NationStates Jolt Archive

The Ladder of Heaven bridges earth and sky, lightning frozen in the moment of leaping into the world of gross matter. That this should be is surely inexplicable, a sign of divine grace; Fulminir, where the Ladder touches earth, is the holiest site of Elerism, a faith rife with holy sites. Every Eleri, every spirit of water, earth, and sky, has its own temple or shrine, with its own god's-gate, humble or high, through which to pass; and every godsgate faces the Ladder of Heaven itself, no matter how distant.

The Temple at Fulminir itself stands in a ring of gates, divided from the world outside, a space in which only priests or Eleri may walk. Like the Ladder of Heaven, the Temple is a liminal space, between worlds. Here, at the axis of the world of matter, the walls between them are weak. Gods and demons climb down the Ladder, ghosts and mages climb up … and sometimes other things walk in, sideways from the places where things are different.

The priests of Fulminir are cautious, of course - as they must be – and ever watchful for such incursions from the Beyond. Fulminir's walls are carved with wrathful spirits and vigilant cat-ghosts within and without; they coil on tapestries and peer from lintels, and even the nails of the window-panes bear their faces on their heads. Eleri and spirits (who are beloved of cats, for they alone of mortal races can see the gods) pass freely under their watch; the ghosts of the dead are granted passage along the proper approaches to the Ladder of Heaven; but demons and the things Beyond may not pass. They are hunted and imprisoned in iron bottles, to await the day the Ladder breaks and the world itself ceases to turn. Upon that day they shall escape, and ride roughshod over the earth unhindered; but that day has not come yet, and will not come for a great many years yet.

The sockets of the broken standing stones are black voids in the moonlight. Ryth pauses as she passes them; she glances down and sees, yes, the yellowed bones of the sacrifices who have kept this place sacrosanct since the building of the world. Their ghosts are powerless now, their graves as empty as the pits of broken teeth, and the stones that were the teeth of the Eleri are broken and scattered on the moor.

This place is open now, the liminal spaces yawning wide to accept whatever god or ghost or Thing Beyond may come. All they lack is a structure, a path to tread, and that is easy to provide. Within the ring of pits Ryth clenches her fist, grits her teeth, and the broken pillars lift from the heath, shifting according to her Will. Until tonight she has not used this power since she was very young, has been a good little Elerist. But the gods will not help her now, and so she has broken all their bonds. Not to use the Will is a small law to break, against the stones she has broken from their places.

One stone, and two before her, to provide the uprights; a third, across them, to provide the lintel. That is a gate sturdy enough for any spirit to pass through, and no matter if the faces of the violated ghosts scream at her from the carvings on the stones. The way is open now, come what will. Ryth steps forward, to step through the godsgate and usher them in … and pauses on the threshold, steps back. Perhaps …

Perhaps there is another way to grasp her vengeance, to exercise her hate? No. The Eleri will not help, the mortal authorities cannot; and so there is only one way left to turn. But a godsgate stands astride the paths leading to the Ladder of Heaven; its doors lead to the space where ghosts and Eleri dwell. To cross the abyss between this world and the one beyond, one needs not a gate, but a bridge. One must turn sideways, scrabble up the moss-encrusted carvings of the warden ghosts to stand upon the lintel … and now the gate is a bridge, the shadows beneath it a fair approximation of the abyss; its far end, planted here in the liminal spaces, reaching into the Beyond.

Ryth removes her clothes one by one, tossing them aside to flutter into the dark, until she stands naked upon the bridge of worlds. In the oldest times, when the Ilune first raised godsgates of stone to usher in the Eleri, to beg their protection from the Beyond, they would make their prayers naked, in abject supplication. It is fitting that now, to usher in the Beyond, Ryth should mirror that. Perhaps those who wait Beyond will find it fitting.

But abject supplication does not come easily to her. “I have broken down the wards!” she shouts, and the rising wind whips away her words. “The way is open! Come out to me!”

Nothing comes, and the wind is cold and empty upon her bare skin. “Come,” she whispers, hissing it between clenched teeth. “Please.”

The wind howls with the angry Eleri riding it, and the shadows lengthen and flicker as if the full moon that cast them were no more constant than firelight; and something answers. It drapes itself over her skin, it presses itself against her lips and is swallowed down. It fills her, she brims with it and flows over, spilling darkness into the night, unlight blacker than midnight, iridescent as an oil slick, all the colours of a bruise; a hole burned into the fabric of the world.

