“Sir, ” I ask, "I do not generally ask personal questions about others’ health and well-being without prior acquaintance, but I must know. Are you as dead as you seem to be to my inner eyes?
That startles both Robert the shaman and the uncomfortable stranger. The old man solemnly says, “Yes. I perished in the destruction of this place. Sister Bernadette died long before. Magister Salonikas is a somewhat special case, but there is an unmarked grave for him in northern wastes down on Earth. ” “Um, ” Robert begins, uncertain of how to proceed.
The old man delivers a long string of titles that make little sense to me, given my ignorance of (and lack of interest in) Western hermeticism. I do grasp that Porthos is his name, and proceed with that. “Magister Porthos... is that a suitable title? ” He nods. “Thank you. Magister Porthos, were you and your fellow councilors involved in the mysterious aid granted to us? ”
He nods again at that. “Yes, we were. ” I notice that he’s avoiding using my name and title. He’s probably ancient enough to be uncomfortable with women of power, particularly those of such tangled background as myself. I decide not to make an issue of it, and let him continue. “You three are among those chosen for an unusual blessing, one that we could not let perish without at least trying to help, ” he says. .
“You speak of our reawakening, assisted by the man I believe Robert referred to as Dante. ”
“Dante Souvent, yes. ” The tanned younger man joins in here. “He is not strictly speaking part of the council, but we speak with him often and he shares our concerns for what’s coming next. Given the opportunity to help in this way, he readily agreed to do so. ”
“I’m sure that we all appreciate it, ” I say, “but truly, we do wish to know more about what’s going on. ”
Magister Porthos steps back two paces, and the others quickly match him. A little dust devil stirs the sand where they were and traces out a circle of nine symbols. “Do you recognize these? ” he asks each of us.
I see the silenced man gasp for breath and speak at last. “Oh yeah, ” he says with a snarl. “That’s the damn cycle of spheres the Traditions came up with as a substitute for understanding the way things actually work. ”
The nun—Sister Bernadette—looks angry. When she speaks, it is (to my surprise and pleasure) in a polyphonic chanting, much like the passage of song that guided Robert and me here. She sings:
The words of the fool
Darken knowledge
The words of the wise
Lighten the way
In doubt there is darkness
Ask only till you find
The answer true
To arrive is better than to travel
There is only one world
There is only one truth
All good thing come from one
All good things return to one All three strains are completely comprehensible. But then of course this isn’t just talented singing, it’s the power of her Way communicating the complex passions of her soul to the rest of us. The magisters nod their agreement, and Magister Porthos continues. “These are nine of the steps by which we pass from potential to achieved reality, uniting form and substance into the expression of human life and then releasing it again for the next generation. ”
“I thought these were symbols for the stages of magic as those of you who work with formal symbolism identify them, ” Robert says. He starts to list some of the more common names for each.
He doesn’t get to finish. The older magister cuts him off. “And what is life but the power of magic made manifest?
I sigh a moment at that, and notice that Robert and the stranger do as well. This, I remember, is part of why I didn’t spend more time studying with the cabal of hermetics I once encountered: their dogmatism, that monastic and missionary impulse channeled into the study of magic rather than theology but if anything even more thoroughly buttressed by rampant hubris. They start by speaking about themselves, end by speaking about God, and don’t change the subject in between; the pursuit of transcendence via power is deeply unappealing to those of us who appreciate the role of duty as part of authority.
He notices, and he’s not at all amused. “Very well, then, if you understand this all so well, you bring me back to life. ” I have to admit that there’s some force to that argument.
The men are a lot more confused about that part of this experience than I am. Robert decides to take the plunge. “Er, magister, if you’re as dead as that, what are you doing here? ”
“I’ll explain the moment you show any inclination to keep quiet long enough for me to give a meaningful answer, ” Porthos snaps. Robert subsides. Porthos waits a little longer. “Thank you. Now then. These are nine of the steps by which we pass from potential to achieved reality. But it’s not a complete set. At every level of the cosmos, it takes something more. In magic, we must apply the trained and enlightened will to send power through the cycle to our desired goal. In human civilization, we must apply directing organization to gather the personality archetypes together into a functional society. The same principle applies to the organization of matter, vitality, the heavens, the angels and demons. There is always something more. Did that not ever strike you as curious? ”
The stranger, apparently feeling brave, pipes up again. “It just struck me as one more damn reason the model sucks, " he says in a conversational tone. “Nine is just too convenient a number for numerology and the other superstitious claptrap. I’m mostly impressed to hear anyone as immersed in it as you actually admit a weakness rather than try to force it all in so it looks tidy again. ”
“There are times, ” Porthos says with icy calm, “that I think it may be worth it to destroy some particularly unworthy souls and gamble on the arrival of better candidates for the end-time mission. " He doesn’t look directly at the stranger. That doesn’t matter, though: I can see the stranger quivering in pain and sensory confusion as the archmage pushes and pulls at the harmony of forces required to keep the stranger alive. It’s not quite like torture—I know from having it done to me shortly before I fled my old masters. It’s more like the experience of doubt translated into physical sensation, an unreliability of the flesh. I suspect that the stranger will restrain himself for at least a little while.
