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The hallways of this cathedral were super duper tall!
Like, what were they made for, giants or something? A giant priest would be hilarious.
All of it was lit up by a slot of stardust energy that ran through the whole building. It was so pretty that it made the air sparkly.
I wanted to live here! I might even be able to get used to that spooky chanting going on in the background.
Mmm…on second thought that might be where I draw the line.
We reached a rather heavy looking door. The bishop turned a lever, releasing the lock on it. Then the door slowly dragged across the shiny marble floor.
At first I was confused, seeing a clean metal room with blueish white lights pulsing across them. But there was no mistaking it. This was exceed design, just like my home.
I walked in. Crates of wood littered the room in a somewhat organized way, sectioned off by fancy red ropes on poles.
Tapestry hung from the walls too, seven in total. Each depicted an angel commanding some sort of colourful element across its woven strands.
And at the very end of the room was something that looked like a cauldron or a fireplace of blue flame. It was bright enough to light up the whole room in a cobalt hue.
“Before you is the Chamber of the Lesser Tabernacle,” Bishop Azori told me. “It is here that artifacts recovered in Esma have been housed for generations.”
“Did you build the church around this room?” I asked.
Mr. Anthony had some history to offer. “All churches are built on powerful mana wells.” He gestured to the unending flame in the fireplace. “Urnan has two of them. One connected to this chamber, and one on mount Inai, where a castle sits.”
I can’t blame them for putting places of worship on top of mana streams. When mana passes through, it has this comforting effect.
The nuns surprised me by walking in with blindfolds covering their faces and mouths. They were holding buckets of twinkly water.
Both the scribe and the bishop used the water to clean their hands and eyes.
“As an angel," the bishop started, "you are pure enough to look upon the scriptures without purifying yourself. But we must be rid of sin to read the hallowed pages.”
Well, I haven't exactly broken any of my commandments...technically speaking...so I guess you could say I haven't sinned.
Way high up on a pedestal behind the fire was a super decorative box. Bishop Azori had to pray seven times before retrieving it.
Just before opening it, he uttered a final prayer and let me see what was inside.
Within were seven books:
The Book of Metatron,
The Book of Michael,
The Book of Raphael,
The Book of Gabriel,
The Book of Uriel,
The Book of Jeramiah,
And The Book of Pireel.
Each of these chapters were one part of a greater story of what was known as the Seven Stars of Heaven. A group of powerful angels that apparently sealed away the devil.
“These are but blessed copies of the legendary scriptures, of which are housed in the Cathedral of Life in Congerlin,” Bishop Azori said.
I don’t know where Congerlin was, but Uncle will have to take me. When he finds me, that is.
Something about these books did feel different. I wouldn’t say holy, but they definitely had an aura about them.
I carefully picked up the first book, which was titled Metatron.
“God sat alone in an unhallowed void of darkness.
Once a space of stars and many living worlds, now a sea of shadow in the wake of a selfish war.
It was then that the Lord took hold of the void and stretched apart the empty waters as far as the north was from the south.
He did not want to dwell alone in the destruction of the old creation, so He created the angels, scattering them across the universe to reseed it.
The chief angel named Metatron was gifted with the blessing of mana in its purest form.
God told him, Bless these lands with living spirit, and Metatron did as he was told, going from one world to the next and laying the foundation of life at their cores.”
The book went on to describe the spiritual journey Metatron went on to see the universe full of life again. It had all sorts of stories revealing different aspects of good and evil, painting a very clear distinction between the two.
Matatron was really cool, especially since he fought off all sorts of primordial demons and stuff.
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Toward the end of the book, a new character was introduced. This one was…well...let me summarize it…
There was another angel that was on par with Metatron’s strength. His name was Baoth.
Although he wanted to go out and rebuild the universe alongside his brethren, he was strictly forbidden from it.
Of course, Baoth didn’t listen. Unfortunately for him, when he came back to heaven, he saw that anything he made was corrupted by darkness.
Baoth got miffed after being scolded and went off “many years away from heaven,” to a place that was similar to it. I think the ‘many years’ part could be light years. But I’m not sure.
Once he reached Eden, our homeworld as the story claims, he then 'made mankind' to try and prove he could do something good.
Yep. Baoth made humans, apparently.
I didn’t realize it, but humans hadn’t shown up in the story yet. I always thought God made humans, but I guess not, at least according to this.
