A flash of blinding light and a rush of wind marked the moment the foot of the spiral anchored itself to the dirt. A luminescent heartbeat pulsed from the point it touched the ground and up the entire height of the structure, far above the clouds and out of sight. Then, for a moment, all was silent and still.
A column of light appeared in the centre of the spiral and expanded to bathe the structure in an incandescent glow. The wind returned with a vengeance, now centred on the spiral descended from the Void, so strong it threatened to drag Michael into the forming vortex. Dust and leaves carried whipped through the clearing and scratched at Michael, threatening to blind him in conjunction with the building intensity of the light. The power that had been lurking in the aether all day followed the wind as the light reshaped itself and broke free of the spiral.
The form it took was massive, an entity composed of raw light and untamed power that struggled to define itself into a single shape. It began fragmented and chaotic, disjointed parts that lacked identifiable intent or purpose. Then, as a familiar sensation of certainty thrummed through the air, a pair of wings burst from the light, still immaterial and dazzling and large enough to spread over the clearing. A person unfolded from the chaos to shape themselves from the light. The brilliant shadow of their wings was enough to dispel the wind in an instant and infuse the air with a burst of power that tasted like the sky before a storm. The aether came alive in response to their presence: a rain of sparkling motes scattered from the wings like lost feathers, tiny pinpoints of shifting colours that drifted to the ground in slow motion, casting miniature rainbows as they fell and causing Michael’s skin to tingle with recognition he couldn’t quite place. Hod stirred in the back of his mind with curiosity; the aether was heavy with the unmistakable signature of a Sephirah, though it was an unfamiliar one. The sky crowning the radiant figure’s head shimmered and warped as the endless power of the Source coalesced around it and a steady, inaudible ringing shook the clearing.
It came apart in an instant. The power that had been building in the aether all day broke with a snap that caused Michael to gasp in pain and press his hand against his head. The forming figure did not fare as well; there was a scream he felt rather than heard followed by an explosion of light and wind strong enough to stagger him backwards. By the time his vision cleared, the wind had died, the light and the figure formed from it were gone, and in their place lay an unmoving body of flesh and blood in a crumpled heap on the ground.
The world was deathly still. The only sound in the clearing was Michael’s breath - amplified in his ears by his stress - and a steady, immaterial thrum of power emanating from the spiral structure. He adjusted his grip on his sword and shifted from foot to foot in agitation. His gaze darted between the unmoving body at the foot of the spiral and the structure itself as he waited for whatever dark force had caused this manifestation to go so very wrong to swoop from the Void and attack.
That didn’t happen. The figure on the ground drew their first breath as if they were convinced it would be their last: wet, struggling and shuddering with whimpering agony. They were collapsed on the ground facing away from Michael and didn’t seem able to right themselves, didn’t seem able to move at all beyond weak squirming. The golden light of the spiral bathed the clearing in a discomforting glow the colour of fresh blood that made it difficult to tell from a distance whether they were wounded. The wheezing death-rattle sound of their breath was a convincing indicator that they were.
‘Do not allow yourself to be exposed,’ Aeon Gabriel told him. Michael had every intention of obeying her to the best of his abilities, but what was he meant to do now? He couldn’t walk away, surely, not with this thing descended from the Void and an injured person evidently from another Sphere possibly dying in his backyard. He wavered in distress as he waited for something to happen that would make the proper course of action clear. The golden spiral from the Void cast the clearing in an eerie, bloody light and thrummed with a resonant power that lingered at the very edge of his awareness, but the spiral itself showed no sign of changing now that the initial event had passed. One of the last motes of light to fall landed on the back of his hand holding his sword and disappeared with a twinkle; the trace of aether it carried bore a signature that Hod instinctively recognised. Tiphareth.
Michael swallowed thickly as he glanced between the golden spiral from the Void and the broken figure on the ground struggling to breathe. Tiphareth. Then that must mean…
“Please let this be the right choice for once,” he pleaded to no one in particular as he returned his sword to its scabbard with perhaps more force than was warranted. Without daring to turn his back on the spiral, he hurried across the clearing to the body he strongly suspected belonged to his fellow Aeon, shrugging out of his jacket as he went. The thrum from the spiral pressing on the back of his mind nagged at him despite his best efforts to ignore it. He needed to focus on assessing what was wrong with his first visitor from outside his Sphere without making physical contact.
She was in terrible shape. That much was obvious immediately. Distance could no longer disguise the long, bloody lines looping around her limbs, her torso, her chest and her throat. He couldn’t see her face, lost under a mass of shockingly red hair and pressed into the ground as she wheezed and whimpered. Her hands clutched convulsively at nothing, trembling with effort. She needed proper help, but Michael didn’t dare call for anyone else to come this close to the spiral and risk exposure to whatever had done this. He needed to move her somewhere safer before anything else.
