At the turn of the century, the savage competition of the rail companies, bold city planning, and the abundant optimism of investors all combined into a single, volatile mix. Enriched by new money and sparked with vision, their plans exploded across proposals and blueprints, imagining New York’s subways as a unified network stretching across all five boroughs. Distant terminals would’ve ended in farmland, in neighboring cities, and at ports for both air and sea.
Dreams of an eastern seaboard megalopolis cast mirages over these far flung destinations. Someday, the builders imagined, businesses and homeowners would thrive among high-rises of staggering complexity and beauty, a gleaming utopia of mechanism, science, and industrial design. With arteries of power and water wrapped like veins around their subway tunnels, developers would pay richly for the utilities served through the earth itself.
Yes, that was the key—money spent now would be worth ten times as much later, so hundreds of miles of tunnels were planned and dug well in advance of demand. This was in the teens, the twenties, even in the stubborn denial of the early thirties. Then the Great Depression became undeniable, and the expansion and prosperity they’d predicted became the shadows of regret. So many places were closed, written off as losses and struck from the public consciousness as an embarrassment, better forgotten than reminding mankind of their frailty and stupidity and their blind, desperate faith in simple models. How many tunnels were born from the deliberately cultivated belief that growth lasted forever in a finite world?
About twice as many as were currently in use, the Baron judged.
There were many side tunnels and niches cut into the stone and lined with brick, shortcuts built by the workers who’d spent their youths toiling underground. After scouting the rail tunnels near the platform, they discovered a maintenance shaft with a cut padlock, which led down to a lower level track. That was the known sign of a smuggler’s road, a well-tread tunnel which otherwise hadn’t been on city maps for decades.
At the edge of the train platform, the Zombie awkwardly bent his fingers against the latch of a maintenance locker until it broke open. Then they stole two oil lanterns, which they lit using the Baron’s lighter, and they climbed down a short access ladder, one at a time, entering that lower tunnel—the smuggler’s road itself.
The Baron held one lantern; the Zombie carried the other. Warm orange light cast about the rust-red brickwork, shaped by shutters into two searching beams. Carefully, they traced the lines of brick arches, picked out support beams, and illuminated the path ahead.
Most of it was clear beyond a thin layer of grit, but maybe twenty or thirty meters away, they could see shallows of exposed bedrock filled with pools of stagnant water. Sheets of tarred plywood had been set across cinder-block trestles, a bridge laid by some industrious criminal with spare time and unfettered access.
The Baron laid out his plan for their escape. “We’ll follow this path north, at least as far as the smugglers built it up. We should be underneath the 2 the entire way.”
“You sure?” Phyllis asked.
The Baron held the lantern close to one wall, where oil-crusted braces were bolted to the bricks. Optimistically, cables would’ve run there, just in reach yet untouched by the slow accumulation of water. “They dug a lot of these secondary tunnels for utilities—power, water, even steam. They’re meant to trace the train lines, but I doubt this goes under the East River.”
“If it does, I bet it’s full of water,” Phyllis said ruefully.
“Yeah. Not everything gets pumped anymore. When we’re close, we’ll head back to the surface and make for a C-line station. That’ll take us to Lower Manhattan, and we’ll figure out our way from there. Do you know roughly where we started?”
“Sterling and Nostrand,” Phyllis answered. “We’re underneath the Sterling Station.”
“Any idea how many miles that puts us from the East River?”
“Four and a half, maybe five?”
“Even if we walk fast, it might take a couple of hours.” The Baron held the lamp out towards Marco. “Good news. You’ll be healed by the time we’re out of this tomb.”
Marco was gently touching the stains on his back. “I’m covered in blood.”
“Once your wounds close, we’ll toss the shirt,” the Zombie suggested.
“When do you think we’ll arrive?” Phyllis asked the Baron.
”Mm. It’ll be sometime after five when we reach the C-train.”
“That’s a long hike,” Phyllis muttered. “Do you want to go up and risk taking the subway? It’d be a lot faster. We could get out of here while the sun is still up.”
The Baron sighed. “They’ll probably watch all the stations along the 2.” He cast an apologetic frown towards Phyllis. “The convenience isn’t worth the risk.”
