Death

We are surrounded by little deaths.

Petals wasting away on arthritic stems. Crippled insects crushed under designer heels. A mangled animal carcass studied by elementary school children. Microscopic fragments from human bodies ringing tubs and dusting shoulders.

Each day, you accept these deaths, these sacrifices on the altar of life. You take it for granted that we can view it today without facing the power of the scythe. But there is nowhere to hide from the scope of its finality. Only when Death arrives with a hollow skull and black hell eyes do you realize how foolish your parodies have been.

Samson Morgan has come to this realization in the time it has taken me to step across the threshold of his office. The door clicks shut behind me with all the subtlety of a rifle shot.

He doesn’t move. Not this one. Beneath a crop of expertly cropped sable hair, he regards me with the steady gaze of a man who has always known his actions will return one day. I leap onto his desk to crouch directly in front of him. Swathed from neck to toe in white, I have become his personal Angel of Death.

As I remove my shades he flinched backwards in his chair, drawing in gasping breaths that never get beyond the reflexive convulsions of his Adam’s apple. My eyes have that effect on people when I allow them to be seen as they truly are: black sin orbs scarred by unholy silver irises.

“Hello, Samson,” I say, leaning towards his sober aristocratic features.

“The 1st Pylon will not be pleased,” he whispers. “There will be repercussions.”

“There always are.”

In one move, I reach out and break his neck by wrenching his face hard to the left. His hazel eyes immediately lose their animation. He slumps forward as if in death he wishes to hug me farewell. I catch him, resting his head gently on top of his paperwork.

Moments later, I exit the sleek beige building in what passes for a business district in downtown Providence. Cars creep down Rhode Island streets still glossy from yesterday’s snow. The sky is pregnant with yet another storm, blindingly white and ominous. I take my time in lighting an imported black clove cigarette, inhaling the fragrant smoke as I watch the human parade. There is little worry that the body will be discovered immediately. My target preferred to work through his lunch hours alone.

A pudgy woman in a gray overcoat drifts by. Her eyes fixate on my cigarette with undisguised disapproval. I blow out another casual stream of smoke and smile at her. What she sees in my smile is not pleasing. She averts her face and hurries away from me on too-small heels.

The scent of chaos emanating from my grin is too much for her senses to take. Only the senseless remains when the facade is stripped away, after all.

No order can be discerned in the discovery of a dead body sprawled across an overpriced desk. Nor the car wreck blocking traffic for miles as people crane their necks to see a glimpse of the destruction. It’s only when the neighbor we admire and respect murders his entire family that a realization occurs to us: other humans are merely masks with a hidden face.

Chaos is there, underneath everything. Restless. Fathomless. Shifting like blackened oil, the substance of the past.

The man I've killed matters little in the scheme of things. He is just one of many cogs dispatched without a ripple in humanity's awareness. Such is the way of our world now. But your human demigods have been unleashed on the Earth only for a season. And my, what an intriguing spectacle the Modern Age has been. We live in a time when my job is even more necessary to curtail the abuses within your systems.

If not for my shortening the days, my friends, no man would be left to withstand it.

Greed is, of course, the most sacred of your seven sins. Accordingly, it has so infiltrated every aspect of modern life that it is considered inane to even think of it as derelict.

Samson Morgan, already rewarded for his underhanded financial schemes with a respectable job and $2.3 million in offshore accounts, could not resist the seductive voice telling him he was entitled to more. Yet it wasn't his theft that tipped the Balance. It was his arrogance in doing so without bothering to cover his ass.

Greed with humility is seen as nothing more than a character flaw. Greed with insolence is placing yourself above your station. His death is as much a punishment as it is a warning to others: do what you will while staying in your designated cell.

You see, I work with everyone. All That Is. Celestials. Angels. Immortals. Demigods. Humans. Demons. Halflings. Nature. At some point, they will all require my services. My role as Death isn’t personal. I am Karmic Balance shifting the dark matter of Creation, an equation totaled out. But I remain, above all, diplomatic in my efforts.

I finish my cigarette, flicking the remains into the street. I walk a half a block before disappearing into a side street used for deliveries. Alone, I close my eyes. The air around me shimmers before parting like a curtain. I step through the space between dimensions, the realm I reside in known as Limbo.

I reconstruct into the form I am most comfortable wearing in your world. Jade irises with flecks of silver form as black fades to white in my eyes. Although a portion of my consciousness has lived in your realm for many years, my eyes remain the fastest feature to morph. My skin becomes sepia, smooth and unmarked, encasing the lithe body I once used as a Kemetic priestess long before there was such a thing as the Mediterranean Sea.

In the Old Days, the Ancients knew what we were. We walked among the offspring of the Nine without hesitation or mystery. Yet today’s humans are psychically blind, historically ignorant and arrogantly insistent that they know everything.

Such is the way it is now since the Great War in the Age of Gemini, which required me to take the Life of the Fifth Pylon. The light of knowledge went out of this solar system with the destruction of that planet. But the Balance had to be maintained. The abuses of Earth demanded it, then as now.

So it humors me, these notions modern mortals have about Immortals. They are romanticized and fawned over, immolated and respected in myth as vampires: Lestats and Cullens and Draculas. They deserve none of this admiration.

This world exists in its current form because a very small population of humans refuses to die. They did not come into this longevity naturally. And the evil they have unleashed here on this plane of existence is testament to this fact.

Despite this, none of them will ever tell you as much. Instead, they will pretend to be your saviors, morphing into your fantasies. This is how they have tricked humanity into servitude. Many dramas have been played out on this tiny globe of yours, the likes of which put even Voltaire's Candide to shame.

