Tag Archive: prayer
In the Company of Angels, Episode 11.1 – The Broken Gate
“There is a tendency to dismiss the events on Orbaratus as an anomaly. ‘Surely’, the historians will say, ‘the catastrophe on Orbaratus was simply an aberration on a world that had nothing whatsoever to do with our own.’ Yet, it was not so. The near cataclysm on that planet — distant in time and in space from the earth — came closer to destroying our world than any historian may ever be willing to acknowledge.”
Brother Azarias, The Orbaratus Chronicles.
When the second earthquake on Orbaratus began, Polydora had spread her glittering silver wings and soared twenty or thirty feet above the Plaza of the Masters. There she circled above both the monolith Luke had sketched upon and the portal into which Jill and Sam had vanished. She soon was very glad that she had taken the precaution, for this earthquake was much more violent than the first. New cracks appeared on the plaza floor, and additional stone monuments were heaved from their pedestals and toppled. Among these was the very one that Luke had sketched upon. But there was nothing Polly could do but wait out the calamity, so she continued to circle above the plaza while the ruined city of Cenurbus trembled and buckled beneath her.
Debris exploded and fell into the shadowed streets, and rumblings like distant thunder heralded the collapse of structures that had been abandoned for centuries. At length, the roaring of the earth began to subside and the ground ceased its convulsions. Only then did Polydora glide gently back down to the plaza’s surface. She alighted near the fallen monolith upon which Luke had created his sketch. She was relieved to find that the stone had fallen on its side, and that the sketch was still visible and intact; if it had been otherwise, Polly knew that Luke would have been unable to return through that frame.
Polly turned her attention to the other portal. It still remained suspended in space near the edge of the plaza; she noticed nothing different about it, and could see no sign of anyone when she gazed through it. She wondered where Jill and Sam were, and how they were faring in their quest to capture the raven.
She then turned her gaze upon the gateway into the mountain. It appeared not to have suffered from the earthquake, but she strode toward it to make sure. With each step the feeling that there were other beings stirring beneath her feet increased; that feeling had ceased when she took flight, but now that she was walking once more upon the surface of her planet, it was back, and now much stronger than before.
She approached the gateway and saw with dismay that now two of the three sapphires were missing from the mirrored surface within which the stone slab door was set. She ran to the gateway and began searching through the rubble, hoping that the gem might have been accidentally dislodged by the earth’s heavings. But it was not so. The sapphire was gone.
Polly looked across the plaza at the distant portal and wondered. Had the raven come back during the earthquake, unmarked by her while she was aloft? It was possible. But now only a single stone remained, and she was unsure what that meant. She shut her eyes and tried to sense with her whole being, attempting to learn through her empathic powers what might be happening behind and below the gateway.
And this is what she experienced:
Deep, deep down through the crust of these high places her awareness drifted. At first she felt the presence only of cold stone, but then pockets of warmth pricked her. Scattered like the tiny chambers crafted into the immensity of an Egyptian pyramid, these pockets were few, but each was filled to overflowing with white linen-wrapped bodies. They were seeds within an otherwise empty and lifeless sea of living rock. And within each of the pockets there was growth; wild, malignant growth: of consciousness; of hatred; of violence. Each pocket was reaching out in diseased flailings as it found its bonds weakening and falling away.
Polydora pulled back her awareness and opened her eyes once more upon the Plaza of the Masters. She then understood that the forces that guarded the gateway were failing, and that some great horror must soon be unleashed unless…unless what?
In her centuries alone upon her planet, Polly had learned the dead languages of her people, and even snippets of the older language of the Masters. To the extent possible, she had absorbed the culture of the Ferrumari: their understanding of themselves before the end times had come; their understanding of what goodness, and truth, and beauty meant in a world that could still be controlled by evil. She remembered what we might call prayers, and these she began to recite aloud, as she had done, alone, whenever her heart had quailed and trembled during those earliest years of her life.
Polly stood before the gateway, reciting the prayers of her people, over and over again. She had remembered a litany against fear, against evil, against cruelty and hatred. And as she said the words aloud in the tongue of her people, she felt calmed and uplifted, as if the prayers themselves were calling forth the life force of all of those that had ever stood upon this plaza, generation upon generation, perhaps knowing what was behind the gateway or perhaps not. But Polly was comforted, and she resolved to continue her vigil, and to continue her prayers, as long as was necessary.
She stood alone, upright before the gateway, and the darkness increased. She knew not the time of day, but this darkness seemed unnatural, and she felt that there must be much more to it than simply a change in the weather. She felt new rumblings beneath her feet, and understood, she knew not how, that some Thing of great power had thrown off the last of its shackles and was now making its way to the surface, intent on finding a way out of the prison that had held it for so many thousands of years.
“The Light is my guide and my refuge,” Polydora said under her breath, “I shall not fear. Fear is the tool of the darkness; it is the mote that mocks the meek. I shall breathe in my fear; I shall allow it to wash over me and through me; and I shall breathe it out again. Then, my fear shall be no more, and only I and the Light shall remain….”
Now the darkness had increased so that the Plaza of the Masters appeared as it might have at twilight. And Polydora could sense movement in the air above and around her. She looked up and saw shadows flitting between her and the high clouds above, and she understood that something evil from beyond her own world had found a chink in the continuum of space and time, and was flooding through that chink to gather around the plaza. This was, she suddenly knew, the culmination of some grand design that must have been in progress for many ages. That she was alone, here, standing before the gateway, could not be coincidence. She must be there for a reason, and that reason could only be to stop what was about to happen.
But how could she? She did not know the nature and power of the forces beneath her, nor of those creatures swirling around her, although the latter she suspected must be the spirit beings, the Amenta, of whom Luke and Sam and Brother Azarias had spoken so often. Alone in the Gallery, she had never encountered them; she had only heard the tales told by others, as one might hear ghost stories told around a campfire.
