Incarnations
Pain seared his skull. Raven didn’t open his eyes at first. The force of the demon’s blow had thrown him backward, and he’d hit his head against a rock or something hard. Eyes still closed, he splayed his fingers across the ground.
Cool. Not grass or dirt. Stone. Smooth. Cut. Flat.
Raven’s eyes flew open. Dimness. A room lit by a distant fire. The crackling of burning wood. Water bubbling. The thick aroma of what might have been broth but a whiff of something putrid from another direction. A hoarsely whispered Daeganean chant from an unseen corner.
Stifling a moan, he turned only his head and squinted into the dimness. He couldn’t quite get his bearings. He’d seen enough caves and hovels since the pole shift that had caused the planet to buck and ripple and tidal waves to wash away cities, but this structure felt different. Older. He caught of glimpse of movement on a long table on the other side of the room. Something in a large glass jar, wide at the base with a slender neck. Maybe a lizard or a mouse in a terrarium.
The whispered chants stopped, then started again. Only one voice. Male. Feeble. A pause and then the fire roared in its hearth. The chanting continued.
Raven peered around the room. It was large with worktables lined with jars, medical tools, and books. Some of the tomes, he recognized, or at least, recognized the markings. Books from the libraries of Daegan. Some he’d held in his own hands. Some he’d never seen but had heard their legends before they had been lost to time. One in particular had been destroyed in a fire—in the 1600s.
He held his breath. Was this a different timeline where the book still existed? Or before the fire? He scanned the room for any kind of twentieth or twenty-first century technology. Even though most tech was useless in the world since The Shift, due to the lack of reliable electricity, it could sometimes be modified, or he could find a solar battery that still worked. A radio? A smart phone filled with digital books teeming with useful knowledge on plant life or medicine or weapon-making? Any kind of salvageable tech?
Nothing.
Slowly, he sat up. His shoulder blades felt bruised. His head still pounded, but when he touched the back of his head, weaving his fingers through the flowing brown hair that was only half-pinned, nothing seemed damaged. Maybe he hadn’t hit his head on a rock after all. Just a stone floor.
He shifted to look beyond the table that stood between him and the chanting. A bearded man with scraggly white hair down the back of his dark robe stooped in front of the hearth, throwing in herbs, watching the flames twist and change color. Then he rocked on his knees, lost in thought. Around him was a black aura Raven had seen many times in many places around many people, especially right after The Shift. This was the aura of impending death. Not immediate, but the way the body’s energy began to fade in preparation for the soul leaving. He saw it mostly from disease and hunger, often enough from war with the nanotechnology-enhanced soldiers, and on occasion, such as now, in slow and withering old age. Not tonight, not tomorrow, but this man was dying, and whatever he was working on would be his last great effort.
When the old man at last stopped chanting, he hobbled to a narrow worktable and lifted a page of oddly familiar animal-skin parchment. Rearranging pages of parchment, he placed them in a row, each with a different sigil. On the last of the pages was the strange mother-with-child marking that had taken Raven back to a moment in time when he’d prevented Lilah’s parents from meeting and conceiving. Without looking up, the old man lifted a blank parchment page almost to his nose so he could see it, dipped a gray quill into some kind of purplish-black ink, and scratched a symbol onto the page that matched the form the flames had taken.
“Breath of Daegan, seal this doorway.” The old man blew on the ink. He chanted a Chaldean prayer of gratitude in the ancient language of the Priesthood of Daegan.
The man wasn’t speaking in English, not even Medieval English. Instinctively, Raven knew the language was different from anything he had ever heard or read, and yet he understood every syllable and knew he could speak it as well. He heard the meaning more than the language itself.
Raven stood cautiously behind the old man’s back to get a better look. The Book of Time? It hadn’t contained a single word, only symbols simply drawn. This wasn’t the final version with its pages threaded together and the vellum cover sewn on. This was the unfinished book and the last sacred task that the old man would complete. He was hanging onto life to finish.
“You should not be here, Lord Aryx.” The old man didn’t look up or turn around.
“I get that a lot. How do you know who I am?” Had the demon told him?
“I am known by many names among the alchemists in this part of the world, but in the Priesthood of Daegan, I have been given the name of Lord Aryx.”
Raven steadied himself against the nearest table. His fingertips touched something cold and brittle, and he withdrew them quickly. Bone. Bleached. Human.
