Lightbreaker

hands more than once. And yet, the apex of the Tree had never been closed to me. I was still in the Abyss, but I could yet see the other side. The light from the Tower still called to me.

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

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

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

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

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

He hissed at me, but didn't answer.

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

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

Just a shadow. My own shadow.

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

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

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

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

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

It always had been. It always would be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXXI

At the top, the light was a physical presence, a globe wrapped around the peak of the building. I floated against it, the pliable surface dimpling at my touch. As more of my body touched the limpid film, the shell became sticky flypaper. I didn't struggle and the gravity within the membrane pulled me flat against the rounded shape. There was a brief sensation of pain-lightning stroking the plane of my skin-and then the world inverted.

Inside, there was neither color nor tint-polar opposition to the gritty darkness of the dead city. Every surface was bleached white. There were no shadows, only dim lines that delineated edges and borders-variations on the play of light.

The soot of the city no longer covered me. It had not come through the barrier. I could almost see the pale history of an outline beneath me, a fading print of my body done in static-charged ash and detritus. My skin was translucent, my blood a series of pale tributaries running through valleys and vales of colorless flesh. The stark tint of my bones was evident beneath the naked flesh. The blue and gray of my clothes had already lightened to the color of early dawn.

As I walked toward the source of light, I became lighter still, my clothes vanishing into nothingness, my skin becoming rice paper wrapped around a clear gelatinous mass. My bones were hardened crystal, sculpted by an Old Master.

My memory of the penthouse was a historical document of its presence. The obstructions of the furniture were gone. The trinity of Thoth figures no longer stood by the window, their metal frames had vanished. Only the mirrored facets of the sphere remained, a glittering diamond of light that was purer and brighter than all the surrounding white.

Lying beneath the floating sphere as if asleep was a two-dimensional line drawing of Nicols, like an Impressionist caricature dashed off on a coffee house napkin. I bent over and tried to touch him and found he really was nothing more than a collection of a few strokes.

'The memories fade until they are nothing but lines and shadows.'

I looked to the source of the voice. Bernard was the only color. His robe crawled with motion. The script-once black, now white-wriggled and squirmed with animate mysticism on a blue and sickly orange background. A silver halo lay low enough upon his head that it bisected the crown of his skull. His face was pale like the visage of a man who has not been aboveground for a year, but it was still the color of flesh. Unlike the bleached translucence of my skin. The ruddy color of his neck looked like a birthmark or an allergic rash.

He inclined his crowned head. 'The walker between worlds. I thought you might be the one to return.' His voice was quiet and sibilant, his throat still new. 'Have you come to take Julian's place?'