I am not an Immortal. Neither am I an angel. I exist in all realms of the infinite multiverse. I am the Gateless Gate, the power of Conscious Transmutation. I exist everywhere and nowhere because I am the threshold through which the great Life Force transforms Itself. But for the sake of Time, I will limit my ramblings to that which only concerns you.

He is a rather cankerous old gent these days.

No one listens to him now unless he speaks Gregorian, but I digress.

____________________________________________________

I step back onto the human Earth. The lilt of birdsong breaks the quiet like a gentle rain drifting through the trees. The villa lies before me in the dark, acres of isolation paid for with blood and tears. He chose the location for its remoteness. A helicopter is the only way to access it all. Few mortals can afford such a thing as their sole means of transportation. Then again, the man I'm hunting has always been an exception to the rule.

As I walk, my form assumes the mantle he has chosen. Wings sprout from my back, slick with mammoth black feathers. Cinnamon hair fades to black tresses that flow like honey past my shoulders. These things I allow his subconscious to choose. My obsidian eyes and sepia skin remain by my will in defiance of his obvious racism.

Again, my clothing turns white. The purity of the color undermines the confidence of even the most sociopathic of mortals. Even they seem to harbor these fantasies regarding angels, although the Solar-Born are more like Spartans than anything. Even so, I try to live up to the expectation.

My strides through the jungle are unhurried; his technology will not detect me. I have rendered it ineffective from the moment my form appeared in this place. Mist creeps by my boots, slithering along the ground beneath the dark canopy of trees. I caress the cheek of a jaguar as I walk past, thanking it for the kindness of allowing me passage. As I walk, 100,000 deaths and births occur in a 30 mile radius, consisting of microscopic life, vegetation, insects and jungle animals.

Mortals do not notice such deaths. They only acknowledge the 500,000 souls around the world that I also extinguish and birth before my five minute walk is complete.

That said, my quarry has disregarded the most sacred rule of the animal kingdom: the realization that you yourself can become prey at any time. He has grown confident that he will not be discovered. Most Immortals are this insolent.

The fifteen guards I dispatch on my path are inconsequential. I leave no grieving mothers behind. These are killers of the highest order, trained by underground militias around the world. Their identities are so well buried that the discovery of any of these bodies will turn up nothing. I knew from the moment I brought them Life exactly where and when I would see them again.

As I enter his dining room, he is just pouring himself a glass of tequila. It amuses me to see him swirl the equivalent of a year's salary in the sniffer he holds. This, after all, is the very reason why I have come to this place: his greed.

"You are a hard man to find," I say aloud.

The hand with the tequila freezes. I count three seconds before he spins and levels a gun at me. What he sees makes him drop it as if he's been scalded. He backs up against the bar. I imagine he would also scramble inside of it if he could. Glass shatters on the marble tiles that stretch towards the apricot rug resting beneath my boots.

Even in the middle of nowhere, my target has managed to acquire the very best the world has to offer. Every room is a picture of opulence. I will spare you the tedious details of his possessions by telling you what happened to those he employed to display them. In return for their laborious journey to outfit his modern palace, the jungle dwellers here were sprayed with machine gun bullets and buried in a mass grave. Those remaining alive have sworn servitude to this capitalist Lucifer until Time erases their lives as well.

This is a man who has held many titles. He stands before me with a face no one would recognize, the handiwork of the best plastic surgeon on the underground circuit. Yet I feel his heart trying to give out as his frightened consciousness struggles to grasp the implications of seeing me.

I extend my hand, freezing these inclinations within him. He evaded one scandal with a heart attack he subsequently used as cover to fake his death after taking part in the largest accounting scandal to rock the year 2000. He’s been dabbling in other nihilistic schemes of creating money out of nothing ever since.

This go round, however, he will not be so fortunate. Not on my watch.

"We meet again, Baphomet," I say, using his true name.

He gasps. "Who are you?"

I smile in response. Mortals do not like my smile in this state. They will back away from me in haste if I reveal it. Baphomet, however, finds he cannot move. Paralyzed, he is only able to talk to me and turn his head. Nothing more.

"They will not allow this." He shakes his head in denial, nearly dislodging his toupee.

“And who exactly do you think will rescue you?”

He licks his lips. “I drank the wine. You can’t kill me.”

"As you can see, your cavalry is not arriving. You are completely mine for the evening." I spread my raven wings. The span of them dwarfs the elegant room.

"They told us the Angels were all going to die off."

I chuckle at this. All the glasses and windows in the villa shatter with the sound. I allow the demon to fall to his knees in front of me. Blood runs in thin streams from his ears.

“You drank the wine of the Nephilim, but they neglected to tell you the real story, my friend. They are the only angels dying.” I make my way to the bar where a single bottle of Pasión Azteca lounges in its platinum bottle, immune to my sonic laugh. Under his burning stare, I open the top and take a heady drink with relish.

“Not bad for a $3 million tequila,” I remark.

“Your audacity is noted. They will revisit these insults on your head ten fold.”

“I don’t think so.” I gesture at him with the bottle in my hand, leaning against his bar.

“Have you ever asked yourself why they’d let someone like you have the Wine of Life? Sure, you solved the riddle of the universe to give them a cosmic loophole out of Judgement. But they didn't need you for that.”

“They did need me,” he seethes. “I had the sacred knowledge!”

“And what did you go and do with this sacred knowledge, hmm? You incarnate just to create fiscal black holes with maverick accounting so you can live like the same wealthy mortals you once loathed. It seems that Fate has an even darker sense of humor than I do. No, they knew you’d leave a trail for me to find eventually. You’ve always been the scapegoat. And now you’ll die as one just as they wanted.”

