Lightbreaker

The Chorus swarmed in my head, ready and willing to take the soul of the man as he died. I was exhausted; I could use the energy. Didn't it feel good? That euphoric rush of strength and clarity. The precision of Will brought about by taking another.

Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill. This was the price of our transgression in the Garden; this was the cost of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. This was the sacrifice made so that we could understand the difference between night and day, light and dark, dream from reality. We learned to kill when we ate from the Tree. We opened our souls and listened to the passions of the flesh. So that we could know the difference, so that we could chose a path and find our way back to God.

'No,' I said, refusing Antoine, refusing the Chorus, refusing everyone but my own Will. I turned away from Antoine as Pender died, his soul leaving his burning body. 'His death is your sin. Not mine.'

I had enough of my own.

XXX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul-dead. Following me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our hands betray what we have done.

I killed nine men yesterday. They weren't the first. In the last ten years, there had been blood and fire on my