Lightbreaker

dense suburbs close to the freeway. More than a mile away, and still at the edge of the devastation.

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

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

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

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

Antoine.

XXIX

Antoine held tight to Pender's arm as they picked their way down the incline. His skull peeked through patches of still-raw flesh, and most of his lower jawbone was visible as were his teeth. His hair was gone, and his left hand was a claw of bone with scattered flaps of healing skin. The silver stub ending his right arm was a heavy knob. Only his eyes showed any clarity-bright lamps in his scarred face.

Pender wore a smug expression, a grin he couldn't quite suppress. Glee of a nearly realized plan, fruition of a torturous campaign. I wanted nothing more than to beat his teeth out of his head. Tear that fucking smile off his face.

The anger gave me enough clarity to stand, to ignore the vociferous dissent raised by every muscle and tendon in my frame as I moved. 'How many?' The words burned in my throat. 'How many did he kill?'

Pender sucked a breath through his teeth. 'Hard to say. It's been a couple of years since the last census. And,' nodding toward the darkness of the city, 'it seems to have fallen short of its-'

'How many?' I shouted

Pender shrugged. 'Fifty thousand, maybe. Give or take a few.'

My knees buckled. Behind me, Devorah whimpered like a small kitten trapped beneath the paws of a large predator. Give or take a few thousand.

'Was this the result you sought, Protector?' I spat Antoine's title.

Antoine laughed, a dry sound like twigs breaking.

Pender didn't like the possibility signified by that sound, the possibility that the Hollow Men's clever subterfuge against the Watchers hadn't been as clandestine as they had thought. The players had been played by their own self-inflated cleverness. Uncertainty flickered in his eyes, and he unconsciously took a step away from Antoine.

Devorah spoke from behind me. 'Therefore to me their doom he had assigned; that they may have their wish, to try with me in battle which the stronger proves, they all, or I alone against them.'

Antoine gave the young woman a hard stare. 'Is that Milton?' he rasped. A shudder ran through his frame. 'Rhapsodomancy. You forced a librarian to See for you?'

'I needed guidance. You weren't offering anything but semantic games.'

'Speak ye who best can tell, ye sons of light,' Devorah said. 'If better thou belong not to the dawn, sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling Morn with thy bright circlet, praise him in thy sphere when day arises, that sweet hour of prime.'

I nodded, understanding the reason why Antoine and Pender were here at the river's edge. 'He's waiting for dawn. You're all waiting for sunrise.'

Devorah spoke again, validating my conclusion. 'Till morn, waked by the circling hours, with rosy hand unbarred the gates of light.'

The world was made anew at dawn. All souls-all light-comes from the sun. A student didn't have to trawl very far in any religion to find that reference. The sun was-like the Creator-the representation of God. This was the light that gave flesh life. It burned the eyes when, as supplicants, we stared at its fiery glow. Every morning as it was reborn in the eastern sky, it reminded us of Immortality, of the eternal cycle of rebirth and resurrection.

Everything is transformed in the presence of the reborn sun. All cycles have an end and a new beginning. The Wheel turns. We fall down; we rise up.

Antoine offered me his own interpretation of Milton. 'Evil is done in order to transcend it, Markham. We pay dearly for our knowledge of Good.'

'A lot of people died tonight.' My voice was raw, torn by the memory of who had fallen. Who had died, trying to stop the experiment. 'What's the 'Good' in that? Their souls have been harvested for their energy. Their lives are over. Milton wasn't talking about mass murder as a means to an end. He was talking about a fucking tree, a fucking symbol. He didn't mean that we had to bloody our hands just to understand humility and humanity.'

'They lived lives of fear,' Pender said, his ideological viewpoint finally having a chance to express itself. 'They would never know ascension. They would never understand the beauty of their light. Why shouldn't they be allowed to give of themselves for a purer purpose?'

'You didn't fucking ask them!'

'Is it just a matter of choice, then?' Pender asked. 'Is that the difference? If you had asked them if they wanted to See God and they had all said yes, would we have the right to intercede and stop them? Could we have any care other than to Witness their attempt?'

'What bullshit piece of scripture did you pull that from?'

'Isn't enlightenment our goal?' Pender continued, ignoring my question. 'What child doesn't want to be with his Father? What child likes being separated from the embrace of their parent?'

'But we're not separated,' I countered, trying to pierce the fervor of his argument. The first principle drilled into the skulls of children is that God is everything and everything is God. It's the basic concept which informs all of Hermeticism and most of Western thought. Just because we aren't consciously aware of Infinity doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Every child understands the idea of object permanence. Take away a toy and the toy doesn't self- destruct. It is still there, just existent outside the child's perception. The 'toyness' of the toy doesn't change.'

'But a toy is an inanimate object. It will never change. It is only a representation of Form.' Pender shook his head. 'It is a khabit, much like we are, of the Real.'

'Shadows. Huh,' I said, letting go of the argument. He was spouting the same obscene rhetoric that Julian had tried to feed me. Light and shadows. The imperfect Creator that bound our sight so we couldn't see the Truth. Archons and blind idiot Demiurges. Very Gnostic and not unexpected from students of Hermeticism, but still so very broken.

Whispers in a dark wood. All things are broken, all things have holes in them. Man is the only creature that can mend the tears and breaks. Man is the only Creator.

'Man is the true shadow of God.'

'Exactly.'

'And you and yours needed to remind the rest of this Truth.'

Pender nodded.

'They all Saw,' I said. 'At the end. They all Saw-' I stopped. They all went willingly. I realized I was still holding the tarot card, still holding the Moon with its twin paths. No, they all went. Without Will. The light of the mirror had taken that from them already. 'Hermes Trismegistus talked about a schema for one's own soul. Enlightenment is a personal choice. You can't bring a whole society with you. You can't just engage in the wholesale slaughter of innocents just so you can split Heaven and talk to God.'

'Maybe an audience isn't what they're seeking,' Antoine said.

I stalled for a second, the word caught on my tongue. A horrible flame licked at my heart. 'Mahapralaya,' I whispered. If Ravensdale gave them the power to devastate Portland, what would the collected power of Portland do? What logarithmic scale were they operating on? 'He really does want to remake the world.'