Mark Teppo - Lightbreaker

Kether -the first Sphere of the Sephiroth-was the Crown. The ultimate goal of the seeker of enlightenment. Lights go up; lights go out. It is always to the crown they go. The Wheel grinds the kings down; the Wheel lifts them up.

"Ask," I said again, feeling the open emptiness of my void, that center that I had allowed to be filled with poison and anger, that I had looked inside as I had fallen in the river and found myself hiding there. Nicols had only asked one thing of me. One tiny thing. A decision I had been forced to make in the woods when he had put the gun to his head. A moment of divergence, paths to be chosen. One or the other. Like the dark wood where I had been born into the occult world. A moment of choice. A tiny thing. This final, fatal choice.

What do you believe?

"Ask," I said a third time, binding myself to this moment. "Query me your riddle, Oracle. Show me the way to the crown." Kether. The eye of God. After everything, the Way was not closed.

Nothing is ever lost.

"Last, with one midnight stroke, all the first-born of Egypt must lie dead," she said. "And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?" I realized it wasn't a knife she held against my throat. Just as I had slit her palm with a symbolic representation of her, she was threatening me with a similar psychic symbol. She held a tarot card to my throat. The answer to her riddle was the identity of that card.

Piotr's reading came back to me, the cards floating in my mind against the churning backdrop of the dream I had had later that night about the reading. Kat and I-the Prince and Queen of water, locked in our embrace-the wheel beneath us with the shrouded and masked body. I understood its mask now, understood it was meant as my death mask. My innocence hidden away beneath a mirror.

Bernard was the satyr cherub with the engorged phallus. The flesh rod was an expression of his priapic quest for knowledge, and his persistent efforts to fuck the world were an attempt to make it climax and give up its secrets. Above us had been the rain of swords, nine blades reaching down from Heaven to prick our flesh. Below, the wheel of five wands surmounted by the empty faces of the unborn. They were opposites, the routes a magus takes in his quest for the top of the Tree-the paths of Severity and Mercy.

Had not the folly of Man let in these wasteful furies? We thought we could Create, that we were wise enough to make changes to the course laid down by God. We thought we could change the world as if that was sufficient apology for failing to change ourselves. Who among us was wise enough to think themselves not beholden to the rest of mankind? Was not murder of another but a murder of self? Was the Qliphotic darkness that had claimed me for so long nothing but my own fear of the unknown?

Where was my faith?

And shall grace not find means, that finds her way?

There were two paths: the path of Severity and the path of Mercy. I was on the threshold, caught on the cusp of nightmare and daybreak. At the edge of the wood, there were two paths. I had failed to stop Bernard and Julian from their unholy experiment, but in that failure was there also not an effort to save someone other than myself?

Was the hole of Daath -the entire lost wasteland of the Tree's Qliphotic darkness-nothing more than a selfish mistake, a failure of Ego?

For proof look up, and read thy lot in yon celestial sign; where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak, if thou resist.

"The Moon," I said. "You're holding the Moon."

Devorah released her hold on my hair and sat back on her heels, lifting the card away from my throat. She held it in front of my face. Two pillars on the shores of a river that cut through the center of the card-separating the world. A pale crab, imperfectly drawn as if it were but a half-dream, crawled in the mud at the bottom of the river. Two jackal creatures-one on either shore-howled at the pregnant moon that hung low in the sky. This was the Moon, the deranged madness that came over the intelligence during the darkness when the sun was dead and rolling beneath the world. It was the card that came after the Star, and it was the gateway to resurrection-the Sun and the new Aeon.

She dropped the card on my chest as she stood. She had been between me and Portland, and her motion was permission to look. I put my hand over the card, holding it to my body, as I turned my head and bore witness to what had been done to the city.

It was a black landscape. I had been pulled from the river near the railway switching yard, a shallow bank bereft of any impediments. From where I lay, I could see the broken arches of three bridges-shattered fingers reaching across the stained river. The destruction-the absolute and empty darkness, autem erat inanis et vacua -stretched up the wooden hill to the west of downtown and across the river through the 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.

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?"