“You know, they’re looking for a king.” Micah laughs. A weak, forced laugh. “Can you imagine that? A king in this day and age? After all we’ve been through?” He pauses again. Keeping his back to Zeke, he distinctly reaches up to wipe something from his face. “I guess it’s just human nature to want to abdicate difficult decisions to someone else. That’s why we set rules. Regulations, policies, procedures. That’s why we seek out leaders. Everyone is afraid to think for themselves.”
Both the astral and the ethereal Zekes know he isn’t concerned with government at the moment. He’s retreating to his hobby, philosophy. Something he knows well. Something safe. “We’ll get through this,” He says. It seems like the right thing to say. “We always have before. King or no king . . .”
“I think you should do it.”
Even the astral Zeke, who should remember this, is caught by surprise.
“What?”
“You would make an honest king. You’re a good person, and you always have the best interests of others at heart.”
“Me? I can’t be a king!”
“And why not?” He asks, still not turning from the view of the sunrise. “I know you’ve always stayed in my shadow, but you didn’t have to. You’ve always proven yourself an intelligent, capable person. There is no one else I would trust to take care of these people.”
They both fall silent, watching the sunrise. The light grows brighter. Warmer. After several minutes, Zeke asks, “Do you want to know how she is?”
Another pause. “I’m afraid I already do.” His voice trembles.
“She’s in a coma. They . . . they don’t expect her to make it.”
“The power of God,” Micah spits out cynically. “Hah.”
It was not the reaction he expected. “What was that?”
“Does God serve only a chosen few? He killed the Egyptians to save the Hebrews. No . . . he wanted to kill the Hebrews too. In the desert.”
“What are you talking about?” Zeke creeps forward cautiously, but stops after a moment.
“People have prayed to and believed in a whole mess of gods since the dawn of time, but what good has it done? This world is imperfect. People have always suffered. The faithful and the infidels alike. What good is believing? Our prayers? All wasted. Do you know why Ariel was in that church that day?”
“No. No I don’t.”
“Her family was killed in the war. All of them. Her town was bombed while she was away. She was at that small church to pray for them. And to tell God she didn’t blame him at all.
“Most people would blame God. Hold a grudge forever. And why wouldn’t they? It’s only human. Does He exist only to fill our need to attribute fault? Does a tragedy become an act of God only when we fail to find a human to censure? Funny . . . knowing this, I can’t even find it in myself to blame him. How can I be mad when I doubt he exists?”
Zeke finds this philosophy unsettling. “Please, don’t think about this. Come back to the camp with me.”
Micah Frostbane howls in rage. He raises his sword and shoves it into the oak tree, embedding the blade deep. He turns to Zeke. His face looks terrible. It’s wet, covered in dirt and blood. An angry face, but weak.
“Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. Whether God exists or not? Who cares? It is the belief in him that is ruining the world. People are wasting their lives for him. Why do they subject themselves to the will of a divine ruler who torments them so? A God with a cruel sense of humor, handing out a few vain promises of paradise, telling us of some divine plan we can never understand? He promises Abraham he’ll be the father of a great nation. Then he wants the man to kill his son. Abraham is long dead by the time his grandson becomes the father of a nation, and that is a nation in bondage. So God tells Moses to free them from the Pharaoh. But the job isn’t easy. Why? Because God makes pharaoh refuse. That bastard wants to make sure Egypt sits by and suffers through every last plague He has planned. Then the slaves get out. He leads them into the desert, where they screw up. They worship the calf. God is upset. He wants to kill them. Who saves them? Moses. The human. But God still makes them wander around lost until every last one of them is dead. Then there is Job. The man he torments and destroys, just to show the devil how much the sorry bastard loves Him. He promises them a land of their own. Thousands of years later, they get Israel, but spend another two hundred years fighting the other religious factions who live there. And then the High Theocrat comes into play.
“Ariel is dying. She’s dying. She’ll soon be in the hands of this vicious psychopathic entity, and He is doing nothing to ease the worries of his believers. Surely not everyone is faithful . . . I know even I spend a good deal of time wondering . . . but Ariel . . . she believed. She believed in God with all her heart and never doubted him for a minute.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change,” he recites, mocking the ancient prayer. “Well, I can’t accept this. I can not live this way. Either God exists, and he is a madman who must pay for his crimes, or there is no God . . . and there’s no hope for any of us.”
He falls silent and turns back to the tree, unmoving. The sunlight reflects harshly off the water. The warm light of dawn starts to fade.
“Micah?”
“Here me out. I swear I will hunt down God himself, and he will bow to me and do my will. And if there is no God, I will create him myself.” Micah Frostbane takes one step toward the sun, then calls quietly over his shoulder. “Take care of Ariel, Zeke. See that she’s comfortable . . . to the end.” He walks off, toward the sunrise. Toward the beach. The sun is bright, and he disappears quickly.
Zeke turns to the oak tree. He grabs the hilt of the sword and pulls. The blade holds fast. He strains. He places a foot on the trunk of the tree for extra power.
It moves. Slowly at first, but the tree soon releases the blade all at once. Zeke falls backward, onto the ground. His katana falls on top of him.
