The cadre bound a tight, single-file formation with Baethen at the front.
His skin broke and sundered, shedding the false skein of humanity to bear the primal hide of the Beast that all men bore within themselves. Scales-of-scoria limned his form as horns unfurled from his temples, cracked and ruined like the spire of some ancient vulcan-mount, dormant and slumbering. Already taller than most before, now he towered over the rest, a wingless, two-legged devil.
The march was a lockstep affair, the tempo fast like a horse’s trot yet careful like a thief’s padfooting. When Baethen first touched down on the bridge with his foot, all Hels broke loose. The stars above were reflected below, the great circular pit lighting up with a thousand-thousand wisps.
They picked up their pace, a quarter of the way to the otherside by the time that the lights reached them proper.
‘Dance with us!’ The little feyries pleaded, whispers forming within their skulls rather than coming from without. As if poured over with water, the bridge underneath the cadre disappeared. The reflection of stars above and below rendered the chasm into a strange lake caught between two opposing and self-same firmaments, as if the mirror of black alabaster within their souls made real.
Baethen signed <
He could feel the veil that the devilish fey had woven, his dominion over the arcana-of-the-Charlatan and of deceit resonating with the magicks to produce a low hum in his mind’s eye. He did not yet counterattack, knowing that once they began to do so, the laws of hospitality, of Wyrd, would bind them in chains thicker than the coldest iron.
Just as Akasha was the prime arcana and font of Babylon, Wyrd was the firstborn of Fata-Morgana. It dictated the flow of fate as ordained by action and reaction, a sympathy favoured by wytches and the like to cast their doomspells. Many hexes originated from the twisting-strands of Wyrd, uncouth guests and trespassers turned to frogs or cursed to always taste food as if it were shite for spitting upon a wytch’s poisoned gifts.
Warlocks trafficked with Scaduphomet but wytches and cunning sorcerers venerated Urd, the Herald-of-Doom. The angels of Fate had joined the Host-of-Hel in the War-In-Heaven æons ago, cast out of Babylon but not fallen to the depths of Gehenna entirely like the worms, becoming instead feyries. Pale shadows of what they once were, stuck between Heaven and Hel.
When the cadre reached the halfway-point of the bridge, the feyries conjured another trick, this one forcing the adventurers to trespass upon the Wyrd. A single, great moth-winged child-shaped creature alighted before them, blocking their path as it offered them a bronze-skinned fruit. The fallen angel had scintillating skin like that of a butterfly’s wings yet flaking as if an already-shed chrysalis, its face smooth and featureless except for a single great, big ear in the middle. Prehensile tongues jutted from the mouths on its palms, licking at the orb it held.
‘You’ve forgotten your fruit, guests. Here, We’ve brought it back. Please, accept.’
Said fruit grew wicked thorns dripping with hypnotic venom that sizzled as it fell to the invisible ground. It reeked of rotting meat and fragrant spice, the tokens metamorphosing legs and eyes, chittering strange and garbled nothings. Should Baethen accept it, he would be forced to eat the poisoned gift. Instead, he gave the fey maleficar his own.
The Wyrd veil around the root-bridge drew upon Akasha, similar to the one that Baethen himself could conjure. With that foothold, he leveraged his will against it, invoking his dominion over Smoke and Deceit to warp the illusion into an inferno fit for the furnace-mouth of Gehenna’s deepest pits. It wasn’t real worm-fire but minor spirits were weak to such tricks, their false-flesh subject to mass delusion—the spiralling streamers of lesser fey were instantly set alight, screaming in their child-like voices under excruciating, if imaginary, pain.
Notwithstanding that they were soulless figments incapable of anything but rote obedience to their progenitor arcana’s ethos, the cry of a vulnerable bairn was enough to make even the fiercest, most stone-hearted warrior flinch.
He felt nothing and in that hollowness he saw no wrong then. There was only the violent need to inflict retribution, to see his enemies struck with terror. His cracked lips split further to bear the rictus grin of a madman, his teeth unchanged for beneath the callous hide of a beast lay his better sense and humanity and the name he’d been given.
“[Such a cold, lightless night, hosts. Here, We’ve brought you warmth and sight. Please accept.]”
Somewhere so far, far away, someone screamed in utter despair beneath a mask of fool’s gold.
The maleficar, wrought of stronger stuff than its lesser brethren, was not harmed in the slightest by the illusory tongues of worm-fire. The fallen angel instead looked around in something approaching astonishment, its face unreadable but its body language like that of a child having found a strange new insect with which to pull its legs out one by one and see for how many parts it could survive without—an innocent monstrosity.
Before it could respond, the Beast breathed-in and then spat out a gout of sulphur; fire equal parts smoldering brimstone, phantom umber, and noxious green. Wisps of ghostlight swept out in the wake of the miasmic deluge, wrought of the copulation between the arcana of light, death, and deceit. Feyries flocked to these beacons only to become inundated in poison air, choking the life from them. They fell like flies, the light that enshrouded their bodies snuffed out such that they looked nothing more than winged straw-dolls thrown to the black.
