Passing through stone meant that for an instant, while Miriai pulled Alexios inside, he ceased to be himself, and became instead the atoms making up the rock. Their blinding electrons bound them in rigid chains—locked together by particles that were also waves of nothing—while the atoms themselves, the mass-points, were made of smaller lights, which were made of even smaller lights, and on and on, all trembling while the tides of the universe tugged them back and forth.

As rays of energy pulsating from quasars at spacetime’s end passed through the door—as neutrinos flooding outward from the sun’s blazing nuclear fusion passed through the door—as waves of gravity from clashing singularities passed through the door—so did Miriai and Alexios and their organs and memories and even their clothes and shoes and his belt and sword and flint and steel and her flaming torch also pass through the door.

Their passage was instantaneous, yet lasted forever. Just as a ball thrown at a wall cannot reach that wall without first getting halfway there, and then halfway again, and again, on to infinity, so that the ball cannot reach the wall, and yet also reaches it and rebounds—though the atoms never touch, only the electric fields repel—so did Alexios—paradoxically, like two mirrors facing each other—pass through solid rock.

Miriai yanked him inside another dark chamber, and he gasped. Struggling to conceive of what had just occurred, he felt like he would lose his mind, having experienced something which was supposed to be impossible. Yet being here in this world in the first place was also impossible. The cosmos itself was impossible.

Alexios looked at Miriai—who was laughing at him—and saw a beauty, power, and brilliance in her he had failed to notice until that moment.

I was never into older women, he thought. As a teenager I wondered in my misogyny and ageism—all thanks to the cult of youth—how anyone could be attracted to them. And yet now I think I understand.

Miriai was energetic, so much so that she tingled with electricity, and could even give people mild electric shocks by touching them. This elderly innkeeper, this widowed washerwoman chatterbox, had also somehow learned to shunt the heavenly river from the stars to the Earth—in addition to shunting the force of life from one who was living to one who was dying. I’m a shunter. And then on top of those impressive abilities, she could walk through walls. What other powers did she possess?

Alexios noticed that he was trembling. Soon he was drenched in sweat, though the dark chamber was cool. He kept staring at Miriai, who was now asking if he was alright. In her beauty he saw Miriai as an infant breastfed by her mother amid the tall swaying grass of the Iraki marshlands, sucking sweet milk from the breast beneath a hot blue sky, the sirocco stirring up sand rising in yellow curtains from the glimmering green horizon.

Then Miriai became a toddler dressed in white cloth watching her parents plunge wooden poles into the water to move their houseboat along the tributaries of the Shatt al-Arab pouring through the grass and muck to the gulf.

Now she was a youth being baptized in the eternal river, a wreathe of myrtle in her rich black hair, the dark currents of life washing away sin as the priest read aloud the prayers of the Forerunner, his right hand on her head. He spoke to her, she answered according to the formula repeated for a thousand years, back to Babylonian days, and her words echoed in Alexios’s mind:

“Rise, our Father, in praise, and lay on me Thy hand of truth and Thy great right hand of healings! And Life be praised! And Life is victorious!”

Into those same watery depths King Gilgamesh once dove to retrieve the immortal rose, cutting his hand on its thorns as he spun around, kicked off the abyssal silt, and swam back up through the river pouring in waterfalls from the fountains of paradise.

Now Miriai was an adult. Her own children were growing, she was walking beside her husband Zaidoun—strong, steadfast, sturdy—and they were taking the extra fish they had caught to the Basra market, carrying it on their backs in reed-woven baskets. At the market she strayed in curiosity into the bookseller’s quarter, where her fascination with alchemy began, as the philosophers agreed to teach her to read and understand. They showed her the ancient books saved from the Great Library, and even the papyrus scrolls from the repository of Imhotep, those written in the hand of Thoth himself—

“Alexios!” she rasped.

He was in the dark chamber, and Miriai’s torch was flickering. In her face he saw all the people she had ever been or would ever be. Even her corpse, her skeleton, her dust, and the flowers and trees springing from her remains, the blinding soul inside her.

“Are you alright, dear?” she said.

He looked at her. “What does that question even mean? I’m not even sure I’m me anymore.”