Phyllis echoed his sigh. “I suppose you’re right.”
The Zombie grinned. “Are we going to stay up past the Baron’s bedtime?”
The Baron chuckled wryly. “We might have to look for a place to shelter overnight. It depends.” He glanced at Marco, explaining himself before any questions were asked. “Night favors the assailant, not the defender. Malik has decided that secrecy is no longer important, so we’ll hide tonight, if we have to.”
“Do you think the gods will assign a task with his name on it?” Phyllis asked.
“Who, Malik?” the Baron replied.
“Yeah. That frozen air was a spectacle. People will pass it off as a freak freeze, but that must’ve threatened the secrecy of the occult.”
The Baron started across the wooden plywood bridges, carefully arranging his steps along the middle of each span. The cinderblock trestles were set stably on their sides, rising just a few centimeters over the waters. Once he was certain that their footing would be stable, he turned his thoughts to Phyllis’s question. “That’s a terrifying possibility,” he said, thinking aloud, “but it’s unlikely. You gave the secular explanation yourself. It’s spring. Sometimes, there’s cold air.”
“What’s terrifying?” Marco asked.
“Look, there’s a reason the occult is a secret,” the Baron explained. “What people believe about the world sets a baseline, which the whole system of prestige is measured against. That has knock-on effects. Three of them, which are all well-documented at this point.”
“People get scared!” the Zombie said cheerily.
“That’s the first one,” the Baron continued. “People have a powerful anxiety about the world not being normal. When they encounter the occult, they don’t see what we see. They have an emotional buoyancy, pushing them up towards their normal. They need a lot of evidence to weigh them down—to help them sink into things and really see what’s happening. Otherwise, they explain it away, and go back to their lives. That’s why we’ve been teaching you, Marco. To show you overwhelming proof.”
“If you can’t find enough proof, you can swim.” Phyllis glanced down at the pooled water around them, just before they crossed a final span of tarred wood and returned to the safety of brick roads.
“That’s from Apostasy!” the Zombie said, recognizing the metaphor.
The Baron snapped his fingers and pointed back at them. “That’s right. The Apostate wrote that you have to fight your buoyancy and swim down to find the truth. If you want to believe, you can. She actually begs women to try.”
Phyllis looked up towards the arched bricks above, then beyond them, towards the darkness that suffused the earth itself. “That was me, when I found Apostasy. I read it, I believed in it, and it was amazing. And it still is—it’s real miracles—but sometimes, through all the stress, I forget why I started.”
“Why’d you start?” Marco asked.
“This world is full of magic,” Phyllis replied. “It’s hidden in the margins, but it’s there.”
“Shit,” Marco muttered, glancing down at his bloody shirt. “I guess I have to believe it too. I should be dead.” The boy paused a moment before asking, “So why don’t more people believe?”
“It has to be hidden,” the Baron continued. “The second effect is very strict. The cost of a wish depends on how much of a miracle it’d be in the eyes of the world. A wish made in secret by unknown cultists? That’s cheap, practically subsidized. A wish made in front of a TV camera, by a famous politician? It’d take all the prestige of the world.”
“Huh. Is there a magic politician?” Marco asked.
“Yeah. Consider Stalin. He’s a cultist. When he was young, he could afford wishes, but now he’s too famous. His prices are oceanic, so he delegates all the occult power to others. He can’t participate anymore, not even in secret. People would notice.”
“The eyes of the world have tremendous weight!” the Zombie cried.
“Do you think Stalin wants to… to wish?” Marco asked.
“No,” the Baron replied firmly. “He would have to give up his secular power. He’d have to fake his death. If he doesn’t, he’ll live and die like a regular man, and frankly, most of them do—the powerful. They choose power over magic. They die important. It’s what they live for, and then they go to the afterlife.”
Phyllis spoke up. “It wasn’t always this way. Few hundred years ago, everyone believed in magic. Wishes could be public, and famous mystics could afford them.”
“What changed?” Marco asked her.
“The Enlightenment,” the Baron said quickly.
Phyllis laughed. “Yeah. Science got better, way better. Reason won over the world. Ever since then, if the public can see it, your wish has to look like a coincidence, or speculative science, or it’ll cost too much. Real magic has to look believable.”
