Pax Daemonica
1 Ash 121
Petra knows the dream has changed. On her plutonian shore, there is less sand. It has been taken up to be fired into glass of a thousand colors. The cliffs are jagged and rough, and pockmarked with deep caverns. They have been plumbed for their riches, and left soiled and empty. Grey figures dig like termites into the land. There is no hesitation, no restraint. Picks swing and saws rake, and the bounty of the world offers itself to the horde. It vanishes into the crowd, the unconscious masses of iron and wood joining the throng and being soaked up by their destructive purpose.
All work towards the same goal. The great tower, upon its magnificent and artificial hill, and the incomprehensible demon whose will motivates each stone and guides every hand. The tree in its arbor, like an infernal prince upon a throne.
This night, the tower is different. It has grown so high that it reaches the clouds above. It punches through them without hesitation or difficulty. Around its ever-growing height the clouds break, pushed aside by ornately-carved stone. The grey stone blends with the grey thunderheads – Petra can hardly find the line where one ends and the other begins. The clouds are a great canopy, and Petra feels their oppression on her. It is as if the majesty of the tower has joined the sprawl of the sky. There is no escaping now. Perhaps there never was.
The faceless servants crawl like gnats on the tower. The carvings, those ornate designs, reveal themselves as handholds. It hardly seems like the workers need them. They skitter, like insects. They fly over the surface, hands and feet pulling them as they carry packs of stone and mortar wherever needed. They are worshippers of the tower as much as the tree, in so far as the tower is the will of the tree, and they are servants to the tree. Scaffolding rots far below. It is an insult to the tower, and it is forgotten. The crowd is a swarm, and the tower its hive. It surges up the tower’s sides, and their grey bodies bleed into the stone as well. All is made a part of the tower, all is part of the tree’s will. Petra feels its pull.
She digs her heels in and resists, but it does so little good. She is dragged, inexorably, into the central chamber. Through the seven gates she passes, each a different color of the world. She wonders, if her eyes could see more colors, if she could see more gates. A passing and errant thought – one of the last before her mind melts into the great tree whose vast boughs await her. It is her feet that walk her, but it is not her will that drives her. It is the alien intelligence of the tree which pulls her towards the beating heart of this phantasmal world.
The great tree is different; it is grander, to suit its growing tower. Its bark glows with the luster of brass. It weeps tendrils of blood like sap – a thousand small cuts bleed lines of crimson on the metal, and they merge together in patterns that spell, in a language long forgotten, the names of power.
Faces protrude from it – faces contorted in pain, and ecstasy, and anger. A hundred emotions, and all of them lies. There is nothing human within this tree. They are merely lures, formed carefully but through unconscious and ignorant processes. Their eyes weep crimson as well.
Petra recognizes the lowest branches. Yesod, and Yesod, and Yesod. Her demon spiraling on itself, twisted and gnarled, bent in every shape that exists in the world to form the lowest boughs. His metal merges into the brass of the trunk, and it shudders with the same inhuman resonance that has shadowed Petra these long months. It looks in pain, but it does not scream. It has no mouth, no breath, no voice. It is a silent machine, and now it suffers in silence. An unwilling part of the whole, perhaps, or simply a part destined to agony. All must serve the grand design, unless one has its own
It is a fearsome thing, to see her aidolon warped and bent, merged into the great whole, but Petra understands that this is its natural state. She merely borrowed part of this vast creation, this monstrosity of ten-in-one. Now it returns.
Petra breathes in fear, and exhales power. It glows in front of her, thicker than it has ever been. The aether is gold, shining and splendid. It melts into the air, but is never truly gone. With each breath, this place becomes more powerful. The tree binds the power in air, and will never let it go. Petra’s breath is tribute to a Necessary Evil. It is willingly given only by technicality. The great chain binds her to her position – she can only participate in the broken system, or die. She exhales a haze of power, and choses to continue another few precious moments.
FLEDGLING CORMORANT.
The voice roars out of the Tree. It flows down the whole entity, through the knotted and warped demons. From the great crown at the zenith, whose portal leads to infinity, down the three spiraled paths, through rivers of molten gold and carmine water and tears of jade, along the boughs and into the air. The tree moves with the voice, as if animated by a phantasmal wind. There is no breeze here. Only the stasis of the inhuman, and the voice of the mighty.
STRUGGLING TO FLY. THE THIRD MYSTERY OPENS TO YOU.
Petra feels a burning on her chest. A light glows over her heart. The automatons beyond the walls begin to sing, and it is a song of jubilation. There is emotion in it, a sycophantic joy that rings painfully hollow to Petra’s ears. In perfect chorus, their work ceases and their praise begins.
For the sword is suspended,
Its blade shattered.
May its edge till soil,
And may its oppressors reign forever and ever,
World without end.
The song continues in the alien language, the voices mingling in harmonies that make Petra want to weep. She can feel the pain it causes in her chest. She can feel the understanding washing over her. The hole in her soul, the part she cut out, aches. She is incomplete. She is broken. The song of surrender to tyrants wounds her, and she feels the pain in her teeth as she grits them in perfect rhythm to the music of blissful submission.
The tree shifts again. Its brass hide convulses, and its branches fall away. It retracts into itself, here, low to the earth. It pulls in, and forms a being within its trunk. Only when it is ready does the fragment appear, sliding from the mass of the tree in an entirely maternal birth.
Metal coruscates. Petra feels sick. She feels weak, and meager, and vile. She is base, and this tree is infernal. She is pathetic, but this tree abides. She feels the power over her, the chains around her wrists. How painful it is, to understand one’s own failure. How terrible, and how irresistible.
Petra cannot help but feel revulsion with her fascination. It is a natural reaction, to the severing of the self, and the spawning of a separate life. The core of her being cries out for unity. The splitting of this fragment of the tree almost brings a tear to her eye.
The being is far larger than Yesod. This is a true demon, this is a true emanation of humanity’s honest soul. It is massive. It is a mockery of reality. With contemptuous ease it disregards the laws that mankind has made for itself, and its massive, stone-carved form looms colossal over Petra’s suddenly-meager body.
In the shade of the great tree’s emerald-carved leaves, whose rustling in an imaginary breeze carries a perfect harmony with the sound of praise beyond the walls of the tower, it shimmers into reality. It pulls apart space like folds of cloth, and warps them into a robe to hide its magnificence. It emerges, with arms of blue and a face belonging to neither man nor woman. Reality flutters around it, animated by the same phantasmal breeze. The boundaries of creation drape it, and form its mantle. Its source is the same infinity of the Crown, high at the zenith of the ever-growing tree, but far more modest, far less sublime. It is the power of the aether filtered and refined and made comprehensible by mortal minds.
And the Third Mystery opened itself, and the left-hand path was chosen. Behold, the Pax Daemonica.
It speaks with a woman’s voice, in a language Petra has never heard before, but understands perfectly.
Its arms open. Power, the deep and abyssal power that abides and tolerates, emanates from it. The light reaches out to Petra in an embrace of perfect love, and though she struggles fearsomely, she struggles in vain. The chains of light wrap around her wrists, and drag her into the embrace of a shadow of her mother.
Smothered in a demon’s affection, Petra screams until she is hoarse, and until the world around her vanishes into the black.