“Your river of self has merely passed through that river of stone behind us, as one current in the sea intermingles with another.”

Okay.

He peered into the dark room, although there was no illumination save Miriai’s torch, and the chamber seemed to be sealed against the outside world. The air was heavy and wet, but also growing more acrid thanks to the smoke pouring from Miriai’s flame.

“This is where he left his worthless flesh.” Miriai’s voice pulsed against the walls. “The man who became the messenger of the gods and the father of knowledge millennia ago in the days of dynastic Egypt.”

“So he’s dead.” Alexios walked toward the stone sarcophagus that loomed in the chamber’s center. “Great.”

“Even a god can die, dear,” Miriai said. “If no one believes in him.”

The sarcophagus was open, but only the ribcage and pelvis bones lay inside. The skeleton’s skull, arms, and legs lay in other, smaller sarcophagi built into the chamber walls. There were no clothes or ornaments, nor were there inscriptions.

Alexios laughed. “So that’s it. We come all this way, just to find that the person we were looking for is dead. And not just dead, but a skeleton split up into—what? Five, six different parts? I saw this coming a mile away.” He sat against the sarcophagus. “Every step I took from Trebizond was wasted. I should have stayed and fought.”

“We can bring him back,” Miriai said. “He can walk again.”

“Let me guess—by keeping him in our hearts, staying true to his example, and—”

“Ach, no, I mean that he can be a man of flesh and blood just as you are.”

Alexios looked at her. “How?”

“Simple. Just help me, dear. This is an unpleasant task. I’m no more interested in handling his crudities than you are. We must summon his essence—that is the true gift.”

Alexios stood wearily. “If you say so.”

“There’s that selfsame hint of doubt,” Miriai said. “What more must I do to convince you of—”

“Nothing.” Alexios shook his head. “Let’s just get this over with. I’ll keep playing along until I can’t take it anymore I guess…”

Using their shirt sleeves to cover their hands, they reunited the bones in the center sarcophagus as best they could. Once they finished, they both looked at the skeleton.

“Well,” Alexios said, “I just desecrated some guy’s tomb for no reason.”

Miriai put her hand to her chin and furrowed her brow. “I can’t remember if we were supposed to do anything else.”

“Like maybe say a magic spell or something? Because last time I checked, skeletons don’t usually come back to life if you just stick their bones together.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m getting tired of this.” Alexios looked to the stone door, which he could barely see in the torchlight. He started to wonder if passing through had been some kind of illusion. Either that, or Miriai had slipped hashish or another drug into his food or drink while he was unconscious. What if the door was actually just a bunch of beads hanging from the ceiling? He could have hallucinated the rest.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Just as he was about to leave, an image flashed in his mind. It was a man’s face, one so close he was almost kissing Alexios—their eyes and noses were almost touching. The man was old and strong, and his straight nose and large eyes had a geometric evenness. His beard was full, but his most striking feature was on his scalp. Rather than a mane of hair, which might have been expected, there was only a mane of smoke and flame pouring away in black and gray clouds laced with sparks, so vast these fiery locks obscured the sky.

The vision disappeared. Alexios kept still, unsure if he was hallucinating. Miriai was also silent.

After a moment, Alexios asked: “Did you see that?”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “Now you must come here and see this.”

Alexios peered where Miriai was indicating—inside the center sarcophagus, which was illuminated by her torch. A cloud of the classical elements—earth, air, water, fire—was condensing above the skeleton, and to these were added the additional Seran elements—metal and wood—as well as the element of space from al-Hind, the personified ether, or Ayar, of the Mandaeans.

The ones who know.

Red tendons connected the bones Alexios and Miriai had assembled. Before either person could speak, the tendons were interlaced with purple nerves. Electricity shocked and pulsated along these nerves; blood surged in branching veins and arteries. Gleaming muscle and organs rose above these, filling with the four humoral chymes—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic—while bright eyes swelled in the black eye sockets. Finally the whole was draped with flesh in the flickering light. Such was this man’s power that smoke and fire poured not just from his head, but also from his hands, as he climbed out of the sarcophagus and onto the floor, where he stretched and cracked his back.

