Lucifer's Odyssey

  ***

  Lucifer’s boots echoed against the dungeon’s stone walls as the prison guards carried him down the corridors. They stripped his gear at the armory and shoved him down the hallway. The last time Lucifer was here, he’d been waiting for the death of his parents.

  A third guard joined them and walked ahead of the others.

  “In here,” he said.

  The guards pushed Lucifer hard in the back, and he blundered into his cell. He tripped over the stiff mattress and crashed into the wooden table. He groped in the darkness for the bed.

  “The great prophet can’t see three feet in front of him,” one of the guards said, drawing laughter from the others.

  As the footsteps of the guards left the cell, Lucifer found the bed and pulled himself onto it. He ran his hands through his short, stubbly hair.

  Apparently, not all of the guards had left.

  “Tomorrow,” the man in the room said. “I’ll return to this cell and collect your arm.”

  Lucifer sighed. “King’s orders, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Garion.”

  “Until tomorrow, Garion,” Lucifer said.

  The door shut behind Garion, and the lock rammed into place. Lucifer ignored the pain in his eye sockets and thought about the executioner cutting off his arm instead. He folded his hands across his face and screamed and cursed as bright color filled his periphery.

  “Quiet down in there, Prophet!” a guard yelled from outside the door.

  The yellowish light that came when he pressed his arms against his face left outlines as it dissipated. He looked to his left and saw the table he had run into when the guards pushed him into the cell. Beside that was a chair. He could even see luminous cracks in the far wall.

  Welcome to your new vision, the pattern said.

  Lucifer sat up. “How is this possible?”

  Do you believe what the oracles see is true?

  “Is this what the oracles see?”

  The oracles see a stream of time. Blinding themselves helps them focus on their gifts. Blinding you has allowed me to give you a stream into something else.

  “And what’s that?”

  The building blocks of the Chaos projection.

  The outlines vanished and darkness engulfed his vision once again. He pressed his hands into his eye sockets and winced as his nerves tingled with fresh pain across his body.

  The acute yellow light came back and gradually disappeared into outlines. He grabbed a table leg and pulled himself to his feet. He watched the table as a shimmer of lines and small glyphs moved across the surface of the wood.

  “What just happened?”

  The texture changed. Watch the chair. It should be happening there soon.

  Sure enough, the shimmer whispered across the seat. The pattern of lines and symbols changed like a wave altering sand dunes on a beach.

  “Fascinating,” Lucifer said.

  “Hey,” the guard outside yelled. “Am I going to have to come in there?”

  “No, no,” Lucifer said. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet.”

  “Damned right, you will!”

  Lucifer walked up to the wall and ran his hand along the cracks. The symbols, letters, and glowing lines broke all along the tear.

  “What good does any of this do me?” Lucifer asked in a whisper.

  Not even Batarel sees the world this way. Jehovah sees the universes as an oracle might—in streams of time. Both of them understand the theory of the lines and numbers, but only you can see them. Eventually, you will manipulate them.

  “You mean I can change them?”

  You’ll never know until you try.

  Lucifer traced the crack with a finger and observed as the symbols bent toward him. He tried running his finger against the grain, but the symbols behaved similarly. No changes. Just faint genuflections, like light bending around a glass of water or a planet in space.

  If you wanted to physically change the wall with your hands, you’d probably be better off replacing the bricks of this wall with identical bricks.

  “I don’t have any bricks,” Lucifer said. He waited for a response but none came. “How am I going to replace the missing pieces of brick if I don’t have any bricks?”

  The bricks are made of the foundations you see before you. If there are pieces of the foundations missing, then simply fill them in.

  “I don’t understand,” Lucifer said.

  He waited for more guidance, but the pattern was silent. When the outlines vanished again, he grew woozy. Time for more pain.

  He groped around for the chair and sat down. He wiped the sweat from his lip and brow and massaged his temples before finally bringing himself to press his seared eyes.

  He banged the table with his fist and bit his bicep. The guard didn’t yell at him, so it must have been quiet enough this time. Maybe he just didn’t like Lucifer talking. Groaning in pain was probably more appropriate to the sadistic guard.

  Lucifer looked at the table and watched for another change wave. This time he put his finger down and watched as the wave crossed the table. It bent toward his finger as it passed, but the new wooden symbols were unaffected by his finger being there.

  He focused on one of the blurry, glowing horizontal lines underneath the table surface and asked it to be vertical. “Change, please.”

  The line remained undisturbed.

  Don’t ask it to change, the pattern said. Command it to change.

  Lucifer looked at the line and willed it to change to vertical. However, the line would not budge.

  Stop seeing it as horizontal. Imagine it as vertical, and it will be so.

  Instead of looking at the table for what it was, Lucifer imagined that the table had the vertical line he wanted in it. He could no longer see the horizontal line.

  “How do I know if it worked?”

  Another wave of symbol changes swept across the table, and a completely different symbol filled the position instead. Lucifer felt the surface of the table. It seemed tougher than earlier, but it was still wooden.

  Changing a table into something else takes more than just modifying a single atom. Try filling in the cracks in the wall again.

  Lucifer moved to the wall and ran his hand along the crack.

  Don’t focus on the symbols and breaks in the patterns that make up the crack. Focus on what you would like to fill it with instead.

  Lucifer nodded and stared at the unbroken sections of brick next to the crack. He then looked at the crack and imagined he was looking at the unblemished brick. Eventually, he was unable to see the crack at all.

  He backed away from the wall as the darkness came back to him. He pushed his hands into the remnants of his eyes and waited for the pain and brightness to die down. The crack in the brick was gone.

  Miracle number two, the pattern said. Now fill all the cracks in the room.