POV: Paimon of 72 Demons of Ars Goetia
The problem -- the maddening, extraordinary, eleven-day-long problem -- was that the time signature was correct.
Not wrong in the way of errors oh no...
Correct in the way of something that existed outside the current framework and was simply waiting, with the patience of a thing that knew it was right and had no opinion about when the framework caught up.
Four hundred pages on the stand. Three inks. Copper hair vivid in the lamplight, the colour that was a paradox in itself, the colour of a mind that had somewhere along the way stopped considering rules on what was allowed and threw a flaming bomb just for amusement.
His eyes: shifting green to amber to green, the iris constitutionally incapable of settling when both frequencies were simultaneously operative.
This was a gift and an administrative inconvenience of the absolute first order, and he had been filing complaints about it with no one in particular since before anyone else existed to receive them.
His right hand conducting three beats ahead of where his eyes were reading, the hand being smarter than the rest of him and he had learned, across more time than time had been counting, to follow it.
Bar two hundred and twelve. The name arrived.
He laughed.
Out loud, one short genuine bark — the specific sound of a mind handed something so astonishing it bypassed processing and went straight to joy.
The hand stopped mid-beat. He grabbed the nearest pen, wrote the name at the top of a clean page in the oldest script he could access without reaching, stared at it.
Eyes wide and fully amber now.
Prior to the act. Prior to the Word -- prior to the first instrument of making, which meant the category of before itself had a before, which meant the taxonomy he had worked within his entire existence was not the first taxonomy,
Which meant the structure had a basement, which meant the time signature was written in a metre that predated every metre he had tried to read it in, which explained eleven days, which was.....
Extraordinary didn't even begin to cover it...
Extraordinary was a word for things that exceeded expectation and this exceeded the expectation that expectations were possible, which meant --
He swept the score off the table. All four hundred pages, one arm, the whomp of them hitting the flagstone and spreading across it in a cascade of annotated wings.
He pulled the clean sheet forward.
The pen was already moving.
Behind him the score lay face-down on the cold stone, three inks of margin notes staring at the floor. He didn't pay them a tick off attention. Those papers were boring...
This? This was far moreinteresting.... It was, honestly, the most consistent thing about him.
· · ·
Three metres from the ember-copper tree, Yosef sat in the grass with his hands in his lap and the fire present.
Finally. At last....
The clan called the passage Mirkaveh -- the full opening of five gates in sequence, a thing done under supervised conditions with the supervision of elders and the proper preparation.
Three days of fasting also specified, in writing, which Yosef had spent thirty years steeling himself for and which had been replaced, in the event, by a figure from before the concept of fasting pressing one finger lightly at five locations on his body in sequence.
He breathed. Followed the fire down into the part of himself where thirty years of the wrong word had lived. Gate by gate.
Mushin.
No mind · the state before~
Base of the skull. Not revelation -- correction.
A lock that had been installed correctly and facing the wrong direction since seventeen, on a morning his father's hand was briefly warm, at the back of his neck and said everything it needed to without opening its mouth.
The corridor opens. Something dormant becomes something actual. Relief is the wrong word for it; relief implied discomfort, this was validation....
Hara.
The gravity centre · where bearing becomes tangible
Between the shoulder blades. His spine corrected half a centimetre -- the involuntary click of a beam finally seated.
Thirty years of fieldwork lived here. The word finder his father had delivered correctly and gently, filed in the muscle, never set down.
He had carried the burden without caring for its weight. He was understanding it differently now: not lesser, not consolation, this.
What he had been carrying between his shoulder blades was thirty years of release.
One of them was Eden.
Prana.
The primary breath · knowing beneath reasoning
Sternum. Prior knowledge -- the knowing beneath reasoning, bedrock under soil.
When this gate opened the garden's sourceless warmth and the fire in his chest became indistinguishable from each other.
He had been in this garden eleven days without knowing he was already the right size for it.
Dan.
the elixir field · the ember that does not go out.
The furnace -- the size of what a guardian could hold without the held thing consuming them.
Dan: the ember that burned and did not diminish, a beautiful terrible word.
He had been running at a fraction of this for thirty years and filed the discrepancy quietly under temperament, under the gentle friction that the ground being good to him, which was true the way the surface of a thing was true -- accurate, and the smaller part.
The ember had been burning since before the fruit, since before the garden, since a seventeen-year-old walked home in the specific silence of a door that had closed abruptly.
Anahata.
The unstruck sound · where fire becomes will
The heart. The oxymoron at the centre of the system: sound before anything has been struck to make it.
The gate the clan's texts went vaguest on, he understood now, because the people writing the texts had never opened it -- they had described the fire going outward into the hands and called that the end of it, not understanding the hands were a destination, not the source. The source.... was the Heart
The blue had originated there. In the unstruck sound. In the place where heat stopped being heat and became direction, where Dan's capacity became the guardian's choice.
It had been waiting since seventeen.
Blue.
He held his hands up in the garden's light. Fieldwork in every crease, knuckles swollen from the lower chamber's cold, the warmth still in the skin like something pressed in and kept.
The glow faded. But the warmth stayed.
The clan's account had said white -- said it consistently, confidently, with the authority of people accurately describing something they hadn't witnessed directly in several generations.
But the fire in his core had always been blue, the account drifting from the event the way all accounts drifted: slowly, incrementally, until the map was a sincere and incorrect document.
He set his hands in his lap. Breathed out -- the specific long exhale of a calculation thirty years in the making, having just finished.
"Yosef."
Rania.... He opened his eyes.
Four feet away, cross-legged, dark hair tucked behind one ear.
The sketchpad closed in her lap -- the same sketchpad she'd filled since the first descent, its spine cracked now from use. The pen between her fingers turning slowly... the same pen. The one she'd held when the garden woke.
She wore the expression she wore when a question had been sitting in her long enough to acquire weight.
"Yours is blue," she said.
"Yes."
Her eyes went across the garden to Amara at the Wall -- palm still flat against the third layer, ochre warmth visible at the contact point.
Below the ochre: blue. Quieter, foundational, the original frequency underneath everything Amara had built on top of it across eleven years and eleven countries.
"Amara's too. Underneath."
"Yes." He'd filed it the morning of the first lesson and said nothing.
The pen went still between her fingers. Not the turning-stillness -- the other kind. She looked at him with the attention she brought to inscriptions when she had run the problem as far as it would go alone and needed the room.
Her dark eyes on his hands first, the warmth still in the skin of them, and then up.
"Then what was the silver." The voice flat -- the deliberate flatness of a question shaped so the answer had room to arrive in.
"When he first came up. When he took her hand, when the garden woke, when the silver spread outward from the contact point across both of them..."
The pen a thin line across her knuckles, motionless.
"We all saw it. Off both of them at the join. If blue is human..." She held his gaze. "If ochre is human."
"Then....what was the silver?"
To be Continued....
(Author's Notes: And the mad scientist gets unveiled along with the 5 Gates of Mirkaveh proper folks... Just a bit more to go and we will see our Protagonist's past)
[I'm also starting a goal from now on:
10 powerstones will make me give a unique reference to the sender in my chapters.
20 powerstones will have me giving a shoutout to the sender in the top of the chapter of the subsequent chapter]