“Exactly right,” the Baron said. “That price structure keeps a lot of secrets. Most of the big wishes must be excusable with a moment’s thought. Miracles aren’t obvious anymore.”
“Ehhh…” Marco let out a sound of confusion. “What about the Cat?”
“Grandfathered in from a mythic age,” the Baron answered. “Old miracles can look as big as they are. The ancient standard holds for them. That’s why the Cat is so valuable. There’s nothing else like it. Still, there are limits. If you walked on camera with the Cat and survived a beheading, or something else that’s hard to explain—”
“There’d be a task,” Phyllis finished for the Baron. “That’s what I was worrying about with Malik. If all else fails and you’re threatening the mysteries, then the gods will set a task on your head. All the other cultists will come to kill you.”
“But that won’t happen to me?” Marco asked.
“I wouldn’t worry,” the Baron answered. “You died, but people have survived some bad injuries. The public will excuse it. The Zombie would be the real problem, if he weren’t a special case. His invincibility stretches all the way across the system. No tasks are ever about him. The so-called gods ignore him in the hope that he’ll just go away.”
Marco tried rubbing his lower back again. “So I really did die up there?”
“You did,” the Baron said.
“Shit. I thought I was alive the whole time.”
“Why so?” the Zombie asked curiously.
“Well, it hurt,” Marco said. “I heard on the radio, death doesn’t hurt.”
The Zombie stepped up close behind Marco and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “The dead don’t feel anything, sure, but I know how the dying feel.”
Marco quivered and picked up the pace to open some space between them, then cast the Zombie a worried look.
The Zombie grinned even wider. “Nothing hurts more than dying, boy. Those who don’t hurt, don’t fight, and once upon a time, your ancestors fought and survived against all odds. Escaping death was the only way to end their pain without succumbing to the world.”
“Jesus,” Marco said.
“Speaking of death,” the Baron interrupted, “you’ve died at least twice, up to five times. Those gunshot wounds were fatal, and I think the injection was their test for the Cat o’ Nine Lives. I need you to think back though—how long were you not breathing?”
“I don’t know,” Marco said.
“You were out for several minutes. If you took a breath somewhere in the middle, you might have survived. If you didn’t, you’ve died another time.”
“I don’t remember. When they stuck the needle in the back of my head, the world got really dark and dry. I felt like I was shriveling up.”
“Baked under a black sun,” the Zombie whispered.
“Stop hassling him,” Phyllis griped.
The Zombie laughed.
The Baron ignored their bantering. “We’ll err on the side of caution and assume it’s been five deaths. Three from the bullets, one from the injection, one from asphyxiation.” He gestured at Marco with the lamp. “If you die again, remember that you don’t stop living. Act like you’re alive. Will it, and the body will work.”
“Like these wounds in my back,” Marco said. “I’m dead right now?”
“That’s right. If we cut the Cat out of you, you’d bleed to death. You need to hold onto it for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight. Then we can take it out.”
“That also gives us time to hide from the police,” Phyllis said thoughtfully. “That’s not even considering our long-term arrangements. We’ll have to keep off the radar for at least a month, if not longer. The Zombie may have murdered a police captain.”
The Baron kept pacing forward. The road was long and the days were all too short. Nevertheless, he couldn’t share Phyllis’s pessimism. “A day will be enough. Tammany Hall will work to keep the Zombie a secret, and he’s the only part that matters. He’s the spectacle.”
Phyllis stopped walking and frowned. “Baron, you need to take this seriously.”
d’Holbach stopped as well, and everyone paused in their march. “I am serious. They won’t want another Rasputin on their hands, so they’ll protect us. They’ll hide us.”
“Who is Rasputin?” Marco asked.
“A Russian monk who held the Cat during most of the Great War. He was using prestige to convince the Tsarina he was a miracle-worker, and he wanted Russia to drop out of the conflict. The Orthodox cult was slow to stop him, and the gods didn’t like that, so a great task came out of Berlin to murder him before the end of the year. It was a mess.”
“Tell him in a minute,” Phyllis said. “Listen to me. Baron, you must take this seriously.”
“I said…” The Baron paused. “Why do you think I’m not?”
“Mr. Barilla may have been ignorant, but he wasn’t a fool. You’re in a special position. You have that man—” She pointed at the Zombie. “—and New York has to protect you because of him. That’s just good business on their part. But they don’t have to protect me. They don’t have to protect Marco. I’m supposed to be running the docks tomorrow, but if I show up in connection with a stevedore getting pinned for murder, they’ll string me up for the disaster you made in the streets. New York won’t protect me. Once they figured I was with you, they’d probably kill me in the county lockup themselves. One more Artemisian, dead.”
“They’ll be looking for the Zombie—”
“That’s bullshit. He drove his fingers into a man’s skull, and there were a lot of witnesses. They’ll want all of us, and they’ll know my face and Marco’s.” She pointed directly at the Baron. “Don’t tell me that we’re just going to hide for a day and the heat will be off. Our lives just went to hell back there, and we don’t have the same privileges. We won’t be safe for years.”
The Baron’s face burned a little. “You volunteered.”
“Because you asked me, and said I’d be safer with you. I expected nothing like this though. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t belly aching. I accept our situation, which is currently really bad if you aren’t a mythological figure, so you need to think seriously on what happens next before it happens to us. Okay?”
“Fine, you’re right.”
“I’m here for the same reason you’re here. I want to keep power out of Stalin’s hands. This is the whole world we’re talking about. Just play it smart.”
The Baron raised his hands in surrender. “As I said, you’re right. When we get to Manhattan, we’ll find a hideout from one of the local mafioso. Is that a plan?”
“If we get to Manhattan, I know a place,” Phyllis said.
“Perfect. Thank you, Phyllis.”
“We shouldn’t stand around here,” the Zombie interjected. He picked idly at a brick in the wall, chipped off a shard with his fingernail and put it in his mouth. The sound of grinding stone reminded the Baron of popcorn at a theater, distracting and out of place.
Phyllis nodded to the Baron, and he nodded back. An understanding was reached. She then said to the Zombie, “I’m good now. We can go.”
“Good.” The Zombie chewed until the chip of brick turned to sand, then to mud, and by the time he was wiping ruddy silt from his lips, they were all walking again.
The tunnel varied little. Most of it had been excavated, supported, and lined with bricks. Where the ceiling had collapsed into piles, a path was cleared. Where the floor hadn’t been laid, plywood ramps and surfaces abounded. This road had almost certainly been used to smuggle something by volume, likely on a small cart or wheelbarrow. Marijuana bales? Opium? Cocaine? Heroin? Morphine and codeine? Maybe even an occasional bag full of mixed gems, diamonds, or stolen art from the war. None of it would’ve surprised the Baron. One end of the tunnel was near the docks or trucks coming over the Brooklyn Bridge. The other end was in Crown Heights, where new wealth could afford expensive, addictive habits.
Marco spoke up after several minutes of quiet marching. “I think you bruised my ribs with your shoulder,” he said to the Zombie.
The invincible man was following the teen closely. “Be glad that’s the worst that happened,” he replied curtly.
“You weren’t hitting me very hard. You just felt like a rock.”
“You were lucky,” the Baron opined. “He’s inconsistent.”
Marco grunted. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It’s an element of luck,” the Zombie explained. “d’Holbach has a good theory about this. The gods themselves can’t make an invincible thing, because invincibility is nonsense.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Baron corrected. “I said that invincibility as a property is nonsense. If you want to interact with the world, then it must have some impact on you. That impact changes you, and that change violates the core tenet of invincibility.”
“That I cannot be changed,” the Zombie said.
“Exactly. Invincibility can’t be a property, but it can be a description of outcomes. If something happens, the gods can alter it so the Zombie doesn’t change. Understand? It’s a mediated invincibility, like one endless divine intervention.”
“The gods never preserve me the same way twice,” the Zombie said.
“This makes him invincible in the only way the word has any meaning. It also means that the gods use a different technique for every interaction, and the results are unpredictable. If you hit him, it’d be a coin flip whether or not your fist stopped dead or shattered your bones.”
“There are too many possibilities to count,” the Zombie corrected.
“Could I have died while riding on your shoulder?” Marco asked.
“Absolutely,” the Baron said. “It was a calculated risk, I’m sure.”
“I didn’t want the Baron to wait on you,” the Zombie said.
The Baron snickered. “That’ll give him a boost of confidence.”
“He can be confident I’m telling the truth. His life shouldn’t inconvenience yours.”
Phyllis added her two cents: “Just don’t touch the Zombie unless you have to. It’s for your own safety. He’s a steel man in a glass world. It’s too easy to break against him.”
“Nobody can touch you?” Marco asked.
“Very carefully,” the Zombie said, “they can.”
Marco lapsed into silence for nearly a full minute. They felt in their chests the rumble of a subway train passing somewhere overhead. Before it was gone, he’d found the question he wanted to ask. “Isn’t that lonely?”
“No,” the Zombie said, “that’s not the reason it’s lonely.”
“So you are lonely?”
“Not anymore,” the Zombie said, his grin slowly vanishing. “But you don’t have to worry about me. Even if I was lonely, it wouldn’t hurt.” He tapped his sternum. “Do you know that feeling in your chest? That twisting up little knot in your stomach that hurts when you’re unhappy?”
“Yes,” Marco said.
“I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I don’t have a soul.”
“Did you ever have one?”
“If I was ever human.”
“What do you mean? You’re a person—”
“I don’t remember being a person,” the Zombie interrupted. “I don’t have a given name. I can’t remember any faces of any family. You tell me, where’s the proof I was a person?”
Marco was looking back at the Zombie quickly, glance after glance. “You don’t remember your dad? Your mom?”
“Did I even have them?” the Zombie asked.
“I—uh… You really weren’t a person?”
The Zombie stopped and asked sharply, “Do I look like a person?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s reason enough to believe the myth. Congratulations, you’ve dug up the truth. I’m the body of a disassembled man.” He gestured forward. “Move.”
“Sorry,” Marco began.
“Don’t apologize to assholes,” Phyllis said.
“Yeah, okay, I just didn’t mean to offend him.”
“You didn’t offend me,” the Zombie said, “but you asked some stupid questions.”
“Leave him be. He doesn’t know the myths.” Phyllis was picking at the corners of her eyes with her pinky. “I don’t think his father knew them well either, honestly.”
“Ha!” The Zombie began to grin again. “Ignorance is a good excuse.”
“What? That’s backwards.”
“Is it?” the Zombie asked. “What’s the opposite? Ignorance is no excuse? Sounds like something only assholes would say to punish people.”
The Baron laughed.
“You really don’t remember anything?” Marco asked.
“I remember a little,” the Zombie said. “I was born a farmer by the Euphrates, but I became a hero. I slew a tyrant king, and the priests taught me a forbidden rite.”
“He’s lying,” the Baron said.
“Yes, that one was a lie,” the Zombie continued. “I was actually a bandit in Central Asia. When I was captured, they tried executing me by the southern mountains, but I escaped and lived in the ruins of a cliff-dwelling people. In their caves, I found an artifact of great power.”
“He’s just playing with you. He doesn’t know his origins.”
“No, no, I definitely remember. I was the chief of a tribe in the jungles of Laos. My people were dying of disease, and they blamed our rivals for placing a curse on us. They sacrificed themselves to give me power, and I exacted their revenge on our innocent foes.”
“Why don’t you tell him one of the real myths about you?” Phyllis asked.
“Because they aren’t my myths. I’d rather tell one of my stories.”
“He prefers it,” the Baron said, “even if his stories are lies.”
“How do you know they’re lies?” the Zombie asked.
“Because you never tell the same story twice.”
The Zombie wagged his finger. “That means only most are lies.”
“Marco, listen,” Phyllis said, “the Zombie is extremely old. Probably older than writing.”
“How old is that?” Marco asked.
The Baron fielded that question: “The oldest written tablets come from the 26th century BC, more than four and a half thousand years ago.”
“Don’t swamp him with facts,” Phyllis chided.
“The Akkadians wrote about the Zombie first—” the Baron started deliberately.
“Shush! Marco, there are a lot of myths out there, and every cult on the planet has their own take on the nature of the gods, the Falls, and the occult. Everything you can think of, someone has probably believed it somewhere—but what’s really interesting is what they all believe together. These are mostly oral traditions, but they all agree on some stories.”
Marco was following Phyllis in the middle of their march. He glanced back at the trailing light. “The Zombie?” he asked.
“They give him a different name and different motivations depending on their traditions, but the cults all agree he exists. Some of them think he was the cause of the first Fall. Others think he was the cause of the second or third. But again, there’s something they all agree on. The Fall of Prestige was the first Fall in recorded history.”
It was incredible what a half hour and five attempts on someone’s life had done to fix an uncouth attitude. The boy with the vulgar mouth had vanished. A young man had taken his place, and he was listening closely, hanging on every word Phyllis had to say. “The Fall of Prestige…” Marco tried reasoning it out, remembering what the Baron had told him back in the Imperial Apartments. “So there was something the Zombie did that made the gods change the rules about what you could wish for?”
“You’re paying attention. That’s good,” Phyllis said, “but it’s a little more complicated than that. The Apostate wrote down the London cult’s version of the myth.”
This was what the Apostate wrote.
Compare all the myths you can find. Collect your books, your notes, and tally up the powers of legend. There’s a pattern shared across everything I’ve ever read—Christian, Classical, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Welsh, Slavic, and Oriental.
The older a myth is, the more powerful the magic it portrays.
This isn’t a coincidence. After creation, after many falls from grace and original sins, there comes a point where myths align with history, and it is this point where our impact begins. For as long as there have been people, there have been cults. For as long as there have been cults, there have been cultists. Our wishes have changed the world, and the myths reflect our influence. Before the Falls diminished our strength, we were powerful. How sad it didn’t last.
Over time, the rules closed around us, we weakened, and the stories changed.
Look back again. There have been many Falls both great and small, but none seem more important than the Fall of Prestige. Our system was born out of this era, and all of civilization was built in the shadow of one man’s sin. We could no longer rely wholly on the gods, and we were forced to rely on each other. Food, health, and wisdom—all became scarce.
Before the Fall, there was a golden age when wishes were granted for sacrifices, and three kinds were known. Prestige was the sacrifice of effort. Life was the sacrifice of time. Wealth was the sacrifice of possessions. The gods accepted all three freely, and the wishes granted were powerful and numerous. Consider all the ways wealth could’ve aided primitive man. A hungry mother could’ve destroyed her favorite necklace for a fortnight of warm food. A healer could’ve burned the fat of a goat to cure disease and plague. Powers could’ve been bought by selling away strength, valor, and cunning—for even intangible qualities were possessions of a kind.
Before the Fall of Prestige, we could’ve given up our wealth for a wish.
In this time, there was an unnamed city in the furthest land, and the people of that city called it the Land of Fire. There was no name for the city, for there was no other city in the land. Their arts were few. Their wealth was scant. Their time was spent in the fields and forests.
As all cities have a god, there too was a god for the Land of Fire. She was a young god, and she loved her people. Whenever she could, she fulfilled their greatest wishes for the smallest sacrifices, asking only token tributes for her intervention.
In the Land of Fire, it was a time of grace, though grace goeth before a Fall.
There was a very clever man in the city. We don’t know his profession, nor his name, nor the rank of his birth. We only know his cunning. With the vigor a farmer lended to his crops or the hunter to his hunt, he searched for flaws in everything. In human love, he found weakness and the force to divide houses. In generosity, he found foolish trust and undeserved charity. He was by all accounts an evil man, and he set his eye on finding the flaws of their god.
Here the accounts vary. Some say he cheated and schemed and stole until he had enough wealth to sacrifice for knowledge. Others say he meditated on the problem and discovered the answer through simple reason. I favor the stories demonstrating a little of both.
This clever man wished to know, “What is man’s most valuable possession?”
He already had an idea, and the god confirmed it. Man’s most valuable possession was his soul. It carried his will and self. He perceived only because the soul formed a locus for perception. Without it, a man was nothing but meat and bones.
He wished to know, “Can a soul be sold?”
Not forever, the knowledge came. It can only be exchanged for a time.
The clever man rested upon this truth. He considered it for many years, turning it about in his mind to examine every angle and detail. He felt the grain of the notion, the warp of its wood. He knew the concept through and through before he acted.
He would be more clever than the gods themselves.
He cleaned himself, dressed in a simple style, and went to the temple. There he sacrificed everything he owned in the world, and he wished for great health and youth, so that for a day he wouldn’t suffer from human frailty, its hungers or its thirsts. His home burned with his animals and tools. He had no plans for shelter or sustenance. It was success or death.
He wished to make an exchange. “My soul to you,” he offered, “for absolute and true invincibility until I choose to exchange it back.”
The gods are fallible. The god of the Land of Fire accepted the terms, for she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible than the emptiness of a soulless body. The mind, separated from the soul, would have no inner life. It would live and breathe and talk and dream, but it’d be perception and intelligence passing through an empty theater, a shadow play put on for nobody. Such a state would be unbearable. The soul would yearn to return to the world.
She ripped the man’s soul from his body and left his flesh an invincible vessel, immortal and enduring. What he did next isn’t clear. Some say he used his new power to overthrow the Land of Fire. Others say he smashed the temple with his bare hands. All accounts agree on one thing. With the perfect liberty of absolute invulnerability, his first impulse was to destroy.
The god grew upset beyond all measure. She called upon the pantheon of the globe, and together they held the man in place and demanded that he choose to regain his soul. The people of the land demanded justice. She threatened to withhold the afterlife itself from him. If he remained invincible, he would be damned to this world, and his soul would be set in darkness beyond paradise, where no joy would ever be felt again. To earn eternity, he would have to accept their punishment freely. Choose, they demanded, and choose now.
It is said that he grinned then, for without a soul, there was nobody to suffer the misery of soullessness. There was only the intelligence of the body, which argued his case.
“I can’t choose to take back my soul,” the man said. “I can’t choose anything. Without a soul, I have no will. I’m not free. I can’t choose any more than the rain chooses to fall or the flowers to bloom. Whatever I do now is inevitable like the rising of the sun.”
The god fumed. She told him that men had exchanged their souls before and taken them back. Why should he be an exception? Why should he be unable to choose?
“The gods were wrong,” he said. “I’m not human anymore. I can’t choose. It’s the wish I wanted and what you granted. Or would the gods refuse a fair exchange, with fair conditions?”
The gods would not refuse to grant a valid wish. To do so would not be generous.
“Then by reason, this body will remain invincible forever.”
And it has remained, appearing on every continent in every occult tradition since the records began. His current name is the Golem, though he has gone by many others: the Body, the Immortal, the Sin that Walked, the Falling Mountain, and a thousand more.
The gods saw the logic of the Golem’s exchange, and they feared it. If one man could find absolute invincibility through the exchange of wealth, what else could be lost for eternal gain? What other holes would they find in contracts made with sacrifices?
How could they trust themselves to never allow another Golem to be born?
There was no great task given. No man could oppose the Golem.
After they released him upon the world, the gods turned to their Oracles and whispered in their ears. “We’ll no longer accept sacrifices of wealth. You may pay only in life and prestige.” Then they were told the story of the Golem, and they all knew why the world was changing.
The new rule destroyed the world before civilization. Disease ran rampant. Famine chased people to the grave, where they were buried with riches they would’ve offered for food.
Contributing to this chaos, the Golem was rampant and cruel.
Each cult that met him has feared him. He is a murderer, a trickster, and a monster, depending on the state of his sanity and his tenuous connections to the rest of the world. He will be among us forever, and nothing we can do will be rid of him.
Children of Artemis, my beautiful girls, avoid this man. You will know him by the ruin he brings and the joy he seeks through annihilation of good and wonderful things. He can only be approached under a single circumstance. There is a philosopher whose story precedes mine by fifty years. In his presence, the Golem is docile, even charming. If he still lives when you read this book, you will recognize him as well. He is the Golem’s pet and the Golem’s master at once.
You may approach the Golem if he is with Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach.
Author’s Note:
This is one of my favorite chapters in this entire chunk of the book. It’s a foundational myth, finally revealed. I hope you enjoyed it~
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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