She is hollowed by it, feels her soul open and empty out all its mortal detritus, wider than worlds. She is harrowed by it, her mind raked over, her self condensed into a tiny spark floating in a sea of night, hard and bright as diamonds. She is hallowed by it, the power sparking from her fingers and in her eyes, vaster than the universe.

“Go now,” it whispers – or she whispers – or is there any difference now? “Go now, mine avatar. Go now and be free, as you have freed me. I release you.”

The wind is very cold, and the night is very dark; the moon is hidden by clouds. Is she any different at all, save the soul-deep ache in her gut, in her heart? It could have been imagination, some hallucination brought on by blasphemy and rage. But no; the shadows twist and flicker at her fingertips, the unlight still burns in her eyes.

Ryth wraps the night about her as a cloak, tastes the blood of the world on her tongue, and knows that all spaces are one space, on this side of the bridge, on the mortal side of the gates; matter is linked to matter by consanguinity as well as gravity. To step from here to there is as simple as stepping off the bridge.

The lights of Irminsul are suddenly bright after the moonlight of the moors; she blinks, regarding her location, seeing the quiet streets, the parked cars, the curtained houses. Yes. Here. Her hands curl into fists, her teeth grit together. Now for the vengeance that gods and man deny her.

Here a house she knows (too well!), a door painted in godsgate red (and that, she knows, is a substitute for the more vital red they one painted upon the gates, hot and steaming, fresh from the sacrifices). She steps up and knocks, waits for the door to be opened. As if she were civilized, as if she had not just committed an act of blasphemy fit to array all the Eleri and all the dead against her.

It swings open at last, behind it a young man; short, broadshouldered, heavy of brow. It amazes her, distantly, that she ever thought him handsome, ever thought him more than the neanderthal he resembles. Well, she has seen clearly enough the rot within him tonight; and he will not see tomorrow.

“Ryth!” he grins, as if young women show up naked on his doorstep every night. “Come back for more?” he grabs at his crotch, and his grin becomes a leer. She spits, and blood splatters his feet – when did she bite her tongue?

“You are an animal,” she tells him, and her hands twitch, spread into claws, contract back into fists.

“We're all animals,” he replies, still grinning, puerile. “I knew you liked it.”

“You are an animal, Runir,” she screams at him, “And I am going to kill you like an animal! I am going to rip your fucking guts out, you subhuman sack of shit!”

“Whoa, bitch, fuck you!” His fist is swinging (slowly, so slowly) and she knocks it aside, sees his eyes widen in alarm. She certainly hadn't been able to do that earlier tonight! She hadn't been able to call up the unlight earlier tonight, either, but she does so now. Runir is slammed into the ceiling, is dropped, lies blinking on his floor, wiping the blood from his mouth with one meaty hand.

“Get up!” Ryth yells, and he pulls himself to his knees. Too slow! She hauls him upright – the Will requires concentration, calm, or surely she would have used it earlier, but now, with the inhuman cold of the Beyond running in her veins, it requires no thought at all. The unlight pushes into him, fills the hollow spaces of his body, gut and lungs and throat, and he hangs on a chord of her power like a fish on a line. Ryth feels her power inside him, taut and humming. Very much indeed like a fish on a line.

Runir is gurgling words – Eleri, she hears, and save, and please. But Ryth said much the same, when she was on the other side of that equation, and there will be no salvation forthcoming. Not from the Eleri, and not from her. She turns her hand, and Runir jerks on the line as the unlight rips out of him, taking with it blood and entrails and all the unidentifiable meaty things of his body. She is splattered with him (twice in one night, that, she thinks, the blackest of humour) and the door behind her is splattered with him. Ryth scowls, lets his carcass fall, and wipes his ejecta from her face (again). It was over much too soon (and did he think that, earlier in the night? I am not him.).

“Thou hast violated our law.” No neighbour that, with so archaic a dialect. She turns and sees that the door is open now, that the young man in the doorway bears a spear taller than himself, a line of incandescent light bright as lightning, as bright as his skin. The lintel is splattered with human blood, the oldest of sacraments, and perhaps Runir's pleading was the oldest and most abject of prayers. The Eleri – Actiros, Lance-Lord, He Who Wields The Lightning – is more beautiful than his statues, even with his face in an expression far more thunderous than the faint smile common to those idols.

