“We are in the fourth circle,” Arawn choked.
“What is this!” I shouted at Manannán.
“The black of the surrenderless surrender to the silhouetted shadow god of the finite. The god that is all in his ever-present nothingness. He does not exist. And so Arawn vomits the untruth in an attempt to speak truth. Your own cup has overflown,” Manannán said, his voice flat and quiet as he watched unmoving.
Arawn’s spilling ink slowed to a trickle, and he stood to his feet with the lower half of his skull gone. He wiped his arm through the soiled space where has mouth should have been. What remained of his skull was cracked and crumbling, but at least the foul liquid had at last gone dry.
“The fourth circle was the cup you drank,” he rasped, his voice like dust-gnawed bones. “This fight is not true.”
“Stop!” Manannán shouted, “Do not awaken him.” He stretched out his sword arm, pointing its blade at Arawn who stood unfazed.
“This light and dark in the heavens is only true to the beholder’s eye. Where is yours? Where was mine?” Arawn said with his words whispering out strained and ghostly.
“What is the meaning? What is my task?” I said, stumbling towards the broken knight.
“Your task? Your task!” Manannán cried. His hands wavered but his sword remained pointed at Arawn.
“We fought an impossible fight. You slew two, but you cannot slay us. Manannán will resurrect and I cannot be harmed by another. This game is not a fight. This circle requires a final point.”
“Was my drinking not that?” I said.
“No, that only brought you here. And now you must aim. Pull back the bow of your intellect and fire inward—a target of the soul,” he said.
“That’s it!” Manannán screeched.
He leapt at Arawn like a shrieking monkey and swung his sword. Arawn’s sockets watched me peacefully as Fragarach crashed his skull into pieces. His body dissolved into black goo until there was nothing left but Manannán and I... and the still waiting white light. I nodded to myself. Aim inward. A final point. It was what I had to do.
I fell upon old Hrunting and let its blade pierce into my heart. Manannán’s desperate screams were burned away in the heat of my pain. My heart’s beating thudded into nothing, and the light of my eyes exploded in a waterfall of color before washing to gray. The white was no more and I was released, leaving the failed god behind in that expanse he didn’t belong in. A beating drum shook my gray blindness. The thumping of a heart pierced by a redeemed sword—the turning of the earth’s wheel, its grind the sudden words that rushed into my dying mind.
The Moon calls.
Pursuit of the sun requires its reflection.
I am Sin—
the quilt you sleep in is me.
I watch your restless rest.
I, the ancient god of the Moon.
Lunar light darkens the Solar.
This quilted black is blotted by the sun.
You must look below the sun to see the moon.
But to see the sun, you need to stand above me.
The Moon calls.
The words filled my dimmed sight as I became the blind gray.
***
The sky spilled over into black. Rangabes in his fearsome form of light had vanished. The remaining figure of black thundered, and in his thunder he spread his arms as if desperate in his strange victory and he too became nothing, his black encompassing the heavens. My dear brother had lost, it seemed. But there was something falling from the dark, a slow descending light, laboring down weakly. I sprinted ahead and into the field.
The light spiraled down, thudding loudly as it crashed against the beaten down grass. Cerberus’s loud steps boomed behind me, but he kept a distance. I looked back and the great hound bowed his heads and waited. Apollo and Lugh remained by the wall. I stared at the fallen man with confusion. This soul was a stranger to me. He lay there unclothed. His hair had fallen beneath him, cushioning his head. An angelic face that belonged to a prince, a man who could make a woman blush just through the flex of his full lips and spreading of pristine cheekbones. Yet this beautiful man was dying, his skin sallow like sackcloth and his head fallen back, too weak to lift up and acknowledge me.
“Apollo!” I shouted needlessly, as Apollo had already come to my side. I sputtered, gesturing at the fallen man, “Breathe over him like Lugh, save him!”
