Novels2Search
I'm Courting Death!
Ch2: Be Not Afraid

Ch2: Be Not Afraid

Six years prior…

It was a night as black as the Council Chambers, but of a more natural sort, for this was not the wine dark walls of a cultivation fortress but a dark and stormy night of our own world. Regular thunder sang, the rain weeped, and somewhere in big city nowhere a young magician was attempting to call forth an angel.

He had done the purifications and the prayers, donned the robe, and prepared the table and the scrying bowl.

He rotated his wand slowly around the bowl, murmuring an hypnotic chant under his breath.

It was the propitious hour, the planets had assumed their positions, and the rushing song of the stars blew silently overhead. The rite would work; it must work, for the occultist would not live long otherwise. His heart was failing him, you see, and if the stars would not come to his aid then he would come to them shortly.

This would not have bothered him, for the stars were really quite pleasant (barring one or two unfortunate habits), except he had so much left to do, so much left to learn.

There were too many questions he yet lacked an answer to, too many things he hadn't achieved. He'd yet to settle the dispute as to just what, exactly, aliens were, and had never spoken with the tzitzimime of the far south. The matter of the Invisible Cities was yet occluded from him, and he'd never been to Boston in the fall.

To die now, to depart and go to those hallowed halls, would be intolerable.

And so he'd sent out feelers to all his usual contacts - ascended immortals, fairies, demons, the enigmatic Uncle Stinky.

Only one had returned a response.

"Sure, I know a guy," the demon Purson said, while noshing on his offering of sacrificial popcorn. "An angel, one of those Enochian types, goes by Urtico. He loves cases like this. Call him up and he'll fix you right up, pronto. 'Course, you can always try my method."

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

And before the boy could say anything one way or another, Purson had blasted a colossal trumpet, then vanished in a cackle of manic fire.

Unconvinced by this lead - there was something about the demon's behaviour that bothered him - the magician decided to double-check, by summoning the demon Sitri.

That was a story for a whole other time - one with decidedly fewer moral strictures than this work - but the end result was that the occultist learned that the angel Urtico could help him (and also that there are actual uses to having three tongues).

Still unsatisfied, he contacted other and further entities, but the end of his investigation was the same. And so we return to the moment with which we started the chapter: with an occultist summoning an angel.

The chant grew louder, louder, louder and more frenetic, his pitch and tone rising further and further as the rite reached its peak. At last there was a crack of thunder and the roar of the unfathomable; the magician had succeeded in his rite.

There was a shimmer and a glimmer in the air, and then what was was not as reality was edged out and Something edged in.

Six sets of wings hovered majestically in air that now burned with heavenly fire, and a gaping maw opened to release a mighty howl.

"Be not afraid, for you have called the Heavens, and the Heavens have answered the call. Come, what is thy will?"

There was only silence in response, an emptiness accompanied only by the occasional crackle of numinous flesh and the flutter of fantastical feathers.

The boy bowed before the angel, and said nothing.

The angel began to grow irate. He had sailed down from the Throne itself to answer the call, descending through all seven heavens and the gap between heaven and earth. It was a journey of centuries, though nothing for the likes of him, and one which required him to traverse the burning waters of the Marble Gates, the viscous Super-Sargasso Sea, and the great voids of Chaos.

A journey that looked to be increasingly fruitless, as not one sound came forth from the boy's mouth.

The angel growled in annoyance, then lifted the boy's head to yell in his ear. "Hello? Hellooooo? Heaven to Hermeticist?"

The boy's tongue lolled out of his mouth; his eyes were glazed and unfocused. The angel took his heartbeat, but it only confirmed his worst fears: at the sight of the celestial being, the boy's weak heart had given out, and he'd dropped down dead.

With a sudden spike of fear and fury, the angel hurled the corpse upon the carpet, cursing all the while.

"Oh, for the love of all that is holy, not again.”