She howled before he could reach her, as best she could with no breath in her lungs. “G-get away f-from me!”
Michael froze as she tried to crawl away from him in a blind, uncoordinated panic. She didn’t make it very far before her new body failed her and she collapsed onto her face, keening and coughing in distress as she spasmed uncontrollably. Unable to help himself, Michael glanced up the length of the spire, but he could see no new threat descending from the Void to finish its work. Meanwhile, her shaking was worsening until she was in the beginning throes of a seizure.
“Easy,” he said, continuing towards her. “We will get you help, but first we must move somewhere safer.”
“D-don’t,” she tried to shriek. Her voice caught on the word, hoarse and breathless, as her seizing grew worse. “I-I-I won’t…! Never…”
She rasped in a final, desperate breath, and then she locked in place. Her head snapped back and every muscle went taut and shook with an overflow of uncontained tension. A radiant halo exploded around her head, white like the light of a Sephirah but laced with traces of too many other colours to name and bright enough to blind. The clearing was washed in an immaterial wind that carried the taste of a foreign Sephirah. Tiphareth.
And she was dying.
“Oh. Oh, no. Oh, no no no.” The spiral to the Void forgotten for the time being, Michael nearly tripped over himself in his hurry to kneel beside her. What would happen to Tiphareth if she drifted from her body, much less here in Hod? They couldn’t afford to find out.
He wrapped his jacket around his hand as many times as he could in a poor attempt to avoid direct contact and rolled her rigid form onto her back. Eight of the bloody lines converged on her chest in a raw, golden cluster over her heart that pulsed in time with the flashing of her halo. It was a frantic, panicked rhythm that flooded the air with desperate energy so powerful it would have been overwhelming had it not been equally scattered, confused, unfamiliar. Broken. He needed to stop the bleeding, at least the external bleeding if he could.
“I’m sorry, this will be uncomfortable, but I need to apply pressure to this wound,” said Michael as he pressed the bunched-up jacket against her sternum.
She choked on a scream. The flash of her halo grew more panicked as she tried to wrest control of her seizing limbs to fight him off. She failed, but he thought it somewhat promising that she retained enough awareness to try.
“Easy, easy, you just need to stay calm and I will help you through this,” Michael cooed. He lifted the edge of his jacket to check the wound underneath, and how bad the bleeding was.
There was no blood on the jacket. The luminous golden lines on her chest remained unchanged. He rubbed the fabric gently over one line, trying to gauge the wound, but it reacted… oddly. There was no tear in the skin, in fact there was no blood at all, merely a straight line that was glowing the exact golden shade of fresh blood etched into the surface of her skin.
She tried to scream again, but could no longer draw enough breath to make any noise at all. He could see the flutter of her pulse pounding in her neck, too weak and arrhythmic by far. Her back arched clear off the ground, her hands clawed at nothing as her halo flashed faster and faster, flickering with panic. She was fighting for her life with every ounce of strength she had, but Michael knew too well the double-edged blade raw fear could be.
“You appear to be going into shock. It is vitally important that you remain as calm as possible and conserve your strength. It helps if you focus on your breathing,” Michael said. He draped his jacket over her chest in hopes of keeping her warm.
With a jolt as if she had just been stabbed, she lashed out to fight off an attacker, keening in distress all the while. That she has such limited control over her basic motor skills made it easy to avoid her blind strikes, but Michael couldn’t help cringing with guilt over her distress even as he readjusted the jacket to keep it over her.
“I know, I know, but you’re safe now," he said as soothingly as he could. “You’re in Hod now, and we will do everything we can to help you, but you must remain calm. Breathe, just focus on your breathing. You are safe now, I’m here to help, you will get through this, but you must breathe.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
There was so much he didn’t understand about what was happening that his words felt dangerously close to a lie. He had never seen markings like these before and did not know what sort of wounds they signified, much less if they were survivable. But no matter his disposition towards the truth, he knew better than to say as much to someone obviously in need of comfort. So he kept repeating variations of the same platitudes while he readjusted the jacket over her whenever she threw it off. She hissed and shook each time, but couldn’t form coherent sounds.
The flashing of her halo slowed, stabilising into a steady light as he spoke. Her gasping grew deeper, still laboured and rasping but surely any air was better than none. The worst of the seizure passed and she slumped onto the ground, panting, as her halo faded from sight at last. He could see the red of her hair again, could see the blood-coloured lines that were not wounds marking her face. Her eyes were open but unfocused, feverish, clouded white. He strongly suspected that she could not see.
“That’s right, you’re doing well. The worst has passed. Just keep breathing,” Michael said. “You’ll be all right.”
