XXIX
Mémento Mori
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> Ashes to ashes,
>
> Dust to dust;
>
> Memento mori.
—Epitaph of Bishop Gascoine D’Tristime, etched upon the lid of the sarcophagus where He lies, skinless so that His soul may ascend all the faster to the Host of Hosts; cir. 556 After God’s Death, located within the consecrated catacombs of Legemonton, Patron-Saint of the Libertine Arts upon which the shadow of the Archærengeist Tentatramon ‘Erudition-of-God’ befell.
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I opened my eyes to the all-nothing and before me stood a great big shapeless, nameless nothingness, drowning under the shadow of Life. There was no silence but instead a loudness that rings within the confines of the soul, begging for cessation. From the darkness beyond that final threshold which is beyond mortal ken, came She-Who-Fooled-God.
A six-winged ravenous-black seraph with a crown of horns atop Her head; the D’yabel Herself held a single luminous feather within Her right hand. The pupils of a goat bisected the slit of a serpent, irises burning with sulphur unconsumed, sclera formless as the earth before Eden, skin ashen-white for God’s body was marred with soot.
The Goddess was a teatánz and I, a louse plucked from Her skin, Her fatal visage all-encompassing within a space that was infinite. Her wings covered Her nakedness and I knew then that my shadow did much the same for me. The dead are clothed as they are on the day they are born; which is to say, they are not.
I was alone for this threshold was mine alone to walk.
Scales wrought of lead appeared between us, the intervening ether like a fathomless gulf and yet intimate as amniotic fluid. There was no fulcrum to affix that which would weigh my soul against Azazel’s feather, hanging suspended in the abyss.
“Come hither and be judged.” The Lady commanded. “Feed me thine sins.”
Either the Bard had been correct in divining the Witch-God’s speech or She had a streak of humour about Her. The smile that split across Her porphyric lips like a dagger through fine lace told me it was the latter.
Within this liminal realm of metaphor-made-real, I placed the first thing of mine to be judged: Ashen—That-Which-Remains, the Lamentation-of-Dál-Riathöm, Luæth-liath. The luminous feather, the umbilical cord that bound together the Twins Lucifer and Azazel, remained unmoved.
“The sword shall hold its tears until all things art placed.”
Next, the artefact upon which I staked my compact with Abeloth—an Éderi bladeshard, carried by the lorekeepers for knowledge is power and power begets strife for tyrants suffer no equals; the turn of phrase ‘secrets kept until the grave’ comes from Us, the Wanderers, the Poets, and the Keepers. The scales yet still stayed their verdict, hung in equilibrium for I was not yet even halfway done.
“A mind must be honed as doth a warrior sharpen his blade. Calm as stillwater and ever in motion as the wind.” Azazel was a d’yabel after my own heart quoting Gregorio, even here, in Limbo.
She smiled, motherly, at the jest then as I plunged my right hand through my chest like a fish into water, meeting resistance only once I happened upon the ruby amber at the core of my being. I plucked my heart of stone from its cockles and placed it before Einseth-Kokabael—the Éder’s epithet for the D’yabel; Fruit-of-the-Poison-Tree, the Shadow-of-Forbidden-Knowledge, Ein-Seth-Ko-Ka-Ba-El.
“No thing thereupon the scales of Creation art without counterweight.” The D’yabel did indeed quote scripture. Had She not been weighing my soul for Heaven or Hel, I would’ve been smitten by Her sanguine attitude.
As it stood, I felt only the slow dread of pain to come but I grinned and beared it, only gritting my teeth just a tad.
Next I placed the raven-idol, that which I offered the holocaust of my scruples upon, that which had saved me from Hel-on-Earth only to damn me to that one after death. It was a gift from Enzati Himself—the Tear-Drinker, the Ash-Reveler, the Scourge of the Éder; Azælaphesh, Hallowed Lord of All-Sorrows, He-of-Many-Faces, and the Penumbra of Kar’Tosh.
This was the betrayal of my people made manifest, made flesh, made tangible, consummate, incarnate—whichever fancy word a man might’ve devised to explain a concept given physical form, choose any one of them and they’d fit right in within this very context.
I’d condemned Mahhomed so harshly for selling me out but, truth be told, it was mere projection for I hated myself for doing so as well. For spitting upon mine own blood and flesh, for murdering mine own brother, for choosing exile over acceptance. I’d called Med a kinslayer while having done the same as Abel, killing my Kaïn.
