“These two have already had their fill of years. Now they merely take up space and resources. Their time is gone. Offer them to the Wolf God. He will accept them from you. Offer us the weak, Bartholomew, and be forgiven your transgression. Once you have chosen, you will not even be required to watch; you can go with a clean conscience.”
“I acknowledge no transgression on my part against your god.”
“None can lay eyes upon the face of God and not pay a price.”
Coarse brown hair began sprouting all over Izani’s face, and, very subtly, his nose and mouth morphed into a snout. “Choose!” he growled.
This was the moment he had been waiting for, and dreading, the moment Anthony had worked so hard to prepare him for, ever since he had drank from the pool of Saevus.
Three
“It won’t kill you,” said Anthony. “However, if you hold too firmly unto your beliefs, it can drive you insane. The world, the Universe, existence itself is far greater than our conceit wishes to allow. Those who believe they possess absolute knowledge—The Truth in the popular vernacular—are oftentimes driven mad by what they see, by what their senses tell them is real but the ephemera of their convictions, where they have attached a disproportionate amount of their emotional well-being, tells them cannot be real. It is our fears and insecurities, coupled with our vanity, that truly drive us mad.” Anthony’s face assumed a look of wounded vanity and despair, and he said, “Oh, the world isn’t the same as my mind believes—even though I’ve invested little effort in actually discovering how the world is—I can’t go on, I can’t go on. Now that I realize life does not cater to me and refuses to conform to my narrow views, life has no meaning. Woe is me.”
Anthony smiled, which multiplied the myriad of wrinkles adorning his face. He focused his grey eyes on Bart. “Forgive me my rant. You, of course, would not be here if I suspected you of being small-minded. Nevertheless, I do need to make certain you’re ready for this, that you’re sure you want to do this. The pool of Saevus will not give you a vision, not in the way you might imagine. It will truly take you to another world. Some of these worlds are far better than ours, but many are worse. There is a Demon World, too. It is very dangerous. Demons are always trying to cross over into our reality. When we take the drink of Saevus, we always pass through the Demon World, sometimes for just a brief moment, but other times it is the entirety of the trip. This is your first time, and you’ve yet to learn how to impose your will on the voyage; you will land in the Demon World. I know this will happen because of my own vision, my trip. I saw three monstrous demons who called themselves gods. Who knows, perhaps they are gods—who’s to say what a god is? One of these terrible Demon-Gods had launched a direct assault, in force, against a world called Piltane; thousands of demons poured into it. Piltane is a world of courage, and I hope it will survive. It is a much more powerful world than our own. If one of these Demon-Gods has shifted its gaze towards us…” Anthony passed a wrinkly hand over his brow. “They will try to enter our world, Bart. We must stop them. This is our calling, Bart, to protect our world from something worse than ourselves.” He chuckled.
Bart thought about what the old man was saying, and had to admit to himself how insane it sounded. The man spoke with such conviction, however, it was nearly impossible not to take him seriously. Still, what he spoke of was incredible, almost impossible. And what was in that drink, anyway? Was he allowing himself to be drugged with a hallucinogenic, manipulated by an intense emotional experience meant to bypass thought and reason?
“There is no shame in stopping here,” said Anthony. “Not everyone can assume this mission; for some it is a burden. And if it feels like a burden it must never be done. Are you sure you wish to undertake this?”
“I gave up my life to be here, old man.”
“You have not given up anything. You are still too young to understand that in life everything requires devotion, and that to which we are devoted is not a sacrifice but a privilege. If you truly believe you have made a sacrifice being here, perhaps you should return to your former life.”
“Don’t be an ass, old man. You know what I mean.”
“I know that words have meaning, and how we use them is important, for whether we realize it or not, the words we use reveal our heart. I can see that your decision chafes at you. I do understand. You are part of this modern Western Culture of self-indulgence, so even when the abysmal emptiness of today assaults you, you cannot let go of the ethics of self-gratification. However, Bart, to walk our path—you need to understand this—demands devotion, and devotion is a form of love. Where there is love, there are no sacrifices. If what we love is worthy, the price we pay for it is fair. If it feels like a sacrifice, the price is too high.”
