The Shadow Crucible

by T. M. Lakomy

  “I told you to be wary of him, this prodigal son of perdition,” Samael continued. “His ways and ours are not the same, and he is not yet subject to my will. I asked you for the girl, and you did not bring her to me, and many times you nearly lost her to Lucifer. Do you wish for me to swallow your miserable soul so your spark can die a thousand deaths, just to be reanimated for my pleasure? Do you wish me to further your humiliation?”

  The caustic voice punished him, dangling before his eyes every fear he had ever had, weaving them into a living terror that would undo the fabric of his essence. The implacable menace leveled his words like the crack of thunder.

  “I ensured Alina’s sacrifice was readily accepted,” Samael said, “do not let us torment her further for the sake of your weaknesses.”

  The king uttered a hollow, choked groan, the last vestiges of his willpower breaking. Alina was his daughter, and he had sacrificed her to gain authority and power over darkness, and demons to rule till the breaking of the ages. But the seven archangels of evil were not to be trifled with, and they ensnared him. Each time he committed a heinous crime they stripped him of his humanity, and as each fragment of his soul was sliced away, the demons devoured it greedily. He only began to understand the price he had paid when he started to recede, existing as a wraith clothed in decaying flesh, a minion over other minions beneath the baleful rule of greater evils.

  “Already I have devised games for your queen, your fallen whore. Soon you shall see the completion of my designs, and then you will have served my purpose.” The sanguinary voice grated like nails, each syllable a sliver of ice and fire, and the king knew there was no deceiving or obtaining reprieve from its demands. “I must know that your entire line is at my service, or else who knows what contrition might arise within you that could inspire you to oppose me?”

  In the darkness of the chamber there was a scuttling sound. Across the faintly burning lights, looming shapes fretted—not quite beast and not quite demon. They were malformations, abominations of something perhaps once divine, but their memories were long gone now. The shadows slithered towards their master, hissing restlessly. The king cringed and recoiled, aghast at the encroaching despair descending with their presence.

  “Here before you I shall assemble your next in line,” Samael continued. “And here shall I also watch the most poignant part of your devotion to me, for you shall offer them to me for safekeeping. Your sister’s son and daughter, young and fresh, ripe for the task I have set before them.”

  The king was startled out of his seat with a surge of desperation. Though all the vigor and tenor had long since departed his once strong limbs, he clenched his fists and straightened his back, mustering some fragment of his authority, knowing full well the futility of it. He approached Samael, preserving what old grace he could muster, but found he not could stare him in the face, though he tried. He felt his strength fail him, shame robbing him of his resolution. Standing there a moment, he remembered days of decadence and debauchery, and they seemed an insidious poison, pointless and worthy of derision. All of it was sacrificed and gone, and his remorse was so strong he braced himself before he gave in to retching.

  The king bent his knees stiffly and knelt before the fiend. He bowed his head, and for a breath he sat silent and unspeaking while Samael’s shadow washed over him like tendrils of smoke. The serpentine fumes wrapped themselves around him, taunting him with their dismal voices.

  “I see no need for kneeling before me,” Samael remarked. “You have already done that for me. Maybe prostration would be more becoming for you now, you who have given all to me and would relinquish even more at my bidding.”

  The king swallowed audibly, and beneath the mocking laughter of Samael he prostrated himself, face downwards, hands held in supplication.

  “Spare my sister’s children; they have nothing to do with this vile game I have played with you. You have eaten my people through pestilence, and feasted upon the souls of the few righteous among them. Let them be! Come back for them when they are older.”

  “Do not presume to distort my plans, king of dogs!” Samael rose from his throne like a cloud of pestilence, radiating the reek of horror. With slow deliberation he set his ironclad foot upon the king’s head. The weight and heat that Samael pressed upon him began to excoriate his head, scorching through hair and skin till the cries of the king were shrieks of agony. Yet he could not move, and though Samael spoke not, the silence that enveloped him spoke of more hatred and disdain than any words could carry. He pressed harder, till the wails yielded to sobs, and the smell of acrid, burning hair and charred flesh became a foul miasma.