Porthos resumes after that display of somewhat petty authority. “The human experience provides us with the clue as to what’s missing. The capstone of the awakened will is the quality of judgment. Our capacity to assess and judge makes it possible to consider success and failure in progress toward our chosen goals, as well as to evaluate the goals themselves. But there is nowhere in the cycle of spheres for judgment. There is no teleology, no art of final causes in it. " He spreads his hands to call the dust devil back. “Or at least there wasn’t. Now there is. "
The wind uncovers a single bright red stone, perhaps an opal. It shines balefully in the midst of the sand-etched symbols. “This is judgment. ” It doesn’t take any of us very long to make the connection, and he pauses a somewhat insultingly long time to let it sink in. “Telos, Judgment, is the last act of creation in a universe that is about to end. Each of you is here because you’ve been marked by one face or another of the tenth sphere and incorporated into its interface with the rest of existence. ”
* * *
Robert I feel a lot of sympathy with the stranger and his repeated cries of bullshit. This isn’t how I approach the world, and it does gross injustice to the complexities of the spirit world. It’s okay for shorthand when trying to compare details of specific practices with people trained in very different approaches, but it’s never, so nearly as I can tell, been more than that. Except to the true believers, of course. I’m going to be annoyed if it turns out that there’s more fundamental truth resting with them than I ever thought, after all.
Once Porthos said they were all dead in one sense or another, I dedicated half my attention to examining the boundaries of their souls more closely. Sure enough, the distinctive traces of death
are there, once I know to look for them. But they’ve been nearly overwhelmed by postmortem infusions of power from some source I don’t recognize. There’s something going on here and I don’t feel I have the luxury of dismissing them as particularly lucky cranks. “Magister, do you identify the Red Star with this tenth sphere, then? ”
“Just so. The vivid and unwholesome glare is a symbol of the fear which judgment strikes into the hearts of all who feel themselves not yet prepared for it. ”
“And what, ” I take the risk of asking, “does its rampant destructive power signify? What is it about judgment that is best reflected in the deaths of magicians selected for no apparent reason? ”
Salonikas steps in while Porthos glowers. “Your question presumes too much about time, ” he tells me. You are marked because you will be marked, dead and returned because your future duties require you to be so. The future reaches into the past to choose those whom it must have for the sake of its own history. ”
“That seems very convenient, ” I object. “Whatever is, must be? That’s the creed of tyranny, the sort of thing that your Technocratic friend here”— I wave at the stranger—“would say. It does not sit well on one who professes belief in any alternatives. ” “Listen up, fuckwit, ” the stranger begins, but Salonikas doesn’t let him get further.
“Weren’t you just thinking about the importance of duty in tempering power? ” Salonikas asks me rather pointedly. “And if you think individuals may have duties, why not the heavens as well? ” “Er, yes. I didn’t realize you’re a mind reader, though. ”
“I’m not. You confirmed it, and the knowledge of that confirmation made its way back to me in time for me to use it productively. ” He smiles as though that all makes perfect sense. My head hurts.
“All right, ” I manage, “let’s say that you’re entirely correct about all this. What does this mean for us? What is it you think that we should do? ” “The ultimate question, ” Porthos says, resuming control of this little seminar. (This is more than usually cynical for me. Am I being contaminated by the Technocrat’s attitude? ) “But not one worth answering just yet. ”
“Pray, worthy magister, ” Xian says with about as much sarcasm as I feel (if the Technocrat is infectious, we’re both susceptible to it), “what must we know first? ”
Porthos looks very much like he’d like to just kill the rest of us, possibly by throwing us into that barricaded sandstorm surrounding these ruins. “First you must know the first thing, because the last thing is its logical complement. ” Oh no, I think, please don’t give us a lecture on hermetic logic. Fortunately, he doesn’t. “The cosmos began in unity, every element that we now identify with the spheres in perfect harmony and identity, and the One Soul animating it all. For reasons that we need not go into now, the One divided, and divided again, and separated out into the rather disorderly cosmos we see all around us. The advent of Judgment means that the reunification may happen, as each thing may he assessed and restored to its proper context, whether original or a context based on the disposition of things as they now are. ”
We all think about that for a few minutes. “I didn’t expect to be the herald of the apocalypse, ” I say, breaking the quiet.
Sister Bernadette makes her first contribution to the lesson.
Perfection in one Everything in potential Harmony in two The foundation achieved
Generation in three Walls and doors, defining
and welcoming Opposition in many Heavens and the earth Disorder and death in all Declare a lost message We have to think about that for a while, too.
* * *
WILLIAM
If I thought there was any point in it, I’d make a break for it now. Whatever these wizards have cooked up, I’m very sure I don’t want to be a part of it. But this is their turf. Listening can hurt me, but I hope to avoid at least most of that.
I also see that I’m getting somewhere with the body-language cues I use to manipulate the perceptions of the other two, Robert and Xian apparently. The wizards are part of some other culture, and they don’t have much if any connection to the cultural matrices of the new millennium. The other two outsiders do, and they’re susceptible to a little covert poking and prodding. I think it might be safer to spread the load of hostile skepticism around some so that all the corrective discipline doesn’t get piled onto just me.
