The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)
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THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY
The Paladin’s Odyssey
Book 2 of The Windows of Heaven A Novel Series by K.G. Powderly Jr.
Copyright Page
All Rights Reserved. 1st edition Copyright © 2003 by K.G. Powderly Jr.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dedication
For Shannyn: no father could be more proud of his daughter, and her husband, Wes—thanks for the humor and help when times were darkest.
For my granddaughter, Laurelin Mae Jordan—grow strong and courageous in Christ, for these stories are to you a legacy from your Popi For Rob, Jaime, and Jim, without whose belief in the fundamental worth of this project—a belief generously put to deeds by their time and creative effort on my behalf—I would have canned it and moved on. The Lord reward you each kindly and generously Thanks also to Martin, that great “Lurking Sasquatch,” who oversees web site and other essentials from a distance, where he always appears as a photographic blur in the background.
For my departed wife Dianne, who dances before the Once and Future King. These books are a tribute to your patience, encouragement, and caring.
For the Promised Seed: the suffering servant, wonderful counselor, mighty God, and the once and future King who waits to welcome us with those who are willing at Time’s End
The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
—Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind
Acknowledgements
Chapter epigraphs appear from the following books with thanks and respect:
All Bible quotations not from the King James Version (KJV) or Revised Standard Version (RSV) come from any of the following versions and will be identified accordingly: o New International Version (NIV) 1973 by New York Bible Society International o New American Standard Bible (NASB) 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975 and 1977 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Ca.
o New King James Version (NKJV) 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
o James Moffatt Translation, James A.R. Moffatt, 1954.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wartime Writings © 1982 by Editions Gallimard, English translation copyright © 1986 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament © 1913 Oxford: Clarendon Press Milton, Book IV of Paradise Lost Jim Leffel, Engineering Life: Human Rights in a Postmodern Age Summer 1997, Christian Research Journal or http://www.equip.org/free/DE311.htm S.L.A. Marshal, World War I © 1964 by American Heritage Legends of the Torah, Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eleazar Plato, Critias, translated by Benjamin Jowett, The Harvard Classics, ©1909–14
Slavonic Enoch (2 Enoch) Translated by W.R. Morphill, M.A.
Ethiopic Enoch (1 Enoch) Translated by Richard Laurence, LL.D in The Book of Enoch the Prophet, Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co. (1883) Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind ©1988 by Touchstone Books Ufoevidence.org
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prologue 1
1: Titan 5
2: Conscripts 19
3: Pyra 35
4: Chosen 51
5: Wurm Bait 73
6: The Song of Tiamatu 93
7: True North 107
8: Psydonu’s Shield 119
9: Priestess 145
10: Underground 169
11: Orb 187
12: Gates 211
13: The Floating Lands 227
14: Desolation 251
15: Day of the Dragon 269
16: Crone 291
17: Invasion 311
18: Damnation’s Mouth 323
Epilogue 338
Appendix: On Mythology, Fallen Angels, and Controversial Story Features Glossary of People and Terms (Updated for Book 2)
Previously in The Windows of Heaven…
Our distant past is not what we think.
Long ago, a violent cataclysm of water and runaway continental plate movements re-surfaced our planet. Another world richer in vast rainforests and gigantic animals once existed on the sphere we call Planet Earth. Many overlook evidence that men also lived there.
The Creator God E’Yahavah gave this forgotten world to the charge of humanity’s long-lived first parents, Atum and Khuva.
Yet they were not alone.
E’Yahavah had created other beings, among them the Watchers, whose proper abode was in the heavens. The brightest of the heaven dwellers was Shining One, bard and chieftain of the Ninth Heaven. Given vast authority in the heavenly dimensions, Shining One grew envious of the two domains E’Yahavah had kept from him—the Tenth Heaven, wherein the Creator alone dwells, and the newborn Earth.
Unable to storm the gates of the Tenth Heaven, Shining One and his cohorts penetrated Earth. In the sacred Orchard of Aeden, they seduced Atum and Khuva to revolt. There E’Yahavah subdued them all and issued a Great Curse upon the universe. He transformed Shining One into the Basilisk and banished him to the cosmos of Earth to wait out the ages for judgment.
Nor were the man and woman exempt.
Everything Atum could see, measure, and touch—even the very stars—was changed. Death, instead of love, became the agent of natural balance in Atum’s cosmos. The inner thought-world of the man and his wife became a labyrinth of fear, confusion, hatred, and guilt, while E’Yahavah subjected the outer universe entrusted to their care to a matching upheaval: Dragons and pack-hunting wurms grew hostile and swarmed from thorny rainforests, followed by natural disasters, decay, and ultimately death.
Even so, hope remained. Although marred by a self-destructive nature acquired in the First Insurrection, the image of E’Yahavah remained in mortal humanity, along with a promise more powerful than the Curse.
Nevertheless, the war in heaven was not finished. Shining One had left a seed of discontent to fester even in the minds of those who remained loyal—or who at least seemed to. That seed germinated among the heavenly order known as the Watchers.
