Beyond the Altar: The Warlock’s Warning

As I stood, looking around at The Exquisitors, as if I had any other choice except to accept.

It’s tough to argue when they fight mostly all of the same demons you are fighting. It can be hard to say no to their resources and information.

Often that comes with heavy IOU’s and often needlessly ended timelines and layers, let’s say they are more often than not in alignment with the truth I know.

————

As Drake reached into his pocket, he could feel his scaur warming. He saw out of the corner of his eyes, two of the Exquisitors suddenly make eye contact with each other.

They felt it too. Drake knew.

Pretending not to feel the warming intensify, Drake continued pulling out some rolling papers and his special blend tobacco.

Im going to get one last smoke in before those fuckin’ demons show up…

—————

“Ok Ordinary, tell me what I need to know before the Warlock and his buffoons arrive.”

I lit my freshly rolled cigarette, taking a stress-releasing exhale after my first deep drag.

The vestmented figure took a step toward me, slowly raising his arm, fist clenched, holding something…

he turned his hand over, opening his fist to reveal a memory shard.

I grabbed it with little hesitation, “Since I have a feeling this time isn’t a trick, I’m going to use this because of your urgency in snatchin’ me from my morning coffee…”

I placed it on my scaur.

Immediately I was transported to the Sacerium Vigilis, well one of the headquarters anyway, and I was reaching my hand out to pick up a memory shard in a Warlock’s hand. We were surrounded by Sacerium guards and the Warlock didn’t have his staff.

This was serious if the Warlock was willing to lose his life to deliver this memory shard.

“You know if this is a trap,” I heard myself say, “you’ll be dead, and this will start a war.”

The words sounded hollow even as I said them. The Warlock already knew. Hell, maybe that was the problem. Maybe he knew something worse than war.

He looked exhausted. Not physically. Spiritually. Like somebody had reached into the machinery behind his eyes and loosened a few necessary screws.

“There won’t be a war,” he said.

It was the first honest thing I’d ever heard come out of his mouth without a grin attached to it.

“Not if I’m right.”

Around us, the Sacerium guards tightened their semicircle, hands near relics, blades, and all the holy little contingencies men carry when they know their faith may not be enough.

The Warlock raised the shard toward me, but his hand trembled at the last second.

“I saw something in the lower Laminae,” he said. “Something the demons would not name. Something one of them begged me to hide from.”

He swallowed, eyes flicking once toward the nearest Exquisitor, then back to me.

“That was the first time I ever saw one of them pray.”

My scaur burned hotter.

“To who?”

The Warlock’s face went pale in the memory, and even before he answered I think some part of me already knew.

“No one,” he whispered. “That’s how I knew we were all in trouble.”

I touched the memory shard to my Scaur, and immediately he knew he was the Warlock:

He knew it was wrong before he knew why.

The chamber wall had been peeled open in layers, old monastery stone beneath subway tile beneath Roman brick beneath something older than all of it, some buried geometry the city had been built on top of without understanding.

The Warlock raised his lantern and saw the symbols painted there in blood, ash, chrism, and something that glimmered like insect wings.

A circle within a square.
A broken trident.
Seven hooks.
The inverse ladder.

Infernal at first glance.
Liturgical at second.

He stepped closer. His breath shortened.

No. Not liturgical. Better than liturgical. Better than infernal.

Wrong in the way a forged signature is wrong when copied by someone who has practiced it a thousand times. Too clean. Too knowing. As if something had studied both heaven and hell and decided they were merely dialects of the same dead language.

His apprentice whispered, “Master... is it angelic?”

“No.”

“Demonic?”

He shook his head.

The center mark was moving. Not spinning. Revising itself. Rewriting line into line, doctrine into doctrine, curse into sacrament. Every few seconds it landed on a symbol he recognized from one forbidden text or another, then smoothly became something else.

Then he saw the worst part.

At the edges of the seal were names. Not ancient names. Recent ones. Exquisitors. Bishops. Mediums. Warlocks. Missing children. Dead hosts. Failed vessels.

It wasn’t a seal.

It was a census.

He staggered backward.

“What is it?” his apprentice asked.

And for once the Warlock had no sarcasm left to protect himself.

“It’s learning us,” he said.

——————————


Like that, I was back, for me hours of meetings and memories, a lived timeline, for the Exquisitors onlooking, mere seconds…

I took another long drag of my cigarette, knowing that warlock scoundrel was going to show up any second now.

As I took another drag, it hit

tsssszzzztt

my scaur and the sizzle of the exquisitors’ all at once. It never gets better, even if you know its coming.

“Haaahahhahaaa",” we could hear the deep, cringy, corny, evil laugh as the Warlock started to say, “hope it stung good, fellas!”

Aftger having just watched the memory shard and seeing him so defeated, I was a little short tempered for his antics.

“Aye-yo boyo, I just watched you about lay down for the Ordinaries and their church cronies to put a crucifix so up where it dont belong… dont waste my time.”

The Warlock gave a tired little laugh, but there was no humor in it.

“That’s the trouble, Crowley,” he said. “I came here because I finally realized the war already started a long time ago. I guess it’s just gallows humor.”

He looked past me then, toward the Sacerium guards, like a man standing in front of wolves while trying to discuss a forest fire.

“You think we’re enemies because we inherited opposite vocabularies. Different altars. Different uniforms. Different lies.”

He lifted the shard.

“But I found something in the deep layers that uses both our languages better than either of us do.”

My scaur pulsed so hot it felt like a coal pressed into the side of my neck.

“What did you see?”

The Warlock’s face tightened. That was the moment I knew this was real. Men like him love sounding dangerous. They don’t often look afraid.

“A sigil that could bless a child and damn a city with the same breath,” he said. “A geometry that answered to prayer and sacrifice alike.”

He swallowed.

“Whatever built it is not from Heaven. It is not from Hell. And it has been studying us.”

I took the shard.

“And you brought this to me?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I brought it to your scaur.”