He picks it up and stands.
“I will, my friend,” he whispers into the sunrise.
The visions cease. The images fade. Zeke stands in a starry void. As if he were suspended in the night sky, standing on a floor painted to match. Except there is no floor. He is simply standing in nothingness.
The ethereal plane of existence.
The visions are still fresh in his mind. He clenches his fist. A flood of anger rushes through him. An old wound opens. “He left us. He abandoned us for ten years! He ran out on me. And Ariel. Ariel . . . she recovered. She didn’t die. And he abandoned her for ten years of her life! He left us all alone!”
He bellows into the darkness, not sure if anyone was listening. Not caring if anyone hears him.
“And for what?” he continues. “Some futile beef with God? How could he! He was my friend . . . my brother!”
One of the starry points of light turns blue. It seems to come unfixed in the void. It dances around like a star-turned-fairy. It speaks with the all-too-familiar voice from Zeke’s dreams. “Painful though your past may be, on one thing you are mistaken. Micah Frostbane’s fight is far from futile.”
“Who are you? What are you?” He seethes at the point of light. This now-unwelcome entity that made him relive the horrors of Rome. The thing that made him watch Micah leave again.
It answers calmly. “I am the collective consciousness of all that is alive in the universe.”
Zeke pauses, trying to understand. “Are you . . . God?”
“God?” repeats the voice as the speck hovers above Zeke’s left shoulder. “There are those who might call me that.” The tiny point of light flies over to his right side. “And there are those who would call me Buddha, Brahman, Allah, Zeus, or even Jade Emperor.” The light speeds into the void, vanishing completely. “And there are those who would be wrong to think so.”
“Then who . . . or what . . . are you?”
“Perhaps I am like a crystal. Just as a single molecule of ice fits perfectly into the form of a snow flake, so do
all living souls fit perfectly into my being. I am all things alive. All life exists as a series of individual organisms, but all those organisms together make up me.”
“But you’re not God?
“You humans place too much emphasis on creator and creation. The universe was not formed by such means.” The blue light rises up from beneath him and hovers in front of his face. “Perhaps it, too, is like a crystal.”
The light stretches and changes into an image. A painting, hanging in the void in front of him. It depicts a mess of reds and yellows, swirling in space with no direction. “One day there was chaos, and the chaos came together.” The reds and yellows of the painting change and become black. The canvas now resembles the ethereal plane. The night sky. It slowly fades to reveal the exact same image behind it, although not on canvas.
“When a crystal forms, all the pieces find their place together. They all retain a similar shape from the largest cluster of crystal to the most basic atom. They don’t build on each other—they all seek their place and snap into being at the same time. In this manner, the universe came into being from chaos.”
Blue flashes to one side. Zeke, startled, turns quickly to face it. “That is where your conflict arises,” it tells him.
“My conflict? With Micah?” he asks, confused.
“Not with him, but with his creation,” the point of light continues as it dances around the void. “When the universe was formed, it was very large. Large crystals tend not to be perfect. When chaos turned to order, a caretaker also came into existence. This caretaker had the power to destroy and repair any imperfections. It was the first living thing known to the universe, and it was very powerful. It existed in both the physical and ethereal planes. Since I am the collective conscious of all that is alive, it was once one with me.”
“But you’re not this caretaker anymore?”
“I am, still. But now I am more. Now I am every life in the universe at once.” The point of light stretches into another image, this one appears to be a massive flight of dragons, gathered around two suns. Zeke recalls Metatron’s words. I exist as one entity with God, the dragons, and all those who you call malak.
This was the caretaker. All of the beings in the image. They all existed as one, single being.
God.
“For sustenance, this entity fed off the power of the stars. But nearly four billion years ago, it was damaged. Just as it approached a star system . . .”
The canvas painting changes. One of the stars explodes, hurling fire, rock, and molten metals at the dragons.
“. . . one of the stars went supernova. The caretaker of the universe was in grave condition, beyond even his own power to heal. But without him, the universe’s flaws would grow, and chaos would return. So with his last remaining power, the caretaker did two things. On the rubble spewed forth from the supernova, he initiated a force that he would one day be able to integrate into his own being to heal himself. Spare material, to repair his wounds. This was the power of life.”
Here it is, thinks Zeke. The story of creation and the meaning of life, all rolled into one.
One, single, disappointing revelation.
“And the other thing?” he asks.
“The caretaker was very weak. The life he created was not strong enough to heal him. Therefore, he needed to wait for it to evolve. He needed a species to come forth with the power to transcend between the physical and ethereal planes.”
“Humans,” Zeke states.
“That is only partially correct. Humans, as I mentioned, are only capable of doing so with their unconscious minds, through sleep or death. However, to be completely whole, the caretaker required a physical body that could also travel freely between the planes of existence. His second act was to leave his knowledge. The ability to nurse evolution to the point he required.”
“He gave us Razael’s book.”
“Correct. It is a set of instructions for pushing humanity to the final stage of evolution.”
Horror flashes on Zeke’s face. “So the draugr are . . .”