Fascinated by humanity’s ability to multiply, some of the Watchers grew apprehensive at the idea. When Earth became full, would the human race expand into the heavens? The situation on Earth worsened every year. Wars raged, and cruelty increased. Could E’Yahavah really restore the monstrous creature that man had become?
A cartel of Watchers thought they had the answer. They petitioned the Creator for permission to go to Earth and civilize humanity. The seed of fear that Shining One had planted in their thoughts had grown to fruition. The Watchers became obsessed with the idea of multiplying themselves through an evolutionary process that would slowly merge their kind with the human race. For this, they needed human women—which further opened the doors for an entirely new and unnatural obsession.
One man remained on Earth not deceived by them; Q’Enukki the Seer spoke for E’Yahavah, and taught men laws that laid the foundations for a rapidly advancing civilization. But it was not to last.
Watchers led by Samyaza and Uzaaz’El descended to Earth against the counsel of E’Yahavah. Self-willed and self-deceived, they gave the tribes of m
en new laws and new knowledge—weapons and other prematurely advanced technologies for the elites that served them. Believing that they had established a Third Order between E’Yahavah and the Basilisk, the fallen Watchers became far more dangerous than even the Basilisk had hoped. Their obsessions grew, with inflated ends justified by any pragmatic means. Yet they refused to admit to themselves that they had now made a Second Insurrection, and had thus become subject to the Basilisk.
Q’Enukki the Seer withstood the Watchers and their illicit offspring—the titans, giants, and demigods—powerful men and women, contorted spiritually and physically by religious and genetic manipulation. Q’Enukki promised that a deliverer would come for the faithful, but not until after E’Yahavah destroyed and restored the world twice—by fire and by water. However, before these World-ends, a Comforter from E’Yahavah A’Nu would arise to lead the faithful to safety.
At the height of his influence, Q’Enukki vanished into the heavens to fulfill a new and mysterious mission. His descendants, the Seer Clan, continued to spread his message across the world. In the centuries that followed, the fallen Watchers slaughtered most of them for opposing their agendas. Finally, a remnant of the Seer Clan retreated to the beleaguered land of Seti, Q’Enukki’s distant ancestor, and father of the Orthodox Archons, which were a remnant of an older order from Atum.
Dawn Apocalypse Rising began the story of the Seer Clan Prince A’Nu-Ahki, who lived centuries after Q’Enukki had vanished.
A’Nu-Ahki grew up in the shadow of a prophecy his father had uttered over him in the cradle. A convergence of signs pointed to the prince as Q’Enukki’s foretold Comforter from A’Nu.
A’Nu-Ahki found his own seer gift after the giants of the Samyaza Cult slaughtered his wife and family while making war on the Lumekkor Empire. The Seer Clan found itself trapped between these two antediluvian superpowers clashing in the thorny rainforest mists.
But not all of A’Nu-Ahki’s daughters were killed. The giants took Uranna and Tylurnis as concubines to the Samyaza homeland of Assuri. The “Century War” followed, while the Seer Clan became a vassal of Lumekkor. To keep some independence for his people, A’Nu-Ahki entered a political marriage with Na’Amiha, sister of Tubaal-qayin the Great of Lumekkor.
Over time, the Seer Clan grew complacent in the political protection purchased by A’Nu-Ahki’s marriage. Yet they rejected A’Nu-Ahki as A’Nu’s Comforter because he had broken taboo by marrying a woman raised in Lumekkor, which all but worshiped the hated Watcher Uzaaz’El.
The war raged, until a giant comet blazed as a warning sign that even those outside the Seer Clan could not easily ignore. E’Yahavah visited A’Nu-Ahki with a vivid apocalypse. Everywhere on Earth, society reinforced the evil in humanity and undermined good. The Watchers, who had come to civilize men with presumptuous noble intentions, had fallen to the same seductions faced by men. Chaos and tyranny resulted. In one-hundred and twenty years, E’Yahavah would send a cataclysm to end the world. Only those who followed the Comforter of A’Nu would survive.
Seventy of those one-hundred and twenty years have now passed…
The Paladin’s Odyssey
For owing to these three things came the flood upon the earth, namely, owing to the fornication wherein the Watchers against the law of their ordinances went a-whoring after the daughters of men, and took themselves wives of all which they chose; and they made the beginning of uncleanness. And they begat sons, the Nephilim, and they were all unlike, and they devoured one another; and the Giants slew the Naphil, and the Naphil slew the Eljo, and the Eljo mankind, and one man against another. And every one sold himself to work iniquity and to shed much blood, and the earth was filled with iniquity. And after this they sinned against the beasts and birds, and all that moveth and walketh on the earth…
—The Book of Jubilees 7:21-24a (A Jewish apocryphal book from circa 120 BC)
Prometheus was one of the Titans, a gigantic race, who inhabited the earth before the creation of man. To him and his brother Epimetheus was committed the office of making man, and providing him and all other animals with the faculties necessary for their preservation. Epimetheus undertook to do this, and Prometheus was to overlook his work, when it was done.
