“I don’t know,” I said.
“It was rhetorical,” he said.“Of course, you don’t know.You’re some girl who finds comfort through cavorting with the Darkness itself.You chase demons and hope they will quell the hole in your heart that only God himself can fill.”
He waved a hand at me dismissively and then turned back to his notes.
“You’re in a strange mood,” I said.I was trying not to let him hurt my feelings.The way he said it was bitter, filled with despair and self-hate.Brother Al was just conscious of his looks, I knew—and conscious that he was losing any grip on who he thought he was as a person.
“A fey mood, more like,” he said, and he pitched his voice upward.“My thoughts are heavy of late.I feel a weight upon my soul after recent events.I myself distorted the flow of events, in a selfish fit.Maybe I went against the machinations of the Lord.”
“You keep talking about the Lord,” I said.“Are you Christian, Brother Al?Catholic?”
“God is bigger than denominations,” he said.“But essentially.All of existence is a series of knots in the whorl of the Tree of Good and Evil, and the Lord on High sits at the top.There are those of us who are not worthy to step foot in his sacred realm.”
“Is that Topside, Brother Al?”
Brother Al crossed himself.
“The Lord is a transmutational being,” he said.“He will strip all fragments of darkness from you, if you go Topside.He will purify and sanctify your soul, even if you lose who you are in the process.We immortals—so called, at least—we fear this, amongst all things, this lack of consciousness, the idea that in death who we are becomes something more.Long are the days I have been Aleister Tzigany.Long are the days I hope yet to be.And yet… I wonder if in the end.Surrendering to that bleak holiness, that cosmic dissolution, would not be my best bet.”
“What’s stopping you?”I asked.
“My flock.Spreading my message to all creatures of the night.That though we may be composed of dark matter, we are yet capable of God’s Grace, and that we may do the work of God on this earth.”
“You don’t believe in the Imperium’s Moon-Kiss theory, then,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he said.“You mean the old Imperium myth.That there is a Moon Goddess, one who will incarnate upon this plane in some form, and usher in the return of the old ways.No.We creatures of the shadow.We live longer lives than those in the Imperium.Deep are our memories, even if our human brains can only retain so much.We wrote records longer and more ancient than those magic-wielding fools in their so-called Utopia.”
“Tell me about it, then,” I said.
“You must understand the Undead concept of existence.That’s key, I think.We are—as I said—all in a whorl of wood in the holy tree of Good and Evil.All that exists lay upon the tree, in one knot or another, all enclosed within.”
“Are there things outside of it?”I asked.
“Some records say yes,” Brother Al said.“One can learn how to traverse the corpuscles of the tree, to slip from whorl to whorl.At the top of all of existence, there is an existence so foreign to us mere insects that it’s viewed with terror in the branches up high.A great alchemical light, holy and all-consuming, a temple filled with ethereal machines that ensnare the souls of those below, beating all darkness from them.There are some who say that it is Topside’s intention to send its Messengers down the branches, to snag all souls of Darkness, to drag them up high and purify them, to devour the darkness and breathe it back into the universe.
“And yet there are records.Of a Lady, the Moon Goddess.She who protects and watches over this world, and all worlds within the Tree.A compassionate Mother Goddess, whose power alone holds back the creeping white of Topside.She will only awaken into her power by embracing the darkness—and her loving arms will hold back the impermeable, to keep steady the Sun and Moon in the sky, to preserve reality as it is, so that we may feel free to live our lives.”
“What do you think about all that?”I asked.
“As old as I am?I find all things possible,” he said.“I find all things probable, even.There are those who view the Moon-Kissed, as the Imperium would say, as a savior—and those like myself, who believe she is only holding all spiritual creatures at bay from their final transformation into the cosmic.”
“That’s pretty depressing,” I said.“And here I thought I had problems.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, Stacey.You’re a mess.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Perhaps you have been overly liberal with your affections,” he said.“I can sense your regret at our past liaison.I can sense your disgust with my form.I can sense how much you loathe to be around me even as I look like this.Even as I share my faith with you, your sense of ease with me is replaced with anxiety.”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“It’s what I’m receiving,” he said.
“Look, I’m starting to think this whole birth mark thing is too much trouble,” I said.“I don’t have any powers.I don’t have any abilities.I don’t have anything other than a mark on my neck.And I haven’t even let any of you bite me.”
“You are worried, then, that others may perceive your status as an incarnation.”
“Clemenza.She’s the one that’s been spreading the drugs around, the drugs that are melting people.She made sure she told me about The Imperium.Maybe she’s trying to revive it.Maybe she thinks I’m the one.The Avatar of the Moon Goddess, or something.”