“Fuck you!” In his rage, spittle flies in all directions as he speaks. “You can’t kill me. You will die trying just like they have.”

That he already knows the Nephilim have been lying to him is an interesting development. I contemplate this as I sip my drink.

"The Fallen will die, but I won’t be among them,” I tell him. “I knew I’d find you the minute they moved your statue to Detroit. The darkness birthed there requires sacrifice. What better lure for gullible humans than to make a pilgrimage? How would they know the Children of the Dark serve a higher god than even you?”

“The Fallen didn’t fucking know anything before I told them. They came here like babies from their solar realms with no guidance! I taught them everything! Everything!”

I’ll admit it: I’m disappointed. Visiting someone of this stature should prove worth my effort. Instead, I find myself staring at the remnants of a once great mind that has destroyed itself with its own raving ego.

How tedious.

“You are a bigger fool than I took you for. Let’s jog your memory a bit. The Kemetic priests allowed you into Thebes to study. In return, you created an entire bastardized mythos full of lies that you took back to Europe, which created the worst wars this planet has ever seen. Those powers were not meant for humans. Humanity wasn’t ready. It still isn’t.”

“Survival of the fittest,” he spat. “Those who cannot adapt will be crushed by progress.”

“Those people were sacrifices,” I snapped. It pleases me to watch him flinch while I talk. “Multitudes have died just so you could achieve immortality with a bunch of other ill-bred mortals and evade death.”

“You betray yourself. Only an angel would know this information,” he snarls.

“I am Amunet.”

The name flattens his arrogance like a Mack truck crushing a soda can. He shrivels in on himself with the awareness of how much power I truly have. In ancient Kemet, Baphomet went by another name: Pythagoras. So he knows what I can do.

“The Hidden One,” he chuckles without humor. “Death has no dominion for us. You were banished with the others.”

I wag a finger at him, slowing his pulse with my movements. Fresh sweat breaks out on his plastic face.

“For an Eternal, all things are possible given the patience of Time,” I reply. “But what was it your prodigy taught this latest generation of fools? All things are permissible, aren't they?”

“I had nothing to do with Crowley.”

“Your lies amuse me. I think I will begin by taking an ounce of flesh for every year you've spent in your self-imposed exile from the Light." I withdraw my katana blades from the casings on my hips. His terror is palpable at the sight of sharpened steel. "Let's see if you can survive them."

He screams for a long time.

I believe I will enjoy my new villa quite well.

____________________________________________________

This is all very confusing for you, isn’t it?

Some of this sounds familiar, deep down where truth can only be felt. Your world is run by liars, not the monsters of your folklore. What you call a vampire is actually a human who drank “The Wine of Life.”

I will assume you are already familiar with the phrase “The Procession of the Equinoxes.”

The Age of Gemini was a time of great wars and tribulations on Earth, which had only known peace until that time. As you know, wars are great tools of innovation, especially in the realm of torture. The notion that pain can be lucrative is a very old idea. It gained ground after the Light left your solar system.

The Fifth Pylon was the heart of your galaxy. To have been alive when that planet existed in all its glory was to know Heaven on Earth. All your stories of Eden stem from this time period. The empires of Lemuria and Mu flourished then as well.

But the Fifth Pylon had to die after humans began a war over white powder of gold. There was an intrinsic process to using metals that the Ancients of the lost civilizations already knew at birth. They were born fully aware of their past incarnations, the cycles of everyday life and the transition in between.

They knew me then as Transformation Incarnate. They understood that I do not kill. The current of Life alters, shapes, and purifies itself through me. There were no sacrifices made to the Gods because none were necessary. Mortals were fully awake. Eden was all of Earth. A paradise.

Until the meeting of the Nine.

There is always one in every category with a sense of entitlement and a belief they are superior. Usually this instigator will also rally a crowd to his or her doomed cause. In this case, one of the Nine resented that Earth had created sentient life without galactic consent.

Eve, your planet, was deemed not yet old enough to break free of the 6th Hermetic Law of Causality. To create through causality is to become enslaved by your creation. Such is the Law. It was determined that the creatures on Earth should be exterminated to maintain her health as a young celestial.

All of the Nine, however, did not agree with this planet-wide abortion. In anger, one of them fell into the material world to do the deed himself. Others followed to fight him. In time, the Nine were all manifested in matter on Earth.

Incarnate planets, undercover.

For two of them, it was a game. For another two, it was a part of a larger strategy. For the others, they only wanted to protect her.

None realized Eve already had a defender and a lover as well.

This is how angels came to be here from the Sun. A Son of Light fell in love with a Daughter of Eve. Or in your terms, an angel and a mermaid formed an impossible love affair. Their children were the first to walk on land. They also freely traveled between third dimension Earth and the angelic realms with the aid of a substance called “white powder of gold.”

Some of you may have heard of it before. It was used to create the Ark of the Covenant.

The Atlanteans were given guardianship over this sacred formula, who passed it along to the sacred priests of Thebes prior to the destruction of the Fifth Pylon. But the Atlanteans fell prey to their own lust for power. Through experimentation, the Atlanteans created a race of creatures known as Nephilim, angels made of Nothing or what your scientists call “dark matter.” They were living voids that absorbed light. Merely by entering the angelic realm, their presence alone extinguished a third of the Solar-Born.

In retaliation, the Solar-Born released a solar flare that struck "The Orb,” a sphere that contains the heart of the Earth. Previously utilized in both Lemuria and Mu, the Atlanteans used it as a power source and their source of worship. “The Orb” was then placed into the hands of The Dragon, a celestial being who appears only when the Earth itself is in danger. Stripped of power, the Atlanteans were left helpless against the invasions of the Sea People, mermaid and Nephilim hybrids with the powers of both.

