Hey there, folks! Miss me?
Been an eventful couple days for sure! You might notice the new radio frequency. Don’t let it bother you. I’ll be serving all the same goodness as ever!
Getting down to business, though, things are looking rough. If I were you, folks, I’d keep your ear open.
There’s a southward wind blowing. Wanna know more? Then stay tuned!
Spring 47
Alisandra left Valkyrie to finish her recuperation and leaped far afield.
Across the void, following the ancient drumbeats of the Wyrm’s war.
How intimately she knew his music now! Twice she had attempted to break his immortal soul. Could husband and wife ever dream of such intimacy? Or was theirs an intimacy reserved only for angels?
Either way, she found her target in dead space, floating in pure void between the tendrils of the universe. Even the grains of sand floated light-years apart here.
And despite all odds, she found an arm, still clad in armor.
In its dead grip, a dagger that sang of futile hope.
That snake-grinned bastard pays this time
With this we finish it!
“I am here to finish what you started,” the Archangel told the hand. “To seal the Wyrm until this place fails.”
The hand opened, and Alisandra accepted the dagger.
“This victory shall be yours as well,” she vowed to that long-dead warrior, touching pommel to her forehead.
Then she leaped away to find the next.
Privately, she nursed a fierce joy. At last, Malkuth yields to its Archangel!
If only the Foundations were half as welcoming!
“In time,” she thought to herself, alone among the stars.
She found more detritus of the Wyrm’s sins in short order. Arms full, she leaped home. Her step carried fragments of her passage – strands of celestial currents that followed her into the atmosphere above the Bones and burst into a brilliant aurora at her arrival.
Bathed in its green light, she landed atop the mesa where her mother once faced Donovan. Sebastian worked there, dragging lines through the mud with a stick.
“Please mind the channels,” he called without looking. “First: the dagger to Gevurah, please.”
She placed her finds in the appropriate circles and then crossed the sucking mud to the angel of Witness. “Should we not remove the bones themselves?”
“As the Archangel will see, we should not. They are vital links to this place.”
Alisandra surveyed the mesa, scrubbed bare by the storms, and nodded to herself.
“Yes. This desolation resembles him,” she breathed. Shaking her head, she focused. “What of Mother’s work? We cannot disturb it.”
“We shall not. We will anchor this Work amongst the dance.”
In demonstration, Sebastian plucked up a pebble. Then, two fingers holding it, he stopped the pebble.
And since everything else continued to soar through space, the pebble shot away at incredible speed.
“Is it not dangerous to grant him such an anchor?”
“All Great Works are dangerous, Archangel.”
“I do not require your reminders!” she snapped. “Answer fully or throw yourself to the center and be done with it!”
Sebastian bowed before her demand. “My apologies. You are correct in your anger.”
I am no longer the teacher I once was
“The Wyrm already holds such an anchor. Has held it since the beginning. For he was First, and he has buried himself in root and sinew of this place, to be found where none seek, to return no matter how he should be rebuked. Indeed, our Work must grant him such an anchor in order to match what he already is.”
He is one among the Mighty
A star upon which the heavens turn
“And he shall remain an anchor even in durance,” Alisandra muttered sourly.
Same as the Tyrant, she reasoned. For even in his prison, he shapes us through the echoes of Eden. Our history; our language; our tools…
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Before she could continue the thought, a ruckus echoed out of the canyons from the mortal settlement below.
“One moment, Sebastian.”
She stepped down, bursting onto the muddy boulevard. The settlement stirred from its drunken stupor for the day, and the prospectors stared at the god amongst them in hungover stupefaction.
“Besotted though you may be, harken my words!” Alisandra called. Her voice rolled through the canyon and beyond, cold and imperial. “Of the mineral wealth found here, take your fill. Of the bounty in gems, I give all to you. Yet I reserve two things in my judgement: that the silver salt baths belong to my sister alone; and that I claim the high mesa for my use. By this Work shall we set the Wyrm among the Bones, never to rise, and bring forth peace.”
This is for your benefit
“Be aware. Trespass shall merit no mercy.”
Alisandra full well understood the nature of men. What she forbade, they would desire.
Her motive, however, was simple: A Great Work that falls before the poking of drunkards would never endure.
Let the mortal mages test her Work for flaws!
To her surprise, a mortal answered her. “What of the Covenant?”
Conclave trained for such surprises, she answered instantly. “Let Hylas and Verdandi voice their objections then.”
Neither god – the one vanished to the Foundations and the other having chosen her course – sang.
“There is your answer.”
Gods silent and still receive no vote in this new order
Let those willing to strive for the world grasp it!
If the Throne should condemn me, then let the Throne raise its Hand!
Foundations echoing in the distance:
Morningstar…
She ignored them.
Closer to hand, her halo heard other whispers.
“The Tempest is outside!”
“Still your lips, you little fool, if you do not want her to know what you’ve–”
Stepping through walls, Alisandra caught the trafficker by the lapel in a dingy storeroom in back of a newly built barber shop. Though this room was new, the sight was familiar: a self-possessed man, a trio of temple girls, and echoes of the lies he told.
