Hope's Light

Chapter 25

by Erisian

Book 6

 

If you have yet to read the saga - the tale starts here:

Into The Light

Hope you enjoy!

 

Chapter Twenty-Five - Unknowable

 

How does one describe the indescribable?

The rampaging anomaly was a rift in the pattern of not just this realm but the very fabric of existence, and words cannot encompass that which is beyond all meaning. Even memories of such contact naturally fail to record the true measure of horror and struggle.

In one sense the cavern walls simply dissolved, whereas in others the realm’s reality itself shrieked in agony as this thing, this terror, forced itself upon us.

Think of a film running at a steady sixty frames per second, the thread of pictures on the screen nicely coherent and connected one after the other. Now imagine if between each of those frames things absolutely unrelated forced their way into the sequence - and we’re not talking about scrambled images but entirely unrelated objects - say like a banana or a volcano, each bizarrely random in size and texture. A film where the projector catches fire and its lenses crack as physics itself warps and shatters from trying to project illumination through things that were never meant to feed into the mechanism.

Yet the original film continues playing as best it can.

Several cultists, spread on stomachs and desperately holding to the quaking floor, simply gibbered and went still. Ripping vocal chords with his cry, the Apostle, the demon Rithgargaxith, remained on knees while clutching the Book despite the bucking rock, his lack of sight now a mercy.

Cassiel’s scream was just as raw, as the foreign presence began unraveling the ritual, began unraveling souls themselves.

“NO!”

Instinct overrode reason as I blipped between Cassiel and the coalesced anomaly, Spear in hand as the weapon’s tip plunged towards the source of the entity. Not the center, for it had none, but its source - the conceptualized thread-line snaking its way into Creation from Outside.

But this Child of Leviathan was a lot more than a sword forged of Chaos. It had awareness, it had will, incomprehensible and immeasurable.

Tentacles that weren’t snapped out to latch upon Camael’s vambraces, the heavenly armor’s solidity a counter, preventing the strike from reaching the intended target.

Summoning additional force, two additional wings flashed into manifestation to paint the dancing cavern with added color and brightness.

And the Spear of Light and Shadow moved forward only but an inch.

“Amariel!” Cassiel shouted again, his own will struggling to keep the skein of Dis intact. “If you go full power the realm will shatter anyway!! I’m barely holding against that thing, I cannot hold against you both!”

“Got any suggestions?!”

“Ask him!”

Him?

Sparing a slice of attention (risky as that was), I felt what he meant. A billion eyes alighted upon my back, all viewing in unison through the available portal as a Beelzebub stepped out of one of the chamber’s few remaining shadows.

Unlike the last Beelzebub I had encountered, this was not a re-written soul. No, this figure in a white business suit had four wings of burnished silver flowing behind.

That could be good for us.

“Beelzebub!!” I shouted with relief. “Great timing! Is this the Leviathan Child you were hunting?!”

Two equally silver eyes granting perception for billions more began measuring the scene. “It is.”

“So how do we get rid of it?!”

The collective consciousness considered. “You are the Servitor of Light.”

“You betcha! I helped you against Azazel at the Citadel!”

“We remember.” Their attention shifted to Cassiel, looking deep at the fires of his new Name. “We do not know you.”

As Cassiel was too busy groaning with effort to answer, I did so for him. “He was Shemyaza of the Grigori, the Light blessed him with a new Name!” I grunted too, flaring brighter to gain yet another inch.

An inch against, oh, call it a thousand miles? Distances slowly were losing meaning.

“You…possess the power to forge Names anew?” The Beelzebub, who had been taking a step forward, paused.

“Apparently! But hey, this isn’t the best time to talk about that don’t you think?!” A pulse of nausea from the anomaly, shrieking across eardrums as the pungent sounds from a garbage pit, shoved the Spear back half an inch. Erk.

Those eyes within eyes focused then upon the Apostle whimpering on the floor. Still contemplating, the Beelzebub commented more to themselves than us. “A tainted weapon of Elohim, a servitor with power of the Word, Leviathan awakes, and the Book of Raziel in Hell. Unprecedented.”

