Prologue - Jamais Vu
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> “Death does not wait and neither do I.”
—Narancan’s Folly: the God-King’s Downfall; Act One, Lines Twenty-through-Twenty-Five (The Sorcier’s Stone) by playwright Gregorio D’Arcene.
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The night was moonless and the stars wept. A great red wound of a comet split the black sky in two and did much the same to both my wits and my courage.
Men might lie to themselves of senseless bravery but I was no liar and much less a fool. An astrologer and arcanist of the Collegium of Saint-Mahault, I held within my heart no falsehoods but instead truths that might break lesser men from the inside-out. This knowledge was beyond mortal ken, not-of-this-world and played no small part in provoking encephalopathies among the practising-sorciers of my most-esteemed institution.
And this red scar of a star was worse than the truth of Lucifer’s death and more grave than the sight of Longinus’ spear within the Black Vaults of Shabiri. The comet bleached what grey there was left in the beard that reached my navel and made me into a simpering, gibbering mess.
By trade, I read starsigns, the effigies or omens as they were called by the gentry. Each one corresponded to an apostle, be They a messenger of God or the D’yabel; seven from the Host and Six from Hel.
What then, was I to do, when I discovered an entirely new apostle? One that was not the fourteenth but instead the very first before all others, hidden betwixt Their constellations like a spider beneath a welkin web woven of the stars themselves. Anteceding even Eden, this herald was neither truly infernal or empyreal, touched by both the Blind-God’s holy blood and by the Sin-Eater’s vile darkness.
It had started as a nagging feeling in the back of my subconscious, my sleeping mind stirring awake at something that should not be. Through months of toil upon bronze-shod orreries of byzantium and calculations upon abacus’ whose beads were wrought of Rethômic alabaster, I came upon the secret.
Not a secret but the secret.
There She lay, indolent outside my window, expanding beyond my telescope and ineffable to the many astrologer’s tools that lined my workstation where I whittled away at the tapestry of twilight to parse at the threads of fate.
The occult starsign formed a dragoon, a great big brooding würm of many heads whose hunger was as bottomless as the bottomless pit of the Sixty-Seven Hels. She appeared fully only once the moon retreated from the night, cavorting in the sky to reach where the sun would rise, aching to devour the light, trailing after the comet as if a fish after the hook.
And once She swallowed the Right Eye of God…
Well, I did not rightly know but, as forebodings of doom come, it sure as Hel wouldn’t be conducive to the good of mankind, now would it? But I could not either bring my findings to the Conclave just yet for they would brand me a heretic, an apostate, a warlock, a lunatic and a Sodomite while they were at it.
I put my nose back to the metaphorical grindstone of my parchment and quill, whittling away once again at the tapestry of night to parse at the threads of fate. Callipers measured angles of conjunction, telescopes caught the motions of the celestial bodies, and I prayed that I was wrong.
But God was just as deaf as He was blind and dead gods hear no prayers. Longinus had seen to it that Red, Nameless Christ was put to death.
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My hands were arthritis-stricken and prone to lockjaw spasms, each knuckle a knot of bone and sinew that protested in fear at sight of the quill. I had spilt no small amount of ink in my fervour, the blackness of the oil rung in shades of cerulean against the scarlet lamp-light. I stared, transfixed and in near-fugue, into the depths of my folly and stared back at myself.
My eyes were blue as the azure gemstones that might adorn a blue-blood’s fingers though my skin was more pale and twice as brittle as the crumpled parchment before me. To any that might chance upon my presence in my star-tower, they’d see the spitting image of a sorcier: hunchbacked, wrinkled more than Zorephet’s taint, diminutive in stature, and gnarled like an oak.
Sharpness of mind and dullness of body; this was my blessing and my curse. A man whose wits had been honed by decades of study but whose flesh had withered under the ashes of time. I had imbibed in the élixirs of God-blood afforded to me by my station but those could only stave-off Lady Death for so long.
You see, I was on the tail end of one-hundred-and-forty give or take a decade—easy to lose one of those once you live to my age.