“I loved Selena Dunning.”
“Not really.”
“Excuse me?”
“Romantic love truly is the death of love. It is nothing more than a state of euphoria caused by the breeding instinct, by hormones. It exists for a few moments, and is then gone. What remains are feelings of dissatisfaction and regret. People ask themselves: Is this all there is to life? And they try to fool themselves into believing they are happy. This is so because this type of love is available to everyone. It is cheap. It does not require any effort, and is available to both the good and the bad. Love, in the modern understanding, is something you fall into—like a pit—and not something you accomplish. Yet, and I find this so interesting, everything that makes life worth living has to be earned.”
“Love is earned.”
“Is it, now? Come, come, Bart, you should really know better than that. We first fall in love when we’re teenagers, and it does not require any effort on our part. Forgive me my insensitivity, I am an old man from a different era, but it seems to me that even yokels fall in love.”
“You sound like an elitist.”
“Ah, yes, the modern bogeyman. Elitism now denotes anyone willing to make a mental and spiritual effort to be something other than just a barking dog, as if only those things available to everyone have any value. No, my friend, I am old enough to remember the ravages of a true privileged elite, people whose power was granted to them by birth; and, yes, the old aristocracies were a bane upon the earth, but this modern, entitled populism strikes me as something, while not quite as obvious, much more insidious, for it is an abdication of the possibility of being human.”
“What do you mean?”
“The possibility of becoming human is open to all, but we are not human. We are cattle for the gods. They feed off our psychic energy, our malevolence—hatred, rage, resentment, bitterness, deceit, fear, insecurity, and suffering. Yet this does not satisfy them; they want more. They want us to be eternal so that our suffering and hatred will, also, be eternal. To cross over into our reality and transform our world into a wasteland of misery is what they want. We who have become aware of this have vowed to stop it because we have seen what these so-called gods have done to other worlds, worlds that were at one time beautiful. We defeat these gods by becoming human. They retreat when this happens. Our willingness to hold ourselves to a high standard is what makes us human, Bart. What is easy animalizes us. Make your choice, boy; drink or not.”
Bart walked up to the pool, which was really a stone fountain in the shape of a curvilinear triangle. He wondered why Anthony called it a pool. He looked around for a container, spotted a wooden cup on a table to the left of the fountain, walked over to it, took the cup, looked inside of it, turned it upside down, gave it a few pats on the bottom, and then dipped it into the fountain.
The liquid inside the fountain entered the submerged cup slowly, as if reluctantly. He raised it to his lips, took a deep breath. He thought he smelled something akin to pumpkin mixed with rust, copper rust. Once you drink this, he told himself, there is no going back. Did he really want this? Were all the sacrifices—yes, sacrifices—really worth it? What was the meaning of life, anyway? He chuckled at this last, and drained the cup in one gulp.
&n
bsp; The meaning of life is the superlative, he thought. That one intense experience, intense moment, for whose sake all of life, with its misery and despair, is justified. For him it all came down to a simple question: What does it mean to live a life worth living?
He had always wondered what would happen if God granted him eternal life; could he imagine something so beautiful, so wonderful, that for a mere moment of it, a day only, he would be willing to surrender that eternity? Whoever could answer this, he believed, already understood the meaning of life. Then he was in Hell.
A wave of heat drenched him, pouring over him like an overturned ephemeral ocean, attempting to drown him. He clutched at his throat, gasping, trying to suck in air through all the heat, feeling his lungs searing, fearing he would soon lose consciousness. Then it stopped; he could breathe again. He took in a huge breath of the foulest air he had ever smelled, like methane and sulfur and cabbage. He dropped to his knees, fighting the bile building up inside him.
His face twisted into a thousand masks of fear and rejection, and his mind reached the edge of madness. That fucking old man poisoned me, he thought. This has to be a hallucination. He truly wanted to believe that; however, when he managed to calm himself