  The doors of the chamber were flung open, and shriller cries joined his in the gloom; two children stood in the doorway, one girl and one boy, both held by chains and weeping. The golden halos of their hair shone in the gathering darkness. Their eyes were red, and they wrung their hands helplessly. They stood at the chamber’s entrance, escorted by the unseen shadows that writhed at their feet and bit their ankles till they bled, poisoning them and readying them for the sacrifice.

  Samael removed his foot from the king’s head. The king arduously turned his sobbing gaze to the children, who watched him with a mixture of revulsion and terror, still clad in the pristine white gowns of their bedchambers. The youngest was the girl. Her quivering lips formed words that barely escaped her mouth, and her eyes implored her uncle for mercy. But even at her tender age she understood that this burned, charred man was powerless, and the devil he had conjured was the master puppeteer.

  Blood and tears mingled on the king’s face as it contorted into a grimace, half consolation, half beseeching forgiveness. The oldest, the boy, stood with his mouth agape and his eyes distant and unfocused. Having wet himself, he stood fidgeting with his robes and staring at the ghastly form of Samael, who extended his rotted arms welcomingly.

  “Come forth, my children. Meet your new king. This one has not served you well enough. I have a remedy for that, realms for you, where you shall serve in kingdoms of fire and wheeling stars, reaping subjects endlessly. And they shall be yielded to you by an earth continuously belching forth more for your company.”

  The children did not move as they stood there. Then the girl suddenly clasped the boy’s hand, defiance gleaming momentarily in her glazed eyes.

  “Run, Marcus, run away!” She pulled at her brother, who did not move. Screaming, she punched his arms with her little fists and scratched them, then pulled at his hair in vain. The boy remained wide-eyed and gaping, the bites upon his feet oozing blood. “No!” she screamed.

  Samael lifted his left arm, and the shadows engulfed them both in a black veil. The screams and kicking of the girl were muffled, then dwindled and ceased altogether. The king lifted himself to his knees and wailed. His eyes were pits of reddened coal and stygian hollowness. With one raucous, maddened grin, he clasped his hands on the knees of the Blind God.

  “You have taken everything from me!” the king cried. “Is nothing ever enough to assuage your lusts? I have given you my kingdom and shared my soul with you. Will you not leave a broken man some bone to content himself with? Will I remain destitute of all the promises you once gave me? Oh, one devoid of mercy, I am evil beyond the reckoning of man and as far from hope as one can be, and yet I beg of you this: spare these little ones for they have done no evil! They are children and innocent. What god would ever justify this? Do you not claim to be divine?”

  Samael remained silent. Then slowly with careless fingers, he removed the cowl from his head and stared at the king. Thereon the king saw and knew and he understood—there would be no mercy for humans, for they were chattel living meaningless lives, easily conceived and easily destroyed. The king was merely a means to an end, a conduit for Samael’s will to subjugate humanity. There was no hope, no love, nor anything that remotely understood mercy. Samael was born of darkness, and being blind to God, knew him not, and saw not the light. Recognizing no one other than himself, Samael saw
himself as God and Lord of Chaos, extending into the chasms of whirling night and obliterating himself, further and further from the sparse particles that once rendered him divine. This creature was negation itself, the total negation of existence and light. And the king finally understood the extent of the terrible error he had made.

  The door to the chamber swung shut. The children, no longer struggling, filed past him clad in shadow. Their faces could barely be seen, only their feet were visible enough to see the serpents coiled around them, digging their venomous fangs into their ankles. They moved silently and knelt before the altar where the king had first sacrificed his daughter. Their stiff, rigid backs made the king tremble and shake. On all fours he called their names and crawled towards them. They did not turn their heads, nor acknowledge his voice, and the king followed behind them weeping, touching their golden hair, unable to look them in the eyes.

  Footsteps behind him made him swing around. His visage contorted with hatred as he saw Alina, the gash on her neck still open and a lewd demon casting daggers from her eyes at him. The king groaned and ripped at his beard. Alina, with an unabated hatred older than humanity itself, kicked him in the face, laughing a high, shrill, masculine laugh.