Anyways, he started by making a guy called Atamo, and then made a girl named Yevah.
Those humans acted like animals because they didn’t have a soul. Baoth fixed this by putting a piece of his soul into them.
It sure made them humanlike, but in the worst way. He caused them to turn rebellious and evil, like him.
They hid that from him though because they were sneaky, then started plotting evil against him. They had a lot of descendents, enough to amass an army.
God didn’t like that, so he went down to our planet and gave people the choice to eat a fruit that put goodness in them. Then planted a tree that grows it so they’d never run out of good if they wanted.
Now that people had that fruit, they were able to choose between good and evil.
Well, as usual, Baoth got angry and tried to attack God for messing with his people.
Yeesh…
But Metatron showed up and overpowered him.
Then when Baoth was defeated after a crazy battle, he flew off to a place beyond the universe and found a shrine.
This shrine corrupted him, giving him some sort of golden fruit that made him super powerful.
He came back to the universe and killed all of the good angels that didn't decide to follow him now, bar seven.
Enter the Seven Stars of Heaven, headed by Metatron and loyal to heaven.
Baoth was branded as the devil, causing the Seven Stars to come together and seal him away. Their power was just enough to do it.
Like all evil guys, he vowed he’d return to flood the universe with darkness and kill all human life that disobeyed him and turned good.
But God said that the day he does, he’ll send the Krinai Inno to stop him, sparing the lives of the good and faithful. In other words, The Eighth Star.
So basically, these church people were saying that they wanted me to finish off the devil for them.
Yikes…That definitely doesn’t send me on the anxiety train down to Doomsville.
There was one thing I was surprised not to find though. Where was the part about how God loved humanity? It wasn’t anywhere to be found in any of the books. I could have sworn that should have been somewhere in here, right?
Or, am I just making things up?
Anyways, that wasn’t the only odd thing here. Each page from almost all the books had a set of numbers at the top of them.
The first time it showed up was in the Book of Michael. Here’s all of them together from that book:
01010000 01101111 01101001 01110011 01101111 01101110 00100000 00110100 00110000 00101110 00110111 00111000 00110110 00110000 00110011 00110011 00110000 00111001 00110000 00111001 00110111 00110111 00110000 00110011 00101100 00100000 00101101 00110111 00110011 00101110 00111001 00110110 00110010 00110010 00110101 00111000 00110111 00110001 00110111 00110100 00110110 00110111 00110111 00111001
A church established thousands of years before the advent of computers would probably have never noticed what this was. The bishop confirmed that the numbers were even omitted from all modern copies of scripture.
But here’s the fun part. This was binary.
It was the most basic language a computer could understand. Actually, it was the very first thing I ever even learned.
So without further adieu, here’s what the numbers from the Book of Michael translate into…
Poison 40.78603309097703, -73.96225871746779
I have no idea what this means. The other books were just as puzzling:
Book of Raphael :
Water 48.8610430285343, 2.335862235616957
Book of Gabriel :
Lighting 35.362514683205404, 138.7304431652538
Book of Uriel :
Wind 51.50473794867077, -0.13515450168569207
Book of Jeramiah:
Earth 37.752526452011075, -100.01670594138942
Book of Pireel :
Fire 19.493689227852506, -155.46317621729224
I was stumped. The words obviously corresponded to the six elemental powers of magic, but what the heck were those numbers?
Yalda, the numbers, what do they mean?
At any rate, I’d keep tabs on those in my memory. I’m sure they weren’t just put in here for no reason.
It’s odd though. Why was computer lingo referenced inside an old scriptural book?
“Mr. Anthony, do you happen to know when these books were written?”
“Each of these books were written in different time periods by either the angels themselves, or people who knew them. We only know that the Book of Pireel was written 1,000 years ago.”
A thousand years is a long time. I’m guessing these editions were made around that time as well. That would also put it in a time period after my kind would have existed.
That could explain how so much of my people's technology was integrated into the religion, but I needed more info to make the claim.
The original copies of these books were in a big church in Congerlin, wherever that was. So I’d probably want to check there to see if they'd fill in more pieces of the puzzle.
Oh shoot! I’d spent so much time here, I seriously forgot that I needed to find my friends, and Uncle had to find me!
“Uh, Mr. Bishop!” I turned to him with an anxious look. “Do you happen to know what happened to all the people I was with?”