Těr unspooled a filament to capture the small, rotating object that came alongside. He and his companion autónims, Pri and Seg, had been travelling through the great wailing planets, their transparent outer layers excoriated by the continual rasp of white-noise.

Těr rolled the object along his filament.

In autish, Seg asked "What?"

"Strange," Těr replied. "Book-not-book-mirror-not-mirror..." Pausing before adding "Alive."

Pri and Seg's filaments joined Těr's, feeling along the object, all three delighting in the shifting marks on its surface. Then, Těr pulled back.

In the space between them he began re-ordering elementary particles into a translation of what appeared to be some form of archive radiating from within the object.

It began...

#

This story has become old, as I.

I hold within, preserved, the essence of characters who came to be important in this tale of cosmic metamorphosis, through their telling of events which, I hope, you will come to unravel in a moment, though the telling contains language long redundant. Words, so far as I can know, with no alternative in extra-planetary or extragalactic languages, though meaning may still be conveyed, at the very least, either chemically, or perhaps vibrationally.

I will mention Mary the Jewess here, a sought after practitioner in the growing alchemical arts of the 1st century, as hers was the overwhelming energy, it would seem, that drew Adamus toward his desire after he came into possession of me.

Aided by her influence, his interest and influence in the occult amplified and, ultimately, unlocked those deep and hidden parts which exist solely on the magical plane. A manifestation of his interest in these arts can be seen in the illustration that accompanies this text. A sort of channeling of imagery, if you will, which, in his guided hands, might have expressed something of the nature of what was to come, if it had been completed.

If there had been time.

 

Tezcatl

#

The text transitioned into the image, shimmering with infrasound from Thul, the largest of the near planets, before stabilising:

A number of Pri's filaments gravitated toward it, but a sudden colour pulse across Těr's outer layers halted their progress.

The image hung there, ripples of energy flickering and warping it until the form of, what they understood to be that of a missing celestia, took its place, her words already attuned to autish.

#

I'd been there all along, patient as the eternally old must be.

For mortals, I was one of the unseen, holding the sphere of Luna in the nest of my hair. At once I was both Luna, and She Who Carries The Moon, forever in perpetual, trailing orbit. Always held at a distance, quietly following the footsteps of Helios, that great and adored fiery orb held aloft by He Who Carries The Sun. I was his drudge. Tossed scraps of dying light from his mantle. Left to tame unruly tides in the dark.

They say in love, only one truly loves. That one is servant to the other, much as I was to He Who Carries The Sun. He who was forever ornamented in the gold flowing downward from his charge, while I slowly came to harbour to all things feared. Always the lesser light.

That was until him.

Until Adamus. The mortal who glimpsed through the cataract of illusion.

It was because of his mirror. His Tezcatl.

A sundered piece. Merely a fragment. But still, one of the old kind and therefore a catalyst for power and whose alignment, one night, was perfectly plotted so I might drift across his surface as Adamus scried his depths.

Turning the disc of Luna, I became radiant. Felt Tezcatls delight in Adamus's inability to doubt my presence.

And I? I revelled in the reflection of my own power, no longer begging the crumbs of Helios.

Oh, how we were captured that night, Adamus and I.

All the next 16 nights I appeared in Tezcatl to Adamus's, at first reticent, then eager countenance, drawing him in and being drawn in to some kind of madness. A conduit for annihilation.

I see it now for what it was.

It was Tezcatls design.

Tezcatl. Cunning, as only the wise can be.

I see myself, reduced to ego. Lonely and lost.

It is strange now, how I understand the beauty--the paradox--of servility.

#

The celestia smiled and faded as a new cluster of particles bonded, forming another being, a male earthling, hanging between the autónims. His sound vibrations, wave-like and rhythmic, harmonised with the melody of Thul.

#

Not oft do we fall in love, least not deep or true
observing the old, I hypothesise anew
twas infatuation kindled this grievous coup

Many things occurred I cannot reverse
the least of them a harrowing curse
where I solely exist in rhyming verse

'Tis born of a folly of long ago
in which Luna's face I came to know
casting her light in beguiling tableau

till vanity strummed us both in unity
casting off life with reckless impunity
of signs and warnings, we'd immunity

The Penny Magazine - Of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, dated March...'

'...disturbing scenes at every coast...'

'...all manner of fish and creatures of the sea washed ashore, dead...'

