Nacht, the exultant voice of Nacht, sirens out to me from the rusting loudspeakers lining the old desert highways of western America:

“Let the moon fall

Sclerosis of the Earth

Need the healing balm

Ready for rebirth”

The chant thunders out to me miles before the skyline of New Babylon comes into view. But even before hearing her voice outwardly—ever since the night at the Vesica—I could feel her burning for chaos in my heart. Now when I behold the wicked face of the approaching moon, I feel her—feel her longing for annihilation. Why? I wonder to myself. Why does she want this?

The loudspeakers join the chorus of events avowing the contours of a prophecy I still don’t understand. Drawing nearer to the earth, the moon now overtakes the sun in size; looming over us like a giant, it shines monstrously through the charred orange smog of these westerly skies. Powdery snow falls like ash and melts upon meeting the heat of my helmet, becomes steam against my ethercycle. This lunar winter has covered the globe. As the city gates gradually emerge from the mournful curtain of snowfall, a dark shape on the side of the road catches my eye. Pulling closer, I recognize a shattered chariot—the sort usually occupied by Spirits of Darkness, and—deprived of the Spirit’s supply of warmth—a shivering man slumped up against the fallen vessel. As if aware of my gaze, he turns over and meets my eyes with his.

“Brother, please come hither, be my last witness. I am to die today, and this is as it should be—I finally see. But come closer, please, lend me one last glimmer of warmth, lend this old man your ear.” “Of course, my brother,” I reply, and idle my bike close enough for it to radiate warmth over his ailing body. I kneel to him and am surprised to discover the face of a handsome man in his prime.

“Old man you say?” “Well, what did you expect? We are all old men, brother, I can see the centuries in your eyes.” “Forgive me, brother… My world has been turned upside down. I have met one of the Last—an Aging One. It was the folds of wisdom I expected to see on your face, not a mirror of my own.” The man gasps, his eyes widening, and asks,

“One of the Last?” “Indeed. The lore is true. They do exist.” Stunned, he closes his eyes for a moment. As he opens them again, they glisten with tears.

“It is my time to die,” the man whispers to himself, “who would not cross in peace upon receiving this good news? The Last exist, shall be our salvation… as the lore has always said. In my heart I always believed it to be so...” The man trails off and looks upward to the sky in reverie until some thought pangs him back to the present, morphing his gaze back to sorrow. “But brother, O brother… how she pines for death. Her cries have driven us all mad; I had to leave the city, so many of us have. How is it that we spend our lives fleeing death while she awaits in vain? Her grief is too much for anyone to bear.”

“You speak of Nacht?”

“Of our Queen I do speak.” “She cannot die?” But before he can answer the man winces with some invisible pain and buckles over. I move in closer to catch him, allowing his head to land softly in my lap instead of the hard ground. His eyes open again to meet mine above him. He stares at me, his draw dropping slightly as if in awe, somehow seeing something different or something more than he had before. “His eyes do shine,” says the man, searching my eyes, speaking of me almost as if I weren’t there gazing back at him. “Brother, what is it that you mean?” “Tell me, what do you see in my eyes?” As the windows of his soul become transparent to me, the night at the Vesica flashes through my mind and up wells a voice that is not my own, speaking through me:

“Forgiven, brother, all are forgiven.” The words strike something deep within the man, prompting more tears and soft smile.

“Thank you, brother. Bless you. Like she says, let the moon fall, let it fall—let it bring salvation to us all. Let it fall…”

He trails off, looking toward the heavens, and closes his eyes. “May Asherah guide him, may he know the way,” I say in prayer for the man and lay his body back down against the fallen chariot. The tranquility upon his face mocks the burning in my heart, the burning of Nacht for what she cannot have. Why?