“Evolved humans? No. They are merely deceased humans. Those who have visited the ethereal plane in death. The book has resurrected their bodies, giving them the power to transcend physically, but they have lost their minds and souls to the ether. But there are still living humans to make up for that lack of power. The draugr to replace his body, the humans for his mind.”
“I don’t understand,” says Zeke, once again feeling a rush of anger and frustration. “How do I fit into all of this? Why do I matter? Or Micah?”
“Many people have held the book, but only one has been intelligent enough to use it properly. Enoch discovered it first, but was not fit to carry it. Therefore, he was made a slave to the power of the caretaker—who you would call ‘God’. Enoch was transformed into the Holy Sephiroth, Metatron, and the book passed on to his brother Elijah. Elijah understood parts of the book, but not all of it. He protected it for years, but passed it on to his grandson, Noah, who lost the book. Elijah recovered it eons later, but it was again stolen by the first High Theocrat. The Theocrat attempted to use it. He learned how to summon the angels into the physical realm. Many people have read the book, but only Micah Frostbane discovered its true purpose. Only he has the power to fulfill its destiny to revive the caretaker.”
“So what’s the problem? Isn’t God supposed to be a good thing?”
“Micah believes reviving the caretaker will lead humanity to paradise. He believes the god he is creating will be under his control. But that will not change the purpose of the caretaker. It is a Destroyer of all that is not perfect. Its injury was not perfect, and the process of healing required the creation of another imperfection. Once revived, this ‘god’ will destroy your lives, your planet, and your entire existence.”
Zeke is silent. The blue light stops dancing, but pulses softly.
“If Micah understands this book . . . if he knows what it means . . . why is he still doing this? What paradise does he think he’ll find?”
“Micah is trying to change the caretaker.”
“Change it? You mean its purpose?”
“He will change the Destroyer’s soul.”
“The Destroyer?” asks Zeke again, hoping for an explanation.
“The Destroyer. Samael. The supreme will that governs the caretaker. In the explosion, the his soul was injured. Without a soul, he has no life. It has no will. It is nothing more than a collection of matter. But rather than heal this soul, Micah seeks to replace it.”
“Replace it? Can he build a soul?” Zeke wonders if it’s possible. If anyone could do it, it would be Micah.
“No. He has chosen an existing soul. One he believes is powerful. One he believes will have the best interests of humanity at heart. He has spent years working on this, establishing his power over the wounded Destroyer. Synchronizing it to match his desires. He removed the injured soul. He hollowed out a space in the design. A shape that will only fit one soul. Yours.”
Zeke feels sick. “How could he do something so horrible? How could he do that to me?” He pauses. Taking it all in. Summoning up the resolve he needs. “So I have to fight him and stop this.”
“No.”
Zeke collapses to the unseen floor. He cries out in both frustration and relief.
The blue light continues. “During your contact with Metatron, you took some of his power into your being, a small bit of his soul. That is why you are here now. But he also absorbed a part of your soul, and with that power Metatron will attempt to restore God using his soul—now infused with yours—as the divine will. He is the opponent you must face. Only by stopping him can you defeat God.”
The void is silent. Zeke stands, running the information through his mind. Organizing it. Understanding it. Dealing with it. He formulates his next question. “I don’t understand. Why do you want me to fight? I thought you said you were part of this god.”
“I did. And I still am. But now there are other lives, and the
y are one with me as well. I suppose, like all living things, I seek self-preservation. To retain my own life. My own identity.”
The blue light begins to fade. “Hey, where are you going?” Zeke shouts.
“I can sense your heart. You have no more questions.”
“What next? What do I do? How do I get back?”
“Just wake up, Zeke. It’s time.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Resolve
The room had not changed much since Micah first entered it. The walls were slanted and missing some bricks, but he had patched up the holes as best he could. The rest of the laboratory was the same. Tables covered with beakers of bubbling liquids. Pipes and tubes running through odd contraptions. The Flower of Life, splintered and chipped away, is still barely discernable on the door.
The majority of the Theocrat’s tower was destroyed when the plate fell. But centuries-old enchantments were placed on this room, guarding the Book of Razael.
The High Theocrat’s seat of power.
It was a stroke of luck that Micah had been there. He may not have survived the fall otherwise. He may not have found the book.
The High Theocrats, over time, had used the room to study the Book of Razael. When Micah took over and became the Karellan, he found many of their tools useful.
Tonight, however, he used no tool. He chanted softly, under his breath. He had used the spell only once before, but had committed it to memory. Using his hands, he drew a Metatron’s cube in the air. His hand left the air glowing in its wake.
He drew it slowly. Carefully.
Then he stepped back. He had no more need to chant. He knew what he wanted, and his will made it appear.
Metatron stepped out of the glyph and into the physical plane of existence. He looked as though he had never been injured. Possibly even stronger than before. “I am impressed that you have the impudence to summon me knowing full well that you are no longer needed,” said the malak.
Micah was not afraid. “You’ve summoned Samael. He’s not ready. And furthermore, you went and got yourself destroyed. You’re getting careless.”
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