By then the maleficar returned its wits about it and covered its face with the back of its hands, its twin mouths speaking although the sound they produced was entirely different from the words whispered into the Beast’s skull.
‘Thank you, O honoured guest. We shall endeavour to repay thee threefold.’
Seven angelic wings slowly spun around the axis of its back, moving without regard for anatomy. Each feather of its wings was a moth, the scales shimmering a riot of hypnotic colours. As one, the insects pulled their wings together to lay bare the latticework they hung upon, bones carved from ivory wood and strung together as an effigy to the Wytch-God. Red and white hair bound the deciduous skeletal fragments together, a facsimile of muscle and sinew puppeting something which should be dead.
Just as the moths pulled their wings together, the world around the Beast was gaoled within a perfect sphere, the insides covered entirely with feyry skins and iridescent insect wings. The Maleficar’s flayed bones were set aflame in rainbow vapour that enthralled any who gazed upon it.
Devils did not care much for pretty things.
The Beast did not feel resonance between himself and the gaol—a physical thing then, wrought of arcana he did not possess nor care to. To test it and the feyry, the Beast spat a globule of molten metal at the barrier and then the maleficar.
The gaol simply undulated, dispersing the magmatic phlegm. The maleficar fared much the same though it did strike back, casting a single curse.
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“[Entwine thy intestines into knots, thousandfold.]”
The Beast felt his insides squirm and rupture as they did as they were bid. It wasn’t near enough to kill, only to enrage as he bent over himself and vomited whatever was left of his previous humanity.
The {Brand-of-Wrath} burned upon his heart, setting him ablaze and limning his skin in rivers of magma as the scoria cracked to bare the fires raging within.
Entrapped and without recourse or will to do anything but, he charged the fey, boots shaking the bridge of roots. No matter how many steps he took, the Beast was always at the center of the gaol, the maleficar out of reach of either tooth or claw.
The working, the trickery, bore some resemblance to Akasha but not near enough to leverage such a paltry arcanum against. Playing [Pagats-Shadow] was not viable yet, seeing as the bug was not worth all the effort; better to use other more-fitting weapons.
This was not yet a blinding rage but rather one of clarity that brought all edges into stark relief. Many men delude themselves into thinking that they’ve let anger possess them, that they’d given into it; it was much the opposite.
Anger did not make you do anything you didn’t already want to do.
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[Arcana-of-the-Crucible]
[Absolute] I - [Resonant] VII
Origin Φ: [{Once} per {Hand} {Player} may {Transmute} a {Metallic-Font} into another {Metallic-Font} of divergent {Arcana} so long as they both {Resonate} with this {Arcanum} and the {Player} possesses {Dominion} over both.]
➤ [As the first contra, {Player} may {Ascend} a {Metallic-Font} to its next {Permutation} of {Purity} {Once} per {Hand}.]
➤ [As the second contra, {Player} may {Condense} a {Font-of-Smoke} into a {Font-of-Etheric-Glass} {Once} per {Hand}.]
➤ [As the third and final contra, {Player} may {Imbue} a {Metallic-Font} with a {Font-of-Phlogiston}, thus {Transmuting} it into a {Pyrophoric-Metal} {Once} per {Hand}.]
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Once an arcanum possesses all distinct grades of dominion—the gamut of minor, intermediate, major, complete, and utter—it ascends into the penultimate form, that of the [Absolute].
Like a vulcan-mount slumbering, biding its time, the Beast’s hide of scoria hid an interior of potential devastation, of abject and utter ruin. He inhaled, the act drawing on a multitude of cards and dominions that the Beast did not care to acknowledge beyond their usefulness.
Phlogiston was the arcana of fire and air intertwined—no flame could start without this ephemeral substance and no flame could survive without it. It was the breath of the cinder, and the conception of the spark.
Scoria ignited, no longer merely set ablaze but rather entirely within the thrall of {Pyrophoria}.
With a guttural bellow, the Beast let loose his grasp on [Scoric-Wormscale-Hide], plates of molten, burning tephra launching out in its wake. Fire and brimstone struck the fallen angel’s panoptic-shield, melting through with ease like toothed-fish chewing through a fisherman’s net.
In his first bid, the barrier had dispersed heat evenly throughout its surface. In his second, the magmatic pyroclasts had adhered to the feyry skins like molten sugar, reacting violently and eating through.
With its spell breaking down, the maleficar cut its losses and dispelled the magicks that bound the Beast. Its wings were utterly ruined, the moths burnt to coals and the ivory bone-frames covered in accumulations of pyrophoric scoria.
‘Apologies, O honoured guest. We must leave early tonight. Please accept this gift as a token of our shame and regret.’
