Episode 7: The Rod of Wadjet

There is a fourth person in the barn.

And they have Peitho by the hair. For a second, everything stops. A hand appears beside me, from the sleeve of a gray robe, and catches Peitho by her curls, halting her apparent dive for the Rod – but which was no doubt intended for Pepin. Now her spine is half-bent backward and she scrabbles with her hands almost to drag herself on her pelvis, her legs useless behind her.

And I don't know what Pepin is doing – besides that it is not at Peitho that he was looking when I last noticed him. My eyes are climbing that robe-sleeved arm to the elbow.

I almost can't get past the white as pure light beard that hangs to the robed navel. But I make it to the shoulder. To the perfectly bald head of skin, as I so often called it during my boyhood.

The Master is looking down at Peitho like it's an actual venomous snake he has by the head: frowning his shrubbery of white brows in concentration to keep her fangs out of reach of anything. And not for no reason: It's only been a few seconds, but a few seconds is a long time to behave like a wild beast.

“Damn you, woman!” The master exclaims, shaking her by the hair.

Surprisingly, she calms. Less but not unsurprisingly, Pepin snatches up the Rod and levels it at him as though the beady onyx eyes might shoot rays of killing magick.

The Master extends and aim's Peitho at him for all the world like Perseus with Medusa's head still attached to her body. She even snarls and hisses. And if I have a sanity meter, it's plunging toward problematic.

“Do not think,” the Master says, pausing to let the emphasis in his voice sink past the mire of Pepin's madness, “about doing what you were going to think about doing. You have one chance to redeem yourself, vile creature. Do not waste it on a choice you will not live to regret.”

I have never heard the Master's voice like this. I thought he was a grumpy old man. I thought he was a jerk to me. But I'd never heard him like this. His voice booms with the power of the Grand Magus in the Void. But this is not the Grand Magus. This is not a power to be feared, but to be reckoned with – to recognize and realize.

Pepin may have been a lot of things. But he lowers the Rod. I look at the Master. He's looking at me like I'm an idiot. Even Peitho – hell, even Pepin – is looking at me expectantly. Like I'm in a dream where I'm the only performer on stage who hasn't read the script – and it's my big scene!

“What?” I ask.

“Are you not aware of the moment?” The Master asks, his voice back to the mildly annoyed, How are you this dense that I am used to from my childhood. It's almost comforting – at least it's familiar! “Take the Rod, boy!”

I look down at Pepin, then immediately back, with the elasticity of a quarter machine bouncy ball. I do not want to believe that it looks like Pepin is proferring it to me.

“I thought you—“

“I can't always— I can't always protect you, son. I have tried. But I— The world has little want of me, these days.” His words and the way he said them are melancholy. But his eyes and his face are smiling. How can he be smiling right now? “I am glad to see you again.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I hear my voice, I hear how slow and how stupid and how overwhelmed I sound. And I don't care. I can't just do what he's telling me to do. Why is he even here?

“Just take the damn thing, will you?”

I turn to Pepin. He is proffering it to me – like a high priest passing on the vestments – or in this case the relic – of power and station. Like a coronation!

This can't be happening. He wasn't really king. The Rod isn't his to give.

But I am bending at the waist, my hands are reaching out to take the Rod. I can't believe it, but it's happening – and I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. Which, I realize with every millimeter of distance my hands cross, I don't want to. I do want it. I it. And I'm about to take it.

The last thing I hear before I take the Rod of Asclepius from the mad would-be-king Pepin the Great and Terrible is the Master – criticizing me:

“How much longer do you think you have before—“

I'm standing on a hill.

All the land beneath me is a war strategist's map of the Mediterranean world – Christendom and the Holy Lands. Intricately carved wooden miniatures of men with swords or on horseback, all of them with banners and colors I do not know. Some of them wear white tabards emblazoned with white and black Latin Crosses – dissimilar in only one way to the robes worn by Metus and his order.

They march. On one another in the West and in the East – and then great forces of them gather together from all over Christendom and swarm the Holy Lands.

[Yaldabaoth] “War, unending. A thousand years of conflict.”

“When is this?” I ask, looking down on it all from on high.

“The future. Soon,” The Yaldabaoth says to my right.

I turn to regard him, his naked obsidian body, gleaming like void, the great black bat's wings folded at his back. His grin is full of hideously white teeth.

“Because of what happened on this hill?” I can sense the barn behind me, the events leading to my being here like a name forgotten, but at the tip of my tongue.

“Because of what may, yes. Because of what may not as well.”

“What am I supposed to do?” I can hear the pleading in my voice. I straighten my shoulders.

“What do you want to happen?”