Alexios stared at him, while Miriai bowed. Although the man was nude, he was unashamed, and even reached out his muscular right arm to Alexios and Miriai, who—after hesitating a moment—each briefly shook his burning hand. The fire hurt Alexios, but was worth it.

“My thanks to you for awakening me,” the man said, his voice grumbling like thunder. “I was dead a good long time, but I dreamed deep.” He looked around the burial chamber. “I suppose I left myself in this dreary place. A reflection of the paltry material world, is it not? A dark abode which rejects that which is light.”

Miriai nodded. “Indeed, thrice-greatest lord.”

Alexios was already coughing in the smoke. He waved some of it away with his singed right hand, then looked around. “Maybe we should get some air?” he said.

“If that is what you prefer,” the man said.

He walked to the wall and pulled a lever which neither Alexios nor Miriai had noticed before. At once, the entire room shook. Dust fell to the floor from between the gaps in the bricks, and stars appeared overhead, shining in a deep blue sky which was tinged with the last red and orange colors of sunset. The stone ceiling was swirling back inside the walls, and its two parts resembled the yin-yang symbol. The smoke and flame pouring off the man rose into the evening, making the stars waver, their light lines seeming to connect like the signs of the zodiac. Alexios saw a lion in the night leaping toward a crab, and an archer loosing an arrow at an enormous bull.

The man looked back at Alexios and Miriai. “Now you feel the air is better?”

“Yes, thank you.” Miriai bowed again.

“Are you Hermes Trismegistos?” Alexios said.

“There are a great many names by which I go. I’m known as Hermes Thrice-Greatest in Rome. To the Greeks I am called Asklepios. Among the fellaheen who labor in the shadow of the pharaonic mace, I am Thoth or Imhotep, the scribe or doctor with an ibis head, a stylus reed, and a papyrus scroll at hand. To Jews I am heaven-ascendant Enoch, who walked with God in paradise, the garden where the Tigris, Euphrates, and Aegyptos fountain sources flow, guarded by the cherubim’s flaming sword. The submitters to Allah keep me in their prayers as the prophet Idris.”

“So that’s a yes,” Alexios said.

“Indeed it is true,” Hermes said.

This surprised Alexios. He had pictured Hermes Trismegistos as someone like the Greek god Hermes—a nimble youth zipping from horizon to horizon on a rainbow with gold-winged sandals.

“You have many names because you are a person with many facets,” Miriai said. “Like the gods of Hind and Sindh with their many faces.”

“Have you awoken me to study?” Hermes said. “Or merely to make conversation?”

“I’m a student of Dionysios’s,” Alexios said. “He told me he was a student of yours.”

“Dionysios,” Hermes said. “Yes, now I recall his bright young face. He was a Roman youth, a quick learner, and strong—like you, a sojourner from realms outside. I sent him to change the world, and to be changed by it. Has he fared well in these iniquitous times?”

“He was an old man when I met him,” Alexios said, glancing at Miriai. “Sadly, he was killed. That’s actually why I’m here—”

“Do you by chance possess his mortal flesh?”

Alexios shook his head. “No.”

“Ah, what a terrible pity that is,” Hermes said.

Before either Miriai or Alexios could react, Hermes stretched out his hand, and a golden staff flew out of the darkness and fell into his fingers. It was made of gold, and two green glimmering snakes with diamond scales and ruby eyes were entwining it, slithering about one another, their crystalline tongues flashing from their mouths.

“Were the body in your possession, I could resurrect him,” Hermes said. “Were only a corpuscle of his being on hand, I could draw him from the asphodel fields of death, the abyss into which we must all one day plunge—from Elysian fields to electric ones.”

“He was killed in battle months ago,” Alexios said. “We weren’t able to retrieve the body.”

“It matters not,” Hermes said. “Time is but a spark between two eternities. All meet in darkness, sooner or later.”

“Still,” Alexios said. “Dionysios told me to come here—in a dream, actually. He said you could train me.”

“Train you?” Hermes laughed so deeply the floor shook. “Yes, I suppose I could.” He looked to Miriai. “Do you seek to learn as well?”