Filled once more with her yearning, I become conscious of another presence—some gaze fixed upon my backside. A shiver runs down my spine. Revving up my courage, I slowly turn around to behold a cybernetic beast—a basilisk—hovering lightly off the ground, its opalescent scales shining in the moonlight. A great mane flows around its neck like water and its luminous eyes penetrate the entire husk of my being; only the most intentional, free movements of my soul escape its gaze—its calculating intelligence encompasses everything else. I dare not move and cast my vision downward lest I provoke its wrath with eye-contact. The serpent slowly draws toward me, encircles me, and begins spiraling in place until enough levity is generated to lift me off the ground.

Soon we are flying, clearing the gate of the city in no time, ascending towards the peaks of its infamous sprawl of skyscrapers. I feel the beast calibrate to its target as we transition to a smooth and unwavering course—the flawless efficiency of machine intelligence. Through the blur of its serpentine spiraling, I glimpse our destination: the tallest tower of the city—the tallest tower ever, as the lore reports—though incomplete. As we close-in on the monstrous structure, pieced together like dismembered corpse, I see that it too burns. Fire seethes from the openings on every floor, as if the entire building were some kind of forge. Surveillance machines hang from its edges like stalactites. Inwardly, I receive the impression that this tower guards the forgotten history of our world; I feel the beast register this, feel it attempting to penetrate my mind, and so I bury and protect this insight in the deepest confines of my soul. Looking up, I behold the remainder of the mighty tower being swallowed up into the welter of clouds which send down this relentless blizzard.

Into that icy welter we plunge; the spiraling of the beast creates a membrane of warmth that protects me from a frigid death. I feel gratitude—but I know that it’s misplaced; I sense that the beast preserves me sheerly out of its recognition of some necessity that I am unaware of. The wintry storm roars around us, whipped up into a cyclone by the serpent’s spiraling; the grey mass of the welter becomes a backdrop for the beast, allowing me to focus on its features. Like still-frames of an animation, I catch brief glimpses of it as it rapidly encircles me and realize that it stares into my eyes, attempting to penetrate them if only I were to make contact. Out of folly, I do; immediately my mind begins to dull. Hypnosis—it’s trying to hypnotize me—trying to steal into the confines of my soul.

I close my eyes and fight back the intrusion; it refuses to retreat, forcing its unrelenting examination further into the surface layers of my mind, seeking the intuition from earlier. My nerves electrify, heart beating fast, sweat beading on my brow. As the pressure mounts, I push back inwardly—all my cognitive circuits firing—but, unable to withstand the psychic intrusion surging through, the strain soon exceeds my capacity and my neural prosthesis fries. All the tension in my body releases as I surrender and recede into the still-point of my uncreated spirit.

At that very moment my memory of the Vesica surfaces again and I am drawn back out by a fountain of loving light radiating from my chest, throwing the beast back. It recoils, slows its spiraling and, suddenly, we emerge from the icy torrent into the calm of the mesosphere, hovering at the crown of the uncompleted tower. The warm glow of dawn greets us from far and wide, softly illumining the desert landscape beyond the urban sprawl. The serpent, still encircling—keeping me aloft—now has its gaze fixed on a figure standing atop the tower: a woman with sky-colored skin donning the oracular head-prosthesis of Pythia. She turns, and, upon seeing me, lifts her spirits from the sullen pits of hell to what I could only describe as joy—joy of the dead in resurrection. Outwardly, she inclines her head toward me—a subtle bow. Inwardly, I hear her voice:

“His eyes do shine,” she says with a subtle smile and a single tear streaming down her celestial face.

“Nacht?”

“Look into my eyes, Vulcanus; tell me—what do you see?”

At first I stare at her in confusion, but gradually her face becomes luminous, iridescent, shifting its shape, flickering with the countenance of many distinct individuals—all of whom strike me as familiar. Like a hologram, she seems to shine with the lifetimes of many. From her form a panoramic tapestry unfolds of reanimated events—memories—the morphology of entire lifetimes, all of which feel intensely personal to me.

“What do you see?”

“I see… I see… Us. I see us.”