lamia’s complete sway over him. How easily it had taken hold of me, but to restrain the might of the Craft was impressive. I hadn’t considered her reach could extend so far as to cripple a beast of myth.

I looked beyond Baphomet toward an eerie green column of fire blazing in front of the toppled head of the monolithic deity. Within the pillar of flame, a sword danced, caught in the apex and swirling madly.

Breeze…

Somehow I knew its name.

The dancing sword belonged to me….To us.

The heat coming off the green fire was cold, not warm and it filled my eyes with similar distaste.

I swayed in the face of its glow, my legs quivering. I could barely move. That was the first clue to my unease. I had no bindings strapping me to the stone as Baphomet and yet somehow being in close proximity with him left me unable to fully articulate my limbs.

I might’ve screamed out for help if I could’ve, but I could barely open my mouth. His own was covered in a muzzle of hardened amber slathered across my lips, the taste of it on my tongue like dead skin and rusty copper.

There was some kind of empathic connection to us now. Something I was unaware of that must have transferred to me during our brief interaction and our fingers touched.

Was this the Forge? Perhaps it wasn’t the violence I had anticipated might accompany the ritual as enacted within the horrid Corpsewood. I could only surmise that Baphomet’s touch was my soul trying to reassemble itself within me, but we had been disconnected again, but our mere touch left behind traces like residual energies of ghosts after someone dies. He was apart of me and I apart of him, but our union was not complete.

The marrow in my bones seemed offended by something stirring inside of Baphomet. It darkened and dampened my coherency. I thought to call out to the Craft, but realized that it no longer had sentience in that respect. It was a part of him as vital as the cells in his bloodstream.

And though I could not rouse him, the perception he had come to understand as the Craft and even his own memories were making their way through me.

Still, there was a strangeness, a constant sensation of duality inside, as though when I moved, he moved, and for several moments and I don’t know how long for sure, I had to reacquaint myself with my body as though I were a newborn staring at the wonder of my own fingers.

It didn’t help that with each movement my limbs grew heavier and I began to drift back into the world of sleep. I felt the resistance burgeoning inside of him. I had a hold on myself, but an opposing force was tugging at me, to stifle my awareness and leave me crippled, or at the very least, mentally incapacitated.

My skin shivered. I wanted to stand up, but I couldn’t. An invisible force sat on my shoulders and pinned me at the knees. A growing malaise wafted the air around me, melancholic and reeling with tiny cellular convulsions rocking in my flesh, warning me – warning us, but I remained unable to rise, to do anything except wait for it, my nervousness a thin and brittle shield. I groaned, the fumes of a venomous cesspool puckering the air flaring up my nostrils.

The death scent of the Revenants.

I did not have to feel their wet skin lush with decay to know they were there, surrounding me in the dark. They made no sound as they entered the chamber, but the air is their choir, goose-pimpling my skin with their arrival. I looked around the room from side to side, my head heavy as a boulder and straining my neck. Their plagued shapes emerged from the shadows lurking about on bloody feet consecrating the floors in their filth.

They dragged their stitched and tattered bodies to form a circle of diseased flesh and rusty blades around my bed of rocks. The filed in from either side of the chamber, rallying with violent hails, their musty breaths a mutinous charge on the air. I listened, unable to shut out the congregation of desperate sucking sounds, the sewage litanies of their mad gospels as they bent on their knees in prayer, their leaky limbs secreting black tar and lime green effluence.

The fanatic sheep sang their hymns, slouched against their ritual knives, like Christ clinging to the crucifix to Calvary, their masochistic faith impressed upon me to show their devotion dripping from sun-blistered pores, chambers of filth incensing the world around me, their hot breaths spilling from cyanic mouths. The more I attempted to block them out, or even move, the fewer choices I had in the matter.

I could do nothing but stare up at the wounded tarp of sky, listening to their songs carried through the canals in my ears far longer than the visceral visuals of their marred faces.

“THE MAGGOT PRINCE SHALL FEED THE DEAD

AND WE ARE SERVANTS TO HIS FLAWS

IN HIS HONOUR LIFE MUST BE BLED

FINAL DEATH SHALL BE OURS

HAIL SIMULARE!

BELOVED LORD OF WORMS

MAY YOUR HEART QUIET WITHIN THE HOUR

AND OUR SILENCE TO FOLLOW BE JUST AS WARM

HAIL LAMIA THANATAS!

DIVINE MISTRESS OF THE SACRED END

BEND FORTH YOUR NECKS UNWORTHY OFFERINGS

FOR WE HAVE ARRIVED SACRIFICED AND PENITENT

AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!”

The chamber filled with hundreds of Revenants, the newly arrived bearing torches illuminating the chamber with brilliant blue-green light.

The destruction of the innermost chamber of the Omphalos was exposed and no longer held the divinity I had witnessed in the dreams before its ultimate fall. Gone was the beauty of sculpted angels warring with great beasts and the gilded foundations of the Altar of Seals and its carved animals lay in rubble. The imbruement of war and the grisly reshaping of the temple into a palace from Hell had left it vandalized beyond repair. The ceiling towering over my head had once been a brilliant firmament with the eyes of the black gems, but the gems were cast aside like fallen stars, their shine cold and lifeless.

Across the mantle of the crippled deity’s crown were the words:

“BORN OF CHAOS, THE BRINGER OF DESPAIR ARISES!”

- spread across the vast, doming overhang like a sick banner Jim Jones might have relished.

The darkness deepened around me despite their torches. A chill raised the hair on my neck and my nerves grew numb. Synapses fired, bursting like Black Cat firecrackers in my hands.

Above me I caught the glimpse of a shadow, and in my mind I uttered Cloak, but this was someone else, quick and large passing over the gap in the Omphalos’ eggshell ceiling. The harsh light above exhausted, blotted out briefly, losing its aching glow and deserted me to the chamber’s own private dusk as I watched the undetermined thing slip through the ceiling’s fractured crevice like a long dark waterfall.

The Revenants bowed their heads in virtuous honor, and I swallowed hard at the sight of the shadow dripping down from the cragged overhang.

Sloping around the maimed statue was the dead girl herself.

Lamia Thanatas edged around the statue’s waist slowly, provocatively, baring her throat and groping her breasts through her formidable, albeit sensual plating of battle armor. She slid her hands down to her half-submerged pelvis to pet the gilded head of the glass serpent whose tongue must have fondled her cleft crevices to entice her to such horrors and venomous charms as she held out her arms and laughed wickedly, filling the temple with her predatory voice.

“Change is coming, Canaan. Can you feel it?” Lamia asked. Her viperous tongue on fire; her face lost in shadows. “Are you ready for the end I have prepared for the three of us? It’s going to be a lovely party.”

“I won’t let you do this,” I said, my voice little more than a cough. “This has to stop.”

“Stop? Oh no, no, no. There’s no stopping. Well there is, but not the way you imply.”

Lamia took to her throne salvaged from the severed head of the great statue, its headless body forever corrupted. She announced herself from the top of its stone helmet, shrouded in a silhouette, nothing more than a long glassy tail glittering under the purple glare and a mane of Medusa curls, lounging at the center of the mantle’s carven crescent moon whose tip split into a jagged fracture during the temple’s destruction.

“Do you like what I have done with the space,” Lamia teased, her voice tinged with witchery. “This was once the gem of the empire, a bastion from which our prayers to the high and mighty Devourer were imparted, but now it is the womb from which a new order will be erected.”

She smiled down at me puckishly. Even from her vantage, it was though she was right beside me, her sharp eyes and fangs poised to strike. She was alive with it, this sadistic joy. She draped her serpent’s tail over the crown of the statue, reclining decadently while her minions advanced to encircle me. A tall, ragged wind-up Butcher clad in a scruffy gray hood stepped forward, a brutish executioner flourishing a heavy blade about the size of a kindergartner to part a path between himself and the Revenants.

Baru the Alchemist followed with the beast-man, Rhada Khar faithfully at his side like a loyal dog. The Rhylian wore his most fearsome set of armor, a black knight serving his blind faith to these monsters. My arm ached at the sight of him, though I couldn’t understand why.

Baru sauntered behind the pillar of green fire, a vicious court jester, his face concealed behind the rusty breathing apparatus. He traded his former filthy rags for a conforming black laboratory smock, a bizarre sort of elegance to his madness.

This was a moment they ached to savor.

“I have to admit, I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Really? Why?”

“Fear. Even now I can smell it on you.”

“I’ve come to stop you and end this nightmare once and for all.”