Another pulse like the taste of thrashing madness, and I lost another inch. And additional thinner tentacles attached themselves to the soul-lines, withering even more. “Dammit, if you can fight this thing, do it!!”

“We shall not.”

“What?! You owe me, Beelzebub!”

A sword of silver matching those wings appeared in their hand and, instead of glowing, the blade began to drip an oily blackness. “No debt lies between us, for Azazel was as much your enemy as ours. And this realm remains in contention no longer.”

“Isn’t this Leviathan shard a danger to all realms?! I thought you abhorred Chaos!”

“We abhor all abominations. And all threats. Thus we act.”

They moved forward again, and I had time to think, Finally!!, before that slickened sword struck.

Except it didn’t attack the anomaly.

That darkening blade struck instead Rithgargaxith’s spine, plunging directly through. And as the demon fell forward, Beelzebub caught not him but the Book.

The shock cost a couple more inches.

Cassiel, wedged behind my shielding feathers within the ritual maintaining the strength of the realm, shouted first. “Stop him! Don’t let-”

But Beelzebub had already disappeared.

With the Book.

Fuckity fuck. Fuck!!

Even Cassiel cursed. “Shit!”

“We need a new plan. You’re the smart one, any ideas?!”

“Not currently! Pray for a miracle?!”

“We’re angels, dumbass - we ARE the miracles!”

“Then be one,” he said with a groan. “Before more souls are lost!”

Right. Be the miracle. Be the ball.

Good grief, of all the times to have a quote from a silly golf comedy flap through your head.

Wait a minute.

“Hey Cass, if I pulse at full power for but an instant, can you hold?!”

“How long is an instant?!”

“Slightly faster than it takes for us to get into an argument!”

“So like what, less than a second?”

“Yeah!”

“That won’t generate enough to overpower that thing!!”

“Probably. But I’ve a thought!”

“Is it stupid?”

“You better believe it!”

“Then do it!! Your idiocy is so ridiculous, at times it may as well be genius!”

Channeling into him as much primal energy as his pattern could bear to grant him the reserve, I asked, “Ready?”

He grunted acknowledgment.

Bracing myself, I thought back to all the other monumentally insane things I’d done. Including taking a Chaos sword through the chest. What was that phrase? If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.

So yeah. It was stupid.

With a shout all six wings flared at full intensity, and in that fraction of a moment I plunged not just the Spear but myself entirely into the anomaly.

In my defense, it wasn’t the first time I’d pulled this kind of stunt.

 

~o~O~o~

 

Tornadoes and trailer parks, small bladders and long roadtrips, Texas barbecue and vegan conventions. These are things that just do not mix well.

Much like the Light and the Abyss.

All perception compressed yet expanded as I collapsed into deafening silence and the maddening stability contained within the bounds of my Name.

And as that Name I shot through the anomaly like electrons in a high-voltage circuit, melting the Child’s lack of pattern across that path to the Edge from which it came, a transition point that did not belong this far inside any realm.

It was instinct, really, how the sense of self hardened into a bullet of Light to launch at the target. Instinct and something more - a practiced maneuver.

Except there wasn’t time (or even spare consciousness) to explore that.

What I did have, however, was the Spear, its existence as much an anomaly as Leviathan’s offspring. Order and Chaos, balanced and sharp, plunged between the line separating both and held firm.

Allowing me to straddle across.

Light flowed in two directions: back to Cassiel as a fuel line for his support of the tapestry of Dis, and as a supernova blast outside the realm. The explosion detonated continually into the insane fractal-which-was-not representing the extrusion of but a tiny portion of Leviathan itself - a splinter contorted and twisted to slide into our framework of perceptions, into our structures of time, space, and spirit.

In the collision between our essences, we both recoiled in incomprehensible reaction.