The Great War broke out in the Heavens first after this, an attempt to keep the Nephilim out. On Earth, the Nephilim beget monsters who turned Earth from a paradise into a prison. They forced humanoids in the sea and on land to mine precious metals and jewels, all of which were used for celestial travel to other realms.

So many lives were taken. The Fifth Pylon had to die to balance the scale. For every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Or in other words: one for the many, many for the one. All those deaths demanded a single death of equal magnitude.

I wept as I destroyed The Fifth Pylon, such was her beauty.

A portion of that planet struck Earth, which caused a global flood that would engulf Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria and other sacred regions. The first third of the sacred knowledge sank with them as the Law demanded to balance the loss of Solar-Born: As above, so below.

In the aftermath, Earth experienced the greatest ice storm humanity had ever seen. The cold killed everything and nearly everyone. The second third of your knowledge froze with Neptune encased in ice on a continent none of you would be able to explore again until the 20th century. Matter became Neptune’s prison. Once humanity’s greatest benefactor, he will wake insane as the Law demands. The prophecies refer to him as “the Kraken.”

The remaining third of knowledge was placed in the hands of the people you know as Egyptians. The Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom were the last pure human-solar breed in your world. When the great war ended, the Nephilim were cast out of the angelic realms and damned into matter. Then the Egyptians had them tortured and executed in droves. Those who remained were banished to parts of Mesopotamia.

There, the Nephilim continued their cannibalism and ritual sacrifice to beings they created in their own image. Their priests also perverted the recipe for white powder of gold by substituting a mixture of 1st generation Nephilim blood. This is how what you call vampires came to exist.

Yet even they were ignorant of all that now lies buried beneath your oceans regarding the origins of Humanity. That’s where your modern history began, though what you know has been distorted by career academics who had no idea what they were even studying. These taboos regarding consuming blood in any form all stem from the very real creatures birthed by that very process.

I know this sounds laughable to you. The idea of planets having feelings or a consciousness seems far-fetched. The possibility that there could have been something to all of those legends of antiquity is ridiculous, right?

This reaction is why your kind is arrogant.

To know what a planet or star is composed of does not tell you what it is anymore than studying human anatomy will reveal the mind of your parents.

Eve, the Earth, is your parent. Your mother. She has suffered for all of you without you even bothering to acknowledge her presence. She chose to let sentient life flourish, though the action condemned her to slavery by the very creatures she created: You.

The Underworld is also not what you think it is. It’s not Hell. What you call Hell is actually the Inferno, an infrared spectrum of existence that burns without heat. From this, the dark deities on your plane of existence arise.

The true Underworld is the one under the water.

Have any of you ever paused to realize your planet is mostly water? Or that you know more about outer space than the depths of the place where you reside?

But now you are reading this, which means you are all out of Time. Unfortunately, some lessons can only be experienced.

____________________________________________________

The hour grows late. A shrunken man watches the snow fall just beyond the narrow glass of his window with a sigh. It goes unheard in this room of vigil. As of this sunset, Elias Carson has been in the hospice home four full days, waiting to die.

People come and go. Nurses, relatives, friends. He greets them all with the same wistful smile and embraces each warmly, though he wishes they would all disperse so he could be alone at last with his thoughts.

What occupies Elias now is contemplation on the measure of a man. He wonders if there was something more to life beyond the one he chose. I listen to the rambling of his thoughts, a narration of age. And though I know it already, it still fascinates me to hear him revisit aspects of his life.

When he was a young man of ten, his mother had been brutally murdered by an escaped convict. In those days, unrelenting agonies still lingered after Reconstruction. So Mississippi was a rather destitute place to live. Employment in his small town of Nanshuk was scarce. His father had moved on to greener pastures and looser skirts a year before, leaving his mother to earn her living as a seamstress.

Marjorie Carter knew her way with thread. People came from miles away for her talents. So young Elias grew up lacking for nothing, despite his mother’s single status in a heavily Baptist town. His mother was modest, kind and charitable, possessing every virtue the preachers railed about from the pulpit.

Yet it did not stop a middle-aged man from breaking into her shop one Thursday morning to hide from the police after escaping the chain gang. While little Elias worked diligently on his math at the school house, his mother surprised this unexpected visitor when she arrived to open for the day. Her battered body was not discovered until just shy of noon when the mayor’s wife, Mrs. Abrasham, arrived to pick up her gown for the spring ball.

After that, nothing was ever the same for Elias again.

As he watches the snowflakes congeal on the windowsill, I see the movie reel of that day playing in the back of his mind. He saw the sheriff holding his hat solemnly in his hands while repeating foreign words like “killed” and “dead” and “orphanage.” The legal secretary from the law office eventually explained that she’d sent a telegram to his Aunt Delilah in Birmingham, Alabama, but it would take time to put his mother’s affairs in order.

So off to the orphanage he’d gone.

It hadn’t been bad at all in the orphanage. They didn’t have much, but the children were kind. Murder was something so terrible it made him an instant leader just because he knew true evil more than any of them.

The real shock came once he’d been snatched from the soothing embrace of the nuns and handed over to the most hostile woman any of them had ever known.

When they were children, Delilah and Marjorie had been virtuous twins. His mother was delicate, respected and demure. Delilah had only grown bitter, callous and wrathful. She wore her faith like armor and her Bible like ammunition. And woe to any person who dared to profess to know the Gospel more than she.