“Such a Brave Little Toaster,” she laughed turning to Baru. “He’s darling, isn’t he? Almost a shame to do away with this much fun.”

Baru passed through the pillar of flame and stood alongside Baphomet. He placed his hands on each corner of the table and the glint in his monocled eye pulsated till all I could see was the lime green putrescence. It flooded out and at its center a black inkblot wriggled out like a swarm of flies moving outward to mask his face.

I shivered as I watched his face vanish beneath a black cowl and his form billowed out like Cloak’s.

“Curious,” he said in the Theurgian voice of many. “How trusting of that old fool you’ve been when once again he places his ward right into our hands. And not just anyone, the true Vessel.”

“I made the choice to come through his portal. Cloak just showed me the way.”

“And drops you off at the party without an escort,” the she-devil continued to taunt. “You can always dance with me.”

“Not tonight, bitch.”

“Now is that anyway to address your host,” she said feigning offense. “After all I’ve done to orchestrate and put into action your party. I’m appalled, really.”

Baru resumed his decrepit form and moved aside as the Butcher dragged its blade. The screeching of Scavenger birds called out like an overture of death parading through the holes in the ceiling to take perch among the rest of Lamia’s flock. The nasty brute carved its path towards the stone table where Baphomet lay against his will, a Mayan sacrifice.

“I am very fond of you, Canaan, and if we’re going to defile your soul and go out with a bang, I think the true Vessel should be there to watch it all come down.”

“You heartless bitch! Is there anything of Jackie left inside of you?”

“Jackie,” she frowned. “What are you talking…?”

“My lady,” Baru interrupted. “Shouldn’t we proceed with the festivities?”

It took her a moment. Her eyes flickered with something I hadn’t seen before: confusion.

Then: “Oh yes,” she squealed, shaking out her giddy hands. “But first I absolutely must complete a little project I’ve been working on.”

The Lamia snapped her fingers and waved toward someone behind me.

“Bring her out. I want her to witness this, even if she can’t see it.”

My heart sank.

Eos!

A second butcher appeared with Eos slung over his shoulders. Her mouth was gagged and her hands tied. They had stripped her down again, shaming her as the monster thrust her to the ground grunting and then kicked her brutally in the side.

I lunged forward to Eos’ aid, but another of the shambling hulks rose up behind me and loped their arms around mine.

“Do not resist. You are as much a part of this as anyone. After all, he is your soul and once we have finished disfiguring it and hand Baphomet the Threads, he will ascend to his proper place as our beloved Simu’la Re, Sustainer of Wounds and you will never feel fear or despair again. We were nearly ready when you arrived, but then you had to go and wake him from his much needed slumber. But we can adjust the dosage and redirect his path. You will join us and rejoice before the throne and the giver of the Final Death.”

Lamia slinked down the statue’s mantle and smoothed her glassy vermillion scales along the floor, her elegant body sleek and defined, a gorgeous form housing such evil. The light of the Revenants’ torches danced on the glass head of the serpent, the fangs so deep into Lamia’s pelvis I could see her wincing with delicious revelry with every swish of her hips. Her compulsion to pain was astounding, seductive and tempting.

A dark flower riddled with thorns.

She steered forward, her conniving eyes lush with the sinister desire to inflict pain and suffering. Her head lifted proudly as she stood over the fallen Oracle.

“Poor sister, it really is a shame to see you in such a dismal state,” she said clutching a fistful of Eos’ hair and bent her neck back cruelly. “It breaks my heart. Truly it does. I can honestly say that I am so happy you can’t see the shape you’re in.”

With a fluid movement of her long lustrous tail she thrust Eos back onto the ground and sashayed up beside the crumbled altar with the effortless poise of an opera diva swishing the long train of a flowing gown, and produced from a small velvet pouch hanging around her wrist, Eos’ eyes.

She rolled them in her hands like a pair of Chinese medicine balls and kissed each of them before showcasing them to her Revenant mob. The crowd cheered and the birds cawed. She beamed maliciously triumphant.

“These are the eyes of the future. The eyes of the last Oracle to grace these chambers. But now I shall take up that mantle and as the ancient rituals of prophecy demand, I shall consummate my first prophecy with our Savior!”

She brandished the eyes madly, and her dark congregation roared like a rock arena screaming for an encore.

She held the eyes on the salver of her palm and opened her free hand. Baru emerged behind his mistress and placed a slender dagger into her open hand. Delighted, Lamia glowered down at me and before I could understand her intentions drove the blade into her sockets.

Her agony rippled through the temple, an orgiastic moan that sent her minions to their knees with consummate devotion. With the Oracle’s eyes still in her opposite hand, she drove her fingers into the gouged socket and pulled out her own eye, nerves and all. She repeated this bloody act with her second and flung the mess out to the congregation as though she were passing out communion wafers.

I shuddered and had to close my eyes when she began to insert her new, stolen eyes into the wounds, her mouth emitting deeper, extended whimpers of dark passion.

Baru took the bloody dagger from her crimson fingers and replaced it with a vial of white blood.

Baphomet’s blood!

She poured the salve blindly over her hands like a lotion and then smoothed it over and inside her eye sockets, groaning as the mystical convalescence went to work to mend her wounds and with them give her stolen sight through the true Oracle’s eyes.

When it was does, she wiped her eyes clear of the red tears dribbling over her gold painted cheeks and squealed like a little girl receiving her pony.

“Yay me!” she cried out to much applause.

The temple shook with their glee.

“How do I look,” she asked Baru, batting her eyes like a Hollywood starlet.”

“Beautiful my lady, simply beautiful.”

“It just goes to show that spoiling yourself can be a good thing. Now, where were we? Oh yes. Consummation.”

She bent over, sure that I could see her newly acquired eyes swimming with stars, cosmic dusted the way Eos herself had expressed when I first encountered her within her grove. It was wrong, all terribly wrong, and as Eos lingered over Baphomet’s body with her fingers, I was reminded of the Oracle and Baphomet’s coupling, the memory of it now mine.

“There is no eternity in the shadow of the Divine Devourer’s lies,” she lifted her voice like a monstrous Evita. “The road has led you to this point and by the act of supreme divination I seek to ensure our destinies see fruition.”

She leaned close to Baphomet’s ear and whispered deftly as a night wind, “Inside, you gestate all our hopes, but I have to know, I have to see that what I have worked for comes to pass. And I’m dying to get my hands on that nasty little beast now dwelling so securely inside of you.”

She placed her chilling hand to his abdomen and up to the glass like hole in Baphomet’s chest.

“We placed darkness into Baphomet, darkness that lived in your own heart, Canaan, and now it’s returned to its owner, waiting to end the world. Too long our efforts have gone unrewarded. How earnestly we have served despair. Waiting, praying for so long for freedom from the flesh, freedom you can give us. Do not make us suffer any longer for our crimes. You yourself know what it is to be contrite.” For a moment she seemed piously solemn, her lips lingering near my soul’s cheek, the silken petals tickling the skin. The sensation running cold over my own.

“Flesh is such a cruel cage…Set us free of these shells.”

I stiffened unconsciously at her touch, watching Baphomet swell tumescent and full. She traced circles around his belly, seducing me empathically. Fear and pleasure entered my limbs, wanting her to touch me and yet terrified that at any moment she might split both of us open like a C-section and scrape our insides out.

But she didn’t. Instead, she bent forward and nuzzled against Baphomet’s chest, her thick curls tickling my flesh. With her hands she groped him by his thick organ, massaging my cock, coercing me to harden under her clammy touch, and uncontrollably enticed, I felt Baphomet squeal behind his muzzle of honey as I feel her mounting him, slithering up the ruins and opening herself up to him, by what means I dared not to witness. Lithe limbed and sensual, the dead girl brings us both into her world. She gathered me into her slender arms and pressed us to the cold steel of her breastplate.

I could feel her stealing into my mind and beyond that into the future. She is alien to the power she wrongfully inherited, but she searches, communing with celestial bodies, caught in the throes between pleasure and the ultimate awareness.

I writhed, helpless as a baby in a mother’s arms, and she controls me and Baphomet, leaning my neck back, exposing my throat. My head was so heavy, resting against the Butcher’s chest, feeling her moving over Baphomet, over me in a strange metaphysical three-way.

“We are so similar, in so many ways, you and I,” she whispered into our minds as we set adrift across the vastness of space. “Once innocent, once fragile, scorned and abandoned. But, now that’s behind us. We have a new facet to share, my dark angel…Oblivion.”