The angel of fate retreated on seven wings into the chasm below, leaving behind a single bronze-skinned fruit. It was without blemish or maggot or poison; Wyrd bound the fey to acknowledge its lack of hospitality and thus reward the Beast.
Rather tired and frustrated that he hadn’t had the opportunity to pluck the feyry angel’s wings or tear it limb from limb, the Beast walked to the otherside of the bridge, the illusory veil over it dispelled. Under the auspices of the altar-of-refuge, the Beast entered a deep slumber.
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“Baethen.”
A single mote of consciousness arose from the morass of sleep like a pillar of salt from the sea; fragile, thin, piercing, impossibly tall.
“Wake up.”
The ignorance, that black ignosis around the spark began to shake, cognizant cracks rivening into ratiocinating fractures and then epiphanic chasms.
“Baethen, wake up.”
He opened his eyes like the first man to do so, as if clay newly-arisen to life, a Qadmon that knew not a single thing of the world around him. Leizuziel had fashioned first the formless golem from the primordial muck of where sea met shore, then the seneschem who were wise and old pillars carved of purest salt, then the nephalem who were giants not of stone but the finest porcelain, and finally the red eralem from which all of mankind descended.
“Baethen.” A woman said, her voice making him breath-in deeply, a drowned man gasping for air.
Seirios the Star had given animating breath to Leizuziel’s lifeless statues which were sculpted after the likeness of Eot’s progeny. Though long-lasting, the seneschem could not venture beyond shore nor away from it, bound in the twilight between earth and sea for else they cracked and crumbled or drowned and dissolved; neither titan nor leviathan but rather both.
His head was heavy on his neck and shoulders, the gears within moving too slowly to form any coherent thought beyond childhood fables and feyry tales. Memory was his only anchor, spoken words his chain.
Morophesh had taken pity on the seneschem and beseeched Gwynedd-Sol but the Sun would not give its fire to children born of earth, water and air. A fourth element and they would become perfect and overthrow the Gods—Sol would not repeat His mistake of sharing the flame, the death of Babylon enough.
The woman gave him a cup, hot to the touch with tea, vapour pouring from it in thick plumes. He drank from it, instinct taking over as the implicit knowledge carved into his marrow bade him to do so. Deeper than speech, every man, woman, child or sybilant knew that a cup was to drink from.
Benevolent Sybil, seeing that the seneschem took after Her aspect, taught Leizuziel to sculpt from alabaster and dry the seneschem into eralem; thus they could venture further but lived shorter lives, wandering earth and sea. The porcelain men were fragile things, easily broken by stronger creations of the Gods.
Each gulp of the tea down his gullet sent sweltering heat to his gut and loins, vivifying the deadness within.
Sybil, O merciful Sybil, She brought the alabaster men under Her wings so that they might find succor in Her bosom. There, in the Refugium where an offshoot of the World-Root lay was the Lyzard—a six-legged serpent which Sybil had saved from being cast into Gehenna with the rest of Scaduphomet’s spawn. The Lyzard, a wily though oft-benevolent trickster, egged the alabaster men to partake of the World-Root’s fruit—Gnosis. That they might become like the Gods and know the knowledge of good and evil.
The eralem were allowed to eat everything of the Garden-of-Eden, of the Refuge, but for the tree at its center. They were innocent, unknowing of sin and thus unable to do so. For their trespass, they were banished from Sybil’s Eden and doomed once again to wander Eot; the Lyzard was cursed to slither upon its belly like the rest of its kind.
Gnosis gave them blood though cold, the brackish water in their veins turned red from supping of Yurnmagog’s shadow. Next, each Number carved a likeness upon their facelessness. Eyes from Nagalfaram the Judge so that they might have the discernment to parse good between evil by sight alone; ears from Nine so that they might hear the whispers around; a nose from Calanrial so that they might smell the wrongness of injustice and lies; teeth from Stribog so that knew themselves to be born like all other beasts upon the earth; brows from Woeden for crowns must be borne there upon for all to see; eyelids from Death so they might contemplate the fate that awaits them; fingers from Balphas so that they might toil and make; a mouth from Hsarash to balance deed by the scales of one’s promises and words; hair from Nezen to hide the profane clay of their flesh so that the Gods do not grow wrothful by remembrance of the original sin.
Sol, seeing that the eralem were not perfect, gave them fire so that they might have the furnace of a heart and heat in their blood—that neither dry earth would crack their flesh nor dissolve in water like pillars of salt. Having the knowledge of good and evil, they had their own will, born of all Gods and yet beholden to none but the moral compass within themselves.
Thus, mankind was born, Qadmon the first among to receive the flame and the last of Leizuziel’s line. Babylon had roused from deathless death to bless them with—
Now, he remembered his name and knew it to be.
Son of his father and son of his mother, Baethen ‘Sore-Loser’ Locke.