“It is true I once listened to what the one who is now fallen said—to test it, as did many of us. Unlike many, we did not follow him. It is from him that we wish to win back the sons of man for you.”
Thunder rumbled from the throne, as the penetrating light reached out to reveal what lay within the gathered throng. “He spoke of the thrill to be had in possessing the bodies of those in the lower realms, did he not? Did he not complain that men multiplied while your numbers remained constant? Did he not hint that by multiplication men would usurp your place? Is it not your desire to co-mingle and multiply your kind—and not only to multiply but also simply to experience the sensations—to control?
“You cannot even embrace a woman under most conditions, except through the arms of a human host! Keeping material form for more than a few minutes at a time is too draining for you without direct contact with a gateway-symbiont, and they are few.
“Even if the daughters of men could actually bear you true hybrid offspring, it would require tampering with the creation codes in ways that would do far greater damage, rather than heal that which already exists! Do you imagine that you know more than I, who designed both humankind and yours? Is the life I gave you so devoid of richness, or have you just made yourselves blind to it? Even if what you propose were possible, how could you win back the sons of man when you would take women from them and produce only your own sons instead?”
Uzaaz’El shuddered as the probing light pierced his body. “Shining One said that man would usurp us, but we are not threatened by his bent logic. You could help us and bless us with your knowledge so that we would not make mistakes.” Yet A’Nu-Ahki saw the Watcher’s huge eyes blink and heard the briefest quiver in his voice. “We can do this to your glory and are ready to prove ourselves.”
Caustic laughter echoed from the throne. “What need have I of your proof? I know that the day you set foot on Earth, the Basilisk’s web will fully ensnared you. Quit this pretense while you still can. You have not Shining One’s subtlety and you certainly cannot work this out no matter what information I give you. When you go to Earth, your seduction will be complete. It already is, in fact, for you clearly do not believe me anymore.”
Samyaza said, “We will consider your words, Master. Yet we shall prove ourselves strong for you! The women are but a means to the end of human redemption. We will not be seduced!”
The throne darkened, but the Voice upon it remained serene. “Go then, since you have it in your hearts to do nothing else. Your desire for women is not a desire I created in you, but one you have taken out of order to yourselves and nurtured. Slowly it grew and slowly it has dominated you. You will be further ensnared by it, for you are not meant for them.”
“We will fight ensnarement!” Uzaaz’El said; yet as one who tried to convince himself rather than one who asserted truth with confidence. “Give us this chance to show you!”
The Light on the throne turned from them.
The Watcher released Nu’s hand, dropping him screaming through the heavens swiftly back to Earth. He landed amid the ruined dragon shrines dotting the Ardis Range like empty eye sockets gaping from hollow stone skulls, where long ago Amazon witch-priestesses first sacrificed kidnapped children to bloodthirsty gods of flame and madness. There, the mountains in western Lumekkor brooded under a black sky filled with smoke and strange darting lights. Heat lightening shot through the air with distant thunder rumbles, as spectral voices uttered dark unspeakable oaths that whispered down from sun-cracked peaks.
A crack of thunder commanded A’Nu-Ahki to look up.
The brightest of the darting lights fell like a dying meteor into the Mountains of Ardis with a wail of rage and despair. Another light followed, almost as bright, and then others of lesser magnitude. Nu realized that these were the sons of God, leaving their exalted estate to obey the pull of their new dark master, whom they pretended even to themselves not to serve.
A coiling constellation of poison pin-prick stars, the Basilisk writhed about the globe, hiding his face from the falling Watchers. Nevertheless, he had a remnant of discreet followers waiting for them amid the nameless cave-shrines when they arrived—power mad and power broken men and women ready to be molded to whatever “divine purpose” the sons of heaven might dream up in their new found futility.
Nu watched as the Watchers walked among the scattered tribes of men and spoke to them, working in various ways as messengers of light to teach them how to make weapons, medicines, and new alloys—things humanity was already discovering on its own. They drew on faint tribal memories of the Promised Seed to twist them for their own purposes. For many of the Fallen Ones still believed that they fulfilled, rather than perverted, the prophecies and Star Signs.