Maybe, it was the swoon of her voice singing like a flute, or the blood rushing to my head, but I lulled into a stupor, helpless under her charms. Her cold, clammy hands gripped Baphomet’s weakened shoulders like meaty hooks and the clever reptile drew us both close as though she may nurse us on her supple breasts well guarded behind her gilded cage.

But she didn’t move to feed me.

The succubus wanted to bury her fangs into our flesh.

Excruciating as it was - being limp and useless as an insect in a black widow’s web - it didn’t really hurt when she slid her long, viper fangs into our flesh, my life-blood a fountainhead in her mantis mouth. The sensation was like a sting, a pinch hard enough to break skin, but the ache quickly gave way to elation. Under the succubus’ thrall, I experienced various shades of emotions, all intoxicating and sexually perverse. This was sex, unprotected, unbridled sex, and with a woman! I was flying, my body rising off the ground, suspended in the air, closer and closer to the opening in the Omphalos. The purple skies called and I wanted to answer, to scream Yes take me! Take me away from all of this!

I soared above the Revenants, their eyes glazed with awe, but I was not flying. It was the Lamia and Baphomet who rose off the ground, his wide wings hanging down like loose shutters. She was standing on the length of her tail, her arms enfolding me in her lush, violent embrace.

The Blood Countess fed from him and still I bled, blood trickling down my neck. She supped at his throat, long healthy drinks, sucking sounds like a baby calf at its mother’s teats, insatiable to the last possible squeeze.

We were but worms to her, a cockroach in her clutches, and she toyed with us, made us feel unbelievable pleasure as if bouncing on clouds.

Then I felt the tumble back to earth and it’s no longer fun anymore.

It’s burning, molten and searing. She raked her nails against Baphomet, her hunger turning fierce and enraged as though she’s searching for something. Reared to claw it out. She was inside me; I could feel it. This was not like Cloak’s tender hands caressing me to know my wounds.

She was seeking them out to exploit them!

It’s wrong. All wrong. Have to break through, but I can’t. I’m not moving and he’s not waking.

I think of my arms and legs resisting her, but I’m not moving. I’m lame. I’m collapsing.

“THERE IT IS!” she wailed fanatically, wrenching from Baphomet’s throat an agonizing retreat that expelled from my mouth. “There it is, bundled up, slumbering,” she gasped exploding with passion, and Baphomet and myself physically and mentally deep inside of her, her lips stained in our pearly vampire’s kiss.

She laid Baphomet back on the ground, her hair flustered over her face. I could feel his mystical blood knitting his wounds together, but it was slow. I oozed out of the Butcher’s embrace onto the floor, watching white blood seeping like tiny pin drops of rain over the side of the broken table.

“I have tasted a sea of darkness inside you. You deny it, but it is there. Let me encourage those waves to swell, give in to its pull. You cannot resist its undulation. Simu’la Re craves as you crave, and he must be sated.”

She nuzzled Baphomet’s cheek and moved her lips to his forehead, kissing him gingerly.

As if, I could stop her.

With her vulture’s claw she began carving into Baphomet’s forehead, scrawling her finger along the skin. I felt the branding against my own flesh like someone finger tracing a letter onto me.

I didn’t have to guess the shape taking form on my forehead: The Seal of Truth.

And it was etched on me as it had been engraved upon Baphomet. The lasting symbol of the Architect’s power, defiled and corrupted as she had maligned my very soul.

I was helpless, forced to watch and to experience yet again the further defilement of all that I am and could be, beneath her meddlesome fingers.

I called out to Baphomet, not with words, but with thoughts. Loud, screaming thoughts as her laser hot nail branded me with the sigil.

Baphomet, wake up. The only hope I have lies in you.

“The hurt cannot be much,” said Lamia, detecting my disdain. The blood pooled out from the wound, thin and cold, cycling down the bridge of my nose and forking off to drip and gather in the shallow valley just beneath my bottom eyelid like tears yet to fall.

“Squirm, squirm. Just like the Craft wriggled before being silenced,” she said lapping up the blood staining her fingers. “But look at me dallying away when the time has come to put aside childish fantasies and hope, Canaan. Our fate is intertwined. I have seen it. And we must together greet the dawn of a new era. One of absolute self-destruction!”

KATABASIS (PART TWO)

2010-11-30T12:55:00.000-08:00

II. THE VANGUARD OF RUIN

I carried the Oracle up the long steps back into the main portions of the temple. We explored further until Eos gave me pause and directed my sight to the center of a sprawling room.

I did not have to venture very far to find my missing counterpart.

We had come to the place I’d seen in my dreams, the chamber with the magnificent altar, though now it was broken, with a new statue lording over the ruin in his terrifying glory.

We stood at the foot of a series of stairs leading up to the grand altar, and barring the path midway sat Baphomet upon a throne made of black glass, lording over the broken remains of what was once the Altar of Seals. His skin was so pale that his veins shone through as icy blue as his eyes. The hole in his chest remained and without the black blood of the Craft plating him in its armor, it looked even more like a punched out hole in a pane of glass.

Even marred, he looked like a living stature of veined, white marble and his hair was brushed handsomely into lush curls, but throughout were little braids fashioned with black and red stones, the light refracting off their gilded surfaces in an dark halo. Atop his head he wore a crown of polished bone and his body outfitted in a black and gold tunic. The Sigil of Truth marked his brow like the diadem of his bony crown.

Despite these changes, there was an uneasy familiarity in the face we shared. His shoulders were slightly broader and the chest more defined from the toils of his journey. His face remained a direct copy of mine now, the same cheekbones and nose, the same shape of mouth; the bottom lip somewhat swollen from being busted so regularly. His eyes were the only real deviation. They retained the same familiar shape, the same dense, arched eyebrows, but the pupils themselves were glazed over in a neon blue membrane that engulfed the eye entirely. He was me and not me, and in some ways though I can’t be for certain how to explain it, he was more me than I had ever fathomed.

The differences however were far more drastic revealing themselves in the form of great wings grew from his back, held grandly and poised in a suspended preen of black and gold feathers. His hands and feet were different as well; bestial and tipped in shiny black nails, or in this case, talons. He was a strangely romantic sort of gargoyle; newly realized in this considerable transformation.

What did that bloody witch do to you?

Around his throne in fetid clusters were the bodies of dead things, animal, man or otherwise dismembered and languishing in their own filth about him, just the way the Lamia had promised he’d be.

I let Eos rest against a toppled pillar and approached the pale god leery of the shadows in this once hallowed place. I hoped Cloak would emerge from a dark corner and join me, but aside from the depowered Oracle, I was on my own.

I stepped up to the living statue and very gently placed my hand on his paw-like appendage. Baphomet did not stir. The icy blue ocean of his eyes remained frozen in their vacancy. Was he even in there anymore at all? Had the Lethe Vitae erased him completely?

Was he nothing more than a handsome husk waiting to be filled with darkness and rot?

“Baphomet…” I uttered before I realized I’d found my voice.

I shuddered, the air whistling, the silence in the room broken by my whisper.

The pale beast-boy did not respond. His liquescent eyes unmoved and shimmering.

Already I could hear movement far in the temple. Dead things on the move to celebrate the victory to come, the fruition of all their ghastly plans, and with them I knew she would come. Jackie the girl turned goddess. Jackie the girl turned monster.

I wasted no more time.

“Baphomet? Are you in there?” I asked, kneeling in front of him. I took his hand into my own.

So cold.

Empty.

I thought of the glass boy and the warmth he exuded. I needed that warmth now, but it was gone. Would it ever be again?

“Please, Baphomet…If some part of you can hear me…I’m sorry. I know what they did to you. I know, but I need you to wake up.”

I begged. I cried. I slapped him. He remained unmoved, my hands hitting granite.

I slumped to the ground before him, resting my tear-streaked face at his feet.

Please, I thought to myself. I just want to go home…

“What makes you think you belong there, anymore?”

I looked up and stared into the lost ocean of Baphomet’s eyes and the cold, marbled smile on his lips.

“Baphomet?”

The voice which replied was oblivion given words, given tone.

“The word has no meaning to It now. It is beyond the beyond. It is the sigh of decay.”

I stood up and stepped back. “This isn’t you. This is just what she’s done to you.”

“It is the vanguard of ruin. The totality and the figurehead of silence. ”

“No!”

“Despair? It feels nothing. It requires nothing. It never was, never will be. It is finished.”

