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focus, or a diverting series of various dei ex machina.

a serial story by marshall vandegrift.

episode 4. but sihon trusted not in redeeming blood-drops.

We stepped out of the glowing tear in space itself and into a vast library, the tear healing almost as soon as we left it. Abdiel dropped his hand from my shoulder and immediately began conferring with his colleges, leaving me to gaze in wonder at our new surroundings.

The shelf-lined walls of the library stretched upwards many times even Abdiel's height, terminating in a curved ceiling reinforced with ornately carved wooden arches, although the height of the ceiling made it difficult to make out the details of the carvings. The ones that I could see appeared to describe scenes from various mythologies, of which I was familiar with a handful, but not with others. Ahead and back, the hallway stretched beyond the limits of sight, the incandescent light bulbs that lit that place continuing at regular intervals on each wall until they blurred to indistinguishablity. But the books grasped my attention far more than the features of their storehouse.

I had never before seen so many books gathered in one place, and probably never will again. Both walls held shelves stacked what I counted as twenty high, each shelf packed with a staggered line of books in a varying profusion of heights, widths, colors and, as I could make out as I stepped up to the leftward wall, languages and alphabets. The dark wood of the walls themselves could only be seen in thin, ragged lines between the tops of rows of books and the shelves above them.

I ran my hand across part of the row nearest my eye level, feeling the texture of the various bindings: this one leather, this one simple paper, this one delicate silk. I read the titles, many of which were in Kalinese, but none of which I recognized. The Expansion of Heresy in the Middle Marches, Early Theories of Thaumaturgic Value, The Collected Works of Sir Lucius of Battenguard, and a slim volume in blue, unlabeled, but familiar to the touch. I looked briefly over my shoulder at my protectors. The three stood in hushed conversation, focused primarily on Ithuriel, whose eyes glowed ever so slightly and had a distant look to his face.

Turning back, I pulled the book from the shelf and examined it carefully. The front was wholly unmarked. Turning it over revealed a series of four concentric circles, the largest no larger than my thumb, with a point-up triangle inside the smallest circle, imprinted in silver in the bottom right corner. I did not recognize the symbol, but it somehow reminding me of my brief meeting with Belial, which triggered the memory of where I seen this book before. Setting the book back on the shelf and glancing behind me again to make sure that the three... whatever they were... were still paying no attention to me, I quickly pulled off my bag and search through it for the book Belial had given me, about which I had all but forgotten. It matched the book I just found in both color and size. Without removing it from my bag, I looked at its back. Sure enough, the same concentric circle and triangle symbol lay stamped on it. I closed my bag and slipped it back on before my companions could notice.

I was seized with curiosity about the book Belial had given me. I was sure that if Abdiel knew Belial had given it to me, he would have taken it, which I didn't want to happen: I still didn't know who I ought to trust. I had no assurances that the contents would match, but I picked up the copy of the book I had found on the shelf and opened it at random to a page near the middle, as I somewhat inexplicably tend to do when examining a new book. My disappointment was almost palpable as the open pages showed nothing more than a blank space on the left and a senseless jumble of lowercase letters and punctuation marks on the right. I turned to the next page, revealing another blank on the left and more random characters on the right. I turned the page again. And again. I turned one more page, prepared to give up, and there it lay before me:

sdhhrehuowyifm fdsuwrdasur jf,;;;dlsda
 r fsaf fdsaf m,,f,'ebrwefsfd''rewrdsf

hello dear athena daybright. if you ha
vn't guessed already, this is your not
-so-dear friend belial. it certainly t
ook you long enough to decide to open 
the gift I left you. or are you readin
g some other copy of the akashic text?
 i really can't tell. turn the page wh
en you're done reading this. my sensit
ivity is rather low, but i can tell wh
en you turn the page and about how man
y you've turned. if i ask any question
s, please turn a small number of pages
 for a yes and a large number for a no
, alright?                            

iurffdsaffoiewqh dfhasjfh eokfdorew,..
;;;sfffceggegghfdg;;sgfdgoiregrgdfgrtt

My hand shaking, I turned a large chunk of the book. Mere randomness. I turned another chunk.

lsak!wrovfncskuoirew?,cmoiwruomeoireia

apparently everything isn't alright. a
bdiel is a pawn for them, likely knows
nothing of what is going on, and is th
us probably trying to explain things t
o you, but failing miserablely. poor p
powers of explaination is a failing th
at we both share, but which his youth 
exacerbates rather dramatically. i'm a
fraid that i can't really answer any o
f your questions right now, even if yo
u had some convenient way of communica
ting them to me. but i'm going to have
to ask you to trust me. i know that yo
u have no reason to do so, but you mus
t believe me when i tell you that you 
are in great danger.                  

roiurewoiuf.lkjkmlkew,iureitrkjpoieqef

Danger indeed. I grasped and turned a large handful of pages. Belial must have been paying closer attention this time.