There was no one else to blame but myself for you are what you become.
“We see thou hast met that daughter of Ours. The Grave, afterall, follows after the Raven.”
Last but most certainly not least, the Iscariote was placed upon the Leaden Scales of Azazel. Yōzæpheroth, Death-Seal, the Maggot-Headed-Vulture-Bound-Within-the-Womb; Sun-Eater, Zæpheroth, Zepherot. Born of the accursed silver of Judas, the infernal sword grinned at me, its many eyes mocking as it sneered at the fool that trusted his life upon a betrayer’s kiss.
It had spelled my doom for rowan did not burn me and so neither should have damascene. Through our blood-pact, I had been stricken with a bane for God’s tears. The scabbard of salt-glass was my fate and within a pillar of salt I had been sealed.
The revelation shook me to my core.
Lamaré was dead because of my stupidity. It was my fault he would meet with Azazel. Lamaré was dead because of me. I’d been the death of him once before and no…
I fell to my knees as desolation took root in my lungs and robbed me of breath.
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“Death to Pierre… need not come at the expense of our morals.”
My Ël could be oh so very narrow-minded at times. It would be the death of me though that mattered less these days as I was more spirit than flesh. Besides, I’d gladly die another time for that exquisitely-sculpted barrel-chest and chiselled jawline. If only he could hold me in those strong arms of his and sweep me off my feet had I any.
Jests aside, I knew that something had to be done. I had seen the man sell away his past for his future, make a mockery of his blood to forestall the Reaper. I hadn’t intervened then because it was his choice to make. The worst that could’ve happened was that we returned to whence we belonged: the grave. Now, another life hung in the balance.
Mallory was by no means innocent but Raphaël was ever the idealist. Guilt consumed him much like consumption itself; rather than a physical disease, a pox, it was a pathologie of the mind, his own conscience eating away at itself, agonising over every single mistake and gnawing at the nails of his perceived sins down to the quick.
I knew the vicious cycle, that of unending remorse, intimately. It wore away at a person until they did that which they grew to regret in the first place; a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will. Fear, it paralyses and paralysis does not make the needle move and so you are destined to never be past that which bound you in the first place, the compass of conscience without its Northstar.
“Yes, we need weaponry to breach past the nobleman’s guards, but there’s another way in which to get the Judas-Kiss.”
I kissed a phantöm kiss upon his right cheek and caressed his left with my wispy hands, a dissolute presence about him. The distance between us was as far as Heaven was from Hel and yet close as two souls within one sole flesh.
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“As thou hast lived, thou must also die. From the dust of the earth Our Brother moulded thou and to it, We return thee.”
Cold talons raked across my soul, collecting the wages of every sin I had committed by action or inaction, through pride or prejudice, with malevolence or benevolence or apathy; every life taken, every falsehood uttered, every thing stolen that was not mine to steal, every unscrupulous thought and every ill deed, tallied and bared to myself in its entirety in a blink. There were no justifications, no rationalisations, nothing with which to defend myself against the baleful spectre of self-recrimination.
Like all men before me and all men after, I was flawed to my core. Led by the nose through the fickle reins of passion, bound by every base desire though I told myself the opposite; hypocrite by hatred of the parts of myself that I most loathed and so sought out their reflections in the mirrors of others for it is easier to remove the thorn from another’s eye than your own; destined to die for immortality beckons age and age beckons death all the same.
I was found wanting but for one single act: I had spared a soul that all others had deemed undeserving of life. Perhaps even a shred of me would ascend and once again see my Ré.
“O sweet, innocent thing, harken; there art no Heaven. God art dead and His Throne lieth empty.”
My mouth hung agape, dumbly before rage took hold and I spat out the d’yabels in my heart: “Sacra! Hope is the worst of poisons—it lulls the mind into thinking there is something better just around the corner and spoils fast as milk when its falsehood is laid bare. May whatever poet that first devised it be condemned to the lowest Hel.”
Azazel elucidated my knowledge on metaphysics once again.
“Hel hath no fury like a woman scorned—the adage art correct but for the fact that Hel be naught but sleep where men lie in the beds of their graves, unstirring.”