“Lies! She’s filled your head with lies, Baphomet. You have to wake up. I can’t do this alone.”

“You have always been alone. It knows this. It feels this. Why continue to fight?”

His question pierced every pore of my being with icy pins. I could feel myself teetering back on the balls of my feet.

Why continue to fight? Why continue with any of this at all?

I saw myself holding razorblades. Saw my own blood on my hands, all the scars, all the bruises and the pain and the hate that rose around me in a maelstrom and with each passing day facing it alone, facing myself in broken mirrors and broken boys fragmented, each crack a piece of me threatening to fall and burst into even smaller pieces. But still I go on. Still I can’t find the way to end it all and blow out my candle like Jackie.

Maybe I’m a coward and so obsessed with death I created a monster from a dead girl to usher me close to the precipice and give me a push, but I don’t want to go that far. It’s not cowardice alone that compels me to live.

No. There’s something stronger in me that wants to keep fighting, despite THE BASTARD, despite the nightmares and the uncertain destiny that awaits me whether in this reality or another.

“Hope,” Eos said, appearing behind us, her arms held out in front of her as she felt the air around her. “You both still have hope that all of this, everything you both have been through has been leading somewhere. That it will get better. It has to, doesn’t it?”

I rose up beside Baphomet and caught him under his chin, caressing his cheek. The sheen of his talisman caught in my eyes. I hadn’t noticed it before, so insignificant a trinket. Just a small piece of glass, but against his pallid skin it shone like a crown jewel. I lifted his beautiful head and stared into his frozen eyes. I could have crawled inside of them and given myself over to his lithium gaze, but I was searching, probing for some inner part of him that remained, a part that hadn’t just been a puppet for others ambitions. The part that made him my missing piece.

My disconnected soul.

“It does not understand. Cannot comprehend what is at hand. It does not require appeasement. Solace, silence, it neither knows nor yearns for anything more.”

Baphomet rose from his black throne and swung a mighty hand into my chest thrusting me to the floor. His massive wings spanned and he levitated off the ground gliding over the ruins to where I’d fallen.

With just the balling of his fist, I was lifted off the ground and suspended in the air.

Where had he learned such tricks?

“You come to dissuade its new purpose. It is not amused.”

A rush of air caught in my ears as Baphomet flung me across the room into a wall. He towered, a magnificent seraphim with black wings, his features shifting from solid, statuesque beauty to a frightening mask of bloodlust. The winter blue ocean in his eyes began to roil and crash.

“Baphomet,” I heard Eos mutter weakly. “Remember me? Remember the others? Jasira? You’re afraid, you’re terrified of being alone, but you’ve never been and you never will be again. I know you must remember Fawkes?”

Fawkes?

I listened to their exchange unable to ascertain the meaning. There were things I didn’t know, couldn’t know, aspects of Baphomet’s existence that weren’t linked with my own, and yet the mention of his companion, Fawkes, was most interesting.

I have a Fawkes too.

“We are who we are born to be, Baphomet. Fawkes fought…to keep you safe so that you would find your purpose. Would you betray his fealty? Yourself?”

Baphomet’s stony expression wavered.

“Fawkes?” He asked, eyes furrowed, struggling to understand the things being told to him. “It cannot remember…It doesn’t…It…”

“It cannot, but you can.”

A single blue tear trickled down Baphomet’s hardened face. The spell was breaking.

I slowly felt Baphomet’s hold loosening. My feet touched the ground and I had control of myself again.

He staggered back, a jilted monument fighting against himself.

I went to him. He raised a hand to stop me, but what power he possessed within him before was weakened or simply gone.

“I can’t know what it was like for you. I was on one side of the mirror and you on the other, but there’s something we’re meant to do. I don’t know why we were chosen, but here we are face to face with the end of the world at our doorstep. We need each other if we’re going to live through it. I need you.”

Suddenly, Baphomet’s eyes flickered, flashing from blue to black and gold.

“But you don’t want this anymore than I do!” he yelled, his voice an accusatory oscillation between the vacant godlike quality and my own.

The words struck true. I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to wake up. To be a normal kid or as normal I can get.

“No, and I’m still not sure I do,” I said, honestly. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m tired of being scared all the time. I’m tired of being a ghost. Aren’t you?”

The turbulence in his eyes grew to rapture, the blue battling with the black and gold. There was a war exploding behind his eyes and it spilled out into the room in the flurry of fists and feathers.

I doubled back. His power had grown beyond that of a man. His transformation into the Craft had endowed him with near invulnerability.

I was Jacob wrestling with a very real angel.

A well placed punch landing across my cheek caught me off guard. The force of it sent me staggering, confused at first as a flash of images followed, filtered into my mind. I was unmatched, untrained to battle with such a creature, but I was also thrown off from any possibility of chance by the flashes blinding me.

“Don’t pretend to accept your fate when you’ve been running from it all your life. It’s me Canaan. I know you’ve wanted nothing more than to be through with it all.”

“This isn’t you, Baphomet. It’s her poison. You believe, far more than I ever did.”

“And look what it has cost me!”

He hammered into my chest before I had the chance to respond. I was reeling across the room, my head butting against a pillar. I could feel blood easing down the back of my neck and my vision wavered. I could still see well enough to watch as the black and white spear that was Baphomet jettisoned from the far side of the altar towards me.

The impact of his assault pitched me head over heels and laid me on my back. Bones were broke or breaking, though I couldn’t know which for he was on me once again, lifting me into the air towards the broken gape in the ceiling.

“’All of this for you,’ they told me. But really all for you!”

He held me out over the room, my legs flailing as the surface of the room grew long and out of reach. He was going to kill me.

But then something unprecedented happened, and I do not know from where this awareness dawned, but with a furious howl, I mounted a mental resistance to the angelic beast and drove my body against his and we went winding back down to the ground in a disorienting free fall.

Primal screams roared between us in our descent and before I knew what was happening, our minds and bodies were colliding. We were driving into one another without knowing how or why.

He in my mind and I in his.

Our war continued on another plane, a void where darksome forces gathered, intent to swallow us whole in our own fury.

“You don’t deserve it!” his other voice exclaimed. “You belong to the dark! We both do.”

“We can do this,” I yelled, assailed by swells of winds shoving us together. “You just have to wake up!”

We pushed against one another, polar opposites trying to deflect one another’s blows, but we kept colliding, and in that collision the flashes sparked like images on a movie screen. Both of our lives were on display, but in each frame an ink blot of darkness leaked into the shots.

“Neither of you are worthy…” a third voice emerged in the void. “I am the way and the right…You cannot hope to win this…”

We both could feel it then, this darkness rising between us to pull us apart, and we weren’t trying to get away from one another this time. We were trying to hold on!

I recognized the voice, the dark voice I’d heard on the strange beach with Cloak. It had disturbed him and I could now relate to his aversion.

“We can do this, Baphomet,” I pleaded. “Something is coming for us. We can’t fight it alone.”

We hurtled through the void, passing through the moments of our lives, a cosmic imbalance and temporal schizophrenia playing out across the empty galaxies of our astral plane.

A strange look registered in his eyes. “No…We can’t…”

Then a slash of light cut across the void and a rupturing thunder spread throughout cracking the space like a yawning pit. It stretched before us, a rift of torture and agony made to assume a form of sentience, an unending tenacity in the flesh. A ghastly form was on the rise, infuriated and incomprehensible to my eyes as I struggle to recall its horror, but I knew what it was without knowing its true form: Priaxura.

“THERE IS DISSENT IN BOTH OF YOUR HEARTS. ALLOW ME TO EXPLOIT IT AND DRIVE YOU AWAY FROM YOUR DESTINY! BE MINE, FOR IT IS FRUITLESS TO CONTEND WITH ME. BETTER TO DIE A CLEAN DEATH THAN TO FACE THE ETERNITY I WILL MAKE FOR YOU.”

The void tumbled down around us as the dark god’s candor filled our hearing with unimaginable despair. But neither of us gave in. We couldn’t. Our enemy, our greatest evil was threatening to dull our wills and steal our control.

“There is something in me you won’t destroy,” Baphomet and I said together. “WE ARE NOT PUPPETS!”

Our defiance rippled out in shockwaves and the Demolisher of Worlds shuddered.

“I AM NASCENT NOW, BUT I AM COMING,” his thunderous voice promised. “MY SLUMBER NEARS ITS END AND THEN YOU SHALL FIND DISPELLING ME FAR MORE DIFFICULT. STILL, WITH THE DARKNESS I FEEL IN YOU, YOU MIGHT END UP DESTROYING YOURSELF…”

A violent force swirled between us, the brawn of Priaxura’s tremulous hands exercising a small amount of his power to jerk us apart and throw us to opposite ends of the void, shattering this mental battleground like panes of glass.