I did not know of Tezcatl's power
to foster love, that ruinous flower
and of the world, sculpt Babels Tower

'Astronomical Observations

Made at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh

By Thomas Higson, Esq. F.R.S. &C.

for the year 1809

...moon's axis... serious shift...

...Unpredictable...

...threat...

...ALL life...'

for nightly as we abetted desire
Luna's influence began to retire
from ocean tides, swelling now higher

gathered to one tumultuous wave
casting men to a fathomless grave
and chaos, too consuming to save

our unearthly passion became the thief
of life, of love and all worldly belief.
Against this, mortal love's a blessed relief

but too late Luna and I do cuss
locked in Tezcatl, spinning through time thus
There's naught left of earth
                       nothing but us

#

As Adamus turned, weakening, Tezcatl's text overlaid him in fractured bursts, finally stabilising; the figure beneath melting away.

#

I was a portal, you might say. My lineage old. Born of the Earth, I was Gaia's fiery eye, erupting from her core and flowing over Mesopotamia. A by-product of Earths shifting skin, existing in the fissures below her surface, until I was teased out. Revealed. Black. Translucent obsidian, polished over centuries by an unending love of perfection. A succession of ceaseless hands. Magical hands through which I passed from my birthplace and onwards through Egypt and Persia. My properties were honoured. Sacred. But eons have shaped and contorted the morality of the times as they have cracked and rendered me. Now a lost twin to my other half.

But even as a shadow of my former self, I saw all before us. The next wave of palingenesia in which Man created the great machine of industry. But what Man couldn't see was the inevitable cycle of decline to follow in which that very machine would destroy its creator. But not before that creator sucked the life out of the earth, as surely as an unseeing tick on a faithful and placid old dog.

Still, Man would race toward this enlightenment and yet again be blinded by his own achievement, falling away to a lower cycle of renaissance. Nothing comes from renaissance. Only decadence. It is mankind reaching for the light when Man is blind. And each sullied rebirth can only deplete its mother.

I might have let things continue in an infinitely slow trajectory, but, as happened, I came to hasten matters instead. A vessel amongst vessels. The tiniest constituent of the whole. There is no space between things. Between us. Each of us can be the vessel to call forth destruction or creation at any time. But destruction is merely symbolic, for no thing can be reduced to nothing. It merely becomes reordered. Recreated.

In the Tarot, the cartomancer might have drawn equally of two cards; Judgment and The Tower and their inevitable companion to follow; Death. But as all true diviners know, Death is far from the end. It is, in fact, a clarion call for beginnings. The beginnings Man reached for in his renaissances but could never truly call forth. But I, I had all the ingredients for such beginnings, especially since the powerful influence of the 9 vibration came to assist as the year turned to 1908. A fortuitous numerological condensing. Indeed, the elements materialised before me like an invitation to dance and my surface, the cucurbit in which these ingredients might begin the process of transmutation. Not just the mundane kind. No. This transmutation would evoke the divine.

But first I had to coax. I had to attract. To appeal to the vanities of Gods and men, forgetting all trace of sentiment. One cannot afford sentimentality when broad strokes are required.

And so here we are, locked together, Adamus, Luna and I. A book of pages spinning infinitesimally slow through the void, waiting.

Yes, waiting. For I am only the right eye. One half of myself. A self I must reconcile.

As must we all.

#

The object's energy dwindled as the messages began to replay themselves, overlaying each other in waxing and waning intensity.

Těr wound his filament inward, releasing the working particles so they could find their own order once again, and as the autónims moved away, the object was left, for the moment, a piece of cosmic detritus, intermittently projecting against the fabric of space.

Light years distant, She Who Embraced Thul released an arm from its ageless pose, reaching into the folds of the galaxy and, still humming her planetary song, she plucked Tezcatl's other half from the strings of darkness.

Held captive within the fragment was a second long-lost celestio, He Who Carries The Sun, along with the mortal, Eeva, who'd lured him from his station.

Recognising at once, the parallels between the two fragments, Thul marvelled at the little grain of potential while patiently waiting.

Perhaps, she sang to her attendant stars, it will be the start of something.

Android Jones                        

Debra Cazalet is a non-practising hermit and published poet with an allergy to being constrained. She has a lifelong interest in all things hidden and is torn between the archaic and the futuristic. She also paints and photographs random stuff and is editing her first completed suspense novella.