You’ve got to pay back that money, you see
It’s what you promised, and mum’s the word
Your parent’ll never need to know what you’ve done
Soon as you’ve paid back all you owe
“In the very shadow of my Work,” the Tempest drawled, ice crackling off her fingertips and across his chest. “You are a brave man.”
The man worked his jaw like a fish, seeking some excuse.
“If you wish to live, you will surrender the names of your every associate.”
In the darkest corners of her heart, Alisandra found she no longer cared which of those options he picked.
***
Some animal instinct twinged in Ezra’s mind early that morning of Spring 47. Maybe it was the low, black clouds that greeted him that morning, swirling over his mansion like a portent. Maybe it was the issue of Greenport and the temple dogs sniffing eagerly into every corner. Maybe it was some lingering shred of guilt that urged him to flee.
“I run a business,” he murmured to himself that morning, hunched in a wagon with his ill-gotten riches packed in between the floorboards and Novian pots and pans visible to anyone also on the Jungle-ward road. “A man can’t pay, and he’s put to work in a labor camp. That’s no fate for a girl!”
He only offered an opportunity; he couldn’t help that some of the girls lacked the stomach!
The black, boiling clouds kept pace with him.
Still swirled overhead, even after he’d put ten miles between himself and Iris.
“Look,” he growled to the demons in his head, “some of those girls are pulling in a gold a month! Two gold a month! Practically their ticket to riches! Couple years of the easiest work off two legs and they can set up tidy for the rest of their lives!”
When had these walls started to squeeze?
Greenport? That had been a real set-back, but he’d burned all the evidence to the hilt.
When he’d shot that white-eyed bastard in the back eight days ago? Something about the way the man had fallen dead like a dog playing a trick for its master…
But the man had laid face down in the mud without an air bubble for two minutes!
Ezra had checked the body twice and felt no pulse.
The clouds overhead rumbled.
“And why does that little brat suckle teat from a throne while I bust my arse like a working man anyways?!” he defended.
The demons in his head agreed obediently.
“We’re both doing the same thing!” he told them and the horse. “It’s natural to seize what you can! Its only–”
Then the black clouds opened above him, admitting a beam of sunlight and the Tempest.
Her impact shattered the wagon and killed the horse.
“Ezra.”
Flung into the reeds, the brother of the Maiden wheezed against an arctic pressure across his chest.
“Was all that I granted not enough?” the Tempest purred.
That you might live in succor and plenty for all your odious life
So long as you left well enough alone
He tried to answer, but the frigid air cracked his lips. Squirming back, his hands shattered frozen stalks of grass.
Flecks of snow billowed across his knees, playful as a puppy before the god approaching him.
“It would hurt Esmie to see you. She would beg you a pardon.”
She is wonderfully sweet that way
“But time is short, Ezra, and the proof at hand. Frustrating, really, that the issue refused to yield until now.”
But you would be amazed how candid people can be under the correct pressure
Priorities shift so quickly for mortals
His fingertips started to turn blue.
“Your trial would be a farce and its outcome assured.”
So let us grant this mercy: to be done with it
The Tempest stood above him, and from his shallow grave Ezra witnessed the clouds that swirled at her command.
Beheld the first flickers of an all-encompassing aurora of gold across the sky.
And cursed the sister that had brought him to this end.
The Tempest drew her Blade in judgement.
“We have no need for your kind here.”
***
Few and far between, certain moments became seeds where what was and what would be joined. The chance glance that set a man to love; the moment’s delay that saved a life; the grasping of one’s purpose and power.
Seeds unremarked in their genesis but for those with the sight to Witness their potential.
Hands cupped, Sebastian caught a mote of Light that floated from the Archangel’s wake. Gentle as a new father, he knelt with it at the very center of this Work to be.
“Here,” he prayed.
Here we begin
It sank into the mud and vanished, but he knew it had found its fertile ground.
The beginning of the rest of eternity.
Alisandra Mishkan burst back into view, still swirling with the steel-cracking cold of her Tempest.
The vastness of space has touched her, the angel of Witness knew. Her sea deeper and more vast than mere waters now. Soon it will encroach upon every shore.
“You still ring with judgement, Archangel,” the angel of Witness noted diplomatically.
“Will that be a problem?”
He spread his hands, noncommittal. “I would be hard pressed to find gold in a single moment of that man’s life. I do not envy his guardian its task.”
“Such expense for so little. Even at the end, what use could be found for him?”
Her gaze fell to the Work, and the air whispered of ancient answers. Practical answers.
“Meager indeed is the Light to be found in such blood,” Sebastian interjected. “Ten thousand such sacrifices would squeeze a meager droplet.”
Her fingers drummed upon the hilt of the Hand of God.
“My apologies,” she exhaled at last. “I lost my temper.”
“Take what time you need,” he urged.
“Time we do not have.” Stepping forward, she unwittingly laid her boot across the seed of Light, driving it deeper into the soil. “This must be strong, Sebastian. A pillar among the heavens. No matter what the cost.”
“It will be,” he promised. “The Wyrm will be bound as angels must be: by power freely given.”
By willing sacrifice