“What the fuck is this?” she yells at the god. “You didn't come for me, but you come for him? For him?”

“The way was not open then. The way is open now.” Actiros' face seems suddenly sorrowful, and weary, and his eyes far older than his youthful face. Ryth doesn't know whether he means the bridge she built from broken wardstones or the gate made with Runir's blood. She decides that she does not care – it is the failure of the Eleri that drove her to this extreme.

“Fuck that! There's a godsgate in every temple and shrine in the city, you could have gone through any one of them!”

“But the law has been broken now. There must be punishment.”

“Yes! Precisely! Why the fuck do you think I did this? I'm not some fucking murderer-for-the-fun-of-it!”

“Hatred. Rage. Vengeance. These things are not the law.”

“The law? The law told me they were too fucking busy! The law has all its officers occupied with a riot over at Crowfield!”

“I am not the One God of the Jehovites; the failings of mortals are not my concern. But I am sorry.” His lance moves (fast, so fast!) and pierces her with all the force of a thunderbolt. It pushes through flesh and bone and into the open spaces of her soul. Ryth gasps and jerks, transfixed, and feels the terrible fire of Actiros' will burn through the Beyond-widened hollowness of her. His lightning forks through her mind, striking sparks against her self which glimmer and burn in the darkness. The dark spaces of her are full of light.

She reaches up to grasp the lance transfixing her, light piercing down from Heaven as the unlight struck her sideways from the Beyond. She falls to her knees, to the floor. Runir's carcass is not so far away, lying sprawled just like her.

Actiros steps forward, wrenches the lance from her flesh. She is left empty but his fire remains, warring with the darkness. “Rise,” he tells her, and Ryth climbs to her knees – too slow, and he draws her to her feet with a hand as hot and hard and terrible as his lightning. Surely she should be dead – but where the spear pierced her flesh the skin is smooth, unmarked.

“Look at me.” It is hard to look at Actiros in his anger, his eyes as fierce as every other part of him. “Know this; I cannot end you, lawbreaker and defiler that you are, for your soul is greater and darker than any mortal soul should be. But for all darkness, there must be a light. And every light must cast a shadow. Ladder and Bridge are crossed within you, as they should not be; you make unstable the division of Heaven and Beyond. You are a fulcrum, a wound in the world more terrible than the Ladder which I wrought.

“You will do terrible things … but great things also, and in that you are not so different from humanity. I bid you to this task only; be mindful always of what you do.”

With that the Eleri is gone, leaving his Lance is left behind. Surely he has many others, one for every lightning bolt in the storms of the world. Ryth reaches out to grasp it, and finds that it does not burn her hands, and although its heat and fury is intense, it warms her. She feels no pain at all, nor hollowness within her.

Runir is still dead, of course. His dead face stares at her accusingly, his mouth open slightly in an expression of fishlike disbelief. His crime was terrible, and her vengeance worse, but she can muster no anger towards him now; the bruises he gave her are gone, mental and physical. She is a murderer now, though, and that remains. Iluminaria's perpetually underfunded, chronically overworked police force will probably be unable to catch her, but the Eleri can always find her, and have seemingly delivered their judgement; be mindful always. How does it change one, to kill a man? Amid the great changes wrought by Heaven and Beyond, Ryth can find no smaller ones in her mind, in her soul. I am a murderer fills her with neither terror nor joy but merely a species of acceptance.

Be mindful always. She has left a bridge straddling the abyss separating this world from the Beyond, a way across which who knows what terrors may have passed. The first Elerists sacrificed their kin to hold the liminal spaces shut; it is needful that the bridge be destroyed.

To step from here to there is as simple as stepping through the doorway. She stands beneath the bridge, in its shadow. Grits her teeth, clenches her fist, and pushes with her mind. The stones – or the ghosts carved into them, there is little difference – groan and scream and topple, pounding furrows in the heath where they fall. The bridge is broken, the way is shut, and the night is still.

The visitor's carpark with its informative placards is over there, the road beyond it stretching out to Irminsul and points further south. Swinging the Lance of Heaven against her shoulder, Ryth begins to walk.