I look down at my hands. The Rod, its serpent alive, idly flicking out its tongue and flirting its tail along my wrist. I look at the map, the war unending beneath me, and I know.

Holding up the Rod like a torch against the darkest night, I cry with all my might:

“Peace!”

The figurines stop. They melt, their banners fall, forgotten, to the ground. And then I see them. The first of the tiny people at the base of my hill – the Sinai from which I thus spake. They accumulate there, until the mock shrubbery and trees are covered – until the whole world has come to hear my Word.

Peitho, more serpent than woman, now, has slithered around the hill, entwining it as the Rod is thus twined; and she rests, with her head on my thigh, her arms entangled in my legs. Not for comfort – holding me here for all to see.

“Is that what you want?”

The Yaldabaoth soars in the sky, eclipsing the sun with his outstretched wings, a dark god in an obscured Heaven.

“Is it?” I ask. “I don't know.”

I feel the rumbling of the Yaldabaoth's laughter before I hear it. “You have a choice to make, Son – Use the Rod and bring Order; don't and bring Chaos.”

“Then show me what that looks like! What is your Order?” I shout into a deafening wind, bilious black stormclouds now dominating the landscape with flashes of brooding purple lightning.

“Look at them.”

I do.

From on high, I can see into their homes, through the streets of their cities. There are smiles on their faces. No more wars. No more famines. No more city walls. Now there are towering structures of gold and silver and precious stones of all sorts. Everything is plentiful. Everyone is prosperous. It is perfect.

But also look at and into their eyes. I can see the lines on their faces – the strain. The number of them that never make it home from the taverns at night – the opium dens.

I close my eyes. Try to remember my hill. Peitho.

When I open them, it is just me and the Yaldabaoth in a world of white nothing.

“Your Order is false,” I struggle through gritted teeth. “You lie.”

“And what of Chaos?” he asks.

Sweeping his hands, I am among them again as I was. Only now the grand architecture is not unified and beautiful as a collection, but ugly and jarring. But everyone is smiling as though they don't notice. Because they don't notice anything.

Their eyes are glassy doll's eyes. Empty. Unthinking. Uncaring.

Unhuman.

“What are you trying to tell me?” I shout, turning on the Yaldabaoth.

But He is gone. I am alone.

“Wadjet!” I raise my face and my voice to a dimensionless sky.

They're gone – the people of the world-to-come. The cacophony of their image stops.

“Robert,” Wadjet's grandmotherly voice says from nowhere and everywhere, as though she had been here the whole time and I should know that. “You have arrived. Good.”

I am in an edifice of gleaming white. Indescribable structures of incomprehensible geometries blind me with their complexity as the white would – if, in this place, I had eyes to blind.

“Not all who come here from the Material world do so... unscathed.”

I'm looking around for Her. At least, my field of view appears to be panning around at something like my command. I seem to have no body, here – although wherever we are might have too many dimensions for me to know where to look. Everything is an ever-changing mass – is the wrong word, and yet – of gleaming marble which almost roils like a swarm of insects.

“Scathed,” I say, still trying to locate Wadjet. “You mean burned out.”

Is that what this feeling, like if vertigo had vertigo in an Inception-dream about falling from and through the matrix of Reality is? “Is that what happened to—?”

“Is that really what you came here to ask?”

“I didn't— Will you please stop asking that like I'm coming here on purpose? And where are you? Why are you doing this again?”

I sense – is the only word, but I don't know which one it is – a change in the mass of this place. Behind me, for what that matters.

The rest of the incomprehensible whiteness moves or shifts or funnels – behind me.

I think about looking to see what is happening – and then I am.

The super-dimensional geometries are knitting themselves into a recognizable structure: Something approximating a stone circle made with marble the color of the moon – but all shifting impermanent, improbable shapes.

I am standing just within the circle, as the stones soar hundreds of feet above me. And before me, at the center—

My breath is taken, now – recalling her, seeing her in this time, it is as the first time.

I have known nothing of awe til this moment.

I fall to the ground on bended, transparent knee. But I cannot pull my gaze from Her even to avert it.

Suspended in the air before me is what I can only describe as a winged serpent. I have never seen anything like it. Plumed with feathers every imaginable shade of every conceivable color spectrum, and all prismaticly glowing with the light of their own universe; great wings are held out wide, as though just about to beat; but she is motionless in iconic image; from the serpent, a green thing with a brown belly, about a third of the way down her body. Her neck arches low that she may level her beady gaze and all-knowing smirk on me from her loftiest of heights. Her tail Ses its way to the ground, where another mass of painfully prismatic plummage is kicked up in a pose as majestic as She is playful.