Apollo held out his hand and a golden lyre flashed from the air and glowed like a ray of the sun. He stepped in front of me and stood over the fallen man, and he began to play. The air seemed to dance along to the harmony of his pristine playing, the plucking pure like gentle streams rolling over pebbled creek beds. Nature bowed to the perfection of this song of light. Apollo opened his mouth and sang: the nightingale's chirp, the rush of the pouring rain, and the mingled tree leaves swaying together in gentle ease—that was what this god’s voice brought, and still more. His humming was an instrument better than even his immaculate lyre. Yet the man stayed still in dying form. And then, Apollo’s hum was built into words.
Arawn once waited for the dead to come
Arawn once sated with red and rum
The light combed its long fingers in collection
The light of life breaking glass dew of reflection
The mourning of morning is for one who is night
This morning is forever, the one sparked sight
A ship moored to land, broken and still
You joined light and life yet fell for the kill
Arawn sees time that leapt away
Arawn can climb the ladder of day
Awaken, you king of deathly green!
Awaken, you king for eternity is mean!
Apollo abruptly stopped his playing and the wind, the trees, and the harmony of nature snapped into silence, guillotined into submission to the solar god’s will. I looked over Apollo’s sleek and strong shoulder and at this fallen man, this Arawn. He still laid there but now his chest lifted slightly, up and down, the beat of his heart murmuring life into his lungs. As if nature sought to sing him back to being, its breeze flowed over him and the smells of green Ireland lifted lively into the air, pushing into our bleeding realm with pure reality. A wave of wind carrying soft glowing four-leaf clovers washed over his body. The swirls of green clovers came down three times from the heavens, resting themselves like a pyre over Arawn’s body. The green light of the leaves hummed there, piled up in a loose pyramid. All fell silent again as we watched and waited.
A green gloved hand abruptly burst through the top of the pyramid, and a body emerged, garbed in green glowing armor that looked like glass bathed in a seafoam fire. The clovers whisked themselves away with the wind as he stood up. Green runes of glowing emeralds covered his armor. Yet the brightest emeralds were Arawn’s brilliant eyes, somehow greener than before. And on his head now sat a crown of gold, studded with seven emeralds on seven points.
Arawn breathed deep and spoke to us all, “Sulis turned me into swine and in that muck, I forgot who I was and am. Manannán tried to play the part of being king of the dead, but he forgot that he himself was already dead. He can still come back, but nobody will care. He is weak and I doubt we will ever hear from him again. I left my kingdom of death to my herds of swine and my red-eared dogs. Nobody came to me anymore. Not until you, Apollo.” Arawn bowed his head, and then looked up and stared at Lugh. “And Lugh! You awakened the light, reminded me of my rooted power and path. This is the only way forward. All else will crumble into the dust of nothing. The sun shines and it will not set on those who follow its path. It sets only on those who forget to look and go up. To ascend. You brought me from the depths.”
Cerberus hummed, looking at us all with his three heads in each direction. “I know of those cold dark grounds—I guarded them for so very long. But it was false. The sun set and did not rise again only because I slept. But I awoke to what I was and am called to bring.” Cerberus took a step closer and lowered his center head, his other two wi
th their tongues lolling out joyfully. Arawn hugged the massive hound’s cranium and itched behind his ears.
“It is true that those who know darkness are better than those hidden only in light. For we know the folly of that black way and have overcome it. We don’t long for what was weak. Those who do not know it, do not grow quite as strong through resistance. It is like a child who never had to make a choice of its own. It is like steel forged without fire. That is a weakness in and of itself. We are brighter for it,” Arawn said, kissing the top of Cerberus’s head and stepping back.
“And what of this black sky?” I asked.
“Manannán is trapped in his own despair, dispersed in the dark he so coveted. The path of the moon is one that misleads. It reflects truth and tries to claim it as its own. The moon’s light is meek myth,” Arawn said, turning to me.
“So now we make the heavens whole and flood them with light,” Lugh said as he walked towards us. His lines of blue tattoos glowed brighter as he neared.
“But Rangabes, where has he gone?” I asked.