When I came to, I found Baphomet kneeling on the ground near the Oracle. She was running her hands through his hair, the bony crown busted against the ground.

He was weeping soundly. “I got so lost. So very lost.”

Even in her collapsed state, she found the will to console him. He held his head in his hands, his wings gathered about him like a fallen angel.

“Is he…Is he alright?” I gasped, every inch of me throbbing.

Eos shook her head, unsure.

Baphomet raised his head, his tear-stained eyes once more their former onyx dancing with gold. He remained a beautiful mix of angel and beast, but he was restored.

“I am myself again,” he said holding back his tears. “But I feel as though I am more now.”

“The Craft,” I suggested. “You’ve become it.”

The clarity in his expression was heartbreaking. He observed his wings and newly developed transformation with a heavy-handed amazement.

“So it is true then,” he sighed. “What I have been meant for all along.”

“Purpose…” the Oracle whispered. Her voice strained beyond its limit. “I told you I saw purpose in you.”

Baphomet regarded her warmly and kissed her battered fingers. “I’ll make her pay for what she’s done to you, Eos.”

He stood up and brought his wings in close to his body. He surveyed the room with disgust and then stared back at me. “You could have abandoned me and let it be over, you know.”

I nodded. “Did I really have a choice?”

“No,” he mused solemnly. “I don’t suppose either of us had much?”

“So what now?”

“The…only thing left…” said the Oracle hoarsely. “Complete the Forge…”

Both of us looked at one another. I easily more puzzled than him.

“Isn’t that done? I’m here. We’re here together. It’s done.”

“Think back to the Corpsewood, Canaan. We have to become one. One mind, one soul, one body.”

I saw Baphomet and the Craft, the nightmarish communion of the boy devouring the beast.

Was that going to happen again?

“You are the true Vessel. She mustn’t be allowed to exploit us any further with her dreadful alchemies.”

“But that means you and I…”

“If what you say is true, then I…I am now the Craft, fully formed and strangely ready.” He looked at his hands and balled them into fists. “I cannot explain it. Inherent knowledge I presume passed between me and the dying Craft.”

The clarity in his eyes was off-putting. I’ve never liked being on the outside of a joke.

“You are the Vessel,” he said in our voice, only more aware, more conscious of itself. “There is no going back.”

Confusion passed through me. I couldn’t accept this. I’d just brought him back. He was going to go away again?

He put a hand on my shoulder trying to console me, but in his eyes, his newly perceptive eyes, that he was thinking the same thing. It wasn’t fair. Unfair to ask him to give up his existence to fuse with me and become one entity when there was two of us.

“You’ll…disappear.”

“I don’t pretend to understand anymore than you do, but I have to believe that if I’m truly your soul, then it’s not dissolution, it is restoration. I’m more than the Craft, Canaan. I’m a part of you. I think I understand that now, more than ever before. I’ve come as far as I can go, Canaan Quintanilla. The Rites of Severance were enacted to salvage us, but now please, put me back together, and take me home. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

Neither do I.

A round of applause echoing throughout the chamber stole the moment and brought our reunion to a staggering halt.

“I don’t mean to interrupt this touching moment,” a sultry voice called down above us. “But I’m afraid this is the end of the road for the both of you.”

Baphomet and I turned our heads as one, staring up the length of the marble staircase, both aware of what awaited us.

At the top of the stairs stood the Lady of Sores, her face painted gold, cruel lips smoothed silver with a girlish smile beaming deviously. Her hair was a blazing mantle of black flame and she was wrapped in the finery of a dark, warrior queen, bound within an exotic casing of ebony armor encrusted with rubies. It was uneasily reminiscent of the dark plates of blood Baphomet once wore, only something far more skeletal about its construction and fitted with deadly, bladed accents on the gauntlets and shoulders. Elegant and regal, but painful to look upon and I could only surmise painful to wear.

No less than her dark majesty would require.

And so like a queen, she was accompanied by her sinister courtiers and ghastly servants. Rhada Khar, the mighty Rhylian stood to her left fully armored with a powerful mace slung over his shoulder, while Baru the Alchemist took to her right, his strange green eyes alight with ever-spreading malignance.

Behind us, the Revenants gathered, led by the Butchers, marching them up the stairs like half-dead soldiers.

They took Eos first and though I fought I was next, overwhelmed and forced onto my knees, my eyes lifted to the terrible countenance of the Lamia Thanatas.

Baphomet did not go as quietly.

Using wing and brawn he challenged his enemies methodically dispatching them with quick flourishes and airy assaults, blasting into the dead things with little chance for retaliation.

Had I ever been as strong?

Probably not. But then again, I never had wings.

Still, it was not enough to stop them. They had numbers on their side and Baphomet was being pulled down to earth, a grounded angel.

But not by their filthy hands alone.

“Naughty, naughty Baphomet,” the Lamia reprimanded, wagging a long, thinly clawed finger. A nebula of magic sprouted like a flower rising from the earth. It blossomed in hues of gold, but then turned an icy blue. “Your strength has always dwelt within your soul, but I possess that now.”

Lamia’s eyes lit up like torches as she strode down the staircase, her long glass tail sweeping the steps with a hypnotic sashay. “You are mine,” her voice called out, intoxication sweeping over me in waves. “Leashed to my mind, my will.”

Baphomet was no more immune than I, and felt the effects of her conjuring in a sharp spasm of pain. He cried out, his booming voice cutting the air.

His body strained, overcome by stress. He railed against his captors, but more and more I could see his resolve weakening.

It seemed impossible.

He was the Craft, the very instrument of the Collective, the being that had help to restrain Priaxura, and yet he was falling. His limbs sagged, he faltered back limp and crumbled to the ground, his black wings draping his body.

My eyes drifted, losing perception, blue waves of light passing through me, drowning me. Her voice whispered in my ears, liquid seduction ensnaring me in a beautiful trap.

Underneath the waves, I saw Baphomet topple over and hit his beautiful head against the steps. Our eyes met for an instant and I could feel him. His hand reached out to me and though we did not touch, I could feel him, the torment reclaiming him, the nothingness lulling him back to her will. And I was swimming towards her as well, caught in between the will to give in and the hope of not letting go.

In the swell, Baphomet and my fingers touched, only a light graze, but a connection was struck, like a plug into an outlet. It lasted only a moment, but as my eyes closed, I felt my soul trying to return to me, pure and alive.

And it was screaming.

KATABASIS (PART ONE)

2010-11-29T18:14:00.000-08:00

I. THE LIGHT AND THE GLASS

“Sometimes when I close my eyes…I go to another world…”

A dream within a dream. A reality in another world.

I found myself running down a long corridor.

Mother was there, rather a wistful, fairytale version of herself in a dazzling gown of gold and taffeta, her hair a dark waterfall of emblazoned curls tumbling down the length of her back. She was an angel, moving like quicksilver through the dark halls. I ran after her and I could hear her laughter in between her voice singing a familiar song, familiar to the two of us.

“Beautiful child…Beautiful child…You are a beautiful child…And I am a fool once more…”

She slipped in and out of darkness like a bolt of lightning, one minute there clear as day, the next just a shadow mingled in the swirling emptiness.

She descended the steps of a long white staircase, the train of her gowns sweeping the steps like obscure storm clouds across white sandy beaches.

“I’m tall enough to reach for the stars,” I cried out to her, singing back as she fled from me, nearing out of sight.

“Too trusting yes? But then women usually are…”

I lost her, her voice, her beauty.

I lost my footing as well and tumbled down the staircase, a hard fall down the proverbial rabbit hole and landed at the end flat on my back in a dim vaulted chamber. I plunged through a second fog as I rose staggered and even more confused by where I was and what I was seeing.

Across the room, sitting on the back of his knees like a perched gargoyle was a young boy playing by himself.

I drew closer and realized that the boy was made of glass, from the tips of his hair to the ends of his toes; a living ice sculpture shining like diamonds in the dim room. He sat on the floor playing, an assortment of glass figurines lined up like toy soldiers in front of a city made of shards of crystal and other precious stones.