But these were no ghost stories. These were malignant spirits blotting out the sky. And she alone might be able to hold the gate; if she only knew how!
Rumblings beneath her feet heralded the approach of yet another earthquake, and this one, she knew, would likely be greater yet than the two that had come before. She could but wait for it to burst upon her here in the open, before the gate; she dared not rise above the surface lest some new evil be allowed to pass in her absence. She felt the rumblings and the heaving waves of fluid rock beneath her feet. And she saw cracks form in the frame around the gateway. At the peak of the earthquake, the stone slab of the gateway itself began to yield; it moved forward as if thrust from the inside. Around her, more of the monoliths toppled, and Polly heard the cracking of stone, glass, and metal around and below her. She looked wildly to her left and her right, watching all the time to make sure that none of the destruction might rain down upon her.
Then, a single voice rang out, as deep as the very roots of the earth. It was a voice of command, and at its words, the earthquake ceased.
Polydora swung her gaze back toward the gateway. The stone slab had been thrust forward. A crack in the center had appeared, and the slab, now in two pieces, swung outward and toward her on unseen hinges. Polydora saw blackness behind it: not emptiness, but blackness; and there was motion there, as of some monstrous convulsion in the shadows.
A form emerged from that blackness. Coppery red it appeared in the dim twilight, and the fleeting forms of the Amenta gathered toward it as blackbirds flock together. The reddish shape emerged, and Polydora saw first the horns, and then the leathery black wings and the clawed arms. She recognized this shape; it was one she had seen in paintings on earth: of demons, and of the Devil himself. She knew not what to think of such a form appearing here, on her home planet, unless….
…unless this was some universal form of evil, one transmitted by dreams and myths between all worlds and all peoples and times. But now this creature literally stood before her, stretching its clawed arms out to embrace its newfound freedom.
Then the creature’s fiery eyes turned downward and focused upon her, and the monster paused, for just a moment. Then it chuckled. The chuckle grew into laughter, and the laughter into a maniacal howl of glee. The Amenta joined their howling to that of this, the greatest of The Masters, in an unholy chorus.
And Polly stood there in dismay, quailing in the roar of the hideous din….
The Window
“Tap, tap, tap….”
Sam stirred ever so slightly from his sleep.
“Tap, tap, tap….”
At first he thought it was a bird, but then he remembered: it was pitch black outside, and other than owls, no birds should be stirring. He sat up in bed.
“Tap, tap, tap….”
Sam looked around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He noticed the faint electric glow of starlight streaming through the windowpanes onto the wooden floorboards. But there was something else there as well: something blocking the light. He couldn’t tell what it could be.
“Sam! Open the window!”
Sam rubbed his eyes. He flung aside the covers, pushed himself out of bed, and stepped toward the pool of starlight on the floor. As he approached the window, he saw a figure huddled just outside among the bushes: a dark silhouette.
“Sam, open the window. It’s cold. I need to come inside.”
He knew the voice, but he hadn’t heard it for quite a while. Was it his cousin?
Sam lived with his Uncle Charles. They shared the house in which his uncle had resided for decades. It was the house with the strange and ancient chest in the attic, the one filled with magical artifacts. The chest had been entrusted to his uncle by someone else, many years before Sam had been born. Sam had borrowed something from the chest once: a book filled with the most amazing stories. He had read it all night long. But the next morning, when he awoke, the book had vanished. It had returned, of its own accord, to the chest. That had been Sam’s first experience of magic: real magic.
Now he squinted into the darkness. It was an April morning and it had been unusually warm, but there was no warmth near the window. In fact, he thought he saw frost at the edges of the panes. But just a few inches beyond the glass, Sam could make out a pale face with eyes that reflected the light from the stars in an odd way: a spooky way.
The face appeared to be that of his older cousin; yet it was not his cousin. His cousin was overseas, he remembered. He was staying in the home of friends in Italy, where he was studying the writings of the desert fathers.
“Come on, Sam, let me in…,” whined the voice once more, and the creature continued its eerie tapping upon the windowpane, with fingernails that looked more and more to Sam like claws….
He realized that this was not some dream; nor was it something that he might ever be able to truly understand. The night was passing, but he suspected that his thinking was still not sound, and he didn’t entirely trust his natural first impulse: to help someone who appeared to be in need of shelter. “Things, and people especially, aren’t always what they appear to be,” his Uncle Charles had once told him.
He shook his head to clear it and then looked around at his bedroom. His eyes came to rest upon a small icon of St. Michael the Archangel on his bedside table. It had been given him by Father Hildebrandt when they had first.
Father Hildebrandt had looked deeply into Sam’s eyes, and had then stepped to the wall beside his desk, on which had hung this icon. He had removed it and handed it to Sam. “This may come in handy someday,” the Abbot had told him.
Sam stepped away from the window, took up the icon, and knelt with it by his bedside. He began to recite the prayer that he had learned long ago from his uncle: “O mighty prince of the heavenly hosts, St. Michael, we beg you to protect and defend us….”
As Sam continued the prayer, the tapping upon the windowpane slowed and then ceased. Soon he thought he could detect the faintest sweet scent in the air around him. What was that? Frankincense?
He completed his prayer and looked once more, with trepidation, toward the window. But there was no longer any figure huddled outside. Instead, the faintest blush of dawn was showing upon the horizon. Whatever creature had assailed him during these darkest hours of the early dawn had been vanquished.
Sam, grateful that he had been spared any greater trial, returned to his bed, and he fell into the deepest and most untroubled sleep he could ever recall having had in all of his tender years….