And I know her immediately. She is the Phoenix. She is the Caduceus.

She is all things, and her domain is Creation.

I try to lower my head.

The wings seem to flap, but it is only the feathers – flowing like all the colors of the wind.

“Now you see me as Goddess and would pay your mother the respect she is due?” Wadjet laughs, and the feathered tail swishes with delight.

“This is— This is what you left the world for?” I ask – of her form, this Realm – in awe. The words Let me stay here, with you on the lips of my soul.

Suddenly the winged serpent is gone. Sitting in the center of the stone circle – which, I can't help but notice is now the appropriate size for two human-sized... people? – is my mother. The human woman that gave birth to me. As I remembered her: Not young; I was the fifth of eight boys and I had two older sisters. Even if she'd started in her teens, she was still a haggard mid-twenties. But kindfaced. With the fieriest red hair and kindest blue eyes I've ever seen.

She beckons me.

“Come. Sit.”

When I think to do as she says, I am.

A green snake climbs onto her knee, into her lap, upon her shoulders, where it loops itself and stares at me as though to make sure that I cannot mistake with whom I am speaking.

“Speak freely, Child. You have made it this far and the worst is still yet to come.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” I ask. I would be breathing hard – except, I realize, I do not need to breath. I have not had a body this whole time.

“You are meant to figure that out for yourself.”

“Do I have time to figure it out?”

Metus is kneeling before me, their hood down, in the same pose I only now might have taken; screaming in inarticulate – and blessedly silent – torment.

“No. I suppose that you do not,” Wadjet says. She doesn't sound like she's in any particular hurry, though.

“Then tell me.”

“Petulant child. Always in a hurry to be told what you should already know.” I can feel the quirk of a smile. “Fine. You have a choice before you. Take my Rod and use it – or do not.”

“And what do you want?”

She looks at me, blinks. Not going to answer.

“You really are – the Goddess – aren't you?” I ask, then. “Shekinah. Tiamat. The Creatrix of the Universe.”

My mother smiles at me and I know I have spoken in error foolish and obvious.

“Yes – and no. Mostly no. She the true Mother Goddess, Chaos, existed long before I did in my corporeal form. And then again, she did not. How can that be, you wonder.”

“No. Everything exists in their opposite – and their opposite in them. Yin in every Yang.”

My mother's face lights up with pleasant surprise, and she exclaims, “Oh, excellent! You have been listening. You had me worried for a time. Now – listen – Awen – Child – it is actually against the Rules for me to help you. And Her – Our – strategy is to let Order break the Rules and undo themselves.” She smiles, and I see the Serpent in her eyes. “You see, I can only talk to you right now because you came here. So I need you to listen to me real close, all right? Because I can only say this once. Do you think you can do that for Mommy?”

I nod, slowly, not sure I know what I'm agreeing to, but knowing I'm not going to like it for sure.

She takes my hand—

And I cannot describe to you what I see.

I see light. Ropes, maybe, or tendrils of light.

Or, like – a forest of vines, but with no trees. Or mycelia – the networks of fungi.

A network of ineffable complexity is before me, all around me.

There seems to be one main thread, call it, for better or worse – as it does appear to be more like a rope than a tendril, with all the others being wound into it at some point, or frayed from it.

It boggles my sense of scale.

“What am I looking at?”

“This? This is Everything. Everything that has ever – Everything that is – Everything that could – and Everything that must be.”

If it could be possible, it is now the size of a moderate mural and we appear to be in an adequately large room to house it.

That can't be—

“It is,” Wadjet says. “If you are going to find the answers you seek, this is where you must look first.”

“At Everything,” I scoff – and I hear all the times in my boyhood I scoffed at some similar claim of widsom from the Master.

And I remember that he is where I am.

Wadjet regards me, and I see that she is now the ebony skinned woman with the sheeps-wool mane of hair haloing her head in dark curls. She is naked, her full breasts and belly low-hanging and full with motherhood, her hips and buttocks thick and powerful. Her face is hard, her lips puckered pitilessly as though to say, Yes. Everything.

“I have to know Everything?”

“You don't think that's a good place to start with a decision as big as the one you've got to make?”

The decision I have to make?

Yes, Child. How the Fate of the Human Being will turn out.

Which side will you choose? Order – or Chaos?

I can feel the power of Her asking this, in this place. In the way I want to behold those especially fertile parts of Her image.

“Well, you'd better get started,” She says, her voice and form taking on the aspect of one who hates to leave, but really has got to run. Then, as though only then remembering, she adds: “Oh. Not now! You don't have time. You have a more pressing choice to make: What is going to happen to my Rod now that you have got it?”