For novelty’s sake, I decide to sound reasonable for a bit. “All right, " I say. “I can accept in principle the notion of transtemporal causality. The Union’s had damn little success with it, but that seems to be a matter of engineering. So future states shape their own preconditions. Fine. But what does that have to do with all of this concern with judgment, for those of us who don’t believe morality is a property of the universe at all? ”
Salonikas pulls a coin out of his jacket and tosses it up and down. “Do you think the planet cares whether the coin believes that gravity is a property of the universe? ”
“No, but that’s the cheapest kind of sophistry. You simply assert that morality compares with gravity, rather making any demonstration of it. ”
“You would feel better with a demonstration? ” He sounds very solicitous now.
“Not particularly, in light of my earlier comments about the unreliability of perception. I meant ‘demonstrate’ in a rhetorical sense, as I’m pretty sure you knew. ”
His accent gets more pronounced as he gropes for some of the technical terminology. “You have made an error in your presuppositions, ” he says in a lecture-hall declarative style, “with your etherealization of morality. The point of my exercise with the coin was to offer an alternative inference, that morality is no more detached from physical essence than gravity. You cannot choose to be moral any more than you can choose to have mass. You can only choose the expression of this innate quality. "
I think that the woman Xian is completely lost by this, and Robert’s looking pretty confused as well. Fuck ’em. “This is... ”
Salonikas interrupts me. “Porthos, Bernadette, we simply don’t have the time for this. I will show them. " The other wizards say simply “yes, " and Salonikas seems to blur, like overlaid exposures on film. In effect, he’s simultaneously reaching out to me and Robert and Xian. It’s an impressive feat of transtemporal connectivity, made more so by the extent to which it must rely on fortunate truths in his sundry dogmas and other claptrap.
What follows next is a trick, I tell myself. An illusion. But it’s so powerfully real. It’s a different quality of experience, a folding across space and time. I realize with an unhappy shock that the ripples blowing across my skin and the patterns of twisting stars rushing all around us define some of the basic catastrophe surfaces, the mathematical models for systems undergoing sudden and discontinuous change. Would some Greek or Persian with a taste for prophecy have learned about them? The hermetic might have, but that’s me grasping at straws. The truth is that this experience, while altogether strange, has a powerful feeling of actually happening, anchored in bodily rhythms and mental transactions just like any other. Figuring out the trick, if there is one (and how I hate to add that qualifying phrase), will take a very long time.
“This is what will be if you do nothing, ” Salonikas’ disembodied voice says. My viewpoint whirls across space (and through peculiar extra-dimensional realms) from Mars to Earth, and spirals down to the laboratory I was working on when I accidentally stared into the red star. I see my colleagues fumbling around, trying to compensate for my absence (with limited success). As one day gives way to the next, it gets worse and worse. It’s like entropy has turned against them: things fail sooner than they should, repairs take longer, and it’s all very wearing. One day there’s a tremendous explosion and the whole lab bums, killing everyone there and leaving only toxic residues. Similar dooms befall every group and place important to me. The last one of them goes up in a nuclear fireball, and I have the dim sense of it being misinterpreted as a deliberate strike of some kind.
Th
e others are apparently having similar visions, though I don’t pick up many of the details. Xian’s disappearance leads to a military investigation by some provincial commander out to get his name in the press, and it escalates (along with other tensions) to something close to a civil war, and then there’s the awakening and intervention of something that my mind wants to interpret as awakened demons or dragons. Robert’s vision is of New York City, its people gone depressed and emotionally sterile, the city crumbling around them until something fails catastrophically and toxic gases drive those who remain into early graves.
Without transition, we’re back in the ruins of Doissetep. “You see? ” Salonikas demands. “With you removed, there is no future worth having for the communities to which each of you has bound yourself with your accumulated decisions. You must... ” He pauses. “What’s that? "
We all look up. There’s the red star, looking very much like it’s descending straight on top of us. That vivid red light that it’s terribly tempting to call evil glares down, and in the harsh shadows it casts, the ruins accelerate their decomposition. The star isn’t precisely straight overhead, I see: it traces out a counter-clockwise orbit around the zenith, so that every part of this place gets some time to be in those consuming shadows.
The shadows are consuming our hosts, too.
“So much still to say, ” Porthos gasps as his feet rot away into something that looks rather like wet sand. “The birth of the avatar, the convergence of the avatar, your protection, you must know... ’’ Abruptly he stops speaking, because a shadow has fallen across the left side of his neck and face, and it has all collapsed into dust wrapped around bone.
Salonikas leaps around in a frenzy of blurs, dodging the shadows, probably drawing on that transtemporal awareness. It works for a while, too, until the shadows momentarily run clockwise and he’s diced apart. A two-story tower collapses on him, its walls intact as it begins the fall, all reduced to the same dark dust by the time they hit what remains of his corpse.
World of Darkness - [Time of Judgment 03] - Judgment Day Page 17