My wrath abated as it was replaced by madness, I laughed and laughed and laughed, manic and hoarse—there was no Hel awaiting me for there was nothing after life. Only oblivion, only the long sleep. This last fleeting moment of awareness was soured by the knowledge that the spirit died with the body.
Just as I began to drift into the waters, dissolving into naught, Einseth-Kokabael spoke and opened a door that once opened could not be closed.
“Five things placed; five things weighed. Yet We shall endow thee with a sixth.”
The Goddess-of-Hel plucked out Her bloodless eyes like fruit from the forbidden tree and placed one upon each scale. She took away Her resplendent feather, leaving only the sulphurous obol, the bitter death-offering.
“When the sun riseth in the West and seteth in the East;
When the last mountain hath been ground to dust under the milling wheel of Time;
When the last star has breathed its last and turned to ash;
Then too shall We meet again.”
“No! Anything but that! Let me go! I will not live in a world without Lamaré d’Amice Solaire!” I begged and I begged and I begged but She was just as deaf and blind as Her Brother Lucifer.
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I discovered then that Narancan had made no pact with Azazel—Gregorio was wrong on that front. She would resurrect me, curse me, with life everlasting so that I’d suffer the loss of my loved ones for She had Her own designs. In truth, Einseth-Kokabael was no different than Zepherot for Her gift was fruit of the poison tree.
The gall from the blade of the Twelve-Winged-and-Thousand-Eyed Silence reversed its course from tongue, my death forsworn by Death Herself.
“Ainsi soit-il.”
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The darkness battered at the edges of our heart. The ruby-amber would not sustain two spirits for nearly as long as was needed to reform a brain, much less a somewhat self-sufficient body. The tales of decapitation needed to slay a vampyre work only upon newborns of Narancan; the Elders cannot be killed but by rather protracted means.
So, as I did many a time before, countless for I would not count such a thing, I gave away myself for him. I drifted away, into that good night, so that whatever ichor remained would give Raphaël Son-of-the-Éder a chance to remain alive. Though I was dead however-many-times-over, my heart beat on within his chest.
I spoke into the ether, knowing it was futile for he’d never hear my words. But I spoke them yet still for they were half for me and half for him.
‘I love you Ël; I am sorry I never said it aloud whilst alive. I was too scared to lose you and too scared to win you, for I feared to do wrong and worse still: to make you think you owed me reciprocation.
‘The only thing you owe me, amoré, is that you forgive yourself. Else I might come back, again, and haunt you incessantly.’
For the second and final time, I say: my name was Lamaré D’Amice, and I pray that the man I saved makes a life for himself worthy of living and equal to the worth of my soul.
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I was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the world of the living.
Like my rebirth as a vampyre, I was erected to face the West, lightning lifting up my skeleton as the salt was shed from bone. From my heart of stone, streamers of blood flowed, coalescing into muscle and tissue and organ. When at last I was moulded out of the womb of the All-Nothing, I fell on my hands and knees, ambaricité arcing through my raw, newborn skin.
The pain was nothing before the numbness within me. My flesh yet lived but my spirit had died, lost beyond the veil for I had returned alone. There was silence in my skull and it made me weep tears of blood.
After a timeless moment of utter devastation, I looked upon the moon, just as it was before I was turned to stone. Then I looked at the spooked inquisitor, his eyes wide in terror before an act of divine intervention. At the sight of the Judas-Kiss, I snarled and kicked the accursed sword away.
Had I the will to live another hour upon this earth, I would melt the silver into slag and throw it into the sea so that it might never again see the light of day. But since I had none, I walked towards the inquisitor.
At my approach, Black-Eye recoiled. When I handed him his axe, he exclaimed ‘sacra’ and was left stunned. When I kneeled before him, my temples to the cobbles and the nape of my neck bared, he was rendered speechless.
“Kill me.” I said. “For I did not want to return from beyond pale.”
A long moment passed before I looked up to see the man sheathe his weapon, a dumbness in his brow like he’d just witnessed an ærengeist. Which, I supposed, he had.
“The only three men to return from the grave did so by God’s hand. I cannot kill that which He chose to spare.”
I spat on his black boots.
“There was no ‘sparing’ involved, much less Lucifer. Azazel has cursed me to never die but never hold that which I find dear. I will live until the last mountain has been ground to dust and the last star rendered ash, alone.”
