Lightbreaker

That was the reason I was here, after all.

My awareness seemed to shake him slightly, just a small tremor in his tongue as he wet his lips.

A thin crease of orange light drew itself across his face, a widening gleam of warmth. His apprehension vanishing, Bernard looked toward the source of the glow. I didn't look behind me. I knew what he saw. That sweet hour of prime. Dawn.

'Nunc,' he said. 'It is time. I am ready, Mr. Markham. I believe in what I am about to accomplish. What do you have to offer?'

'An observation, I suppose,' I said. 'For a very long time, I believed in the Devil. I believed that, in illo tempore, I met him in the woods. And, actually, I believe I met him again a short while ago.'

'And now? This is the final moment of your existence, Mr. Markham. Is that all you believe? That you've seen the face of evil. Have you driven him out then? Is that the basis for your newfound religion?'

'No, I believe he's part of me. Like God.'

Bernard smiled. 'Ah, the old Hermetic truism. Do you feel His presence, then?' The band of light filled his eyes.

'I don't have to 'feel' Him, Bernard. I am God.'

His attention snapped back to me, even though I was almost gone, almost invisible against the burning light.

'Just like you, Bernard. Just like every soul you took last night. We are all God. Separate and distinct.'

'No,' he said. 'God has been hidden from us. We must free ourselves in order to perceive him.'

'Free ourselves from what?' I asked. I held up an arm, the orange light of dawn outlining my skin. Such a faint line, such a thin film holding my soul in. 'You don't even understand the nature of your prison, Bernard. Because if you did, then you would know that the truest thing that can be done has nothing to do with Will. The greatest change is not external. It is within you. It is the act of giving up being God.'

The act of sacrifice.

The penthouse room filled with color, orange and red and yellow and rose, a series of expanding circles of light. Sunflowers bloomed in a dizzying mass of texture and tint, a sea of petals that swept over Bernard and the mirror and my tiny spark of a spirit.

Nunc.

The mirrored sphere in the sculpture broke, the individual facets drifting apart as if released from the adhesive that held them together. The light of the sun danced on the drifting mirrors, splitting into refractions and reflections. The one became ten, round circles of light arranging themselves in a known pattern.

Now.

I released my self, embracing the many, and took hold of the Tree.

XXXII

Is this how God dreams?

Katarina, wreathed in red, whispers in my ear. 'Your reality is an illusion.' Her hand is on my chest. Fingers caress my flesh. World touched by Word.

Behind her, the Tree rises like a plume of white smoke. Its heavy globes split from the trunk and hang like luminous worlds.

Her fingers touch the flickering light of my soul. Her index finger tickles my heart and I arch under her caress, pushing myself against her hand. Though I am bound, chained by my ignorance, I raise myself to meet her touch. Take me. Free me.

I cannot see the top of the Tree. A veil hides the last three spheres from my sight. A line is drawn through the neck of the Tree, separating the trunk and limbs from the head. In the center of the line, right in the hollow of the neck, there is a black smudge, a hole to nowhere.

God dreams. Fiat lux. The world immolates and is made anew. My heart is on fire, a burning stone within the cage of my chest. She touches me, and I am released from bondage.

Free to climb the Tree. To grasp the center trunk and scale to the edge of the veil. I am free to touch the dark hole at the base of the neck.

The Tree splits, sundering into a vale of darkness, lit by the black fire of negative globes. In the center of the valley, in the depth of the wood that crawls across the black land, cowers the Son of Man. Caught in his throat is the Word that will remake the world.

He has no speech, no gift of tongues. His mouth is a rotten hole through which he feeds the appetites of his body. His hands, instead of writing out the Word and making it real, tug at his flesh. His ears are filled with the sound of the leaves in the trees, almost a voice, almost a whispering promise. 'Your reality is an illusion.'

A hand emerges from the darkness and the Son of Man does not realize it is his own, wrapped around his emaciated body. The hand holds a seed, dug up from the roots of the black trees, and he hungrily opens his mouth to take the dark Communion.

It sticks in his throat for an instant, caught in the web of the Word, and then it falls into his stomach, wrapped in the beauty of the Word. It falls into fallow ground and yet, sheathed by the Word, takes root.

This is the way the world ends.

I am the architect of my own demise. I am the demiurge of my own ascension. This is the dream of God. This is the seed wrapped in the Word. This is the Tree that takes root and from which springs Creation.

This is the sacrifice called Faith.

We are in a palace of wind and light, buffeted by storms of orange lightning and howling fire. Bernard lies on a table of coiled smoke, his head resting on a strata of cumulonimbus clouds. He is naked, stripped of his civilized vestments. Tears leak from his eyes and water comes out of his mouth as he gasps like a fish drowning on land.

Hush, you need not speak. I know all the words you seek to make; just as I know all the words you have uttered before you came here. He looks at me, pleading with his eyes. He cannot move his arms or legs. He cannot move anything but his mouth and his eyes. I know, I forgive you.

I tear the first piece from his chest, just below his left nipple. It is a morsel of pale flesh, wet with his translucent blood-all the color has left him, all his strength has fled. I offer it to the first supplicant in the long line that stands beside the table.

She is a pale cloud lit by lightning, a swirling nimbus that shapes itself in a memory of her form. Her fabric parts, a hole through which I can see the light behind and beyond her, and I place the piece of Bernard's flesh on what passes for her tongue. The hole seals itself into a ghostly smile and the smoke of her fills with a rainbow explosion of light. She drifts into me, melting through my presence, and my vision blurs with violet and silver light. She passes through me, through the portal of my bones and through the curtain of my flesh.

I offer Communion to all of them: every man, woman, and child of Ravensdale, of Portland. I give them a piece of Bernard in exchange for what he took from them. When his flesh is gone, I rip his organs into tiny strips and break his bones into small wafers.

They are patient, the souls who have passed. Their timeless wait is an incremental span of the Universe's existence. They know, and wait. For there will be enough for all of them. Each one crosses through my gate and becomes part of the wind and light surrounding this palace.

The last one in line is more solid than the rest, and I withhold the final piece of Bernard from him. No, not you.

Please, he whispers, kneeling on the clouds at my feet.

No, I tell him, and his despair is plainly writ on his face. You have not earned this. I crouch and lift his chin. Looking into the mirror of his eyes, I tell him. The path will remain open.

I give him a kiss-ex lux et vita-and I accept the sacrifice that brought him here. But it isn't enough. Not yet.

Rede, meus filius.