“I’ve come merely to observe—to bear witness to your majesty,” she said.

“Oh, but you’re far too kind,” Hermes said. “Do not forget, I was once a mortal being of blood and flesh, not unlike the two of you. Fate would have snipped my thread of life like anyone else doomed to die, had I never uncovered the fire seared inside all matter, and the matter contained in fire.”

“You became a god, my lord,” Miriai said.

“Certainly I did,” Hermes said. “As though to drive the solar chariot across the sky, to whip the reins of Apollo’s steeds, I grew drunk on sorcery, I became addicted to it.”

“It’s sort of like Faust selling his soul to the devil,” Alexios said. “I don’t remember how that story turned out, but isn’t there supposed to be some sort of drawback or moral lesson or something?”

“What profit a man who sell his soul to gain the world?” Miriai said. “Isn’t that what the Christians tell us?”

“I gained everything, and lost nothing,” Hermes said. “But to cease to be human means to cease caring for human things. When you hold in your hand the universe entire”—he raised his burning hand, and hovering above it were milky spiderwebs of glimmering galaxies—“what does it matter, those things to which men aspire? All the terraqueous orb is far less to me than an anthill is to either of you. All the oikoumenē—the terra mater—what you call the planet Earth—is to me but a corpuscle of a sand grain.”

Both Miriai and Alexios stared at him, unsure of how to respond. Hermes snapped his fingers, and the galaxies faded.

“The two of you ought to come with me.” Hermes waved his snake-entwined staff of gold and walked toward another stone door, which parted for him after he stepped on a loose brick underfoot. “A tomb’s a poor place to learn the ways of the world. In this chamber here we can only learn the ways of death, though I think we all prefer life—life piled on life—for why else would we seek the Great Work, except to prolong the joy of days?”

Averting his gaze from Hermes’s rear, Alexios followed the nude and muscular man along a stone corridor with Miriai. The god or demigod led them to a vast library, one lined with lozenge-shaped wooden bookcases packed with dusty books, codices, scrolls, tablets. These were all made from different materials, including mulberry paper, bamboo, papyrus, clay, stone, even emerald. Alexios spotted writing in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Seran, and what he suspected was Babylonian, Axumite, the scripts of al-Hind and Tomboutou, the picture-writing of old Egypt, and some languages he had never seen before. Those works whose letters Alexios could read had strange titles like On The Uniting of the Masculine and Feminine Principles by someone called Mary the Jewess, The Self-Devourer and Self-Impregnator of Zosimos, as well as others without authors like The Book of Causes, The Book of the Silvery Water and the Starry Earth, and The Reunion of Broken Parts.

The library was decorated with stools, couches, tables, classical statues of marble gods, and even a couple of large globes—one for the Earth, the other for the stars in the night. Another chamber they passed held dusty alchemical tools like alembics, retorts, mortars and pestles, several kinds of strange and complicated-looking furnaces, and many jars and amphorae, including phials of gleaming mercury and cloth sacks of red cinnabar. None of the lamps or torches in any of these rooms were lit, and so Alexios and Miriai could only see thanks to her torch and the flames and sparks pouring from Hermes’s body, which failed to ignite any of the materials at hand.

A stone door rolled inside the wall, and they were outside again, standing on a balcony overlooking the deserts and mountains of Arabia and Tourkía. Fires flickered below in the nomads’ camps and the squatters’ caves.

“Behold.” Hermes gestured to the horizon. “We have passed through the library and laboratory of my mortal youth. But the world itself is the only true library—the only true laboratory—of the immortal truth.” He turned back to face Miriai and Alexios. “Will you come with me?”

“I beg your pardon, lord,” Miriai said, “but where would we be going? And for what purpose?”

“To show you that which you might become, should you so desire it.”

Alexios shook his head. “Another vision? I already saw enough when that ghûl was hypnotizing me—”

“The ghûl are nothing,” Hermes said. “They are like animals that prey on men—like lions—only they take the form of spirit sickness. Whatever you saw in the company of the foolish ghûl will be as a darkling shadow play—to the blazing lights I shall soon display.”

Hermes stepped toward them, and before they could react, he seized them both, and lunged into the sky.