Could it be? The old man was the author of at least a dozen alchemy texts—or, as Raven knew them, standard fare of Daeganean magic. Raven knew the alchemist by another name, the one given at birth. The only other Lord Aryx he knew to be an author was still a few generations away from that incarnation and from penning the legendary Key of Hell and Death, the book of recipes for weapons of death—and one ritual of resurrection to be used in the next age.
Every book written by a priest or priestess was a steppingstone to the apocalypse and what would come after. Each text offered insight or instruction into how to survive the last days, no matter when over the course of thousands of years or how many times republished. Or, if not to survive, then for the priesthood to endure and reincarnate into the next age. The Order’s survival was critical to the resurrection of their god and the survival of the human race, even an altered human race.
Lord Aryx was the name given to Raven in the course of his own initiation, during a meditation in which his previous incarnations had spoken to him and gifted him with his sacred name. That meant that this old man was his previous incarnation, one of many.
“You need not worry,” Old Aryx said from his workbench without looking up. “We share the same soul, but we will not melt into the ether in our proximity nor cause our universe to implode. We are not the same. We are, but not.”
“How did—”
“How did I know what you were pondering?” The old man chuckled through brown and yellow teeth. “Because that is what I would be pondering. We are the same at our center.”
Raven squinted around the firelit room, trying to take in everything. By his standards, it was small, but in this era, the room would have been considered large, the perks of being a wealthy man who could turn base metals into ones more precious. This was how the elder Aryx was funding his occult research.
A set of stairs led up to a second-floor bedroom. However, Raven doubted the old man could still climb to his more comfortable bed. Probably he was spending his last days here in his study, all his focus on completing his work. Surely none on hygiene. Here, with his bottles of squishy stuff that moved and his books with covers made of vellum or, in at least one case, human skin, he lived his last days.
If he had an apprentice, none was present at this hour. The large room and bedroom were only part of the entire house, so maybe he had a family stashed behind one of the closed doors. Raven would never know.
“She told me you would come.”
“She?”
The alchemist strained wilted herbs from a boiling pot and handed him a cup of what might have been tea. “Here. Drink this. It is for your head.”
Raven stepped forward, took the cup, then backed away. He sniffed it. He didn’t recognize the herb.
“Go on. Drink it. If I had wanted to poison you, I would have done it when you landed with a thud at my feet.”
Raven touched the back of his head and then looked at his fingertips. No blood, but definitely a small, growing knot. Rubbing the lump, he let his fingers wander up to a half-done topknot. Good, both hair-daggers were still tucked safely into the twist of hair. Raven didn’t have the strength to form them out of energy. He sniffed the cup again and started to set it down on the table.
Anger washed over the old man’s face, though it might have been hurt in his eyes. “Is that the kind of man I am to become after centuries? Is this the evolution of my soul? That I do not have the integrity to trust my own offerings?”
“Same soul, different body.” What had the demon said about even the aging of the human body changing the essence of the man inside? “Different experiences, different needs. Different enough.”
They stared at each other, neither breaking their gaze. Raven searched his intuition. Even after thousands of years, he couldn’t imagine being less of a man than he was—in any incarnation. He was as good as his word, always.
Raven took a sip. Then another. To his surprise, the tea tasted better than expected. Rich. Filling. Maybe a little like the chicken soup that Tessa fed him the last winter of high school when he was sick. By the time Raven swallowed a third sip, the pounding in his head had subsided.
“Good. A good bone broth can raise the dead.”
Raven paused for a moment. The old man didn’t mean it literally. Or maybe he did? The nourishment of bone broth in the Middle Ages was known to bring a patient back from death’s door so maybe that was the genesis of the idea of raising the dead—or almost dead.
“Thank you.” Raven finished the cup and handed it back to Old Aryx. Their knuckles touched in the exchange. This was no illusion. The aged hand felt cold in temperature but hot in energy. Aryx would’ve been a powerful priest after a lifetime of learning, particularly if he’d accessed the knowledge of prior incarnations.
The old man held out his hand, baring his wrist. The Walking Lightning inked there had faded and stretched with his sagging skin, but it was no less powerful. He reached for Raven’s forearm and pressed the sacred marking into the one on the younger man’s wrist.
They both were caught by the jolt of electricity. For a split second, Raven saw it all. All the magic in this man’s long life. All the potions and books and… the demon.
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