Eight years underneath her roof eradicated any love Elias had for Christ and Christians. He did not choose the wayward path, just an indifferent one. At 18, he applied to work in the state prison because they offered the only secure and steady wage located as far away from that hellhole of a house as possible.

Elias had been dedicated, efficient and earnest. The inmates respected him. His fellow officers admired him. His superiors thought him remarkable. He showed up on time, did what was required, and managed to make friends with even the most deranged of criminals.

He used to tell people it was his mother living on in him. Even now, if he closed his eyes he could still envision the radiance of her auburn curls swept up in a simple bun, her favorite blue and yellow dress she’d so carefully made, and a hint of lavender that hovered about her everywhere she went.

Elias was his mother’s son and his father’s bastard. The last fact never bothered him much. He actually crossed paths one day with his father when he was about 27. Stricken with cancer, the man had sought him out to ask for forgiveness in Nechuk’s small town diner where every patron ordered the same plate of resignation.

He remembered listening to a skeletal Martin Carter recounting a life story of adventure and challenge for an hour without comment.

“You’re my only son,” the dying man said. “I never had any more children.”

Elias took a long sip of his coffee before responding. “I reckon the aftertaste of abandonment kept you from getting that far.”

“I know I didn’t do right by your mother, Elias.” His eyes ran with tears he didn’t bother to wipe away from the sunken holes of his eyes. “It wasn’t in me then to be a family man. I was just wondering if you’d let me get to know the measure of the man I helped create.”

Elias finished his coffee, then carefully placed a bill on the table between them. “My mother was a wonderful woman, so wonderful that nobody even faulted her for having a child out of wedlock. They could have, but she was so kind and helpful and honest, they forgave her that one little sin. And for all that, she died choking on her own blood after she’d been stabbed 47 times. Whatever we could have been died with her on the floor of her shop. So now I march other murderers to the chair every week in her memory so they won’t get a chance to harm anyone else. That’s my justice. You dying alone? That’s yours.”

“Elias, wait. Please…”

____________________________________________________

The man on the bed shuts his eyes against that hoarse plea his father gave all those years ago. Martin Carter died five months after that day in the diner. Elias had not shed any tears for him at the time, but he did pay for the funeral and arrange for his remains to rest in peace beside his mother. She still loved him even after he’d left her. Maybe if she’d lived, he would have come back to them one day. Elias didn’t know.

And now as he faces his own imminent death at the age of 102, Elias wonders if he ever will.

“They’ve found each other,” I say softly from the chair beside the bed.

Elias does not flinch when I materialize. I am a guest he has expected. He sighs again, this time with relief.

“I know what you are,” he tells me.

“Do you?”

“You’re some sort of angel of Death.”

“No, Elias. I am Death.” I stare at him.. “Not everyone warrants a personal appearance like this. It seems you’ve made an impression on me.”

His eyebrows raise, disappearing into the multitude of creases on his brow. “That bad, eh?”

“No, my friend. I am here for another reason.”

“I know I’ve killed a lot of men in my time. Ordered more than I actually pulled the switch on, but they are mine all the same.”

“145 souls to be exact, but who’s counting?”

He laughs at this, a fuzzy wheeze that evolves into a brief coughing fit. “I know the damn number. I remember every face.”

“You would,” I murmur. “I’m here to help you remember now.”

“Remember what?”

“Who you really are.”

He looks aggrieved. “I am Elias Mathew Carter. I’m 102. I’ve been an officer and a warden presiding over death row cases for more than seventy years. I also hunted killers who evaded justice across five states and buried them all in unmarked graves. I ended whatever terror spree they were on before it could go further. During all this, I married a sweet black woman named Magnolia and had three girls with her, a sin that everyone forgave me over the same way they forgave my mother. And our girls gave us 14 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren. I’ve out-lived my wife and my daughters. I cheated on my taxes three times in the years 1944, 1957 and 1994 because I was mad at the government. I also lied that I had nothing to do with the death of that boy who raped my granddaughter Anita because it would have broken her heart to know I had that in me to do with my bare hands. But he’d also killed before. So I ended him. And the only thing I’ve ever stolen was the $300 from the wallet of that executive who slapped around a waitress in The Blue Bell Cafe before I gave him a right hook that he very rightly deserved. That money saved that woman’s Christmas. I don’t regret a thing.”

“I’m not here for your confession, Elias. I know who you are and what you’ve done. But your services are required elsewhere. The Ferryman is needed again.”

Elias grows restless. “What do you mean?”

“Your real name is Charon. You have been an angel of mine since time immortal. You asked to be released from this duty for one lifetime, just to learn if living a moral life is as hard as the souls you ferried claimed. This was your experiment and your reward. So what say you? Is it hard to live a moral life?”

To his surprise, Elias breaks down into wheezing sobs. “No, it’s easy. Too easy. There is such beauty here. Such wonder and beauty. And they choose to defile it.”

“Yet your heart does not hate them.”

He laughs through his tears and quotes the Christ he abandoned, “They know not what they do.”

“Truer words, my friend. Truer words. You’ve been an instrument of Justice for all 102 years. No one left this life that was not supposed to leave it at that time.”

He closes his eyes, thankful for the confirmation that he is absolved from wrongdoing. “I had forgotten what it is like to be in your presence. Such peace. You’re like the snow falling outside. The grace of eternal sleep.”

“There won’t be much sleeping for you, my friend. I’ve a task for you.”

“Name it.”

I tell him.

____________________________________________________

The mortal world plays lip service to Justice.

Corruption exists in every institution you name. In fact, the law has become a spectator sport you all watch on various screens. Media personalities launch entire careers off the back of tragedy. And you all are constantly greedy for more.

There’s no recompense for the whistleblower saying a corporation’s product is causing cancer. You decry the voice in the crowd shouting the sneakers you like were made by impoverished children for cents on the dollar. People in power evade consequences by paying their way out of any situation.

Yet you cheer them on.

Come now, don’t be modest. I can hear your protests already. Surely I’m not talking about you, am I? You’re just one person of many. You didn’t create this world, right? It’s not all up to you.

That’s where you’re wrong.

Each of you here has been given a specific set of tasks to complete on your life’s journey. You know when you’ve strayed from that course because life becomes a straight jacket you can’t take off, a noose tightening around your neck while you struggle to breathe.

Anything else is merely an excuse.

Ah, I see. Now I’m self-righteous and preaching to you.

How predictable.

On other worlds, they call you the “snobs of carbon.” There is this underlying assumption in your modern understanding, one your ancestors didn’t share, that all matter worth calling “life” is carbon-based. Many of you even seek out planets like your own in hopes to one day spread the same malice you’ve made so profitable here. And all the others that fail to meet this criteria, you consider to be inanimate objects you can terraform instead.

Did you know that Earth is actually a testing ground?

Beings are sent to your planet from various corners of this galaxy to experience life through matter. For most of them, it’s considered a privilege. But like the wealthy, you remember that breathing is also a luxury only when you can’t.

The Balance doesn’t play favorites like your courtrooms. It won’t take a bribe like your politicians. It won’t forgive you like a brother.

The Balance controls causality by maintaining zero.

Nothing owed. Nothing gained. Everything even.

And the Ferryman always gets his coin.

____________________________________________________

True evil is not spontaneous.

It plans, orchestrates, and executes. Evil narrates its own brilliance, showing the world that it will endure above all. This is why the Heart of Lucifer is actually a diamond in your world. It takes an unbreakable type of cunning to be callous and exacting with malice.

Unfortunately, the woman I meet in the cloak of night just outside the city limits of a forgotten town in southwestern Georgia is none of those things. The air weeps with humidity. Further in the swamp, I hear the sly movements of an alligator on the prowl.

She smokes a Virginia Slim cigarette with nimble fingers. It takes a discerning eye to notice the shake in them. Her hair is bottle blond, carefully curled to appear effortless, surrounding a heart shaped face with minimal makeup. A gray suit clings to her frame, flattering her ample curves. Just another small town mayor, but the first woman elected here since the county’s origins. Anyone else would think Suzette Collins was a career woman and a sensible politician.

I know her as an Immortal in hiding.

"Interesting venue," I say, lighting a black clove of my own.

Her subconscious has chosen the form of a slender British man with elegantly cut gray hair and a goatee for my attire this evening. I take this nod to Mephistopheles in stride. He actually prefers his hair long.

Nervous, she searches the darkness for movement. “I had a dream last night. It’s silly, but it got me a bit spooked.”

I chuckle. “Aren’t you a bit old to believe your nightmares?”

“I died in the dream,” she replies flatly.

“And somehow this bothers you more than the boy you sacrificed?”

"It wasn't meant to go down like that." Again, she searches the shadows. "They got rowdy, you understand? Too goddamn rowdy for words. I was just there because of the connections. I don't believe any of that shit.” She swallows. "They took that boy and beat him bloody. I watched them take turns cutting parts of him off and feeding it to the fire while he watched."

"And the coroner?”

“He did what he was supposed to do: presented the family with the ashes. Who knew the family would go nuts over my requiring all suicides to be cremated?”

“They just lost their head over it, I suppose.”

She flicks the cigarette into the water, all business now. “Look, I don’t care for your fucking commentary. I hired you to provide a service. Erase this. We don’t need a riot in this county.”

“You mean you don’t need one.”

"It's all goddamn connections. Kinfolk. They believe all this race war shit. I mean, seriously believe it. The ceremonies and the books."

"The ones you provided them because they need a distraction. Angst without a target is chaos, after all."

"So you’re understanding me. I knew it." She smiles, relieved. “I always admired the work you guys did in the war. After all, nobody's going to wreck somebody's career over a nig-"

I raise an eyebrow, daring her to utter the word. She falls silent.

It is of no consequence. She’s already confirmed both the existence of the books and an established power structure in this region.

The boy in question had been about fourteen. He died as a sacrifice during an initiation ceremony into The Brotherhood, a new name on an old group dating back to Ancient Rome. It included the upper brass of the sheriff's department, two county commissioners, the entire city council and one reporter who kept everything quiet.

This circle of sixteen individuals moves from one town to the next, one country after another, invisibly influencing the gullible to kill for them. Not one had ever sullied their hands, though they claimed to be minions taking orders from the top.

But I alone am Death. I give orders only to those the All deems worthy.

To die requires no theatrics. A parade with trumpets is little more comforting to the dying than being surrounded by relatives you loathe in those last seconds of consciousness.

Killing, on the other hand, must fulfill the twists and turns of the psyche. The death has to satisfy the lust for blood, the passion of pain, and the endless thirst for life force. The Di Inferi have used all three to keep themselves alive. Once mortal, now they exist as energy vampires siphoning off the living to keep me at bay.

“Well, can we wrap this up?” The thing calling itself Susan rubs her arms, shivering with an emotion she hasn’t felt in millenia: dread.

She doesn’t notice the alligator crouched a few feet away from her, where it has lurked during this entire discussion, watchful and silent.

I take the first drag of another cigarette, listening to the first of her screams while it drags her into the reeds.

By dawn, the swamp will have swallowed all sixteen of these beings. Each one meets with me at the same location, unknown to the others. And when the first ray of sunlight strikes the heart of this tiny community, none will remember them. They will wake as if out of a fog. A leader will come forth from among them.

And life will go on.

____________________________________________________

There have been many wars going on in our world. You only register them when they make the headlines in appalling fashion with atrocities so riveting that we can't look away.

Secret societies exist all around you. Their terminology has always been symbology. Words fall within the legal spectrum. A symbol carries none of these implications. Some of these symbols are given by birth. Others are inscribed by tattoo artists. Some are given via scarification.

The woman who met her demise in the swamp had a particular type of tattoo. It was just over the breastbone, a symbol that blended a swastika with a red cross. It was just small enough to be mistaken for a mole at a distance.

Don’t be fooled by the jargon. Us vs. Them is the mimicry in all these groups. It is not about race or class. It’s been beyond culture and country for some time as well.

There is only Power. Its sole political party is Spin. All else is manufactured reality to make you a better consumer while the world dies.

Capitalism is a warmonger's wet dream. Communism is the peacekeeper’s nightmare. Both make it possible to call war a business and attain heights of greatness few countries can attain. And the easiest way to gather troops to such a cause is to arouse their hatred of an enemy while enticing them with carrots of advancement.

They have created many enemies for your palates. You only have to scroll through your cellphone to pick your chosen adversary, whether it is an ideological struggle or merely someone who will raise your taxes.

Even so, your dollars tell your actual unseen leaders exactly what you worship and the true measure of your dedication to any cause.

Real power is invisible.

As am I.

____________________________________________________

In this war, I play many roles. But all of them boil down to one: I am the protector of The Jewel. I have no alliances with anyone except mortals, who do not even believe I exist.

The Jewel has gone unchallenged because its actual existence has always been questioned. One group calls it the Ark of the Covenant. Another will claim it as The Book of Thoth or The Tablets of Destiny. Even the demons have a name for it: The Horn of Gabriel.

You see, the Jewel takes the form of the keeper’s desires.

Imagine a relic that can become a Fountain of Youth, a Tree of Life, a Golden Apple, or the secret knowledge of the Fifth Planet. It holds every answer to every riddle formed in a mind, mortal or otherwise. There isn't a secret it does not know, no journey it cannot encompass.

Such a thing, when placed in the wrong hands, becomes monstrous. It then forms The Cube, a geometrical prison where every savage appetite can be sated.

Mortals who have stumbled upon it have not fared well. Pandora, for example, did exist. However, her actual name was Pompeia and she was the wife of Julius Caesar. It is often mentioned that Caesar once saw a statue of Alexander the Great around 69 BC. Caesar's lamenting that he had done poorly in comparison to the man is said to be his "turning point."

Left out is the fact that this statue was subsequently confiscated by Caesar. He had no idea the Jewel was inside it. The only person he trusted with the relic was his wife, who was indifferent to political affairs.

But there is no wrath like a woman scorned. Years later, after Caesar divorced her because of an obvious coup attempt by backers of Clodius to undermine his popularity with the Senate, Pompeia would uncover that relic by accident. She broke the statue by bashing it to bits with a blacksmith's hammer she'd stolen. Once her eyes saw The Jewel, it transformed into a box containing the corpse of her husband. She subsequently made offerings to it on a daily basis, abandoning every aspect of her faith in Roman gods and goddesses.

The fable says ”hope was caught inside the box [her worship] after all the evils had been let loose [the power vacuum after his death].”

There are other stories I could tell you, of course. But you are no doubt wondering why I am the protector of this Jewel.

Immortals thrive on killing and manipulation. Like you, they also have emotions. When your lifespan can cover an entire millennium, one tends to like company. But these often result in senseless companionship without trust.

You see, it is mortal love that drove some of us to help you. We envied it. Most have no idea what it is like to be a natural born killer, much less sleep with one on a regular basis.

But we have found over time that the human appetite for killing can far surpass ours. The ones who fought alongside me are now jaded; they no longer believe in a higher future for humanity. The consensus has become that you serve the forces of chaos. The Immortals began to trust each other in the face of this great abomination called mankind.

For that very reason, they were allowed to elicit control over their human populations. Their biggest triumph was Rome. The devil is in the details, as they say. And these details have been particularly lethal for your species.

So I protect the Jewel because I’ve been the only one on your plane of existence left who believes sparing any of you from yourselves is the right thing to do.

Even as I speak these words, my scythe harvests the multiverse every nanosecond. Counting the amount of lives I’ve taken in that span is on par with solving Pi. And yet some of you will still try.

Just as some of you will search for the Jewel.

But your journey will only end with me.

All the things you think you know ultimately do.

____________________________________________________

I hear the crow shrieking outside my window. Morning approaches. Even now, forces gather for the battle, old soldiers summoned from the corners of the earth. Being Immortal does not render you impervious. Quite the contrary: it allows you to live long enough to see everything you loved destroyed by time, including yourself.

I have seen the carnage of humanity, you see. My footsteps take me down darkened alleys where gun smugglers count their monetary gains. I watch mortals wander over sidewalks during their morning commute unaware of blood spilled there hours before over politically-enabled deliveries of illegal drugs. Senseless death. Yet you all crave, seek and desire it above all else.

They say Los Angeles is the City of Angels. Then surely New York is where they decided to explore their dark side. Undercurrents reside in this city, covering it with a film of grime one can only discern upon leaving it.

I once asked a homeless man on Steinway Street in Astoria years ago why he made no attempts to acclimate himself.

He glanced up at me, then pointed to the buildings. "They can pretty it up. Giuliani can push it all under the cover of new and shiny. But it's still shit. Gloss covering shit. And people just pretend they don't know it."

I agreed with him.

Humans have played a great game on this planet, horrifying the Immortals enough that they have given up your cause.

I walk the streets, past women with faces more plastic than flesh. They saunter by on pinprick heels, curling lips at homeless people asking for a bite to eat. A man in a $15,000 suit speaks on his expensive cell phone while six feet away another digs for cans out of a public trash can. The distance between them is the summation of the mortal fall from grace.

And here, a man with a prosthetic leg chews on a banana given to him by a street vendor wearing a Rolex. A roughshod man sells apples for $2 a piece, perfect genetically modified orbs that perfectly taste like nothing. The woman strolling past me stops traffic. She is tall and Russian with half her face hidden behind Prada shades. The subtle scent of high-priced sex lounges on her skin as less endowed women fidget in their skin behind her. A stretch limo waits at a red light beside a battered taxicab.

Such extreme differences, all tossed in front of the eyes like collisions.

The duality of this world makes me tired now. From the pulpit they preach that there are angels and demons after your souls. But you've decided your own fates from the very first. You did not need us to guide or mold you. All you needed was enough ego to believe in your own brilliance.

And here is that brilliance laid at your feet:

Genetically engineered hornets in Florida impervious to pesticide. Similarly modified bentgrass now spans 28 states from its original test site. Laboratories growing human body parts without consciousness for use in operations and genetically grown meat for consumption. A global ecosystem asphyxiating from plastics. Oil spills saturating ocean floors and morphing sea life into versions of the Kraken. Weather machines that can alter wind patterns and create storms.

Generators used to smash particles without realizing how many entities they have allowed to enter this dimension through these minute gateways. Entire generations of ethnic women given hysterectomies without consent and whose tissue was then used in genetic testing to maintain the dominance of a single racial group. Public denial of psi abilities when humans with them have been used in military operations since Egyptian times. Entire groups of people injected with biological and chemical agents under the guise of immunizations to test their effectiveness for warfare. The purposeful construction of housing on lands poisoned by waste merely to study incubated forms of cancer…

The list is infinite.

Even one of these subjects causes years of arguments over the validity of the claim, smoke and mirrors cultivated by an armada of lawyers. The real players know what's going on. They’ve been laughing all the way to their anonymous off-shore banks.

You speak of The Fallen in your fables and your religion, yet you don't realize that you refer to yourselves. Humanity's brilliance is matched only by its evil. You are on track to shove itself back into another dark age with cataclysmic repercussions. Accordingly, every non-human entity on this plane of existence is jumping ship as we speak.

As it is, your mortal demigods only possess two-thirds of the complete history of humanity. That is why 616 is the actual number of the devil in the oldest translations of the Bible. 616 is the numerical equivalent of mental enslavement within this physical dimension: The self (1) caged by matter (6).

The goal has never been to convince you that "the devil" isn't real. Instead, there has been a calculated effort to convince the populace that there is nothing more real than what is in front of you right now.

And this illusion is so pervasive that telling someone there is more to life than working to death for things you will never fully own gets you labeled as crazy. You have been brainwashed to think of "living" as something you do after you are already dead. Life as you know it now is more akin to an afterthought.

The secrets I know make me a very dangerous Eternal threat, indeed. Yet this is the brilliance of parables: they make fiction speak so much louder than the news.

____________________________________________________

In the end, we are surrounded by little lives.

Ants trudging down cracks in the sidewalks to feed the hidden city beneath. Birds soaring through wispy clouds over a world as endless as the horizon. A baby giving its first cry as it emerges from the womb, surrounded by medical staff and crying parents. Microscopic spores floating on the wind to carry on the cycle of life wherever they may land.

And each day we accept these lives, these examples of the versatility of Existence, never taking it for granted that in the future we will face the abyss at peace with the scope of its finality. Then when I arrive with my tailored suit and radiant wings will you realize just how precious each of those moments has truly been.

The Morrigan has come to this realization in the time it has taken me to step across the threshold of her home. The door whispers shut behind me with all the subtlety of a nymph laughing. A smile rises on her face as the quiet enfolds us like a woodland glen.

She doesn’t move. Not this one. Beneath a mane of red hair that falls all the way to her waist, she regards me with the steady gaze of a woman who knows who she is. I walk through the quaint living room to join her at the ancient dining room table, made from wood in an Avalon these current generations will never know.

As I remove my shades, she clucks her tongue in disappointment. “What is this? I get no theater?”

I laugh, leveling my human gray eyes with hers. “Why would I need to frighten you?”

“Bah...you’ve never frightened me. Neglected, more like.” She passes me a cup of mint tea the way we used to drink it eons before the world knew Time.

Two others sit at the table with us. One is an Indian man of lean athletic build with hair to his shoulders. Kalki has the type of beauty only Bangladesh can produce. He sports the softly chiseled face of a prince with eyes of a Bengal tiger and wears a commoner’s linen suit. Beside his chair is a jeweled sword and an ancient bow with arrows.

A cool platinum blond occupies the other chair. Every hair strand whispers wealth. Her porcelain skin glows translucent with a network of light bluish veins. Babylon has eyes the color of glaciers and just as frigid. As if aware of her arresting nature, she solemnly bites into a red apple as I join them. A cup of wine in a wooden chalice sits before her, dark with wrath.

The Four Horsemen have gathered at the Great Table. Since we last met six thousand years ago, we have fulfilled what has been prophesied.

I listen as the seven angels release the last of the seven plagues.

“So begins the end,” I say to them all.

To be continued...