She wrenched away from his voice with a racking cough and a whine, succeeding at last in tossing his jacket aside. “Wh-why would you do this?”
The question wasn’t what he had expected. Michael rocked back on his heels in confusion and sent a cautious glance over his shoulder up the spiral to the Void. Still, he saw nothing descending from the blackness beyond his Sphere. Unsure how badly he had misjudged the situation, he let out a slow breath. “Is there any reason why I wouldn’t help you, Aeon Raphael?”
At the sound of her name, Aeon Raphael lurched onto her side and heaved; her body was new enough that she had nothing in her stomach to expel, but the effort of trying looked and sounded uncomfortable.
“We can’t stay here,” said Michael with another glance at the spiral. “We must go somewhere safer.”
“Don’t ever t-touch me,” Aeon Raphael hissed.
“That is a promise I can safely make,” Michael said, “however that does not change the fact that we cannot stay here; help is waiting in a more stable location, though I can’t say how long we have.”
“There is n-no escape,” Aeon Raphael whispered. She struggled to push herself onto her hands and knees; her shaking arms buckled under the strain and she collapsed face-first into the ground, where she lay, wheezing and trembling as she fought to catch her breath.
Michael was abruptly, horribly aware of the fact that the top Aeon Raphael had manifested in was little more than a strip of white fabric wrapped around her upper torso and held in place with a ribbon tied behind her neck. Despite his better judgement, his eyes wandered across her shoulders. More of the same golden lines marked her back. Some ancient and oft-ignored part of his mind nagged at him that he ought to recognise the pattern they formed, but he was shamefully distracted by the state of her dress. It left her shoulders completely bare; he inadvertently caught a direct view of the joint where her wings folded into her shoulders before he realised he was staring and averted his gaze, flustered.
“I-I-I knew it was there,” Aeon Raphael stammered, bringing him back to the present. She had given up trying to right herself for the time being and lay on her side facing away from him as she grasped blindly at the grass underneath her. “I w-wanted to run, but I knew what would ha-happen if I tried. I couldn’t wake up. I kept the Paths closed. I kn-knew it was there.”
“What? What happened to you? What did you see?” Michael asked, leaning forward.
“No, I w-was dreaming,” Aeon Raphael continued as if she hadn’t heard him. Her voice was absent-minded, breathless, and her convulsive shaking was returning to her hands as she mumbled to herself. “I couldn’t wake up. I kept the Paths closed; it w-was all I could do. I-I thought it w-would help. Why did I think that?”
The spasms in her muscles worsened by the moment, and her wheezing mumblings took on a feverish tone that implied she was not aware of her surroundings, much less what she was saying. The hum of latent power from the spiral behind them vibrated throughout the clearing, an ever-present warning of the newly arrived unknown. This was neither the time nor place to prioritise questions over action.
“I have no answers and many questions, but I’m afraid they must wait for now,” Michael said. He retrieved his jacket and began tying the sleeves together to fashion it into a poor sling. “If you can still hear me, I’d like you to focus on my voice. Right now it’s most important that you remain calm so we can help you.”
“If y-you can still hear,” Aeon Raphael parroted deliriously, oblivious to what he was doing. “If you can still hear. Y-you can h-hear it too?”
Michael froze. He was almost afraid to ask. “Hear what?”
Aeon Raphael locked up with an agonised gasp, the onset of another fit. A mere heartbeat later, Michael realised what she was reacting to.
The thrum of power grew to a painfully intense crescendo. The entire sky lit up with a pure, blinding presence and a voice rang down from above. The voice came from everywhere at once and resonated with an undeniable power that caused Michael’s very essence to vibrate with each syllable. Guided by instinct, Michael felt himself folding into a deep bow before it registered that he was doing so; at the edge of his vision, he saw Aeon Raphael fall on her face, spasm violently one last time and then go limp. Even if she had lost consciousness at last, he doubted it would do anything to muffle the voice of the King.
“The Paths are now open,” the voice of the King of the Aeons came down from the sky. “Do not fear this change. This is as it should be. We are all one in the eyes of the Source, and now We may act as such. Come to Me, Aeons of the Spheres. Join Me at the Throne of the Crown so that We may discuss the future. We will convene by nightfall on the morrow.”
The brilliant, powerful presence of the King faded from the sky, and with it went the overwhelming compulsion to kneel. Sense returned to Michael slowly as his mind fought to shake off the daze left behind. His head was so fuzzy he couldn’t feel his tongue.
“Wait,” he whispered, the loudest voice he could muster from his numb throat. Urgency prompted him to swallow and try again, louder. “Wait, please. We…”
He trailed off. The presence of the King was gone from the clearing. The golden spiral from the Void - a Path? - hummed with barely perceptible power in the back of his mind, but it was a quiet, non-intrusive, stable presence. Nothing else in the forest moved; the King’s brief visit cowed even the animals. For all intents and purposes, he was alone.