I had borne witness to the Garrote Peninsula exchanging hands twice. I had seen the city of Saint-Mahault expand beyond the border of its valley and spill over the White Mountains such that it began to encroach upon the Eastern Cairn of Legementon. People that I met as young’uns did not remember me once full-grown and those very same adults forgot of me under the ravages of old age.
I was ancient and I was tired and I was scared.
The eventide gave way to the morrow’s morn’ and my dread fermented slow and steady into a vintage of terror that wracked my already-shaky hands with convulsions that could put a wolf-fever-stricken man to shame. The morning star appeared just east of the weeping moon; it was the dragoon’s eye and I could feel it watching me.
She—do not ask me how I knew the apostle was a dame, for not even I knew—opened Her maw wide. And there, just beyond the grasp of my telescope, I saw that red scar of a star and came to understand how the comet fit into the constellation.
It was Her herald, it was Her child, it was our doom.
Just as God had sired a son, so too did Azazel sire a daughter.
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The dawning sun bled its scarlet across the mosaics of the Collegium; that scarlet, in turn, was dyed into a porphyric amaranth as it crossed through the blue-stained glass imported from Asfaraba—its sultanates were famous for their cobalt mines that gave the glass such a colour.
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I huddled towards the prentices’ quarters on my cane, its tombac and oricalc long since burnished a dull and tawny verdigris due to the one part copper I had put into its composition. The iron end-cap smacked against the Ossirian marble, echoes hollow like a beggar’s insides come winter.
The only ones awake at such a time were the tranquille as sorciers of Saint-Mahault are all high-blooded and thus impossible to arouse before the fourth bell. Like all of their brethren, the tranquille that I caught sight of were completely bald of pate and beard; their spines tall and their limbs languid—the opposite of what the general populace conjured up in their mind’s eye when thinking of an occult practitioner.
The tranquille never left the Collegium for the only magiciens to interact with the commonwealth and gentry were those that had survived with their scruple and sanity intact. Those that do not retain rationality are condemned to a ritual that castrates the mind, becoming a eunuch of spirit with flesh yet still intact; never again can such a man dream, their blood forevermore thinned into stillwater as they walked the halls of the Collegium like sleeping men half-awake and yet not truly aslumber.
The Tranquille were beasts of burden and servants, given the simple tasks required to maintain the Collegium. They were no better than golemns in this regard; no higher-order faculty, no spark of a soul—empty husks.
One false step and I’d enter their ranks soon enough.
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I knocked on the door and waited, slumping my corpulent weight on the cane.
When my temper got the better of me, I knocked once again though this time not in body but rather spirit. My knuckles rapped thin air and through sympathie, I linked the well-worn wood’s surface to before me. The knock this time around was elevated to a drum-beat as the door vibrated under the strain of my sorcerie and impatience.
“Coming!”
When Petyr af Valancius opened the door, he was robed in the midnight-azure of our order. He bore no pointed hat as only masters proper might wear such—I forwent the blasted thing as the Hels would sooner freeze over than I would suffer the fate of the dandy. Ritual garb has its use in rituals but is damned-difficult to wear in the rigours of day-to-day spellcraft.
“Come with me, boy. I’ve need of you.”
I did not wait to see if Petyr would follow. I knew he would lest he anger the Collegium of Saint-Mahault’s Astrologer-In-Chief Aldritch Euthustra von Caligost III, nephew of the Duc Janus Reinharte Albernon von Caligost IV, rightful ruler of West Getâria from the foothills of the Allemon to the sempiternal peaks of the White and a right prick.
Let me tell you, having an uncle younger than yourself and possessing of ten times the power is irking to say the least. To say more: Blinder-Gott hat blut geweint, tötet mich jetzt, denn nichts auf dieser welt macht sinn und ich brauche guten alkohol—
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“Master, is it wise to be drinking this early in the morn’?”
