Mae-Ying Allen ~ 3-18-2029 3:58 AM GMT
Benny leads Mae-Ying across the bullpen, back towards the marble hall -- actually, on reflection, she’s not sure that it is marble, but she’s no mineralogist. A few paces away from the door, Benny turns to Mae-Ying. "Look, if you're too tired, I'll take you somewhere you can rest and I'll say you fainted."
“Thanks, but I’d rather just get this bullshit over with,” Mae-Ying says.
"All right.” Benny takes a deep breath. “Just… once this next part starts, you're going to have to see it through."
“I’m pretty sure I can handle it,” Mae-Ying says.
Benny twists his mouth to the side, but he doesn’t argue with her. He leads her back into the strange marble hallway with the statues.
“I’m taking you to a room,” he says. “Inside, you’ll have a vision. You’re going to be told or shown a bunch of stuff. So if you're too tired--"
“Why do you keep asking that? Is it dangerous or something?”
"If you try to run away from what they tell you, yes."
“Well then I won’t.”
Benny shakes his head. "You got moxie, kid. I'll give you that."
Mae-Ying smirks.
They arrive at a pair of doors at the end of the hall; Benny puts a hand on one of the two. "This is the Chamber of Kings. There’s a bunch of different versions of it. Ours was designed a long time ago, I guess. It helps you figure out who you are."
Mae-Ying nods. “Okay.”
“You ready?” he asks.
“Uh-huh.”
Painted in the center of each facet is a symbol, some sort of vaguely familiar script, symbols that remind her of Sanskrit, or Chinese maybe. In the center of the room is a cube of black stone.
"Just walk to the altar,” Benny says. “You'll know when it starts."
“Thanks,” Mae-Ying says.
He closes the door behind her.
Mae-Ying’s skepticism slips as she approaches the cube. It’s slick, reflective, like a dark mirror. Her reflection seems to warp and flow as she gazes at it. A low hum fills the air. The surface of the cube shifts like liquid; her reflection twists and grows, filling her vision. She tries to tear her gaze away, but she can’t move her head or her eyes. She begins to panic as her mirrored face ages, lightens, becomes longer and sharper-featured.
She sees a white woman, older than herself, with red hair. She blinks, and the reflection mutates again; the face of a young man appears, black, with pouting lips and beautiful eyes. Their faces look familiar, like she could remember their names if she focused hard enough.
She finally manages to stumble back. The room has gone dark. Mist fills the space around her, but still the symbols on the many-faceted walls shine through in a rainbow of prismatic hues, yellows and blues, reds, golds, greens, not fire or light but something beyond both.
“Benny?” She turns back, but the door is gone. Panic rises in her chest. “Benny, are you out there?!”
"We are the Righteous Apostate of the Glorious Order,” a voice says, youthful, masculine. She turns to see the black man she saw reflected in the cube, standing in the darkness. He is slightly taller than she is, and naked. The cube itself has vanished. Mae-Ying recoils slightly.
He speaks again. “We have always come before the Gate of Tears to supplicate ourselves."
He raises his hands. They burst with an emerald aura, the same color-beyond-light of the symbols on the walls. Mae-Ying hears trumpets sound as though from a great distance. His form shifts; he becomes a full-figured Latina woman.
"Who we were is not important,” she says. “It never is. We have been a hundred-hundred thousand faces, women and men, but we are the Righteous Apostate of the Glorious Order. We seek truth ignored by hubris; we refuse to fail in the face of the undeniable."
She shapeshifts into a thin Caucasian girl with blue eyes and long, blonde dreadlocks. "You are we and we are you. We have always been the first and everlasting eye of the Law.”
Eight pillars of white fire erupt at the edges of the room, illuminating the mists, revealing the space around them. Each pillar is surmounted by a radiant golden flame at its tip, a circular form that looks almost like a crown. Mae-Ying turns back towards the door, but it’s still gone.
“The Enemy is returning,” a woman’s voice says. Mae-Ying turns back; the Latina woman has become a petite Polynesian. “Fools seek the Enemy’s power. They have breached the prison of Oblivion once again. In their arrogance, they would seek to supplant the Lawgiver.”
The woman makes a mudra with her hands, and a web of emerald color begins to emanate from her palms, Instinctively, Mae-Ying understands that each filament represents a thread of fate; the center of the web represents her own existence. Intersecting lines of cause and effect weave through her life. Her own thread bends and weaves unnaturally to latch onto another that she somehow knows represents James, and his death sends ripples through the entire web.
The Polynesian woman transforms into an East Asian man, Japanese or Korean, with a thin mustache. “You look into a mirror now, and see yourselves, across one thousand times one thousand lives, each just another part of a thread running through the core of the world.”
The Asian man morphs into an Aboriginal woman. She wraps her arms around herself in grief. "The Enemy has torn the world asunder and we have sewn it back together, again and again, but now the seams are taut to bursting. There will be no further chances."
The woman twists and shifts again, becoming a tall blonde woman with sad eyes and striking features. She grips a long, single-edged sword in her left hand. She looks down at the weapon, then at Mae-Ying. “We are first and eternal eye of the Law; we are the sword of sight. To wield the power that is ours, your mind must be a weapon.”
The woman steps forward, thrusting the blade towards Mae-Ying. Without thinking, Mae-Ying sidesteps the attack and slams her palm into the woman’s forearm, above the wrist. There’s a flash of emerald power, an arc between them, and Mae-Ying feels stronger. She grabs the handle of the sword and twists it away from the woman, pointing it back at her. The woman smiles approvingly.
The pillars of fire expand around them, blotting out all sight of the symbols on the wall. The woman raises two fingers in front of her naked chest, as though giving a sign of benediction, and says, “You are the Righteous Apostate of the Glorious Order. You are the sword, the first and everlasting eye of Divine Law, and the eye of the coming storm. Your glory is older than the mountains and the seas. Around you swirl the destinies of all who will fight. Awaken, and face the coming night.”
With those final words, the pillars of fire vanish and the prismatic symbols go out, plunging the room into darkness.
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