by Dan H Kind
Chapter 47
Evoking the Archetype
When Jack opened his eyes, he really looked at the world around him. He saw that everything—trees, rocks, dirt, sky, sun, clouds, people, birds, buildings, atmosphere, the planet itself, everything, down to the smallest particle in existence—had spirits. One single, connected spirit. A Great Spirit that united everything in the universe as a single, bonded entity made up of billions upon billions of smaller parts. Twinkling jewels in a vast, all-encompassing net of existence.
He was Trickster, the One Thousand and One Tricksters—and he knew what he must do to stop the end of the world. Now, he knew who he was. He knew why he had felt that Masaaw's kopavi was a part of his own skull. In a way, it was! He was Trickster, the One Thousand and One Tricksters, the only Trickster in existence. The original Trickster. All Tricksters were one being—him—splintered into millions of tiny shards. He was the Trickster that resides, and laughs uproariously at the joke of Creation, within each and every little jewel.
Trickster closed its eyes, and Trickster saw stars. Within the blackness behind eyelids, bursting forth from the darkness of deepest mind, were galaxies, infinite galaxies. Trickster had been here long before the gods showed up, and would be here long after they had been swept into the Void of Misplaced Myth like so much divine dust. Trickster was humanity, yet no human being. Trickster was mythical, but no mythological being. Trickster was Creator, but no Creator god.
Trickster was Firstborn, the Shaper of the Minds of Men. Trickster had created mankind of the elements, regulated the seasons, and put nature into its natural (snicker, snicker) order. Trickster had cleansed the primitive Earth of ogres, giants, and terrible monsters. Trickster had given human beings fire, light, tools, farming implements, tobacco, corn, language, writing. The ability to read between the lines, to look beyond duality and just exist. The talent—no, the necessity—to laugh while living in a harsh, unforgiving world.
And now Trickster would give mankind one last gift.
Survival.
Life.
One more chance to do the right thing.
Trickster looked up to destruction-bent Shiva in the sky, peered at the sphere of molten fire that looked like the sun times a thousand gripped in the god's star-painted hand—and Trickster was not going to let the dancing fool destroy the universe because of some erroneous, outdated duty.
Something Powerful, Someone Powerful, Someones Powerful, arose within Trickster.
And then Trickster began to laugh—an insane hooting and hollering that echoed across the New Shaolin grounds, the town of Eden, Time and Space and Eternity, like a gong of hilarity. Trickster, the One Thousand and One Tricksters, cried out in a voice that certain beings dwelling on countless Worlds of Myth heard echoing as drums of war across their minds:
“TRICKSTERTRON, UNITE!”
While Shiva watched the creatures of Earth scurry about the surface of the planet like ants, Jack Whiskey stood up and began screaming out gibberish next to Sir Arthur. Then mythological beings began flying across the sky in droves and landing in a deluge of divinity atop Jack.
A knowing grin stretched across Sir Arthur's face. He moved to the shade of a dogwood tree out of the way of things and leaned against its trunk to watch the show. He pulled a cigar he had been saving for a special occasion from his suit pocket, lit up, and began puffing away.
He was not at all surprised when Tom Sawyer, Iktome, Old Man, Masaaw, Raven, Rabbit, Coyote, and Hermes rolled past him like tumbleweeds, laughing as they were dragged towards Jack Whiskey by some unseen force of nature. The Tricksters were lost to view when they merged with the dogpile of mythos, which was growing larger by the second. Already the mass of shifting, writhing, cackling Tricksters was taller than the tallest building in Eden.
Birds such as blue jays, ravens, owls, mockingbirds, buzzards, and crows flitted by, their forms flashing between avian and human. Hundreds of half-human raccoons, monkeys, spiders, beavers, rabbits, minks, and an extraordinary number of foxes. A white man with one gigantic eye and one tiny eye, cursing between uncontrollable chuckles. A black man wearing a hat that was red on one side, white on the other, and green in the front and back.
A guy with antennae-like protrusions sprouting from his head tripped by, playing a flute with reckless abandon. A being with the torso of a man and the hindquarters of a goat, satyrs and nymphs tumbling along behind. A little Polynesian dude covered in seaweed who carried a human jawbone, his form changing from human to dove, eagle, fish, and back to human—an endless cycle of transformation.
Two veiled Arab women stumbled past. The older woman had a giant rosary hung over her shoulders and carried a green, red, and yellow flag made of rags clutched in her hand. Even veiled, the younger woman was unearthly beautiful, and Sir Arthur understood how a man could fall in love with her with a single glance, as if in a fairy tale.
A stone monkey with fiery red eyes and a golden crown upon its head, sporting a halo and holding a massive cudgel four times its size, rode by on a flying horse that looked suspiciously like a dragon. A banner flapping behind the pair read: “Great Sage, Equal to Heaven.”
Hordes of clowns with painted faces, both happy and sad, scooted by on unicycles, clinging in droves to tiny cars. Superheroes and villains torn from the pages of comic books. Cartoon beings ripped from the television airwaves.
All in all, the things hurtling by and combining with the massive mythical behemoth arising on the grounds of New Shaolin Monastery were far too numerous to name—and every single one of them was laughing at the top of his, her, or its lungs.
