Mark Teppo - Lightbreaker

"I needed guidance. You weren't offering anything but semantic games."

"Speak ye who best can tell, ye sons of light," Devorah said. "If better thou belong not to the dawn, sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling Morn with thy bright circlet, praise him in thy sphere when day arises, that sweet hour of prime."

I nodded, understanding the reason why Antoine and Pender were here at the river's edge. "He's waiting for dawn. You're all waiting for sunrise."

Devorah spoke again, validating my conclusion. "Till morn, waked by the circling hours, with rosy hand unbarred the gates of light."

The world was made anew at dawn. All souls-all light-comes from the sun. A student didn't have to trawl very far in any religion to find that reference. The sun was-like the Creator-the representation of God. This was the light that gave flesh life. It burned the eyes when, as supplicants, we stared at its fiery glow. Every morning as it was reborn in the eastern sky, it reminded us of Immortality, of the eternal cycle of rebirth and resurrection.

Everything is transformed in the presence of the reborn sun. All cycles have an end and a new beginning. The Wheel turns. We fall down; we rise up.

Antoine offered me his own interpretation of Milton. "Evil is done in order to transcend it, Markham. We pay dearly for our knowledge of Good."

"A lot of people died tonight." My voice was raw, torn by the memory of who had fallen. Who had died, trying to stop the experiment. "What's the 'Good' in that? Their souls have been harvested for their energy. Their lives are over. Milton wasn't talking about mass murder as a means to an end. He was talking about a fucking tree, a fucking symbol. He didn't mean that we had to bloody our hands just to understand humility and humanity."

"They lived lives of fear," Pender said, his ideological viewpoint finally having a chance to express itself. "They would never know ascension. They would never understand the beauty of their light. Why shouldn't they be allowed to give of themselves for a purer purpose?"

"You didn't fucking ask them!"

"Is it just a matter of choice, then?" Pender asked. "Is that the difference? If you had asked them if they wanted to See God and they had all said yes, would we have the right to intercede and stop them? Could we have any care other than to Witness their attempt?"

"What bullshit piece of scripture did you pull that from?"

"Isn't enlightenment our goal?" Pender continued, ignoring my question. "What child doesn't want to be with his Father? What child likes being separated from the embrace of their parent?"

"But we're not separated," I countered, trying to pierce the fervor of his argument. The first principle drilled into the skulls of children is that God is everything and everything is God. It's the basic concept which informs all of Hermeticism and most of Western thought. Just because we aren't consciously aware of Infinity doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Every child understands the idea of object permanence. Take away a toy and the toy doesn't self-destruct. It is still there, just existent outside the child's perception. The 'toyness' of the toy doesn't change."

"But a toy is an inanimate object. It will never change. It is only a representation of Form." Pender shook his head. "It is a khabit, much like we are, of the Real."

"Shadows. Huh," I said, letting go of the argument. He was spouting the same obscene rhetoric that Julian had tried to feed me. Light and shadows. The imperfect Creator that bound our sight so we couldn't see the Truth. Archons and blind idiot Demiurges. Very Gnostic and not unexpected from students of Hermeticism, but still so very broken.

Whispers in a dark wood. All things are broken, all things have holes in them. Man is the only creature that can mend the tears and breaks. Man is the only Creator.

"Man is the true shadow of God."

"Exactly."

"And you and yours needed to remind the rest of this Truth."

Pender nodded.

"They all Saw," I said. "At the end. They all Saw-" I stopped. They all went willingly. I realized I was still holding the tarot card, still holding the Moon with its twin paths. No, they all went. Without Will. The light of the mirror had taken that from them already. "Hermes Trismegistus talked about a schema for one's own soul. Enlightenment is a personal choice. You can't bring a whole society with you. You can't just engage in the wholesale slaughter of innocents just so you can split Heaven and talk to God."

"Maybe an audience isn't what they're seeking," Antoine said.

I stalled for a second, the word caught on my tongue. A horrible flame licked at my heart. "Mahapralaya," I whispered. If Ravensdale gave them the power to devastate Portland, what would the collected power of Portland do? What logarithmic scale were they operating on? "He really does want to remake the world."

Antoine remained inscrutable, neither confirming nor denying my accusation. Giving me no sense if this was indeed the goal to which his machinations pointed. Had Antoine intended to step in at this point and take everything away from Bernard? Put himself at the top of the tower instead of his alchemist to face the dawn?

Devorah spoke from behind me. "By thee adulterous Lust was driven from men, among the bestial herds to range."

Lust. There is no room for it in God's pure realm. Lust was what imprisoned the soul in the flesh. Bernard's quest wasn't one of enlightenment, not in the way he approached it. "What happens when God doesn't take lightly to the manner in which Bernard has assumed the mantle of Creator?" I asked. "What happens when dawn arrives and Bernard realizes he's just a psychopath who has murdered an entire city in an effort to prove what may be nothing more than a philosophical distinction?"

"What if he isn't?" Antoine asked. "Murder has been done in the name of God before. What is history but a litany of our efforts to show God our affection by smiting unbelievers. Hasn't Bernard done one better? He's taken those without real faith and made them part of his purpose. He's converted all of them. They are of one faith. One vision. How could God not love that?"

I sighed and rubbed at my face, feeling the scabs and stubble of the last twenty-four hours. Two paths. Was Bernard's way just a twisted variation of Severity?

This time yesterday I had been wreathed in fire, stalking Hollow Men through the shadows of their warehouse. I had been filled with vengeance, flush with the desire to do damage to those who had done harm to me. What had I brought to them? Not enlightenment. I had taken their souls, broken them upon the rack of my mind, and poured their spiritual essence into my vessel. They had been transformed, subjugated to my Will. Could my role be accorded the same distinction, the same rationale as an "act of devotion to God"?

I had justified my actions over the years by warping John Stuart Mills' axiom of the Greater Good: what ultimately served a beneficial purpose was worth the destruction. Love under Will, as long as it was all my Will. Bernard was just applying the same axiom on a larger scale. Thousands died so that he could remake the world in his image, a design that was better simply because he had thought of it. Because he had faith in it.

This was the cosmological closure, the bending back of the Universe on itself to a single point. The big magico-religious Bang where the world could be created anew. Here, at the center of the world-at the axis mundi -we would be able to perform that Act of Demiurgery that reflected the initial creatio ex nihilo effected by God. Bernard would become God by imitating God.

I sighed, and looked at the single star floating above the sea of darkness. "If this is the Apocalypse," I wondered aloud. "Then why did the Watchers send just a Protector? Shit, they would have sent all seven of the Architects. Philippe himself would even be here." The Hierarch's name caused a twitch in Antoine's ruined face, a break in the Protector's death-mask face. A flinch. I had struck a nerve.