Arawn rubbed at his face and said, “When I beat the darkness out of my soul and ripped off its parasitic mask, I spoke as true as I could to guide him free. He has left that quilted darkness and has traveled through. Where, I do not know, but I do know he has to do what he is about to do. The four circles are finished and Valhalla and its confused inhabitants have returned to where they belong.”
“So it is left for us to clear this sky. In the ocean of light that follows this flood, we must hope that Rangabes surfaces anew,” Apollo said, his golden eyes blazing and cast upwards.
“Pour out your light, pour it out together!” Lugh yelled.
I focused the glory of my light in my chest and shot it out in a flow of orange-red fire into the heavens. I screamed with power, pure pleasure and joy coursing through my veins and gathering explosively into my heart. I laughed and drank deep from my soul, the power welling up with eternal flame. Lugh’s tattoos cast him in a blue glow as he thrust his chest forward, and a polar white light burned through the atmosphere to join my stream in the heavens. Cerberus reared back his three heads and belched blood red fire into the sky. The flames shot out in three separate streams and then burst together, forming into a thin line before billowing out to embrace the already blue-orange sky. Arawn’s armor lit up green, his runes crackling with energy as his emerald light flooded the heavens.
Apollo hovered into the air and spread his arms, pouring out golden light from his entire being. His light tore through the sky and exploded into the wash of blue, green, orange and red. The heavens burst open in waves of pure gold; electrified rainbows carved through the sky and swam back and forth like eels. Gasping, I cut off my light as the others ceased as well. The sky tremored and rippled, settling into an expanse of gold.
Apollo gently floated back to the ground like a petal of a flower and sighed as he landed. “It all rests in Rangabes’s hands now. He has reached a realm none of us could dream of. Now, we wait.”
And with that, he sat there on the ground with legs crossed, staring up at the clear gold sky—yet his eyes were clouded with a lingering dark.
***
The air was absent, yet I breathed in a stale something, that at the very least, was fitting of the darkness hanging above me. Whatever I breathed, it was not my lungs keeping me alive. The frigid freeze of this empty space bit my skin with frost, yet it didn’t manage to pierce through to my blood and bones. My cracked armor still remained, but my dear Hrunting had finished its race and was gone. Solisinanis was still latched to my waist. My arms were heavy and covered in a landscape of carved, canyon flesh. Something was keeping me afloat in this dark land. I stood on rocky gray ground and I felt almost weightless... this land was surely not of earth. Could it be that I stood on the moon?
“Turn around.” If a planet could speak, it would sound like this voice. Deep and low, the rumble of an earthquake carried further by the rush of an avalanche.
I turned to where I’d heard the voice and stared in awe at the glory before me. I collapsed to my knees as I saw the top half of a giant sphere that was bright and blue, swirled with white and green. The earth hung there like ripe fruit from Eden, dangling above. I wept, knowing it was beyond my reach. I grabbed clumps of ashy dust and threw them away in disgust. Despite all the horror I’d seen, despite all the impossibilities I’d faced, this was the most terrible. For even as a Christian, the mythical still belonged to earth, even if in some strange realm. This, the moon—this was not meant for me. It was wicked. Wrong. My home was a far-reaching blue light—a beacon of birth, power, and humanity. Now I stood in the land of darkness, the land of stolen, not borrowed light.
“Do you know how I am I?” the voice said.
I shook my head at the strange cadence. “I do not care how you are you, I care only what you do,” I said, still on my knees and staring in awe at my beautiful home, with the moon ash sifting through my fingers.
“Do you know when I was I?”
“I care not for when either, but instead a why.” I sighed, the airless atmosphere a nothing to my emptied chest. More riddles. Always riddles. I breathed a deeper, emptier breath.
“Open your eyes then,” the voice said.
Open my eyes! I frowned and closed my eyes in protest. Closing my eyes did not bring that familiar black, but instead my shut eyelids were somehow ineffective. The landscape was still the moon and I still saw as if nothing had changed and my eyes were open. I shook my head and opened my eyes and saw the same. My stomach heaved and my heart dropped as I recalled the fleshless feel of Tartarus. I looked down in relief to see that my body was indeed still there. Solisinanis was tucked at my waist and faithful Hrunting was still gone like I’d noticed before.