i'm going to take that "no" as sarcasm
. some of the danger is likely already
 obvious to you, but much of it is not
. however high his rank, abdiel's supe
riors have their reasons for keeping h
im the dark. from him you have only th
e follies of ignorance to fear. ithuri
el and zephon however... at least one 
of them is secretly of the order of th
e purifiers and takes his orders direc
tly from metatron himself. unless abdi
el has explained more than i suspect, 
that means very little to you at this 
point, but suffice to say that those o
rders are very likely to include your 
death. you must not let them take you 
to elysia.                            

uurewurewnccmcxkzmcppasqcvdk...fdsvcxv
?drewr.affate;rtthsg4trewtgsgfsarwqopo

"What are you looking at, Eena?" Zephon asked, his voice directly behind me and, in light of Belial's warning, menacing despite its comforting tone. I started, reflexively snapping the book closed. He stepped around beside me and gently lifted it from my hands, his eyes radiating nothing by concern tinged with curiosity. "Ah. A Babel text. How interesting." I glanced at the other two men, who were still conferring, Ithuriel's eyes still faintly glowing. Abdiel turned his head enough to meet my eyes as I glanced, a gesture that indicated he was paying attention, which somehow reassured me. I didn't know then whether I should have trusted any of the strange people that I had met, but all of them seemed to credit Abdiel with at least good intentions.

"Perhaps some member of the order of Librarians knows their origin," Zephon continued, "but no one's ever told me. You find mystics using them every so often, calling them 'Akashic texts,' and claiming that this or that deity points them to passages with particular meaning, although I've never seen a page with more than gibberish on it." He opened the book, and indeed the page contained nothing more than a random jumble of characters. "According to a buddy I had a while back, although he was just of the order of Soldiers, the idea is that each time you turn the page, it creates a new sequence of characters, and never the same sequence twice. If you read it from cover to cover for eternity, eventually you'd read every page that could possibly be written, and thus know everything. Too bad those of us with eternity on our hands are too busy with other things." Finishing, he smiled wryly and slipped the book into an open spot on a shelf just out of my reach.

"Too bad, indeed," Abdiel noted as he glidingly stepped towards us, placing himself squarely between Zephon and me. Ithuriel stepped in beside him, his eyes no longer literally glowing, but still lit with accomplishment. "It wasn't easy, but Ithuriel has found a safe route from here to Elysia."

"We have to pass through five more happentracks," Ithuriel added, "but at least we'll get there."

"So let's get moving, then," ordered Abdiel, nodding his head towards the leftwards hallway. We began moving again, forming up as before, although this time Ithuriel led the way while Zephon walked behind Abdiel and me.

Although I had started to give up hope of understanding anything at all about what was going on, I turned towards Abdiel as we walked and asked him, at the very least, for an explanation of where we were headed.

Abdiel sighed. "There's so much that you don't know... I deal with humans from isolated happentracks so little that I seldom remember how little you do know. Elysia is the abode of the Elohim, and we," with this he stopped and made a gesture encompassing himself and his companions, "are Elohim." He said it simply and unassumingly, but he might as well have been claiming that they were gods.

The Elohim. I had taken Abdiel's earlier invoking of the Nephilim as an allegorical reference to the Sehari, but there was no mistaking this. Although they possessed different names in different tongues, the Elohim were as ubiquitous as deities in the mythologies of the world... my world, anyway. Shards of the Elohim myths scattered through my mind even as I tried to reform them into some kind sensible whole. Portrayed almost universally as tall men with eyes of light and wings of starfire, but not men by any means. Instead, immortal servants of the gods, granted a measure of their power and their authority over humanity. Some so powerful that they had challenged and usurped the gods themselves... It was all myth, yet half of me believed him.

But only half. "If you are Elohim, then where are your wings? And which god do you serve? Are they suddenly real as well?" I asked in a voice bitter with the ashes of skepticism.

"Myth is half-remembered legend, which is half-remembered history, which is the half-remembered past. Best not to pay too much attention to myths," Abdiel replied, then paused. "But that does not mean that they are always false."

With that, his eyes were once again swallowed within wells of unfathomable light, and his hair and robes swirled and danced to the beat of a wind only they could hear. His face became terrible with power, as somehow did his hands and feet, as if the light pouring from his eyes had its source within the very core of his being and flooded throughout his body. He raised his arms above his head and turned his face upwards. For a moment, his light dimmed, then flared again as wings the brilliant, glowing white of starlight rushed ceiling-wards.

As Abdiel flexed his wings, it seemed that the hall of the library, vast as it was, would not be enough to hold them. They seemed massively physical things, in utter contrast to their apparent nature as objects spun from the aether. He beat his wings forward above my head, sending a shock of air that rattled books from their shelves and knocked me to my knees.

In a voice that shook my being with the strength of its authority, he declared, "Mortal, behold Abdiel, Elohim of the Seraphic Order, and tremble."

end episode 4.

previous episode. next episode (to be posted on 09-12-2001).