The city was built upon a base of ivory with carved faces spewing founts of water crafted from silver from all sides, emptying into a sea of jasper and other dazzling gems. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen and yet I had, hadn’t I? I’d seen it in dreams. The city of Illmatar, illustrious and tall and expanding across the floor toward the Citadel of Mirrors as it emerged from the silver water like the brilliant hilt of Excalibur or some equally fabled sword of legend.

I watched him from afar, keeping to the shadows to avoid disturbing the boy and his curious work. Even in the gloomy sparseness of the chamber the little glass men and women sparkled, imbued with an inner light whose vibrancy seemed to channel from the Citadel, but greater than that harnessed by the boy himself with each delicate touch of his glass hands.

I stood astonished as he opened his palm and the glassy surface rippled as though he held water and from its shimmering crest, the wings of a gryphon-like beast fluttered freely. The creature lifted its mighty head to roar as it met the light of its creator’s eyes and bowed nobly. The boy took his winged companion and set it soaring over the city, letting the wings flair and flap before it rested in mystical suspension.

The boy waved a hand over his miniature wonders and out of the darkness hovering above the spectacular glass menagerie, precious rays of light produced as a miniature sun bounced off the city walls in rich, otherworldly rainbows.

A powerful voice filled my head: “In a grain of sand an island; in a piece of silver, the light of the moon. In the hands of an Architect, the vision of the world…”

“You’re the Architect, aren’t you?” I asked without moving my lips.

The boy stirred and turned his head, haloes of white and silver expressed in each subtle movement. He wore a strange mask over his face, obscured in radiance, but very beautiful. Fixed on his right arm was a rather impressive gauntlet, a fantastic, but deadly looking armament from which several keys dangled around the wrist. It looked heavy, too heavy for such a small boy to bear.

He was a true child of light without any darkness about him except for the shadows of the room pushing against the perimeter of his masterworks.

“What came before has passed,” he said in the powerful voice. “I am but a memory to a dreamer who no longer dreams, only wanders.”

“Am…Am I the Wanderer? Or Baphomet?”

He shook his head, his radiant eyes carved and polished smooth. “This is neither fever dream nor revelation. Just a fragment. One shard of many.”

“I have to find Baphomet. Can you help me?”

A violent crash sounded over both of our shoulders. He looked one way and I the other. I could hear screaming, voices erupting above the rancor. I looked to the beautiful child and he was frantic, hunched over his glass city trying to fend off something only he could see. He gathered the tiny glass people into his small hands, but some managed to slip away crashing as they hit the ground. Arms full he looked to me and back again, his eyes pleading, his young mind and heart working overtime.

I tried to help him, but I froze as I saw Mother appear again from the shadows.

She entered the boy’s failing light with an intricate box in her lovely hands. She knelt down behind the incarnation of the Citadel and hesitantly lifted the box lid.

Almost instantly the Citadel rang out with a piercing shriek, white light spewed from every surface as though it were bleeding. The little glass boy dropped his figurines letting their bodies rain down with discordant harmonies as he shielded his eyes.

I watched in despair as the contents of the box manifested in the form of angry black tendrils of smoke lashing out with undercurrents of energy shooting out in all directions. Some of it was attracted to Mother, entering her violently through her eyes, nostrils and mouth. It drew power from the darkness in the chamber and spread like a cancer sweeping in to cloud over the glass city and the boy at the base of its shores.

“She didn’t know,” he implored, his voice now a child’s, meek and scared. He stared back at me with desperate eyes brimming with crystal tears. “How could she? She had fallen in love.”

I charged forward, crushing glass figures under my feet as a tendril shot out to catch the boy at his waist and pull him into the chaos. Mother was lost in the waves of it, her voice a muffled scream.

I yanked him away and into my arms. I could feel heat radiating off of him, a nurturing, photosynthetic light encasing me, but it flickered like the light of a failing flashlight. The dark was winning. I wanted to run, to turn and take him away, but the darkness filled the room in its inky flood.

“You must be ready,” he said, pressing his face against my chest. “I was too young to reign, and you have been away so long.”

“Stay with me! Please. Tell me what to do.”

“I can’t,” he shuddered. “I am already gone. My light has shattered. You must find your own now.”

Black clouds blossomed through his glassy flesh filling him in shadow, stealing away his light. Already his little arms were beginning to fracture, and the beauty of his mask and features started to crack. I took him into my arms and held the fragile boy, listening with tears in my eyes as his small frame sang out with a shattered symphony of brittle limbs. The darkness swept over the glass city searing the wings of the gryphon and laying to waste Illmatar’s structures, the citadel toppled into snowy dust, the jeweled sea blackened and the small sun blotted out from the make believe sky.

I couldn’t stop the darkness from devouring his glow, his shining eyes myriad breaks, his brilliant mouth lost in the void consuming him. I cradled him in my arms, whispering into the carved sea shells of his ears, “I’m so sorry…”

But he couldn’t hear me anymore, lost between falling to pieces and goodbye.

***

I woke up sprawled on the hard floor with a painful headache pounding like artillery shells in my skull. Every perceivable part of me ached and when I tried to move I stiffened like a board, but at least I wasn’t being kicked in the side by Logan anymore.

I lay on the floor of a vast chamber with swathes of dirty cloths draped over me like sheets. I sat up rigidly, a hand to my brow, hot with fever and a slick drool sliding down the side of my temples, the leakage lingering at the corners of my eyes, before I soaked it up with one of the dingy cloths. My hair was a sweaty mass of curly tangles dancing along my fingertips.

The dream was over, but I wasn’t finished with this new reality yet.

I knew this place – the chamber from my dreams and accepted that the portal had emptied me out into the Omphalos Temple.

My eyes burned behind the eyelids, and though the light in the chamber was faint, it hurt to blink. I closed my eyes letting them calm and listened to gusts of wind passing through my ears, hammering my eardrums like a mad bandleader’s frenetic march. Mother Nature screeched on this bristly wind, prodding the senses with cancerous hands. She maimed the air, sweetening the dead smells with a rank, errant peppering of burnt hair.

Just the right amount of wrong to wake me up.

My wincing eyes searched up the curving, broad walls of the immeasurable chamber into a high oval-shaped ceiling above me, the crest of which cracked and peeled back like a hardboiled egg. Beyond the gouge, purple skies greeted me, the torment and the pain visible in their undulation.

I had arrived.

I was here in the netherworld of my nightmares, staring into the same sky I had seen painted in my dreams, visible as the skies I was apt to see on any ordinary evening on the back steps of my home. How had I taken my world for granted, only to find another existing where one ought not to be?

The light from the breach gave me small comfort. The obscure shafts shone upon my glossy, black skin, the tired purple reflected on the backs of my hands like dozens of listless shadows trying to find their way to the grave so they can haunt no more. Though I could not feel its presence, I knew it was there.

I let my feet touch the floor, cold as a sheet of ice, and tried to stand. The ground was solid, but vague and shadowed in perpetual silhouette, like a flight of stairs waiting in a dark hall. There was an air of paralysis curtailing my every movement. My arms could move, but they were leaden, a sluggish mobility while the rest lay bound by static. In the folding of worlds, I too had been bent and had to shake it off, revive the blood and get a move on. I had accepted Cloak’s invitation. I had to do what I had to, hoping it’d lead me to the doorway that would take me back home.

Find Baphomet, that’s all you have to do.

I cast a glare to the grim clouds once again as if expecting a flaming ladder to descend from the scorched heavens and give me a heavenly escape route. But I am starting to believe that there are no easy comings or goings in this mad, mad, world. There’s only the hope I make it out alive.

I ventured deep into the chamber, using the grim twilight overhead as my guide. The space was quiet, a stillness settling over the temple with a deceitful hush. There was no need for illusions now I supposed. The traps were sprung. I had arrived afterall of my own volition. What need for whispers and shadows now? Certainly this place was full of shadows. They congregated, they lingered out of sight just enough to tease me with the threat of their shapes, but they left me to my own devices. The witch’s breadcrumbs were scattered to the wind like the dust coating the once smooth surfaces of elaborate monuments holding court over a room which once housed a magnificent fountain.

In another part of the temple I discovered an auditorium, the remnants of its players lying in heaps of weathered cloth and cremated dust on the very stage they performed upon.

The Omphalos was haunted, in the respect that in each chamber I came across there was a history dwelling within, so abruptly cut short and left to inhabit the very moments of their demise forever. I felt like I was walking through the Parthenon without ever having been there. This wondrous ruin had its share of mythology, murals and carvings showing fantastic battles and brave heroes. There were so many stories to explore in the ancient pediments and friezes.