So deep in mine own woe was I that I wanted to hurt the man before me, to spite him just as I felt he had me.
“There is no Heaven and there is no Hel. When you die, you go to sleep and you never wake up. There is nothing on the other side.”
Black-Eye sat down, removed his waterskin, took a sip and stared at the moon in listlessness and existential ennui. I had expected him to remove the dagger by his hip and kill himself before the awful truth but he’d chosen to bask in the disappointment rather than be enraged by it.
I recalled, then, a phrase that Lamaré d’Amice Solaire had spoken to me on the night that we met.
‘Blades and staves may break bones, mon ami, but words… words, they break souls.’
Words are not only spoken for the listener but also the speaker themselves for to speak is to hear; I hadn’t broken the inquisitor’s soul, I’d broken mine own. Melancholy and sorrow chilled my ears and constricted my throat and I wept then, silently under the wan moonlight.
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I did not risk another foray into the cold below, rather taking to the brick walls of the tenement, my fingers finding purchase with ease that befits a creature made to parasitize humanity. And so I crawled my way up until I reached the chimneys; Lamaré took my place as I would fit within the claustrophobic confines.
His lithe form manifested, thinning into spear-like limbs.
Down, down, down, we went; the soot—that frozen smoke—transmuting our skin from rubédo to nigrédo, from tub āq-red to pitch-black.
We alighted upon the basement of the tenement house, the central heating founded here, in the bowels. It did not use wood for such was far too expensive in Saint-Getaine; corpse-starch, like coal from a peat-bog, was burnt to keep the living alive come winter. Ambaricité cannot provide heat without a medium such as water and the infrastructure needed to conduct pipes of Byzantium throughout the building was far too costly to the slum lord.
Ré returned to me our body and I climbed up the stone steps, the door locked. There was a serf boy sleeping down below, tasked with shovelling the mummified bodies of the poor into the furnace-mouth. Most likely, he held the spare set of keys beyond Lemean; the holder to the lease of the tenement.
When I crept around, smelling the scent of wrought-iron for the lock, I found only the spade for the lad was bound here from the outside. The closeness of his circumstance to the gaol in which I had suffered was too close for my liking so I left him a coin before I returned to the door; just enough for a sweet but not near enough to rob.
The latch was of a make I did not recognize but Lamaré was a spirit learned in the arts of the thief just as that of the scholar; the excellent dexterity and hearing of a vampyre made short work of the wrought-iron mechanism, pyrite talons in place of pick and shiv.
With a hiccup of rust, the door opened and we entered through the threshold uninvited.
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“Steel does not weep.” I chided myself, standing from the cobbles as I heard footsteps approaching the Promenade. There would be a time for mourning after the dead were put to rest and until then my work was not yet done.
I took up Zepherot, the akeldamascene leering at me. I sheathed it within salt-glass and spoke into the sealed silver: “After I have doled death to those that deserve it, I will bind you in with your other half and throw you into the sea. There, in the dark, no one will draw you and no one will hear you scream.”
Belting the Iscariote to the chain at my hip, I quested after the wheellock I had stolen from one of the inquisitors, binding it as well to me.
There was nothing more that kept me here, at the place of my death, and so I went after my executioner for we had a debt to settle, one with usurious interest. Every broken bone, every wound of flesh, every scar of mind; I would exact them on Alexiaries Encre d’Sang, seven-fold.
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How does one find a needle in a haystack? They become a bedfellow to the D’yabel, of course. Having sold my soul to Sathariel, I had an aptitude for finding shiny things and I quested after the Færie’s blade.
The lady smelled of cardamom and gooseberries—the same perfume as Gervais. She was fond of him beyond the trappings of his flesh. Courting a courtesan was to court the death of one’s own naïveté because whores and actors are one and the same. Historically-speaking, most plays were run by lads and ladies of the night and poetically-speaking, both must play the heartstrings of their audience.
I quested after the scent of the Sixty-Ninth Hel, winding my way through the corridors and stairs of the tenement. The wealthier leasees lived near the bottom so as to escape from a would-be fire while the poorer dwelled up-top where wind wove through the plaster and mortar, raw and cold.
It did not take longer than a quarter of a quarter of the night to chance upon the Mantigore’s perfume. I followed it, losing the trail here and again, until I came before Mallory’s door; no sound came from it which suggested a charm of deafness. Shrunken heads are not at all cheap, their process of construction meticulous.