—Thomas Bulfinch
The Age of Fable, (1855)
Prologue
S
amuille took Q’Enukki away in the sky chariot about an hour ago. At least Q’Enukki thought it was an hour. Could it have been a day? Time itself seemed to have lost coherence.
Only the discussion remained.
The icy head of a gigantic comet filled the transparent bubble section of the Watcher’s star-chariot on Q’Enukki’s side—if star-chariot was the correct term for it. Q’Enukki did not know—he was only human. Samuille was not. Sometimes the vehicle behaved like a machine, at others like a living thing. It obeyed the commands of Samuille, but also did things of its own initiative.
Q’Enukki suddenly had a hard time focusing on the Watcher’s answer to a question Q’Enukki could not quite remember asking. It was something about the comet and why we slowed to meet it—that is it!
The glowing humaniform being seemed about to end his monologue on celestial mechanics—a detailed description of how the primordial waters of the Abyssu deeps had been divided by the expansion of space at the Beginning. Q’Enukki had asked—he fully remembered now. Normally the topic fascinated him. He had studied it his whole life back on Earth, though on a far less sophisticated level.
The Watcher ended his lengthy explanation with a question: “Do you know why I have shown you this comet?”
“It wasn’t about the primordial waters?” Q’Enukki said; pretending his attention had not drifted towards the end.
Samuille’s black white-less eyes took on the gravity of the deeps. “No. When we left your world, we increased our speed to near the velocity of light. Time back on Earth has moved more rapidly than for us in this chariot—just as time moved more rapidly beyond the white fountain than it did for the Earth inside it during the early days of Creation Week.
“When we left Earth’s solar system, we deliberately knocked this chunk of primordial ice from its course. It has now fallen into the attraction-well of the sun. It will orbit once, taking one hundred and fifteen years—Earth Time—to do so. We have looped back into the solar system to check its progress, with a few other things that are not for you to know.”
“Why will it orbit only once?”
“Because this comet is Sword of the Breaker; destined to divide the Leviathan, Tiamatu—that fifth inner planet which the Basilisk has taught the sons of Earth to worship. In a sense, the shards of Tiamatu’s cleaving shall destroy the old Earth and be used to create the new.”
“How soon until the cleaving?”
Samuille laid a shimmering hand on Q’Enukki’s shoulder. “Even now the last generation to reach adulthood is being born.”
The passions aroused during the religious wars were only the consequence of intellectual debates. It was Calvin versus the rabble, not one drunken trooper against another. When the Spirit is aroused—each time it is aroused—it sheds blood, without knowing it or troubling about it. The bloodshed takes place on a lower level. Neither Diderot, nor St. Paul, nor Calvin, nor Marx, nor the rabble, nor Confucius thought of bloodshed. But in the last analysis the Spirit walks on human feet. Then it is blind and it devastates. It turns to emotion on the lower level, and then there is shooting.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Wartime Writings
THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367
1
Titan
“F
ire!” The Zealot in the stone amphitheater bellowed, his skinny hands flailed upward, dried twig fingers each a wavering tongue of flame. “Fire shall consume you from the heavens, and from the cracks of Underworld! The flab of this overfed people is grease to fuel the flames! The vision of Belkrini, son of Tarkuni, son of Urugim, the son of Q’Enukki the Seer! It is sure—written
by the hand of E’Yahavah A’Nu! There is no quenching…”
U’Sumi sat many circles up from the center-stage rostrum and only half-listened to the self-parodying fanatic. The low pass of some titan’s flying chariot broke his thoughts and made a more interesting object for his attention. It hardly mattered what this particular would-be seer actually ranted about, anyway. They all played the same song on slightly different instruments—and there was no shortage of instruments.
The chariot of glass and flame vanished somewhere behind the cupped hollow of the amphitheatre, leaving only the shrieking Zealot.
U’Sumi curled his lips into a mirthless smirk. He muttered under his breath what he wanted to shout: “Come on, Belkrini, your eyes can bug out farther than that. I’m disappointed in you! And that pious trembling of your voice just isn’t jiggling our livers the way it usually does. I should be ready to hurl my morning flat-cakes by now. You’re so off your game!”
“Water quenches fire!” a newcomer said—a tall, handsome man of rich dark skin and ocean blue eyes—who strode down to the center of the amphitheater toward the podium. Those in the crowd who had not yet found seats made way for him. Even the golden afternoon sky seemed to move for him with a gust of wind to ruffle the humid air.
This second speaker had once been a student of U’Sumi’s father. He was now U’Sumi’s own chief instructor at the Akh’Uzan Boy’s Academy. “At least Nestrigati half knows what he’s talking about.”
U’Sumi realized sadly that this was not saying much in a valley where the chief domestic product appeared to be “mystical knowledge” for which nobody seemed to have any practical use. Who am I kidding? He thought. Old Nesti’s every bit as drunk on his own speculations as these other clowns—worse, since I have to study under him! I only give his ideas some credit because they’re based mostly on my father’s.