It wasn’t the difficulty of two foreign languages crossing paths that rebounded, but rather the inability to find any common ground. Even two people using different tongues may convey shared meaning based on their perceptions. Point to a rock, pick it up, grunt a labeling sound or draw a symbol, and the counterpart will begin to understand. Such potential is wired into our beings, into brains and the spirits moving through them. But what if the perceptual sets are so different that there can be no shared frames of reference?

Here is where Abyss and Creation don’t so much collide as scramble upon each other, and from their contradictions are birthed the mess of Primal Chaos that lies between.

Unknowable, Unknown, and Known.

Leviathan existed in the former, and to its nature we, Creation, were its Unknowable. To that entity, plunged as it was through the middle layer, we were the anomalies and the danger.

The Light at the Beginning had shone into the Darkness of those waters, and churned a reaction desperate to snuff out its greatest threat.

And in full measure, that original impulse of the Light refocused within, overwhelming all usual sense of self for that surface pattern could not contain the greater whole.

There, along that Edge, my being echoed with the burning holy fires of the original underlying premise and promise of the Source of All:

I AM.

With a shriek not of rage or pain but of incoherent static, the tendril from Beyond snapped and fell away, the path through which it had infiltrated severed entire.

As awareness collected itself, an image came to mind out of a frantic need to understand that which had been witnessed: a vision of a tremendous hammer poised above an egg of glass covered with thick molasses. The egg, a marvel of structure able to withstand immense pressure, remained safe from the hammer due to the protective covering - for it slowed and thereby reduced the strength of repeated blows.

The egg however had a crack running down its side.

A shout of necessity caught at attention. “ENOUGH!!”

Crap. Cassiel.

With a pulse, six wings folded into two, and the cavern once used for water storage resolved itself into an image of an angel with wings of vibrant multi-colored flame kneeling with palm pressed against its floor of hardened tile.

“You okay?”

The angel nodded slowly. “I think so.”

“The souls?”

“They’re mine. We lost some, but the rest…they’re in my care.”

Before relief could register, a bloody hand brushed against my foot. Gone was the boot, gone was my outfit of armor, as wet crimson smeared across bare toes.

As I bent over wreckage of body and spirit, the Apostle grunted and his fingers went still. “Amariel?”

“I am here.”

“We sought,” he rasped, “only your sacred mystery, your holy blessing…and the Book…it appeared before us, granting a path…” Eye sockets I had once burned away stared into nothingness. “I only wished,” he added, choking out each whispered word, “to again touch the Light. Was that…was that wrong?”

As a reply formed to lips preparing to give it breath, the demon shuddered and lay quiet. And within him, the measure of his name as granted by his mother frayed entire.

Alongside words not given, salty moisture dripped one drop after the other, falling from my cheeks to mix with the growing pool of blood.

From behind, Cassiel spoke. “You would mourn a demon?”

I blinked at the tears. “They, too, are of Creation. Reflections of the very souls upon which they feed.”

“He knew you. And he carries no souls. How?”

“I had hoped…” I swallowed.

“Hoped what?”

“That he could be more.”

As had been done many times before, a hand plunged into dead flesh. But unlike when last I had touched the demon Rithgargaxith, this time fingers filled only with Light.

And they withdrew that which had been planted: a tiny spark no bigger than a dime, sizzling and uncertain.

With an exercise of will, that spark enfolded into a small gem of solidified luminescence, sustained and preserved. Upon a manifested thin chain, a tiny twinkling diamond clasped between twin feathers of gold dangled against neck and chest.

Standing, I turned to the angel who had become more than just a Grigori.

“What will you do now?” Cassiel asked.

“Now?” A hand tightened into fist. “I go get that Book.”

“You’ll need help.”

“Yes, I will.”

Getting to his feet as well, he flexed newly-colored wings. “A lot of help.”

I stared through the ceiling towards a distant battlestation hovering below a blanket of fire.

And beyond it to a simple circlet of gold.

“I know.”

 

 

If you've enjoyed the story so far, let me know in the comments below!

- Erisian