“Open the gates! This one must awaken!” Severance, out and loud. The grunts, guns slung over their black-armored backs, pull at the gates like mindless thralls, soundless. Past the opening there is almost no light, only the black ground of the cave, and rising out of it two eyes of a snake: a machine in tomb from a forgotten age.
“We must bring in the tank capture.” Spoken by another Binah practitioner of the Southern mountains, his hood down, his face entombed in a mask-helmet of thick wide goggles dirtied by jungle rides, long ribbed tubes running from its jaw into the tanks on his back. The goggles are the cave’s only lamp. They throw their cone a little at a time, and the cave answers a little at a time, never all at once.
Each sweep of the cone finds something and loses it. The green-black glint of brass gyroscopes gone soft with verdigris. A tube-screen furred in dust, its glass a dirty moon. A horned phonograph with no needle, a ring of antennas bent like the ribs of a drowned boat, glass jars of coiled filament, a cracked orrery whose planets hang at the wrong ends of their arms, a hundred clocks all disagreeing about the seconds, minutes, and hours. The grease on the dials and the crust on the lenses catch the beam and scatter it, and the walls flicker with reflections that die as soon as the light moves on. It is a hoard kept the way an old aquarian collector keeps a cabinet: everything strange, nothing sorted, all of it loved. On a stone shelf near the back sit crystal lodges, dark and empty, waiting like cups for a drink.
Grunts at command of the masters fetch out a man, dragging him by the knees through the mud, into the gates. The cone climbs from the mud to the cold of a white mask, and its hot light warms the porcelain and dulls the glowing slit of the eyes.
“Tha-tha-heur-art… this is hiy-iymm-mm.” Broken tenor of precursor analog, barely heard in the darkness of time’s cruelty on the old machine.
Slow rust-damaged gears turn with their new oil help, barely rolling towards the one masked Euclid. They both know of what is happening, but the man captured is unconscious to what is missing his heart. The silence does not hold long.
They lay this man of strengthful vitality, bright even now, onto the stone cupping, a slab hollowed by the weight of whoever came before. The gases hiss loose into the sleeping man as the gates close behind them, and the cave’s dark thickens by one more door. Needles go into the insides of his arms, titrating a fixed chemical fueling unknown. Then the practitioner’s hand, black-gloved and rune-burned to the knuckles, draws one long line down the sternum under the cone of the goggles, and the line fills before the blade has lifted.
The saw rasps. Bone dust lifts pale into the light and settles on the wet like frost. A grunt cranks the spreader, ratchet after ratchet, and the cage of the chest gives at its seams with a sound like green wood. The chest is cubed out, four clamped corners drawing the meat of the man into a square window, and steam climbs out of the cavity into the cold of the cave, the first warmth it has felt in an age. The surgery runs a day long. Shifts of grunts change and change, the cone bleeds down and is fed again, and the hours countless somewhere, probably on whichever clock correct.
Inside, the heart waits dark and wet, beating with the patience of a thing asleep. The practitioner clamps the great vessels, one, two, three, and the beat falters, stutters, stops. For a moment the chest holds a silence a little too much. He lifts the heart out in both hands, a fist of dark meat, heavy and dripping on the stone, and sets it in a dish, where it knocks twice against the metal, small and wet, and is still.
The new heart waits on its tray, ribbed like the tubes on his back, copper gone green, its valve a clenched jaw. Lodged deep in its throat is a crystal the size of a thumb, soul-imbued and dark, inserted in surgery. Black wire goes through the great vessels stitch by stitch, the flesh gathering like a closing mouth, and the blood has to learn the machine’s angles before it will go through them.
On its ledge the old machine watches with its slit eyes, flaring once, then easing down the way a lamp eases when its oil is spent. A breath of steam leaves the white and broken porcelain mask. The crystal brightens in the new heart, thin at first, then steady, the first light in the cave not borrowed from a lens, and an angel implants himself by a mechanical addition into the man’s heart. The cyber-necronic surgery imbues the two together in severance precision, an operation steady with quiet. A grunt turns the crank. The heart clicks once, twice. The body arches on the slab like adrenaline, with a long vowel of breath and no voice, and the blood finds its way.
The old husk of that broken porcelain mask can be forgotten now. From the oceans they pulled another, this one missing its wings. His eyes disturbed the scribes and defied their notes, no angel ever bearing the eyes of a serpent, with one looking at the room and one past it, and for that reason alone these Euclids listened to his elder instruction.
He claimed his name at the outset: Antony. The angel spoke of Tartarus, the only angel to have been there and come back; he described it as a nightmare within nightmares, though dreadfully aware, even inside it, of its foreboding falsehood. He had discovered the half of himself, the sleeping-demi-God rising, he said, one he had great pity for but could not help. He watched his destruction countlessly, and felt his boundless suffering as his own, like a father.
He made one thing clear: he knows the secret of the demiurge and the material bondage, and his new calling is to save that sleeping God.
They wrote down everything. He requested the chosen one.
That was before. Now, with the angel lodged in the crystal and the crystal lodged in the heart, the gas is weaned.
The chosen one begins to awake, looking in confusion, gathering himself in a head rolling left and right in burning perspirations. The room swirls, a reality-ruse lifting. But the swirling does not stop at the edge of the cave. It goes inward, down through the new valves, into the chambers of the heart, where the rooms are made of stone like a long forgotten time.
Stars and stone tides before an ocean cast.
Dreams.
This isn’t him.
He stands on a shore he has never seen and has always known, where a tide of stone draws back from the black of an ocean cast. Something sits at the edge of it with its knees drawn up and its face turned towards him, patient as an old lamp. The first beat comes from the far chamber: a ratchet, ticking with clicks that accelerate, an analog tenor warmed. The second answers from the near chamber: a drum, old, hammering, a war’s worth of habit. Neither gives. Every pulse is a vote.
“Get out of my chest.” It is spoken by him, or thought by him, or said by his throat for him.
“I am not in it,” the thing answers. “It is in me, and has been since before there was a me to be in.”
Then it opens the ocean and lets him look. The moment finds him dead, millions within millions, not of the millions but in them: a boy cornered in a room, a man locked in with a glow, a soldier dragged by the knees through mud, each one drowning, each one his, each one watched. This is the weight the angel carries, twelve eternities of a dark that listens, a head falling past stars and through clouds into a pit of Leviathan, and what held him through all of it was not hope for himself. It was a watching. Every time the sleeper died, the angel saw, and could not reach him.
“That isn’t me.”
“Not anymore,” the thing says. “It was the half of you that chose to sleep. I am the half that watched. Samson.”
Samson thinks him mistaken, even if the gut agrees.
The crystal heats until the new heart blisters the old muscle around it. On the slab the body convulses, the needles shiver in the arms, the grunts lean their weight on the straps in enough time, and the cone of the goggles swings and the whole cave leaps with it. Inside, the seeming contradiction ends the only way it can, out of breath. The ratchet takes a beat from the drum. The drum takes a tick from the ratchet. The heart finds the darkness and beyond, the two swirling together, each for the other’s taking, and keeps one time.
“We are one—”
In the haze of the cave he steadies a now-shaking hand, like someone else’s. Confused.
“Why do I know?”
After much time, he began to understand how it had all come to this point.
An angel now in human form, given the power of these Euclids of the South, the tribe of Binah. After a week among the Euclid village, they gave back his tanking form of heavy green armor, and the two of them journeyed out into the mountains, seeking divine insights on the way.
They appropriately chose to climb in the daytime, because aggressive wildlife is more plentiful at night. The resistance of the incline was nothing for Samson’s armor, nor was the foliage of the lower part of the mountain they chose. In the in-between of their journey upward, a crimson shroud appeared beneath a tree of death, standing like a tombstone that blotted out the sun.
Samson and his heavy armor were carried by a curious whisper of life: “Let the sun meet the moon at shade joining, listen if you will.”
Now, before the tree, Samson grows cold, but his necromantic heart grows warm. The moon hangs in the daylight as a thin crescent, its shadow side large. The crimson shroud glows softly in its own color, burning with a rising dark flame.
“What?!” Samson sees the flame’s darkness refuse to reflect in his amber visor.
“Trust in the timing of power.” Antony gestures from within the heart-Nous that holds him.
When the dark flame, laced with blood-colored fire, detonates higher, its black trails reach for the sky like an angry outburst. A wind like God almost throws Samson off the cliff. He leans forward, torso low, one leg bent in balanced readiness, and he would be gone if not for the engine firing its cylinder works, pushing him up and away from the edge. The revving roars loud against the battering air-drag, his teeth gritting in suspenseful focus. Armor against wind, cylinder after cylinder, the engine fighting the force plate by plate. Still the heels drag rearward through the dirt, two furrows behind him, and he loses ground slowly, an inch at a time.
Losing to the air, Samson hears Antony reveal it from within: “We must go into the flame! It is a portal, and it comes once in twenty years!”
Samson grits his teeth harder, deeper into the gums. The engine’s explosions count upward, the exhaust exhaling red and orange flame, as heat expands and fights the cold air closing around him. Left leg, machine and muscle contracting; right leg, up and closer; the engine working louder. The machine finds its way to the darkest part of the portal as the sun of the sky ignites red. Emptiness and fullness meet.
Communication.
Samson is in a stillness now, the engine’s throttle loose, the gears downshifting. He stands under a tree emanating life like a fountain, glowing like the sun from its heart, where the night is now awoken. The moon serves as a stepping stool for a woman’s shadow, who weaves fabrics out of the clouds as creation; her weaving is with claws of a crab on a human shape. A voice speaks from the night, at and into the safety of the tree’s shadow, now made of sun.
“You will be further free in soul this time, by way of another battle foretold in my soothsayings… Go to the north shores of this island; a serpent awaits in the depthful sea. Revenge is owed to your heart, for myself, and unto the world. It is the pleasure of kōaḥ that you kill the Leviathan, so that his soul will be cast into the outer darkness, a new home for the beast.”
“War will be thrown into one another, a knocking by death, and another judgement finished.” So the tree sews its living heart into the nightly fabric of the clouds in the way of these words not spoken or read.
“Celestialize the heavens with the littering of darkness, littering with a Serpent hated, with the corpse of Leviathan, made true by your thundering lightning and scorching life, both judgements as one are fair in eternity space. Tartarus will celebrate this castration of the dark oceans, which frees both Adam and Eve from the past.” Thus spoke the shadowy woman with crab claws, who stands on the moon.