  “Get up, old man. Time you fulfill your duty, or I will shred Alina’s soul and scatter it across the thousand seas of the endless chaos for every horror to defile. Get up, or you will hear her screams as we skin her soul again and again.” The demon’s voice was hoarse and masculine, incongruous with the delicately built girl he was possessing. It was like a knife grating on bone, or shards of ice piercing through the arteries, perforating the senses. Her features, once soft and tender and given to smiling, had now hardened, and the muscles of her face were pulled into an unnatural, ghoulish rictus. The demon wore her body as a glove, and her movements were rough and inharmonious, the body being unable to expand to the mold of the hellish inhabitant within.

  The king’s grey face was already an ivory mask of misery, but this was merely the first layer of hell for him. Deep within him, the stillness of horror settled and renewed with each glance he obtained from the undead proof of his own cruelty.

  “Now,” came Samael’s cold tone, devoid of inflection. It was a suggestion and a question, a command and a blow, and the king found himself cowering and scrambling to his feet, despite his struggle to shake off the spell that lay heavy on him. He set his gaze longingly towards the children, their bleeding ankles streaming with crimson blood redder than the sunset in its glorious sail towards the west, and as red as the pigeon blood rubies of the papal crown. It glistened with a holy vitality that he craved and yearned for—the sign of honest life, of mortality.

  Already coiled around them were the dismal ghouls that fed on the souls of those given as offerings to them. It was the highest desecration of life and God, these innocents whose blood would fetter the king further into the coils of hell. The wraiths clamored and filled the king’s head with their ghastly whispers, and his will was threadbare and like a glass bauble, frail and liable to splinter into a million pieces. Alina was at his side with a smile that could curdle blood, pushing a sharpened silver dagger into his hands. The king did not recoil from the beast’s touch this time.

  “We own you, today and yesterday, tomorrow and for infinity, body and soul, blood and bone, mind and dreams,” it hissed.

  The words fell like an acid rain upon him, and he stumbled forwards, broken and bowed, one hand reaching for the girl’s throat and the other grasping the dagger. Swaying slightly as he reached out, the blood on the floor caught some unseen light and gleamed. He halted a moment, staring. Amid all the weighty gloom, this vibrant color struck him with its ineffable beauty and radiance, and he began to weep.

  “There is no mercy left on earth for me,” he cried. His eyes could not forsake the captivating scene before him, which was enveloped in the silence of death and desolation, echoing back to him the answers to his questions.

  “Mercy?” he asked again, barely audible. He pulled his gaze away from the blood and the children’s faces and looked beyond Alina, and beyond Samael, trying to find a place in the chamber undefiled where he could shelter his unworthy thoughts.

  A chill wrapped in wrath and warning emanated from Samael. Alina’s gaunt eyes danced with red flames, and within his head the king felt sobbing and weeping. The disembodied voice was broken and wounded. Alina’s soul, his darkest sin, haunted him, and the echo of her torture festered darkly. As he shut his eyes he saw her, and as he opened them he saw them all—his subjects and enemies, friends and servants, all those he had idly murdered for power. They watched him with hollow eyes that saw right through him and lusted for his blood and soul to devour, to alleviate their anger and bitterness. Children leered and women bared their teeth while men watched with vultures’ eyes, waiting to rip him to slivers of quivering flesh. They still bore the wounds he had inflicted on them.

  “We own you,” came the promise from them, spoken together in unison, a tide of fetid, rolling thunder.

  “May I be judged,” the king acquiesced knowingly.

  Then there was a gentle knock; barely loud enough to perturb the infernal hosts, but audible enough to dispel the horror they emanated. The king turned to the door, welcoming this distraction. Though mundane and meaningless, it was a sign of a living entity on the other side. The knock renewed, and this time it was louder.

  “Yes? Yes? Who is it? Who are you?” cried the king spraying spittle, his eyes bulging wildly as they fixated on the door. “Thank you for knocking! Is it beautiful outside?”

  But there was no reply, and he fell to his knees, groaning, crawling, and sobbing as he approached the silent door.

