Howls through the teeth of skulls whistle through the graveyard. Each pitch is different, a low hollow note from the large skulls and a thin whine from the small ones. Bones tick and clatter inside the walls whenever the air shifts. The hangman, kept in a familiar shape amongst the dead walls of bones, is sitting upon a tree. “For which temperament do you hail, traveler?” talks the shadow on the tree, the resemblance in its shriek reminding Samson of someone.
“What is that?” Samson asks. He stops walking and turns sideways, his weight settling on the back foot. His voice sinks into the fog and does not echo.
The shadow hangs upside down from the tree, gesturing with a third arm for him to move closer, and so he walks closer. Twigs snap beneath his steps, and dry rocks shift and scrape. The fog weighs across the grey-purple ground, with twigs and rocks scattered beneath dead trees. It beads cold on his arms and tastes of wet stone when he breathes it in. The shadow figure hangs from a tree youthfully dead like autumn. A few brown leaves still cling to the branches, curled and trembling, and none of them fall. The smell of humid stone and deadwood rot eroded by mycelium is foreboding in the air and into the nostrils. White threads of mycelium web across the bark and roots, and pale caps push up from the soil, leaking spores that settle on his tongue.
Samson, now below the tree, sees the outline of the shadow. It is skinny, with a pointed hat hanging. “Huh…?” Samson wonders out loud. The shadow smells Samson. Immediately, it is undeniable, and Samson screams, “It’s you! You fucking idiot!” His fists close, and the loose tooth in his mouth aches under the clench of his jaw.
“I smell a waking God made of Mars. Will you sell your mind as a toll fee? Just drink this ignorance…” the shadow speaks.
“You fucking Jester! Come here!” Samson ignores him and speaks his intentions before trying to grab at the shadow, but nothing. “Where is she!? What did you do with her!?” He lunges again, and the shadow only sways, a cold passing through his fingers that leaves them numb.
“I am a fool’s relation, you could say, and my name is Wisdom of the first of third Limbo,” the shadow speaks.
“What?” Samson is caught off guard. He is perplexed, placing a hand over his mouth, looking at the graveyard ground, wondering. Then his brow comes down hard. “Wisdom!? You have his hat and his shriek! Why should I believe a word of you!?” He breathes through it, trying to gather himself before the blackened image. “Okay… If you are Wisdom of Limbo, then can you explain what this means to me?”
“I am the lesson learned, born out of foolishness, and I will answer any questions,” the Wisdom of Limbo speaks.
“Well, does that make you the son of a fool?” Samson asks, his lip curling over the swollen split of his mouth.
“I am the lesson learned after all, so yes,” the Wisdom says.
Samson looks around at the graveyard, filled with stones as far as the horizon can see. The horizon is a dark blue—purple covered in a white mist fog. The wood is either dead or rotting, except for the tree of the hangman Wise. The rotting trunks leak a black wet that soaks the soil soft under his heels. Samson speaks again, “What about that tree? I know of the tree of neither life nor death, and I cut it down, but what about your tree?”
The shadow would grin if it could be seen, and he answers, “This is the tree of both life and death, and its living wood is always withering without loss. It is this tree that stands as transformation, where the being is not what it gains or loses, but it just is, and that which it is, was, and will be is only ever the form of transformation.”
Samson stares up at the withered bark, his jaw working over the loose tooth. “Is it alive or is it dead!? Answer it plainly this time.” The shadow does not answer. The leaves tremble, and the fog slides between the roots. “What about the tree I cut down? What consequence comes of it?” Samson looks for guidance from the Wisdom.
“The tree you cut down brings the curse of the joker, whose joke is your loss, and this loss is unforeseen in its dream. The curse will cast your greatest possession into Limbo as bait, and the only way to retrieve it is to become both life and death. Your love could be found within yourself, within the outermost realm of the outer—darkness. This journey either ends in eternal life or death, either togetherness or loneliness. That is how you save the one who is neither living nor dead,” the Wisdom speaks unto the traveler Samson.
“A joke!? My love is related to a joke? Is that what you are saying?” Samson’s knuckles whiten as his jaw becomes more tense with his neck stiff. “I’ll fix this…” Samson keeps these words from the hangman in his heart, and the heat in his chest does not leave. He wonders another question with a flash. “If you are Wisdom of Limbo, then who is Wisdom of all?”
Wisdom of Limbo says unto him, “Sophia is the mother of the devil-God Yaldabaoth, and she is the one who is the form of Wisdom. You are closer to life in asking this… You carry the image of the waking God.”
“Me!? Who is the waking God?” Samson seeks to understand this phrase. The taste of blood lingers on his tongue, and the iron will not quit.
“You are the waking God, and your half is the sleeping God. A half of your wake will die for all three of you. The most cursed part, the half of the sleeping God who isn’t her, he will become death, so that the other sleeping God may no longer be cursed to the realm of the living and dead. This is truth, and the fool who gets in the way of this is the pawn of Wisdom’s planning.”
Samson is somewhat confused in trying to parse these words with reason alone, but it is understood in the gut regardless. A chill runs down his neck, and the hairs on his arms rise in the fog. “Die for me? Which half? Who decides it?” The Wisdom stays silent, swaying on the branch. He swallows the anger in his question he did not mean and asks the pertinent question, “What of this realm?”
“This is a crossroad between these four forms of act and potency: life, death, both, or none. Of these four, there are the four ends of the being: eternal life, eternal nothingness, both, or none. I am the both of both, and my duty is unto the fullness.” The Wisdom says this unto listening ears.
“I will do what it takes. What am I to do?” Samson asks one last question. His voice breaks, and the fog swallows the crack. The tree creaks above him, and the mist closes around his ankles.