The mythos present at New Shaolin Monastery joined Sir Arthur underneath the dogwood tree. Many patchrobed monks and novices—novices who were not too sorry to see the dormitories go—met them there. At this point there was nothing they could do; it was all up to Jack and his mates. This apocalyptic scenario was well beyond anyone else's ken.
Even Shiva—the fireball expanding in one hand, another pounding steadily on the drum—seemed to watch, from on high, the Trickstertron arising in Eden. The human attendees of the “Your Trash, Their Treasure” sale had collected their discarded garments and become grim and silent as they watched the awesome events unfolding in the Eden sky.
Sir Arthur gave an impromptu seminar on “Evoking the Archetype,” a powerful spell thought to be lost to modern mythos: an ancient evocation that used up vast amounts of ken, all beings that made up the Archetype contributing their own small increment to the vast whole. Everybody nodded and smiled (many secretly hoping he would wrap up the long-winded lecture already) as they watched Trickstertron grow bigger and bigger and bigger. The behemoth's newly-formed legs now straddled the grounds of New Shaolin, its spindly limbs and strange-looking head reaching up to the heavens, reaching towards the indifferent Nataraja.
The Trickstertron had the overall form of a human being, with appendages in the right places, but it wore a massive elk skull upon its head, antlers and all. The hide of a planet-sized raccoon was draped about its shoulders. And what was that sticking from Trickstertron's backside, wondered the earthbound. A feathery tail? No. It was a hawk, flapping its wings, its head embedded deep in Trickstertron's rear end.
All the beings that made up Trickstertron laughed at the top of their lungs. The cacophony of hilarity was deafening, and everyone in the universe could hear the insane hooting, giggling, cackling, snickering. The sound gave one the urge to laugh in the face of destruction, and made one realize that concepts such as birth and death were illusions. There were no such things as beginning and end, real and unreal, good and evil, order and chaos, creation and destruction.
These dual concepts did not exist, for Trickstertron was all of Creation.
And Creation was Trickster.
Stephone looked in dismay upon the novices' dormitories, where only last night the novice monks had slept crammed into tiny rooms like packed sardines. In an instant the old building had burned down to the ground. There hadn't
been a soul inside when the plane had crashed into it, but who had been flying the plane? She heard a groan from the left of the building and went to investigate, while Captain Promo extinguished the fire. She found Charly Dodgers lying on blackened earth, his clothes smoking. The old pilot moaned and whimpered, his limbs splayed about his torso at odd angles.
“Help me, lady,” wheezed Charly. “I jumped outta the plane just before impact, and now . . . I don't think I can move, or my guts'll start pouring outta my or'fices.”
Stephone knelt next to Charly, whispering soothing words. She placed her hand on his bloody forehead. Her palm began to glow with a soft white-blue light that transferred into the pilot, rippling like electricity throughout his broken frame. He gasped and jerked up, twitching like a marionette, before falling back to the ground, breathing heavily but smiling.
A moment later, Charly sat up like a healthy man. He checked his healed limbs, then looked at Stephone with unabashed gratitude bordering on awe. “Christ, lady, you're a miracle worker. I thought I was a goner for sure when I defied that demon and sent the plane into a nosedive.”
Stephone smiled down at him and thought: Demon, huh?
Charly grinned at his beautiful, heaven-sent savior—that is, until he glanced over her shoulder and saw Nataraja, painted in starlight upon the night sky, and Trickstertron, made of tens of thousands of weird, living, contorted monsters melded to one another.
Charly screamed falsetto and passed out right there in the charred grass. Stephone smiled, shook her head, and went to find Promo, leaving the pilot to wake up on his own.
By the time Stephone rejoined Captain Promo, he had extinguished the flames. The fire-bringer uttered a curt goodbye and allowed himself to be pulled across the monastery grounds to join Trickstertron, qualifying as one of those Trickster types, though he was often loath to admit it.
Stephone began walking towards the dogwood tree. She passed hordes of stargazers who stared up at the heavens with mouths hanging open and eyes wide as saucers, transfixed by the cosmic scene taking place up there in the empyrean.
Nataraja twitched, and everybody on Earth looked up to see what was going to happen. The Cosmic Dancer peered down at them, a judging expression in his starry gaze. Then Nataraja spoke, and his voice was the voice of the universe, the voice of life and death, the voice of creation and destruction that hides within every instant of every day.
(I am Nataraja, the Cosmic Dancer. I Dance, and the universe is created. I Dance, and the universe is destroyed. I Dance within all things, I Dance within all beings. I Dance, you Dance. Inevitably, we all must Dance.)
While the drumbeat shook the universe, Nataraja reared back. He wound up, lifted a starry leg, and pitched the ball of molten fire towards Earth.
Some people screamed in terror, but most just stayed put and watched their too-short lives pass before their eyes. Trickstertron leaped into the sky, blasting off like a huge, misshapen rocket ship, the hawk stuck in its rear end flapping its wings. Tricksters hurtled from Tranquil Forest and shot into outer space, following in the wake of their glued-together brethren. The fireball headed towards Earth, growing larger with each passing second.
While everybody looked up into the sky, Hades appeared in the midst of the mythos gathered underneath the dogwood.