EHYEH-ASHER-EHYEH (I AM THAT I AM): An Elena Duran/Corazon Negro
Vi Moreau (vmoreau@directvinternet.com)
Wed, 25 Sep 2002 12:26:50 -0400
Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh (I am that I am) 30.1/34
Julio Cesar divad72@prodigy.net.mx
Vi Moreau vmoreau@directvinternet.com
The cave's wall shattered in an explosive tremor, collapsing into rubble.
Just as more shadows entered the chamber, Zarach fled into the hole Aylon
had just created. He pressed onward. At each turn and in every corridor,
statues of forgotten Gods confronted him. He could feel the faith, corrupted
by shadow, which permeated Lilitu's lair. But Zarach wasn't a creature of
faith. He feared neither Heaven nor hell.
Zarach needed only a single opening to steal away through the darkness, but
at every turn the shadows blocked him. Though the fight was not yet lost,
neither was it won. Time and powers would eventually tell the tale.
========
Vague illumination shone from inside the tunnel, bright enough so that
Zarach could make out the stonewalls as he passed them, seeing various
pictographs and cuneiform alphabets chiseled in the walls. All of the walls
showed signs of recent sandblasting.
He ended up on a low, wide gallery that overlooked a vast cylindrical
chamber. Passages and catacombs webbed off the galley in all directions.
Zarach recognized the architecture: Sumerian. Staring out at it, seeing the
immensity of it, he remembered those days alone. The whole chamber seemed
like it had been hammered out of stone and darkest night.
Zarach watched the shadows move on the other side of the gallery, almost
getting the feeling they were alive and angry. "The Temple of the
Everlasting Night," he murmured. He stared into the mass of shadows that
filled the chamber, knowing Lilitu was near. The lichen-encrusted stonewalls
had been worn smooth over time. Too smooth. For a moment, he was disoriented
in the shadows. Loose debris rattled around him, felt like it was filled
with angles and edges. Zarach recognized the shapes as dry and brittle
bones.
Zarach had to move cautiously in the chamber. Bones slid out beneath him,
causing treacherous footing. Even when his eyes adjusted, vision remained a
problem. All he could really see clearly were the bones-skulls, ribs,
femurs, and tibiae, all of them picked clean of flesh. The bones seemed to
glow like neon in the blackness, and as he examined them he noticed some of
them had what looked like human teeth marks on them. "Bon appetite," Zarach
said sarcastically.
"Welcome, my beloved," Lilitu said in the darkness.
Zarach frowned in frustration, trying to break the fever that was burning
him up. The fury was alive in him once more, claiming his body, staking out
each new gained piece of territory from him.
"It has been a long road, has it not, my child?" Lilitu's voice asked from
the shadows. "When I think of what we had, of what you have become, what you
should have become... I guess I don't blame you after all, though. I want
you to know that. Even after all you have done. It was your human side that
made you weak. You should have listened to me eons ago."
With difficulty, Zarach focused himself, glorying in that small success.
"Say what you want, Mother," he growled. "You are going to die."
"Oh, Zarach," came the reply. "You're just so naïve. You have turned your
back to me. You're a traitor to your own race."
Despite the fever and nausea filling him, Zarach moved closer. "Come,
Mother. Come and die with me."
He continued advancing. The sense was becoming even stronger. Zarach glanced
around. Still nothing. At that he broke into a sprint, as fast as he could
move.
Lilitu was standing in front of him. She extended her sword.
Zarach leaped and tackled Lilitu, sending them both tumbling into the wall.
He spun for an instant, and then turned back, but Lilitu was gone.
Then the shadows moved forward. "Ah, crap." He was certain he knew what was
going to happen next. And he was right. A foot slammed into his face,
sending him crashing over backward.