The old sword had gone full circle, and its redemption had closed off those wicked circles. I patted my axe and ran my hands through my thick hair. I breathed a deep sigh, a breathless breath in this impossible air, and closed my eyes again. Through my shut eyelids I saw a strange being that stood before me. I opened my eyes again in shock and the being disappeared. I walked forward, stretching out my arms where the figure had stood but touched nothing. I stepped back and closed my eyes once more, and now the same being stood there towering before me, mere inches away.
The stranger blinked at me, his eyes two large walnuts hanging deep under full, heavy-lidded eyelids. He had thick black eyebrows that arched above like silhouetted domes of a cathedral. His beard was thick and pulled together; the hairs looked to be impossibly made of gemstone. His beard’s color was a bright and vibrant purple-blue that could only belong to the lapis lazuli. Even stranger, he had four pale feathered wings extending out—two from his back and two angled below his waist. The wings glowed a sickly gray, a strange mimicking of the moon’s own diffused light. His legs were as wide as oxen, and his muscles were comfortably covered in a rippling robe that caressed his tan skin as if not there. He had six large breasts stuffed beneath the robe... what kind of god was this? He... or it, reared over me like a beast; I barely stood up to his knee.
“So, you are Sin, god of the moon?” I said, longing to spit at the feet of such a being.
“I am Sin, an ancient god hailing from Mesopotamian myth. While the rest of the gods linger in weakness as the world forgets their might, I gather strength here always, all the world’s ills fueling my delight. I need no mention by name. A mere glance from the herd at the night sky and I’ve won over those weak-willed ones who see only material, rot and death. Fools fuel my cold flame.”
“And yet you’ve brought my fire here. Do you wish to burn?” I said, staring up at his bearded face, which showed no emotion. I opened my eyes once more, and again he vanished. I blinked and he flashed before me. I closed my eyes again and placed my hand at my waist, holding Solisinanis’s hilt.
“Open your eyes,” he said.
I frowned, but this time took him at his word, unsheathing my irises to cut his image into this fleshless landscap
e. And now there he was, standing as the same being, the same exact features, only now he stood at eye level with me at my height. I quickly shut my eyes again, relieved to see the darkness of flesh shielding me from false light once more.
“And which of these images is true?” I said.
“Can you trust an image that is a mere reflection, a dimming of light too pure to see?”
“And what would you have me see?”
“Come. It is why I have brought you here.” He curled his fingers at me and turned, his wings flexing and swaying in his gait.
He walked as if he were still twenty feet tall, but I followed all the same. What else was there left for me to do? Was I to slay this god, as his deity stood against my very blood and purpose? Or was his invitation and my listening necessary to move forward? Now was not the time to rush—where was the purity of powerlessness in that? Time was my whip, and as its wielder, I stood behind it by not letting it force me into fear. Its sting was my own to feel.
“Where are we going? There is only nothingness,” I said.
Sin stopped and spun around with a toothy grin. The way his dark, hungry eyes gobbled me up made me want to split his face with Solisinanis.
“My ziggurat and throne. Look behind you.”
I turned around and sure enough, on the hill we had first set off from, a massive temple now stood. It was made of gray sandstone—moonstone perhaps—as it reminded me of desert architecture. Only the desert here was gray, and so was the temple. A sick and pale glow exuded out from the stones. Shaped like a rectangular pyramid, the ziggurat had sloped walls in front of it that flattened out into a wide plane of surface. A stairway of shiny silver material went right through the middle of the walls and two gray stairways crossed the silver one horizontally, descending out like spread arms. And before those stairs another wall split through the silver stairway, turning it into a t-shape at the intersection. The silver staircase at the top plane of the ziggurat had a silver archway over it, a sort of gate that shined with an even brighter and smoother sheen.
Cerberus Slept Page 27