Aeon Raphael had not stirred following the end of the King’s announcement. When Michael turned to face her, he wasn’t sure she was even breathing. In a mildly numb panic, he used his jacket as a protective barrier once more and rolled her onto her side. She did not respond to this in the slightest; she had gone slack. The new angle allowed him to see the pulse still fluttering in her neck, but it also showed her utterly vacant expression and the worrying grey of her skin; as he watched, what little healthy colour in her face was draining away until only the bloody golden lines to coloured her skin.
“Aeon Raphael? Can you hear me?” Michael called.
No response. He thought her fingers twitched, though he could have just as easily imagined it. Her white eyes were half open, but they were glassy, unfocused, unmoving. Empty. Fear clawed its way out of Michael’s persisting numbness to settle in his chest.
“Hang on, I’ll call for help,” he said. He glanced at the spiral Path one last time out of the corner of his eye while he fumbled to retrieve his communicator from his pocket. ‘Do not fear this change.’ The King had ordered it, and so he couldn’t. A ‘Path’, was it?
His communicator rang shrilly while it was still in his hands, the sudden noise startling enough that he fumbled the device. Once he fought his hands under control, he recognised the identification code attached to the incoming call and accepted the transmission.
“Remiel,” he greeted, gratitude heavy in his voice. “You… I’ll venture a guess that you heard?”
“I doubt there is a soul alive who did not hear, my Aeon,” Remiel said. Of course there wasn’t. “Michael, what -”
“Wait, Remiel, wait. I need an emergency response team sent to my location right away,” Michael interrupted. Using his covered hand, he eased Aeon Raphael the rest of the way onto her back in hopes she would be more comfortable. Still no reaction. “It’s urgent. Is Umahel with you?”
“No, my Aeon. He returned to the city before this mess started. Are you injured, Michael?” Remiel asked. The tenseness in his voice was evident even across the comm.
“No, it’s not for me. Someone came down with the Paths, but she’s in bad shape. Get the response team here and have Umahel meet us at the Sanctuary; we’ll keep her there until we know what’s caused this. Tell him I’ve never seen a case like this before.”
“And you want her brought here, next to the Sephirah?”
“Less chance of a spread there than in the city. Remiel, don’t argue with me, this is important. I can’t get any reaction from her anymore,” Michael said, a note of panic leaching into his voice despite his best efforts.
“They’re on their way, Michael.”
“Thank you. Remiel, I think this is the Aeon of Tiphareth,” Michael admitted in a hush.
“Ah,” said Remiel shortly. His tone made it clear he had no idea what to make of this information. “Of course. I’ll get Umahel myself.”
“Good. Ah, you may as well call off the evacuation, I suppose,” Michael said. “If everyone heard the King, there’s no reason to evacuate over these Paths.”
There was a pause long enough to make him wonder if the transmission had been dropped by mistake before Remiel agreed. “As you say, my Aeon.”
Michael cringed. “Get the emergency team here and we’ll talk at the Sanctuary.”
“As you say, my Aeon,” Remiel repeated. “They’re en route; do not take any unnecessary risks until they arrive.”
“Understood.” He ended the transmission and returned his focus to his ‘guest’.
There was no change; she remained as still and pallid as a fresh corpse. The golden lines marking her brightened and dimmed ever-so-slightly in a slow rhythm, more in time with the concept of breathing than her actual, barely existent gasps. It took him a moment of watching to realise the light of the Path shared the same rhythm.
Michael had no idea what to do with himself. He covered her with his jacket once more, if only to pretend he was helping make her more comfortable. In all honesty, he doubted it made any difference at this point.
“You’ll be all right,” he said, more comforted by the act of speaking than he expected the act comforted her. “You made it through the worst of it. We’ll take care of you now. Everything will be fine.”
Aeon Raphael never responded to him. He kept talking anyway. Michael was still talking to her when the response team arrived and continued talking as they loaded her onto the stretcher for transport. He did not miss the alarm in the healers’ otherwise professional reactions to the scene, both to the colossal Path itself and their new patient’s condition, so he continued the platitudes for their sake as well. So long as he was talking, repeating over and over that things would be fine, he wasn’t panicking. He was in some semblance of control. And the daeva, bless them, but they believed him. He had to keep talking once he realised that.
He finally fell silent as they took flight from the forest to return to the Sanctuary. The beacon of light from the Sephirah Hod was their guide, as it always had been. That it was now ringed by four spiralling Paths connecting their world to the Void beyond was inconsequential for the moment. Numb with too many questions and a confusing gamut of emotions, Michael put the Path behind him out of his mind. He wasn’t sorry to leave it behind.