He came up ready to fight, both his sai in front of him, using all his
heightened senses to figure out where his opponent might be lurking. The
blackness was totally black. A whisper of movement caused him to turn, just
in time to roll with another blow to the head. This time the impact sent him
crashing into the bones. This time, his wounds did not immediately heal. He
rolled again and came up, moving toward the far wall. Lilitu was nowhere to
be seen. Yet he still could sense her presence. He moved slowly, with animal
grace, turning, employing every sense. She had to breathe, so he listened.
She had a faint smell, so he let his nose guide him.
Her voice sounded far away. "Why are we fighting, my beloved? You walked
away from the light, just like me. Stand by my side, my son, my lover, and
my beloved. We could share eternity. We could rule this world. You know very
well that there can be more than one!"
"Is that so?" he needed to keep her talking. The sound of her voice could
guide him through the shadows. "What about your eternal hate?"
"My hate has a reason, my beloved. The pain of Christ nailed at the cross
was nothing compared with my suffering on being cast out of Paradise-you
know that."
"Perhaps... why don't you-" Shapes hung heavy in the air over the chamber.
Zarach sensed them, but he sensed them differently that ever before. It was
as if someone had plugged new senses into his head. Then he realized he was
standing with his back to himself so he could see his own head.
"Do you like that? The gift of bilocation, my beloved. I could give you the
power that would allow you to exist simultaneously in two places at the same
time. Just think of all I might give to you."
Zarach struggled to keep up without falling over the scattered remains and
other nameless debris that littered the cave. The darkness clung inside the
cavern, a petty, vindictive blackness that had lain undisturbed for many
centuries. It jealously guarded its secrets. It snatched at his ankles. It
battered at his hands and arms with unseen turnings. He could not see
Lilitu, but he could make out snatches of her voice, muffled, battering
against the pervasive dark.
"My beloved, you have fought worthy of recognition, but it's over. In other
circumstances, I would admire your bravery," Lilitu said with low voice,
almost chanting.
Zarach did not like the implications of that last phrase. He felt he was
being drawn inevitably down an ever-narrowing spiral. There was a presence
at the bottom of that gyre. A force gathering, rolling storm-like in its
depths.
"In a sense, you were right to betray me, my beloved... just in a sense..."
Lilitu hissed.
Zarach had heard that line before. Somewhere up ahead Lilitu's eyes
flickered green. "You are insane, Mother..."
"Again, the merely pragmatic escapes you. I am
Naamah-Zmargad-Aisling-Lillake. I am that I am."
Zarach looked at the green points of light ahead. He had to move closer.
Then he could kill her. There was power in him still, but it no longer
flowed along his soul in the traditional way that nature had given him
twelve millennia before. He was tired. He was a false image. He could not
keep the note of bitterness from his voice. "You started all, Mother. You
forced Methos to start the Game... you forced him to create the Watchers!"
"It was necessary," Lilitu said. Suddenly, her eyes disappeared in the
darkness.
The statement caught Zarach off guard. "Necessary for what? This is not our
world! We exist just to be witness of humankind."
Lilitu replied in a hushed tone. "You are wrong, my beloved. We are Gods,
and the Watchers failed to note anything out of the ordinary."
Zarach was acutely aware that he had come to the still point, the very
center of the downward spiral. He could feel the weight of mountains looming
above him. "You caught me unaware once, Mother. I am not about to be so
outmaneuvered again." He forced down the unsettling thought of tons of rock
poised above him and defiantly plunged forward striking into the cavern,
moving directly toward the source of the sin. The darkness seemed to resist
his every step.
"Yes," Lilitu's voice was almost a purr of satisfaction. "Not exactly
fiddling while Rome burned, but I think you are on the mark, my beloved."
The darkness Zarach in which struggled was thicker than mere air. Seconds
passed as the syllables fought their way across the intervening distance. He
could not let that monstrous being go unchallenged. He knew he must kill
her, else all was lost. In the final reckoning, it was not, however, the
need to fight against the injustice of so many deaths that drove him, nor
any compulsion to condemn the brutality of them. Nor was it the reflex to
defend himself, to rationalize his own failures. No, the need that drove
Zarach to fight was something more humble and less noble. His fight was his
only means of clinging to that tenuous lifeline of eons that connected the
two antagonists. That bond was all that kept each of them from being
isolated, swept away, lost amidst the rising dark of time.