I was an archeologist excavating the remains of a lost city, enchanted by the mystery within each uncovered relic or decoration lost to antiquity. Totemic columns of ancient beasts rose into a center of one room and in between each stood a mirror. The glass was cloudy and dull, but I could only imagine what the room’s purpose served.

Still, its inherent beauty was not enough to mask the temple’s deeper wounds. There would be no evergreen for this lavish tomb, only death and the morbid creations which inhabited her halls.

This temple was once sacred. The heart of Illmatar. Love and glory and worship once filled the halls and the auditoriums, where now there was darkness and the dank, fiendish stench of wickedness and atrocity.

The further I wandered, the darkness grew and with it, the rank squalor and abhorrence of the temple’s current residents brought its destruction to light. In these subterranean chambers, every room, every sacred facility had been defiled. Reflecting pools teemed with excrement and blood, statues dismembered and rearranged into macabre sexual deviances. Rooms off these unholy corridors were fitted with torture devices adorned with the shorn flesh of their victims. It was a palace of torment the likes of which might’ve offended even the Marquis De Sade.

I have heard of desecrations before, burning churches, religious effigies defaced, but this was a whole other level in sacrilege.

The walls themselves were marred by the Lamia’s propaganda and dogma.

In what I believe had once been an atrium, the bodies of those monstrous carrion birds were mutilated from ceiling to wall. Their bizarre sideways beaks were ripped apart and the tendril-like tongues hung limply in dried pools of their blood. Pieces of human flesh could be found amongst the creatures, to what extent I didn’t care to venture.

Some were hooked and strung up, throats slit, torsos and extremities on display like meat hanging in a butcher’s window, but still animate in their undeath. I felt no sympathy for these abominations. Even in dismembered they were that much more horrid, but the degree to which they were ravaged did send bitter chills down my spine.

The inhumanity and the extreme lack of mercy utilized by the Lamia and her kin were incomprehensible. It didn’t seem likely that a girl like Jackie could boast such depraved butcheries, but she no longer was the girl I barely knew, if ever really knew anything about her at all.

The temple was now a reflection of her, malformed and distorted as much as she was a part of the serpent choking to devour her whole.

And now Baphomet was her prisoner and I fought to my folly to resist the imagining of what his new distortion would be under the tutelage of her abominable image.

I advanced through the gloomy vaults, eventually reaching a dark landing at the top of a flight of stairs that wound deep into darkness. I took them two by two and descended for what felt like several miles. When I neared the bottom, the soft glow of candlelight regarded me warmly. I pressed on, but approached with less enthusiasm.

Somewhere in the darkness I could hear singing. It wasn’t vibrant or joyous, but rather sorrowful and exasperated:

“The light returns his ancient crown

A halo from on high

Descending now from atop the clouds,

Arises the Divine

And in His face all pain erased

Glory is His name

And to those who sought to make Him naught

A violent fate waits

Rise! Divine One rise, your people need your light

Rise! Divine One rise, turn away the blight…”

The singing was familiar. Not my Mother’s, though I admit I had hoped it might’ve been hers. But this voice, I couldn’t denote from where I had heard it exactly, but I was aware of its rhythm and this compelled me to seek it out, to discover and hopefully remember something I’d lost.

I clung to each note winding down the stairway and entered into a long corridor lined with a series of cell doors to either side. It was lit by melting candles and smelled of death as I turned the corner. Each passage was choked with some new monstrosity, but the singing kept me on my path.

My hope turned sour as I stepped into a puddle of blood and a trail of it smeared against the surface showing me the way.

The blood led me to one of the cells. The door was ajar, welcoming and daring me to enter and explore its secrets.

I obliged the blood and entered.

At the back of the room I came upon the one who had shed it.

Crucified to the wall, restrained at the wrists by rusty spikes clung a figure cast in half-light. Naked except for a dead-man’s shroud tied around its head. It was a woman, frail and bent with whip lashes cutting across her exposed breasts and dried blood spilling from between her defiled thighs. She was a female Christ left to die in her own filth and decay; paying for sins I wanted no concept of.

Her singing stopped as I approached. She sensed me, stiffening.

“Who’ss there?” a broken voice inquired.

I froze where I stood, hoping the shroud would conceal me thoroughly.

“C-Canaan…My name is Canaan…”

“Canaan…” she repeated, a lilt in her tone, the voice alien to me. “Y-You’ve come…”

The woman knew me, but for all I could know, she was a stranger.

I took a step forward and reached out to the covering concealing her identity.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I assured her. “I just want to know who you are.”

She shook and squirmed like a worm on a hook as I came into close proximity with her naked form. “Please,” she wept. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I said aloud, though I intended the words for myself. My heart was working overtime as I slipped my fingers into the binds and let the filthy shroud fall away.

Waves of crimson hair spilled over the sad creature’s face and I recoiled, struck and aware by the identity of the woman bound before me.

“Eos?” I asked, though I knew already who she was. “But how?”

“I am but a shadow now, beautiful boy. Leave me, leave me to my fate.”

But I couldn’t. She was real, not just a vision in my head, but real. I could smell her, the faint allure of flowers mired in the blood of her wounds. She was everywhere.

Shock became surprise and then anger.

I reached up to her crude bindings and began the arduous task of pulling her down. The spikes were embedded deep into the stone and I was sure she’d die from the exhaustion alone as I fought to remove them.

When I finally managed to release her, she fell into my arms weighing little more than a bundle of sticks.

“You’ve come…” the bloodied Oracle sighed, curled up against my shoulder, infantile and broken. “I knew you would. Such a good boy.”

Her hair was still red and retained the fragrance of fresh earth, though the curls were loosened and dried with blood and soot. I turned her over in my arms to cradle her and pushed back her crimson hair, to reacquaint myself with her lovely face.

The wind was knocked out of me. I thought I might faint at the unfortunate sight of her.

The Oracle, like the temple which had become her prison, was in ruins.

Her face was pinched with wrinkles and her once delicate mouth creased with scars. Her lovely features were gone, devoured underneath bruises and had it not been for her red hair, she would have been completely unrecognizable, for even the distinct and cosmic glow of her eyes were diminished.

Someone had ripped them out.

“Oh my God. What have they done to you?”

“The pain lessens with your every word, child. But where I am in tatters, you are still equally fractured.”

“Baphomet…”

She nodded against my chest. I held her tightly as though the slightest weakening of my hold might cause her to slip through my fingers.

I stripped off my outer shirt and cloaked her in it as I carried her through the halls of the temple, searching for the chamber I had seen in my dreams with the great altar.

She revealed that she was one of Baphomet’s companions and that they had been plucked from different worlds to usher Baphomet toward his destiny and to provide him with tools he’d require along the way. They had to leave him, for the Craft was on its way to unite with him, to complete the Forge. Upon its arrival they were to continue their own journeys. Eos had thought her fate to be completed, but she was taken by the Lamia’s agents and imprisoned in the temple to provide Lamia with the tokens of Eos’s gift of prophecy: her eyes.

“She asserts herself as the new Oracle of the Omphalos…But she is not one of my sisters.”

“I know who she is. And I know what she wants. Me.”

“She is an anomaly, Canaan...You and Baphomet are not the only puppets…”

This was certainly a new idea I hadn’t considered.

Was Jackie a pawn in this? But why? Why use a girl who was nobody, who never hurt anyone? Why her?

“With my stolen power she will ensure her new prophecy comes to pass. You must stop her.”

I nodded, more than ready to be rid of the dead girl.

“But first, I have to find Baphomet.”

XLIV. MAY 23rd

2010-11-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

SATURDAY, MAY 23RD (ABOUT LAST NIGHT)

Dear Virgil, sober now. Waiting for Teresa to wake up to take me home. My head is still spinning in orbit, and not just from the alcohol I ingested last night, but from the swollen knot that is my left eye. Just when it can’t get any worse it does, the nails go deeper, crucifying you to a cross made out of shit and regret. I made a complete idiot out of myself, and I deserve what I got and everything I’ll get after. Teresa came over to Logan’s and persuaded me to get out of the house before the party. We grabbed a small bite to eat and I told her what had happened, and she let me cry on her shoulder. I could have melted in her arms. We scooped up Logan, hung out, talked, whimpered and moaned some more, and then infused with pre-party favors of vodka and some sweet weed Logan scored off of Keith we headed out to Chris’ grandparents. After the week I have had, I needed this party. I couldn’t have been more wrong. But I’m not psychic.

Shit!

I’m not perfect.

I Fuck Up!