I waved the boy away as I gulped down another mouthful of Tirrish spirits—uisce-beatha, fermented mash put through the distillery thrice and given to hangmen just before the stool is kicked-out from under them and to women during childbirth. The Tirrish might be backwards savages but let it be known that they make good swill.
“Look at the parchment, boy, and tell me if it makes sense.”
Petyr did so, peering at the ink-stains and chicken-scratch and consulting the bronze-shod orreries of byzantium. I took another gulp of the uisce and let its cold fire burn away my woes. I was an unwilling prophet to the Apocalypse so what better way to ease my building sense of imminent doom than to thoroughly embrocate myself?
The lad’s head started to swivel not unlike a star caught within the welkin web of an orrery, becoming more and more spasmodic the longer he read my findings. The callipers shook in his young and dexterous fingers and I swore that I could see his pitch-black hair begin to grey.
“No.”
It was a firm and disbelieving monosyllable.
He measured the distance between the Morning Star and Mercury’s retrograde once again.
“No.”
It was a shaky and refuting monosyllable.
He took stock of the sun’s shadow and divided its relative position to the White Mountains to ascertain time of year and then tallied that against the comet’s angle in relation to the Evening Star. I knew the number he’d get for it was the same one I had divined—six-hundred-and-seventy-six; the Mark of the Beast as ordained in the saint-skin scroll of Revelation. Eraneius of Cathenz, Iustianius the Martyr, Jon the Apostate; take your pick of whichever saint you thought wrote the book of Apokálepsis because Death came on the ‘morrow.
Thankfully, we did not have to run for the hills because Saint-Mahault was built along the peaks of the White Mountains. We were already in the proverbial—nay, the actual—hills.
“No.”
The monosyllable was just pretence as the lad’s shoulders slumped and he gave into despair just as I had. In silence, he extended his arm towards me and I put the bottle of uisce in his hands.
His singular gulp was like that of the seven-headed dragoon that ached to devour the sun—desperate and inexorable.
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It was the year of Our Lord Lucifer 686 After God’s Death. A winter had passed since I discovered the time in which the world would end. In eighty-one years, the blood-rains and ash-storms would shorten until they came every seven days and then would continue unabated until the earth drowned under fire and brimstone like Sodom and Gomorrah.
I sat in my observatory, looking out across fallow fields of spring where the serfs toiled after oxen that ploughed the ground so as to be able to plant a variety of crop—Carconên wheat, Chaeri sweet potatoes, and barley endemic to the Allemon of our fair Getâria.
In less than a century all of it would vanish under a tide of monstrosities as d’yabels poured from the opened mouth of Hel.
How placid did the men look as they worked in vain for a future that would last only four generations. How blissful was the ignorance that I so envied—the d’yabels in my heart had only grown fiercer since I learned of the truth.
I was no pious man; sorciers tend to spurn the clergy and their tall tales for the simple fact that we could explain their miracles as naught more than our own spellwork filtered through a lens of ignorance and simpering obeisance. Magicke and the arcane had been rendered into the occult sciences of the Sixth Century, able to be wielded through contraptions of steamforged sorcerie.
There was supposed to be logic to it all. Natural philosophy should’ve reigned over hocus pocus mysticism. Lucifer wept, I had divined the Apocalypse through means entirely scientific. And it stung to no end that the ignorant, dogmatic fools had been right. Blind-Faith and hope were the beggar’s lot so that a man might not find the closest body of water and throw himself therein—smoke and mirrors.
Those three words sparked something in my sleeping mind. Another knot of faint traces whose threads I needed to untangle so that I might parse and understand what lay beneath. It was like an itch in the hot darkness of my skull that demanded me to scratch it.
Rapidly, I took to my abacus of Rethômic alabaster, the stone beads tinkling their song as they hit against one another. The Morning Star was still visible, owing to the retrograde of the weeping moon and the equinox of the bleeding sun. I needed only to input the correct variable into the Jarten’s equation and, as the Lucielãçais say: voilà.
Just as Longinus had put an end to God’s one-and-only son, so too would another put to death the D’yabel’s daughter.