Closing my eyes, I opened that one within, feeling out the contour of an ambarique aura; there was sorcerie afoot that warded the apartment. It might strike me with an arrow of ambaricité should I attempt to pick the lock and might even alert Mallory.
As I could not risk losing her from my clutches, I lowered my right shoulder and set my feet. Mentally, I girded my loins as this was going to be quite messy.
I charged, breaking through the slab of lacquered wood reinforced with iron, ambarique current itching my skin as the glyphes detected an intruder of unknown blood.
The apartment opened into a long corridor that turned the corner into a bedroom; by the breathing, I could tell there were two people within just as I barreled through the last door between me and my quarry.
Above and below, seeing as this partition was located in the middle of the tenement, people cursed at the ruckus I had wrought at this ungodly hour of the night.
A woman nearing her thirties cowered behind Mallory, the sheets protecting her nakedness but not the Grasshopper’s; though I enjoyed a nice pair of breasts, I was not here for a ménage à trois and neither would the ladies have me, seeing as they already had a third—Gervais. I dug my heels into the carpet so I’d not tackle the ladies whose slumber I had disturbed; though a brute, I was not a savage though my bedside manners were, evidently, lacking.
“Be not afrai—”
Mallory pulled the trigger to her firearm, sulphur and iron once again, for the third or so time, I reckoned, scraping my face off my skull. Once my lips regenerated, I said, as if it were a smacking from a cane rather than a bullet towards the brain: “Prithee, stop that. It stings something fierce.”
The Grasshopper did not move to attack me, loathe as she was to leave her lover’s side. I sighed, knowing that I did not have it in me to kill another loved one before their beloved. Yes, Mallory had attempted and failed to put me six-feet under but she was nowhere near the level of depravity of Claude.
“I’m not here to kill you or take you, Mallory, but to save you. Demos has a bounty on your head and it is not small—said he’ll give me his Judas-Kiss in exchange for your death. The interest keeps fattening his coffers and he’ll not stop until you are no more. Give me your dagger; leave the Cairn lest it become yours.”
The woman, without breaking eye contact with me, threw said dagger in said eye. I was not impressed as I removed it, wincing at the visceral discomfort of a foreign object within my cornea.
“Yes. Mayhaps, I deserved that.” The stiletto was unbloodied in my hand as I tipped an imaginary hat and walked away from the absurd tableau I had just set.
Were I to tell anyone the story of how I saved the future Pyrate-Queen of the Sword-Sea from an early grave, they would not believe me. I would remember the banter of that night, between me and Lamaré, as the last precious moment between the both of us.
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I stood before the gates to Northway, the parapets at either side manned and bannered with the crests of the Blood of Sol. Ambarique lamplight, that Sixth-Century marvel, shone against my skin like the lime-caster of the Grand Guignol, limning me in resplendent shadow. I could not see the faces of the men on the high, retaining walls as the interplay of red and black played tricks on my senses, no matter how beyond mortal ken they be.
Stone steps were carved into the earthen bulwark, treading a path to the Blue Mountains so as to set apart the nobility from the land and gentry; the unwashed masses at the foothills while the sublime lay above them, indolent and separate.
“Who goes there?” One of the more courageous guards enquired. His voice was rough and unshaken but I knew fear had many a face and no more common one than that of bravado for no man likes to be emasculated, no man likes to admit that he is afraid.
I was past fear, having been robbed of any illusion of hope. What was to come, would and what had been, was; I expected nothing and wanted for naught. Hel had seen to it that I returned a creature having tasted the waters of death.
Shadow, severed by an idol of the Raven-God, unfurled from the embrace of my body, returning to whence it came. I opened my arms as if a scarecrow on a cross and fell backwards into the gorge of the abyss, letting it swallow me whole like the Lévayathan of Johanz—Dægöth-Gādol—the Great Fish.
I did not crawl, I did not dig, I did not claw.
I swam on the wings of the Raven through the primæval waters where lévayathans slumbered their deathless sleep. When their eyes opened, they did not see an interloper but another of their nameless kind; this, I now knew, was the true visage of Hel: oblivion.
Each and every soul, upon death, would be devoured by their doppelgänger in the ether below the earth so that they might become one. The éphémère, the omen-touched of Sathariel, knew this from birth.