You can't, he says. Every day, innocents die. His voice beats against me. I am too soft in the dream, and his words are hard. Most of them from stupid mistakes and misguided ventures of other mad visionaries whom they had the accident to touch. Most die in darkness and in pain, their minds filled with idle garbage about their bank accounts and whether or not they were loved by their children and respected by their friends. What do we gain by saving them? Do they recognize us for our efforts? Do they reward us by continuing their menial, grubby lives?
We don't get to decide, I argue.
Of course we do. That is what we do; that is who we are. Every time you kill someone, Michael, you act like the Lord.
I contract at his words, at his blasphemous translation of my name. Like a slug pulling in on itself, I try to hide inside my soft shell, but he chases me, his claw digging into my flesh. Those people in Portland died in an attempt to bring us knowledge of the Infinite, of the Creative Spirit that made everything. Those people didn't die in vain. They died for a cause. They died so that we could understand why we live, Michael. They died for knowledge.
In ten years, there will be another million souls born on this planet. In ten years, Portland will be rebuilt and this will all be forgotten. We'll still be destroying the world as we refashion it with our limited bovine imaginations. Time slays us all, Michael, and the vast majority of people that it takes will never make any sort of positive impact on this planet. Why shouldn't they make an actual contribution in the search for knowledge? Why shouldn't they be allowed the opportunity to participate in a transmission to the other side? Bernard sought an audience with the Primal Agent of Reality. Those who sponsored him sought to Know the Divine. Can you damn them for the effort they made?
Yes, I shout at him. Over and over. Yes, I can. Yes, I did.
His claw stops digging. Milky tears drip from his good eye. Yes, he says, an echo taken up by the Chorus, who swoop around us in a rushing swirl of blank faces and hollow mouths. Yes, you did.
I weep in the dream, and maybe my body weeps outside the dream as well. I feel like I am starting to float. The library becomes transparent, and soon all that is left is the chair in which the Old Man has collapsed. He is getting smaller. My body is a disease, he whispers, it can no longer support life. It must be slain.
He is the organization, and the organization is the man. What I see, he says, is the end. The end of this age, of this body. It is time for us all to be set free.
Free. From ourselves. From our histories.
My legacy. He beckons to me with his claw hand, summoning me out of my soft shell. You are my ultimate resolution. My panacea for this decay. You are the hand that will break this corpus mundi. He bows his head, showing me the naked crown of his skull. All the black wounds on his skull stare at me.
In the dream, his request is not a request, but a command. And I balk, as I did in the flesh yesterday. I do not want to do this; I do not want to become what I was before-a devourer of souls, a breaker of the light.
I am dying anyway, a voice tells me, you're doing me a favor.
It is the voice of my shadow, the voice I thought I had destroyed. But, like Samael said, the shadow is never gone. Never completely forgotten. The stain will always remain.
For the last ten years, I'd been taking the souls of tainted men. To my own guilt, I had added the poison of psychopaths and deviants. At the unconscious bequest of the black seed I let root in my heart, I fed it all the rage and anger and bile the world could offer. That seed, that Qliphotic influence, had tried to make me over in its image.
In the end, I threw off that yoke, and found a path of forgiveness. Did it absolve my deeds? No. But it showed me the way out of the dark wood I had lost myself in. I saw the light, and earned. . no, I have not earned this. I have not earned anything. I have only learned.
The stain cannot be removed. It is the shadow that defines us, because without it, we do not know who we are.
The Hierarch asks me to kill him. He asks me to stain the Chorus with the Willful Act of devouring a soul. Into the holy and cleansed core of my refreshed spirit, he asks me to bring a little darkness. Just a little bit.
Nunc. This is how it begins.
And I did it. In my dream, I watch Portland burn again, and I watch Philippe smile as I spike his soul. Light pours out of him: first from his eyes, then from his mouth and nose, and finally all the black sores on his skull open up and release his light. His spirit erupts in a brilliant geyser, and with the net of my Chorus extended, I catch it. A fisherman of souls, bringing in his harvest.
I am overwhelmed by the rush of Philippe's life: all that he knew, all that he was, all that he dreamed, all that he feared. It roars into me, threatening to drown my own identity under the tsunami weight of his existence. But, like with the others, I know how not to be drowned by the flood of another life. I know how to swim through it. How to separate the knowledge from the fantasy, the history from the speculation, the desires from the dreams. I know how to make the sound and fury of another life part of mine.
When I wake from this dream, I am clutching a memory of a little girl, chasing geese in a field by the river. Marielle. So small, so young. Her face, alight with laughter, shining like a morning sun. I remember that day as if it were part of my past, as if that sense of contentment and security were mine.
But it isn't. It belongs to Philippe, from a time before he was Hierarch, before he slew his predecessor, and took the ring as his own. Before he, too, took a little bit of darkness into him.
He's in me still. This is how fathers pass on their legacies to their sons. This is how sins are perpetuated across the generations. This is how the myths take root, and how they grow.
Our hands betray what we have done.
I'm sorry, Father.
And Aristotle Emonet grabs his son's blood-slicked hands as Philippe takes the ring. He can't speak, not with his throat cut, but he can still do magick. One last time. He grips my wrists, a phantom memory handed down to me, and I hear his final thought before he dies. Te absolvo. I forgive you.
The word was on my lips when I opened my eyes. Absolvo. I sighed, and it slipped out of me, like the Word that started the World. Not a shout, but a tiny whisper of sound.
IV
The ceiling was rough, unpainted stone mottled with age. A heavy blanket held me down, and as I moved my arms to push it back, the bed frame creaked. Lifting my head, I examined the room. The air was dry, with a hint of mold. I was in a basement somewhere, in a room made up as a guest room. Bed, dresser, floor lamp, chair.
Man in chair.
Antoine was reading The Wall Street Journal. The light from the lamp spilled out in a cone of yellow illumination, and it reflected from the silver fingers of his right hand. His blond hair was shaggy, a different style than I had seen on him a few months ago. He was still growing it back from when it had all been burned away. His face was smooth and unblemished, making him seem all the more like a teen pop star with his delicate cheekbones and narrow mouth, and there was no hint of bruising from when Marielle had tagged him. A wool jacket was carefully folded over the back of the chair, and his clothes were tailored and expensive. Dark colors: charcoal and black. His tie had a hint of red, threads that seemed wet in this light.