  “Is it shining outside? Is there laughter?” he pleaded with the door piteously, ripping at his seared scalp, yanking out the few unscathed tufts of hair wildly. The knock on the door renewed again, and the king cackled dementedly between sobs. “Tell me everything! But come in! Tell me what color is the sky? Tell me something outside of this cursed place, let me hear your voice!”

  But the door remained impassive to his demands. Rocking back and forth, he stopped crawling, but his eyes watched the door as if it held his salvation.

  “For mercy’s sake, open the door. I want to see the light. I’ve been bound here too long in the dark!” the king pled. His voice was humble and beseeching, and he was a spectacle of misery before the dreaded hosts. He had not yet noticed the sudden halt that had taken place in their games.

  “Open the door and let me see you then,” came the voice beyond the door, cool and calm.

  The king flinched in fear as if he dreaded its clear tenor would call the hungering lusts of the demons down on it, and they would murder it and devour it there and then. But the voice was bound in steel and underscored with authority, with an equanimity that was so vast it recalled to him a clear, azure ocean. The king scrambled towards the door, and beneath the frame he saw a faint glow, but no shadow to indicate a presence outside. Fearing another of Samael’s tricks, he knocked on the door himself.

  “Who are you? Good master, will you tell me your name? Why have you come to me?” He touched the door almost lovingly, caressing the wood with bent fingers.

  “You called me. I have come before and knocked, but you did not open the door to me then.” The voice was soothing and devoid of judgment, reassuring and mild like a summer breeze.

  “Forgive me. I was a fool. I did not see and I did not hear. But will you come in now?”

  For half a heartbeat there was silence. For the king, the moment stretched beyond the brink of sanity. He threw himself at the door, but didn’t dare open it, or to let it go. He pounded it with his fists, weeping and wailing.

  “Open the door,” came the tranquil voice of command.

  The king leapt to his feet like a hound and grasped the doorknob with both hands. But all his vigor was gone, and he turned the unyielding knob desperately. It wouldn’t turn, so the king smote the door with his fists, but stil
l it would not open. He felt the presence outside, patiently waiting for him.

  “Open the door,” it repeated, and this time there was a faint coldness to the tone.

  The king staggered back as if he had been whipped, then threw himself back at the door, desperate in his madness not to fail the person behind it. The doorknob finally twisted in his grasp, and he flung the door open jubilantly screaming, “Light! Light! I need to see the light!”

  As the door swung open, a blinding light filled the room and burned the king’s eyes, which were so long accustomed to the darkness. The bright rays speared the gloom and consumed it. Like the tumbling echoes of trumpets, it rolled into the chamber, conquering the darkness. But it was also as cold as the icy, whirling fires of the stars. It was light itself, domineering and proud, undeterred by darkness. Like a cosmic ocean it roared and spread its tendrils, washing over the king.

  “I am the way, the light and the truth. I am the light of the world, and you who are farthest from my Father’s eyes, pass through the fire and come to me. Cross through Hades and join me, for the fire shall cleanse you and expurgate your sins, then you shall be washed clean as snow.” The august voice was sweet and mellow. It belonged to a man who the king could not properly descry amid the glare of the light. He leaned on a shepherd crook, and was crowned by a burning halo of dancing, golden light.

  “Pass me through the fire of hell,” cried the king enraptured, falling forwards at the shepherd’s feet, “and through the darkest valleys of the godless ones! If I may just join you afterwards, to forever kneel at your feet! Yes, nail my heart to your feet never to depart nor sin again. Do not leave my side ever!” He crawled to the shepherd, but could barely lift his head to meet his gaze, so instead he held his feet in adoration.

  “Pass through the fire and come to me. I will await you. Behold! For salvation only comes to the repentant, and each sin must be expurgated with fire so that the darkness may have no hold. I forgive you, but I cannot make your victims forgive you, and neither shall the enemy, who has staked a claim on you. Justice precedes love, for love is kind and love is just. So go! The fire shall cleanse you and you will return to me. No eternal damnation shall befall what my crook has brought back to the fold!”