"Damn you, Mother! Damn you to hell!" Zarach's voice shook. "Just a Game?
The new Goddess? We are Immortals! Nothing more! We are not supposed to eat
our young! That was one of the few points on which the laws of God, man and
the Ancient Gathering all agreed. Now I see each of them reserved a special
dark hole for monsters like you!"
Lilitu's voice was unruffled. "Quite the contrary, my beloved. It was I who
taught men to live," her tone became contemplative. "It is perhaps ironic,
because now I am going to destroy them, do you not agree?"
"Destroy them? A moment ago you said we could rule the world, you and I!"
Zarach closed his eyes, listening to her words against the callous litany of
crimes. He plodded steadily forward, counting off the precise number of
paces between him and retribution.
"What I did not expect," Lilitu's voice thrummed along the umbilical
passage, "was such unexpected promise, such wasted potential. I am talking
about the way so few Immortals nowadays have the necessary prudence to
ensure that their gifts have the opportunity to mature and develop. It is
one of the signs of the decline of our race."
Zarach had more than a passing familiarity with death. The mere mention of
that word conjured up a wave of unwelcome thoughts. He felt rather than
heard Lilitu's words. A vibration transmitted along the ghost-vein, the
trailing strand of life that bound them.
"Come now, my beloved, we are one. There are many who might envy you such
gift. Tell me, did you lose heart after twelve millennia?" Lilitu asked
distractedly.
Zarach spoke slowly and deliberately. "All the words that have passed
between you and me to this point are nothing. The empty exhalations of the
grave. The muttering of the wind through two exhumed skulls. It is time to
loose what has been bound. It is time for this nightmare to end."
A feeling of vertigo crashed over Zarach. His eyes refused to focus. Ghost
images flickered in the periphery. Ancient verses and snatches of song
hopelessly intermingled into a uniform muttering, pitched just below the
range of his hearing. It was as if two competing words vied for his
attention.
"The Quickening and Life," Lilitu prompted.
Zarach recoiled from her. Staggering backward, he caught the sudden
impression of something vast rising up behind him. He spun. Something dark
brooded over the cave-an ancient and unappeasable anger than refused to be
contained within the cramped confines of the cavern. It rose head and
shoulders above the crypts, ignoring the protest of intervening walls and
ceilings. Zarach caught a momentary glimpse of an immense rough-hewn idol,
the cool black stone of its feet worn to a perfect smoothness by the passage
of centuries of blood.
"I had hoped you would come freely to me, my beloved. But you were taking
such an awful time I feared I would have to fall back upon the contingency
plan. No matter, I have completed all of the preparations. All that remains
is for you to speak the words," Lilitu said.
Zarach tried to fight off the sudden ambush of the mythical, he tried to
cling to the real. He opened his eyes. "This is what it all comes down to,
then, isn't it? All the lies, the betrayals, the murders. It was never about
revenge!"
"You only have to believe," Lilitu coaxed. "Then all this wouldn't matter
anymore, my beloved. Say the words."
"I am your accuser, Mother, not your redeemer. Can you not hear my voice? I
clamor for your head," Zarach's voice rumbled through the cavern. The
ancient walls rang with his authority. "I am here to kill the kin-slaying.
May God have mercy upon the quick and the dead. Come, Mother, it is time to
go home. The nightmare is over for you now."
Lilitu laughed like a dark angel. For a brief moment, she appeared in the
darkness.
Zarach watched the unthinkable, trying to avoid the piercing truth. He felt
the icy weight of a feeling of dread clutching at him.
"Look at me, my beloved! Behold the miracle of Lilitu, the new Goddess,
giver and taker of life!"