Their haunted voices came to A’Nu-Ahki, as they communicated over great distances to one another to plot their options. Soon an argument broke out, then another, and another. The issues always sounded complex and serious—whether to trust human beings with the knowledge of living creation codes and the power of elementary particles, or to keep them in ignorance through making them dependent on sorcery and mysticism. Yet the emotions of the sons of God were those of proud children swaggering for dominance in a playground of human souls.
The Watchers soon realized humanity would eventually discover these things without them—just not as quickly and not under their control. Panic seized the Watchers—a creeping fear of having no place of their own any longer. If humanity could eventually reach the stars without them, what need had men for intermediary gods? Could human beings even redeem themselves? The sons of God now feared for the first time to call on the Divine Name. Had they not left their place against his counsel? Thus, they worked under their own names or under whatever titles men gave to them.
Nu listened as some admitted their ensnarement. These left Samyaza and Uzaaz’El to join the Basilisk openly, although most of the rebels still protested of how they could turn things back to E’Yahavah in the end and find satisfaction in the process. These, led by Uzaaz’El, approached Q’Enukki the Seer to ask him to petition E’Yahavah on their behalf.
The Seer reluctantly complied with the intercession, but refused to join them. Nu watched his ancestor climb the Mountains of Ardis to read their petition to the Divine Wind, El-N’Lil, on the desolate peaks where the Watchers had first made their ill-spoken oaths.
A’Nu-Ahki had often read the prophecy Q’Enukki had received in response to that petition:
“Hear this, Uzaaz’El, and the other Watchers that you and Samyaza have mustered; judgment has been passed on you. Your request will not be granted. From this time on, you will never ascend into the heavens. For on the Earth I bind you for as long as the world endures. But before the end, you shall witness the destruction of your beloved ‘sons.’ You shall not possess them, for they will fall before you by the sword and by the convulsions at the world’s end. Neither shall you plead for them or for yourselves. You will weep and beg in silent prisons of hot stone until the day of the end.”
Desperate and deluded, the Fallen Stars fled from Q’Enukki. They told themselves the Seer beguiled himself under a clever device of the Basilisk—he was only a man, after all. The remaining Watchers resolved still to prove themselves worthy by somehow accomplishing the redemption of humanity; for if they must be bound to Earth, they at least wanted to make it a fit and pleasant place for themselves.
Yet they could not agree on how to proceed. Some established differing codes of law among the tribes they had adopted. Others revealed hidden knowledge, while still others performed various wonders to keep the sons of men in awe of them, but in total ignorance. Nu noticed that all the deeds of the Watchers had one thing in common—they worked to make humanity dependent on them instead of upon their Creator.
The super-human bickering went on for centuries. As Nu listened further, he overheard how the Century War, unbeknown to those fighting it, had actually arisen as a showdown between Samyaza and Uzaaz’El over whether the quest for
a deathless seed should continue by means of sorcery and mysticism or through material technology. Though loudest of the otherworld arguments, it was by no means the only one.
Many lesser Watchers gambled on both sides, or in the ruckus, played more remote games of their own among the distant clans and colonies. They each hoped to gain greater power after the two chief rivals had depleted themselves. It seemed that every family on earth welcomed their aid and knowledge except one—and now even that last holdout buckled under their relentless solicitations.
A’Nu-Ahki saw the new Archon at Sa-utar; Kunyari son of Adiyuri mechanically taught the children of Seti the lessons of the Seers. However, these children had also seen the Basilisk-Whore and his two lovers in the lower chamber, for Nu recognized them. They listened to the Archon speak, but Nu could hear them discuss things among themselves afterward.
“Will the old windbag ever change his tune?” said one young man. “When will he figure out that we can make our own truths?”
A smirking girl scratched her sores until they popped open, and answered, “What I don’t understand is how he can possibly expect us to take him seriously. The world has changed and everybody knows it.”
“He kind of looks like a big grease-toad, doesn’t he?” said another. “Eventually, we’re just gonna need to crush his kind.”
They all laughed.
When Archon Kunyari saw that he had lost prestige, he tried to accommodate his listeners until he sounded like both the Sage in the hall of colored lights, and the Priest on the serpent-polluted altar. He stood with a hand raised to halt the Watchers at the gates of Sa-utar, while his other hand gestured for them to enter the city secretly through the catacombs.
The children saw this and smiled knowing smiles that said, “Yeah, but we’re still gonna have to crush you; nothing personal.”
With the delusion now complete, a stifling apathy settled like a poisoned evening fog over the city streets.
Nu approached one of the children and pleaded; “Don’t you want to know the truth and be healed of your infected wounds?”
The youth looked back at him with dull opiated eyes and shrugged, just as the mists swallowed him alive. “What wounds?” he said. “The only answer is that there are no answers—only opinions—and the questions were all meaningless from the beginning.”
N
u woke up to hear weeping, only to discover it was his own. He looked up from his mossy bed.
His grandfather sat dangling his legs in the warm waterfall pool.
The Old Man grunted and tossed a pebble into the water. “Had a vision, did you?”
Nu simply nodded.
“At times I think the reason we fast when we come up here is so we will not vomit when we actually get the answers we seek.”
“All I have are more questions.”
Silence fell for long minutes like a blanket of heavy wool.
Nu jumped when a gust of wind ripped through the tiny ravine, followed by an ominous rapid darkening of the sky. Heat lightening flickered in ghost-flashes from the turbid air above the small gorge. For a moment, he feared that the sacred Mount N’Zar had become another Mount Ardis and that the rebel Watchers now came to claim it too—along with Nu and his patriarch.
He shielded his eyes from the stinging dust and pulled his grandfather with him under the shelter of an overhanging rock.
That was when the air itself changed.
A tangible presence inhabited the blast, more powerful than anything A’Nu-Ahki had ever experienced in a simple disruption of inverted air layers. Something big and alive lurked nearby that brooded overhead—pervasive and impenetrable. He looked up instinctively, expecting to see pale Watchers looking down on him, clinging to the rock walls like giant spiders, but saw no sign of any other life. Then he realized that the air itself was alive.
The wind shifted until it blew perpendicular to the small canyon, making the waterfall hollow into a shelter. Nu and Muhet’Usalaq rose from beneath the overhang, rubbing their popping ears at the pressure change.
Outside, a tormented howl screeched through the narrow gullies, as if the forces of nature themselves acted as lungs and vocal chords, wailing for lost creation. Trees whipped against rock, while choppy wind blasts slammed into the outer slopes to form airy, but distinct, consonant sounds that merged perfectly with vowels piped through the many stone crack vortices around the ravine.
Then the earth too came to life.
Nu felt the words in his feet as they vibrated throughout every portion of his body—just as the voice at the Divine throne had. The sensation undid his muscles like a loose garment until he fell to the shuddering ground. Every bone rattled with a sound that moaned from the wind outside, yet resonated from within him in the deepest reaches of his soul.
“M-m-m-my-y-y-y spirit will not struggle with man foreverrrr because he is also made of flesh. Hhhhis remaining days arrrre one hundred and twenty yearrrrs-s-s-s.”
Thunder rumbled across the crevasse. Nu and his grandfather scrambled on their hands and knees back beneath their ledge.
The Apparition squeezed in to fill the gorge like pressurized-fluid rage. Nu’s soft internal organs quivered to the words like waves in jelly. The two seers could only lie there and tremble as they stared outward like living dead men trapped in sealed-tomb claustrophobia.
“I-i- have seen how the corruption of mankind is multiplied on the earth; that every imagination of Man’s heart is only evil continually-y.”
The scathing denouncement kicked Nu in the stomach.
Despite all his knowledge, despite his terror, as if in a sudden moment of solidarity with the human race, he wanted to object—to point out all the good things people still sometimes did. Yet the piercing light he had watched penetrate Uzaaz’El and Samyaza now lanced through him. It picked open his heart like a locked vault, spilling its damning contents in a splayed heap. What were those good things he thought he had seen but mostly a network of self-protection, arrogance, and pretense? Even his genuine motives at best had worm-holes in them and easily fell to pride.
A’Nu-Ahki the son of Lumekki did not fully know what festered inside the people of Bab’Tubila or Assuri, much less in the thoughts of Watcher-bred titans and giants. But he knew what lived inside his own imagination. He struggled daily with the darkness there. He understood defeat by it extremely well. He knew how selfish and egotistical his own motives often were, even behind many of his most noble and arguably selfless deeds.
But it was worse even than that.
It was not that he never honestly wanted to do anything good except for his own benefit; if that were it, things would be easy! People would be mere vermin. Their extermination would simply be the cleaning up of an infestation, not a tragedy. There was more to it than that. The heartbreak was that some people truly wanted to be good. It was that no matter what good Nu did, something in his own nature—something even in Nature itself—always managed to twist even his best intentions into something dark and diseased, given enough time.
He watched himself drink in the intoxicating praises of plain Na’Amiha, while in the redness of his fantasies he still pretended her to be the perfectly endowed Emzara in the darkened bedchamber. Yet he wanted to be able to respond as naturally and whole-heartedly to ‘Miha as he had to Emza. He simply couldn’t do it no matter how hard he tried and no matter how much he prayed for strength. So he lived a lie and tried not to hurt her.
Not only that.
The truth bubbled to the surface like swamp gas. He did not just yearn after Emzara, long dead. Any and every woman he might have had freedom to court, had the need of the day not demanded what it had, opened their bedchambers to his mind’s eye sometimes. Their images invited him in, as their real persons never would have. Most were younger than his grandchildren would have been, had they lived. He hated such thoughts, but such interwoven impulses hopelessly meshed with his attempts to satisfy ‘Miha.
Not only them.
He had visited
the fortressed camps of Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi often enough to observe how the armies spent their rest rotations. Pleasure-women flitted from soldier to soldier like butterflies, no shame, no pretense, and no pressure. Nu had seen them laugh and dance in their tight see-through silks—unavoidably displayed to any camp visitor. He was glad that he had only observed, never participated, and that such observation happened unavoidably, only when legitimate business brought him to the fortresses.
Such images had a way of sticking however, in ways that no man can simply will himself to forget. How often had he desired the momentary release from responsibility such women offered? Having resisted them outwardly, how often had he closed his eyes in his own impotency and willed his wife in the darkness of his mind to take the shape of a dusky pleasure-girl with no inhibitions? How often had he even told himself it was all so he could satisfy his wife anyway?
‘Miha wanted nothing more than to be attractive to him. Her attempts at it were still clumsy, insipid, and sometimes even tiresome. Yet in his mind, Nu had magnanimously granted her wish—kind of. He had encouraged her to come out of her fear-frozen shell with all the gentleness and patience of any woman’s dream-husband. Yet he often followed through in love-making by pretending she was someone else—truth be told.
Truth—the God-awful truth!
Nu wanted it to be different; wanted to be the man she thought he was from the inside out. ‘Miha bathed in the thought that she was the center of his eye, when in truth she was faceless, formless, and forlorn, the wearer of other women’s imaginary appeals when the lights went out.
In the throttling trauma of the Voice, and the Light’s piercing blade, Nu could only tremble, while his failure as a husband shook to the surface like dead fish in an earthquake-churned lake.
And it was deeper and worse even than that.
The images of last night’s vision cavorted around in his head. The pale children wandered into the depths to escape from self-involved fathers and mothers, only to find themselves trapped in the treadmill dance that would unravel their lives until it killed them all in the end.
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 29