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take it out on you. You’re most likely the only friend I’ve got left.

A huge bonfire greeted us. The coolers were full and overflowing with beer, and everyone sharing in camaraderie as if the end of the school year was the last night of the world. But for a while it was perfect. It was a clear night, and I spent most of the time off to the side of everyone else, my eyes raised to the night sky. I started drinking pretty heavily, downing long necks like my life depended on them. I was beside myself, an inebriated filth pig, wondering why I was even there to begin with. Teresa was off flirting with the boys with her usual tease, her connection with Nathan long severed, and Logan sped around on Chris’ four-wheeler, giving a certain blonde blow-job-giving machine a ride around the property.

I am used to this.

This is normal.

I found myself drinking more than usual, drowning myself in amber hoping that it’d rid me of my mother’s eyes looking out at me in the flames of the bonfire.

Sometime after midnight - I remember because someone announced “midnight skinny dipping!” a group of us ran down to the tank behind the house - Logan came over and plopped on the ground beside me. He was dangling a beer bottle between his thumb and forefinger, swinging it back and forth like a pendulum. He was blitzed and bug-eyed, but under the moonlight, his pale skin shimmered beautifully. He had been stripped of his shirt a long time ago, because the girls love his muscles.

They are not alone in this.

Whether it was the beer or just my ignorant attachment is unclear to me, but he was looking more handsome than ever. I wanted to throw my arms around him, and cry against his shoulder once more. It was pathetic and it was demeaning, but it was all I could think to do.

“You’re quiet tonight.” He told me.

I nodded. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I’ve made enough confessions to him as it is, one more and I might as well assist him in putting the bullets in the chamber. If only he had a gun. I’m sure I’d make an impressive paint stain on the lawn. We talked a little while, I don’t really remember what about. Too far under the weight of my intoxication to notice. I just recall him putting his hand on my shoulder, and turning to face me as he said:

“I hope no matter what happens that we’ll always be friends.”

In a drunken half-sleep, spellbound by the grip of his hand on my shoulder, the heat burning through the fabric of my shirt, testosterone and bonfire smoke pervading the air, I leaned forward and kissed him.

I should have died then and there.

It was the shortest kiss in history, but for that instant our lips met, and I don’t think I’ll have another kiss quite like that ever again. It’s unexplainable. Enduring and satisfying as only a brief romance could ever be, and sadly, unforgivable. He pulled away from me like he had just cut his wrist on glass, shoving me headfirst into the empire of bottles I was erecting beside where I sat. As I bowled into my makeshift Illmatar, hitting my head against the glass necks, I could hear the rallying mob gather. I sat up, and they stood around me, Logan in the center, glowering at me, his face contorted with tribal tattoos of hate. Actual hate lining the porcelain skin, scabbing the eyes that had for as long as I have known him, never dimmed so dark!-a vortex pulsating in his beautiful blue eyes.

I half expected the other guys to pull on white hoods and string me up in a tree. I deserve capital punishment. I crossed a line I swore to myself I’d not cross, and in my hopelessness I gave in to something that has been gnawing at me ever since I had laid eyes on Logan, in the 7th grade. I have betrayed my friend.

Weldon and Greg hefted me up, strangling the blood flow in my arms, carrying me like a sacrificial calf; their fists bound me tightly, beckoning Logan to hit me. And he did. A good, strong explosion to the left side of my face. I was sure he shattered bone, but this morning it didn’t appear anything more than a huge bruise. Another mark for this Century’s Cain.

They urged him to do more, to “erase the fucker!” and I know he wanted to. The others cheered him on in pep rally fashion. This was a spectator sport beloved by so many rural towns.

“Beat and kill the faggot!”

Hometown bashing at its finest. I must be honest here, Virgil, I wanted him to. I wanted him to erase me. He clenched his fists, and I closed my eyes, wishing under my breath to end me. What good can I possibly bring to anyone or anything when everything seems to turn to a shitty parallel of reality? It follows me, like Mr. Cloak follows me. It follows and yet leads me towards chaos. He might have done as I wished, had it not been for Teresa fighting through the angry gathering. I could hear her screaming for them to let me go. She and Logan began screaming at one another, and in the haze I saw her slap him and call him a “redneck asshole”.

Greg and Weldon released me and pushed me to the ground. Teresa fought to help me to my feet, but I was stumbling, blood running down my face, disoriented. Pale faces stared at me, silhouettes around the bonfire’s glow.

I got up and stumbled about, dazed, watching so many eyes glaring at me surrounded in firelight. Teresa tried to steady me, but I shrugged her off. She tried to reason, but I was beyond it in my drunken stupor. I walked away from the gathering, listening to their voices cheering that I was away from them. Before long I found myself walking the dark country road, the house and the sound of the party far behind me. I didn’t know where I was headed. Maybe I figured I’d know it when I got there, but anywhere far from Logan’s eyes was far enough for me. How could I have been so ignorant and allow myself to act like such a fool. Logan is not Josh. He never was, no matter how much I wanted him to be. He’d never feel what I feel for him. We were like brothers and I’ve messed it all up.

It wasn’t long before I was met with endless country road before and behind me and the stars, lonely sentinels watching overhead. I slipped off the main road onto the wayside and drifted about, my senses muddled. I faltered in the dark, tripping over a rough stone as I wandered in a field. As I tumbled down the stars circled overhead like the panoramic scene inside a carousel. I landed on my side, my open mouth getting a good taste of earth and grass. I honestly don’t know how long I lay there before the darkness grew in around me. Even with my eyes wide open to the night sky the dark thickened; impenetrable stuff.

“It is time,” a voice in this darkness emerged. My eyes felt heavy. I could have passed out then and there, but the voice called out to me once more. “The time for sleep is over. We are past that now. I am with you.”

Bursts of wind shot up from the ground

I stood in the darkness, silent as the world around me unveiled itself. The sky rattled like a loose window during a thunderstorm and the earth grimaced, a disconsolate sigh, bothered and unappeased by what followed. The solid world was no longer stable. Fractures appeared, webs of broken glass seizing up and down the dark field. A door was opening somewhere, and someone was battering their fists like a hammer to bust through.

I wanted to believe it was only a dream, a slip into inebriated hallucination, but it was happening, seams popping in my ears, a great upheaval of the world’s axis; a knife through easy flesh. All was coming undone.

The mouth of the world opened up and took a chunk out of the fabric of reality. Cloak emerged from the schism and descended to the ground, the ravaged stars and night sky halved over his lustrous shoulders. He was whole once more, a tall and domineering figure, real as any lone gunslinger standing in the moonlight, his dark robes traded for a sleeker, form fitting, hooded duster. He remained a shadow, but there was something undeniably human in his dark features, a certain definition further solidifying his restoration. His mystical energies surged, the very stitching of his coat, brilliant runes running along the outside of his hood, the black skull illuminated in auras of purple and ink.

“Take my hand, Canaan.”

“This is wrong. It’s impossible. I’m dreaming. I have to be asleep.”

The wind swept through his coat, the hem slapping against my hand. I felt it. Seriously felt the cloth, the fabric, electricity charged through it from his sustaining magic.

“I wish it were so, but the time has come. I warned you. The portal is opened. It will not hold for long. We must breach the schism, before it’s too late.”

I rolled onto my back and laughed staring at the rift in the sky, following the rip as it savaged the field like a baseball through a window.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t have the Craft. I’m just…me.”

“It will be enough,” Cloak said, his voice of many filling the open world.

“I’m not ready. I don’t deserve this. I don’t think I’m worthy of this power.”

He bent down and placed a hand to my shoulder. He squeezed generously. “That’s how I know you are.”

I could’ve walked away. I could’ve returned to the party, to the real world, but the real world was here, spliced with the other world. Either side of the road yawned on to nowhere. One way the mad bonfire and its heavy fisted savages and the opposite the road leading to angry parents and lies. But here was the crossroads, a fork offering me retribution, power, but most of all, death.

I did not need the Fringe or the Anchor to traverse the rift. All I needed to do was to take his hand.

And so, I did.

I cannot say what transpired once I placed my palm against his. There was suction, a vortex siphoning me through, a circle into a square. I was thrust through, feeling as though my cells were being divided to accomplish the transportation and reassembled piece by piece on the other side.

From here on out, I’m not sure of what comes next, all I know is what happened. Teresa will be up soon, but I must get it all down before it leaves me, if in fact it ever will. Whether I believe it all or not, I am still reeling, but I want to believe. I need to believe in something.

Here goes: