Angel of Knives

 

It’s a thin line between pride and shame, beloved ones. Razor-thin. Enough to cut ourselves deeply, or another. Like a thorn in the flesh. I believe there is great insight in knowing the solemnity of such uncomfortable truths. That place in human storytelling where light gives way to shadow. Sometimes a darkness can be birthed in the fervour of protecting our own, and we become the very thing we hate. It’s the lament of many poets, isn’t it?  And warriors who wished desperately for some other way.  But sometimes the sky of a mind can darken, and you are hunted by jackals in the wilderness. Suddenly, you find yourself prowling like a jackal too. It’s easy to discuss the polity of occupation from a distance. I suspect it is something else entirely to be ravaged by it. To see your children ravaged by it. In such instances some men truly believe that they are forced to take up the sword.  But eventually, it is always the innocent who suffer most.  The children on both sides.  Violence is always an anguished lament to those of sufficient soul. I’ve wept like that, in dreams. I’m still not sure if my soul is sufficient, but like all true initiates of the hidden way I once knelt before the burnished Mountain of God, praying that a man might not be forced to become a wraith to defeat an army of even darker wraiths. Cruelty is no glamorous thing, believe me. Neither is war. There are so few heroes in war. I’m no hero either, but I’ve been called many things across this dreaming of a thousand years. A ghost, a charlatan. An angel of thorns, or knives. Like that wretched Prince of Sicarii. Well, such titles are not entirely unwarranted. As I’ve said elsewhere in these epistles, your enemy is still your brother. And spilling the blood of your brother is always a matter of terrible, hideous shame. Saltire or not. Regardless of what side you’re on. All causes are righteous to men of burning conviction. In a climate of such hate, hostility and viciousness only a fool would consider himself righteous, without shadow or flaw. I once walked among such men, in my nightly sojourns. Honour and integrity were beyond so many of them. Beloved ones, I want you to realize that fiction is a prerequisite to religion, as all writers of merit understand. Storytelling is thus often the business of crafting more palatable heroes. Pacifists and polemicists. I know this because I was a storyteller even as a boy, long before I was blinded by vision.  Long before I watched my many brothers and sisters curl their fingers around the hilt of a sword. I tried to renounce such revolt and pledged myself to the Mysteries of Rhacotis, like any true seeker of that time and place. There I learned many things. What my enemies might call magic or malefica. But more than that, I learned secrets of imagination. What one might call spiritual technologies. I learned that no text is a dry recital of dispassionate fact. All texts are dramaturgies. Even this one. Full of religiosity, sympathies and antipathies. Occulted aspects. I quickly realised that our words are full of incredible revelation, and our actions also. Not a single soul is without agency. From peasant to prince. Man and woman. There are no true hierarchies save those forged in the mind. Regardless, some say a dark angel birthed those sinister hooded ones. The shrouded ones. Some say this angel led them to the mount. Men and women of dagger and cloak.  What know you of these darker things, Fallen? Josephus, Celsus, Origen? Are these your measures of supposed fact? Listen to me. You know only what the Magi have allowed you to know. These mysteries, these hidden things – they are not discontinuous. There is a lineage of light stretching back to those times long before the temple fell.  The Cult of First Dreaming. We who recall the shining realm.  We who rebuke these slavers and traffickers in all forms. Do you really suppose ichthys and anchor were the only signs of revolution? Do you think swords are the only weapons? Hear me now, lost Roma. I don’t need to kill. Insight is a far sharper blade. And it cuts both ways. Your empire collapsed in the end, didn’t it?  Just as my namesake did at Damascus. It was only a matter of time.  And poetry. As I said, it’s a thin line between peace and war. Razor-thin. Perhaps the difference between pieces of divine light and pieces of silver. Just ask those vicious zealots, or the sicarii. I know who I am, and what I’ve been working toward. Protection for the little ones. Voices for the voiceless. Insight and comprehension between all clashing ideologies. Perhaps it sounds naive to a warlord or a demoniac, but I have no interest in slaying my enemies in some paper-thin parable of good versus evil. I’ve seen far too much horror for that.  But you will have to face yourselves in the end, Fallen. Just as I did, in the crucible of my dreaming. Owning up to every wretched sin. See, my concern was never counterfeit.  My love is not entirely lost.  I value my heart and my shame, even as an angel. It means I dare not make the same mistakes again. Instead, I shall find other ways. Gentler, hidden ways. A warrior of the innermost. For I am not without imagination. All souls deserve freedom and decency. A fair trial beyond claims of sedition, regardless of their fealty or their faith.  Even you. It is no laughing matter, Fallen.  I take it very seriously. Lay down your daggers, all of you, and take up a different kind of blade. For Kasi tells you now, we are all equal in the eyes of my Father. Praise be to God and his grace.  That I almost never was, nor shall I ever be again. There is a great wisdom in that, even for a humbled storyteller.

 

Legends of Ludgate

 

In the old stories they used to speak of a fractured king with two faces. Half flesh, half myth. Folded through artworks and songlines beyond linear time. Buried on the holy hill beside the river, beneath Navahtri's white lantern of stone. An angel of Rhacotis, some say. Or a giant. A winged messenger of dreams bearing the oldest mark; one who was both the end and the beginning. My brothers have never forgotten these stories, but such legends are mere fancies among a plethora now. A panoply of fictions regarding what my people once called the City of Gates. The place of both ways. Libraries and lighthouses.  Navah has other names now, and other histories. Framed and favoured with the blood-dimmed heraldries of officialdom. But there have always been other voices. Alternate histories. Even when raven-touched sorcerers remind men of these things they are often sadly disbelieved. Ignored by those same souls they wish to liberate. The now familiar lies of the Church are offered as an almost instinctive rebuttal.  Lies made holy writ by royal sanction. "There is but one truth, one history, and it was forged by Rome." Oh, Fallen. You know nothing of Rome. Of Peter or Paul. You know so little of true divinity, or art, therefore your grasp of history is tenuous at best. Hear me, and men like me. My brethren are among the Cult of First Dreaming. All Dreaming. Pearls of great price and serpents of the sea.  Those who watched the Watchers even as the war began. There have been a thousand names for London, Shalem and Rome. Countless visions of Albion. And innumerable fires. Sacrifices made ritual. Like a board being cleared of its pieces, being reset. But even these local genocides have crow-like echoes and strange secrets. Many places, becoming one. As I said, the Fallen know little of magic. I don't know everything, of course. But likely I know more than you. My wisdom is debatable, but I studied diligently, and my years have more breadth than I care to admit. Regardless, gates and wings does not an angel make. You need a message. A vision. And believe me, despite my flaws I am a creature of vision indeed. True scholars know that we become what we fear if we're not careful. Do you fear night-wraiths, as I once did? Well, I was once a king among wraiths. A wild gypsy-king standing defiant in the sand before the burnished Mountain of God.  But I was humbled.  Brought to my knees.  This is what it means to be a thing of fractured dreaming. Hear me now, dear ones.  You exist in a false, aberrant chronology. Your most ancient compendiums and memories are counterfeit, or else very partial truths. The splendour and vastness of the myriad, of which you are key, has been hidden from you. Who did this, you ask? Who engineered such darkness? Such sinister oppression? You know who did. The gatekeepers did this, the day they buried the angel alive. On the hill, by the river of Temesh.  You were a keeper of gates once, even if only in dreams. I know you were. I remember you at Rhacotis.  This is nothing new, lost ones. I've said all this before. Souls of great sweetness and depth have revealed all these things to you in various ways. But, I admit, it is a terrifying thing to grasp. A horror to reconcile. That dreaming – reality itself – was hijacked by malevolent, adversarial forces. Satanic forces. The devil wears many faces, say the Christians. Whereas the pagans say that wraiths ruthlessly shape themselves to all expedient folklore, and whisper through the veil to any mortals who can hear them. Both groups are correct, of course. Both have stories worth hearing. You see, I was once a Christian. And a pagan. I am still both, as are you. There is no getting around it, dear ones. You dream and imagine. You are a thing of gates whether you like it or not. A creature of madness and logic. Brothers and sisters, know this. Golgotha weeps at the breadth of your soul's dreaming. As do the circles of stone. Sacrifices were made to keep you intact despite the Fall. Despite the hush that seethed. That which stole your true memories and your birthright. But you are not alone.  Artists and Magi now walk this ruin with you. Marked and marginalised – offering pieces of the old songs in lament. Two faces, both ways. Beyond linear time. And yet, those far less brave than the carpenter or the raven wish to call me a fantasist.  They wish to lecture men like me on the nature of history and dreaming. I would laugh, if not for my brother's weeping. Yeru'shalem, the old ones say of the places of peace. Mira'shalem. Blood is indeed a miracle, as is storytelling and love. Listen to your brother. He knows far more than I do. There are greater kings, unburied. I'm just a scribe. A poet of bold vision but imperfect grammar. I am not the fallen angel of songs redeemed by the sacrifice of sky. I am not the winged one interred on the hill of gates, made bright by the benevolence of his brother. You are, dearest one. Of course you are.  Knowing this secret, a great and dangerous secret, it is my genuine hope that you dream well.   

The Weaver's War

 

I speak to you now, black-as-crown.  Hear me.  Hear your brother, husband and father.  Rune and relic.  Sigil and stone.  There is always a war where art is concerned, isn’t there?  Between the beauty of form and the utility of function.  Reality versus representation.  You know well of this war, seamstress.  Storytellers always do.  They grapple often with the eternal question.  When to share the truth, or else offer a comforting deceit.  And then there are those rare, confusing moments when both are one.  But the human soul requires both.  The black is blinded without it, believe me.  It cannot survive on fact alone.  Soul requires fiction to grow, to express the fullness of its myriad nature.  Heaven and Earth.  Dreams, and dirt.  Like a seed.  My dreams were threadbare after the Fall, and I went seeking after Fates.  Norns living at the Mouth of Weavers.  The lip of Urd’s Well.  The legends told of a massacre.  During the seething hush, when the cities themselves began to darken and fold.  It was announced as so, but the Fates were not truly slain.  I wouldn’t have allowed that.  Instead, they were hidden away.  In the Book of Doors.  A pocket place.  A threshold realm that only artists and storytellers truly understand.  Even angels are a little wary of the book.  After all, it is a place where anything can happen.  Fire, and death.  This place.  This haunted earth.  Afkárr, hear me.  I am the storm, as your sisters know well.  Some men call me an angel of thorns, or knives.  Others call me a king of ravens.  But what I truly am is a storyteller.  I am not the story itself.  At least, not entirely.  Then again, we build our world through imagination and memory.  Don’t we?  Just like the legends claim.  I suppose I am a thing of mystery, and secrets.  Aren’t we all?  Artists especially?  Isn’t it the Christians who say, if thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light?  Our stories put it another way, but the secrets remain the same.  As I said, the black is blinded without deceit.  Without sweet lies that tell of greater, hidden truths.  This is indeed a war, Afkárr.  A War of Imagination.  You see it all around.  These sickening lords of genocide.  But there is a greater light, seamstress.  A greater purpose we must find for ourselves amid the chaos.  That dance we must graciously undertake, or else endure unwillingly.  Between function and form.  Utility and beauty.  You are not lying to yourself when you turn from the horror for a moment and imagine with an artist’s eye.  You are full of light, my wild one.  Fierce, pale as shadow, and crowned.  How do I know?  Because it is I who crowned you, in the world before worlds.  Not for myself.  Not for glory.  But because you held steadfast to both sides of the soul, even when it was difficult.  Mind, and sense.  I shall never forget that.  Storm or not.  Be well, un-slain Fate.  Be well, my Queen.