Heartland

old collection of dead men, the new Chorus nearly had individual voices, soloists who occasionally rose out of the throng of voices.

You are different, they-he-had told me. We are different.

The experience at the peak of the tower had been one of the moments that Mircea Eliade, a twentieth- century Romanian mythology scholar, had quantified as a sacred epiphany, a cosmological instant of death and rebirth. At the axis mundi, the pillar of the world that reaches from our profane meat space into the sacred world of the spirit, a seeker is granted an audience with the Divine. Be it God, or Pure Ego, or Ptah, or Animal Spirits from Dogon: the name doesn't really matter, as they all fail to truly encompass the Infinite that breaches into the Finite. When the light goes out and the Ineffable retreats, the seeker is returned to his secular world, changed by his experience.

The Chorus wasn't the only thing I lost that night. I also lost that last part of my innocence. I had been clinging so tightly to it, to that tiny ego child of denial: I wasn't responsible for what had happened to me in the woods ten years ago when I had first seen magick; I wasn't responsible for the choices I made that night, or that I made over the successive years when I took lives. I did these things so that I might live, so that the hole in my soul might not devour me. All these lies over the years, wound around my frightened spirit like a security blanket. It's not my fault.

But it was. They were all my sins, and at the top of the tower, frozen in the eye of the Ineffable, I was judged and found wanting. I was thrown back, like a fish that was too small. Rede, mi fili. Go back, my son. Go back, and try again.

When I sleep, I dream of that night. I dream of throwing Julian, Bernard's insane right-hand man, out the window. I dream of the crown of stars I tore from his head; I dream of how it felt in my hand, the weight of those souls, and I imagine putting that crown on my head. Anointing myself, and fighting Bernard before he can trigger the device. I dream of rising and falling, over and over, as I try to understand the judgment delivered.

Go back.

But now-nunc-the dream changes. When I fail and fall, the tower exploding behind me, I fall through layers-concrete and timber and sheet rock-until I land in a library. In the dream, the fireplace is real, and the marble busts aren't medieval replicas but real heads, stuck on sharp sticks. And Philippe Emonet-the Old Man, the Hierarch of the Watchers, the Silent Guardian Who Waits, Marielle's father-is older and more decrepit, as if he had been wearing a glamour when I had last seen him-less than twenty-four hours ago-and now, in the True Seeing vision of my dream, the true extent of his illness was apparent.

His hair is gone, and black sores like weeping eyes cover his skull. His left leg is gone entirely, amputated just below his hip, and his left hand is reduced to a tiny claw like a dried chicken foot. He is blind in one eye, and he stutters fiercely when he speaks.

This is what would have happened if you had failed to stop him, he says. This is the map of Portland, carved into my flesh.

But, I remind him, some did die. I didn't save them all.

You can't, he says. Every day, innocents die. His voice beats against me. I am too soft in the dream, and his words are hard. Most of them from stupid mistakes and misguided ventures of other mad visionaries whom they had the accident to touch. Most die in darkness and in pain, their minds filled with idle garbage about their bank accounts and whether or not they were loved by their children and respected by their friends. What do we gain by saving them? Do they recognize us for our efforts? Do they reward us by continuing their menial, grubby lives?

We don't get to decide, I argue.

Of course we do. That is what we do; that is who we are. Every time you kill someone, Michael, you act like the Lord.

I contract at his words, at his blasphemous translation of my name. Like a slug pulling in on itself, I try to hide inside my soft shell, but he chases me, his claw digging into my flesh. Those people in Portland died in an attempt to bring us knowledge of the Infinite, of the Creative Spirit that made everything. Those people didn't die in vain. They died for a cause. They died so that we could understand why we live, Michael. They died for knowledge.

In ten years, there will be another million souls born on this planet. In ten years, Portland will be rebuilt and this will all be forgotten. We'll still be destroying the world as we refashion it with our limited bovine imaginations. Time slays us all, Michael, and the vast majority of people that it takes will never make any sort of positive impact on this planet. Why shouldn't they make an actual contribution in the search for knowledge? Why shouldn't they be allowed the opportunity to participate in a transmission to the other side? Bernard sought an audience with the Primal Agent of Reality. Those who sponsored him sought to Know the Divine. Can you damn them for the effort they made?

Yes, I shout at him. Over and over. Yes, I can. Yes, I did.

His claw stops digging. Milky tears drip from his good eye. Yes, he says, an echo taken up by the Chorus, who swoop around us in a rushing swirl of blank faces and hollow mouths. Yes, you did.

I weep in the dream, and maybe my body weeps outside the dream as well. I feel like I am starting to float. The library becomes transparent, and soon all that is left is the chair in which the Old Man has collapsed. He is getting smaller. My body is a disease, he whispers, it can no longer support life. It must be slain.

He is the organization, and the organization is the man. What I see, he says, is the end. The end of this age, of this body. It is time for us all to be set free.

Free. From ourselves. From our histories.

My legacy. He beckons to me with his claw hand, summoning me out of my soft shell. You are my ultimate resolution. My panacea for this decay. You are the hand that will break this corpus mundi. He bows his head, showing me the naked crown of his skull. All the black wounds on his skull stare at me.

In the dream, his request is not a request, but a command. And I balk, as I did in the flesh yesterday. I do not want to do this; I do not want to become what I was before-a devourer of souls, a breaker of the light.

I am dying anyway, a voice tells me, you're doing me a favor.

It is the voice of my shadow, the voice I thought I had destroyed. But, like Samael said, the shadow is never gone. Never completely forgotten. The stain will always remain.

For the last ten years, I'd been taking the souls of tainted men. To my own guilt, I had added the poison of psychopaths and deviants. At the unconscious bequest of the black seed I let root in my heart, I fed it all the rage and anger and bile the world could offer. That seed, that Qliphotic influence, had tried to make me over in its image.

In the end, I threw off that yoke, and found a path of forgiveness. Did it absolve my deeds? No. But it showed me the way out of the dark wood I had lost myself in. I saw the light, and earned. . no, I have not earned this. I have not earned anything. I have only learned.

The stain cannot be removed. It is the shadow that defines us, because without it, we do not know who we are.

The Hierarch asks me to kill him. He asks me to stain the Chorus with the Willful Act of devouring a soul. Into the holy and cleansed core of my refreshed spirit, he asks me to bring a little darkness. Just a little bit.

Nunc. This is how it begins.

And I did it. In my dream, I watch Portland burn again, and I watch Philippe smile as I spike his soul. Light pours out of him: first from his eyes, then from his mouth and nose, and finally all the black sores on his skull open up and release his light. His spirit erupts in a brilliant geyser, and with the net of my Chorus extended, I catch it. A fisherman of souls, bringing in his harvest.

I am overwhelmed by the rush of Philippe's life: all that he knew, all that he was, all that he dreamed, all that he feared. It roars into me, threatening to drown my own identity under the tsunami weight of his existence. But,