Rewriting Radiance - I have taken off my robe

In the process of rewriting Radiance, I realised that I needed some extra chapters in the early part of the book, to fill in more of the back stories of the characters. This is the new chapter 4, that comes after we meet Asher and Virgo but before they meet each other. I love this chapter and hope you do too.

    Asher pulled the coat closer around him, feeling the light fall of rain begin to seep through to his skin despite his best efforts, and the large umbrella being held over him by Uncle Melvin (not really one of his uncles at all, but an old family friend). After seven years in America, he had almost forgotten how much he hated English summers.
    Drum beat rain beat down on the hollow pine as the coffin was lowered gently into the black earth. It was quite unreal.
    Someone nearby burst into tears and had to be gently consoled - it would not do to have to great a display of emotion. His mother seemed to tut in disapproval under her breath, her face an empty mask as cold as the wind roaring over the hilltop cemetery, and whistling between the low forest of tombstones and memorials.
    No, ‘Emma Grunfeld does not cry’, he heard her mother’s austere voice saying in his mind. And neither did he.
    Someone handed him a shovel.

Radiance 35 - Epilogue - Ein Sof/Without End

     Dan Black stood in his Manhattan-sized kitchen, and for the third time that evening, waited for the kettle to boil.
    ‘A watched pot never boils’, his mother would have said, but he didn’t like to leave the kitchen when the gas was on, not with Jonny wandering around and playing with everything he could get his fingers on.
    And if he was being honest, some of his guests in the living room were a little… unsettling.
    After that Saturday afternoon, he hadn’t expected Asher to show up again, not really. Five years without much of a word had felt like an eternity, even with the all-present Facebook keeping them in touch.
    But then a text message from nowhere - ‘can we meet up? I’ll buy us some beers -Ash.’
    And so they had met in a bar downtown, and, a little cautiously, renewed their friendship.
    There had been something different about Asher in that meeting, and not just the missing hand that Dan hadn’t dared ask about - something deep and dark, lurking beneath his eyes, a greater seriousness than he had ever seen before.
    “The daughter became the mother,” was all Asher would say about it, and laughed a little hollowly.
    Not that Dan himself had been fully present in the conversation. Since the day of the ‘earthquake’, nothing had been quite right in his mind. He could have sworn that he remembered witnessing a sanity-defying serpent rise up from the Hudson, serrated teeth like swords, black poisonous spines, mile-long coils spreading and wrapping themselves around the city, people screaming and dying as the world crumbled around them.
    But no one said a word about it - no one seemed to remember but him, and then only in the dark of night, when nightmares would find their way into his dreams.
    No, Dan hadn’t been himself for a while.

Radiance 33 - The foundations of the earth

    New York city lay wounded and bleeding, smoke rising from a hundred places, a tearful wailing filling the air.
    “We did it,” shouted Mercury, “we won!”
    “In a way,” said Virgo, closing her strained eyes and sitting heavily on the cracked tarmac.
    “And at what price?” asked Li, looking at the stump of Asher’s arm.
    Strangely, Asher felt no pain at all from where his hand used to be - it was as if he had simply been born without it. It was an unsettling sensation. The world began to swim and blur around him - was this victory?
    “Here,” said Mercury, “sit down, we all need some rest.” She gently brought Asher to the floor and put an arm round his shoulders. “We’ll be okay,” she said, as if trying to convince herself, “we won.”
    Asher looked around. A coldness had seeped into his heart, a heavy emptiness. They had saved the world, hadn’t they? The Leviathan was rebound beneath the earth, once again waiting for the end of days, and yet…

Radiance 32 - He gave the sea its boundary

    “What’s the plan?” Li asked, flexing every muscle in her hand, sending tiny flames into the air.
    The Leviathan roared and lashed its tail - the ground shook violently, sending lampposts and traffic lights crashing to the asphalt. The last three of the Seven barely kept their feet.
    “The Leviathan can’t be killed,” said Virgo, as she tossed the Staff of Moses from hand to hand, “the best we can hope is to contain it.”
    “The Palace has restored much of my energy, but even with a full Seven I don’t know if we would have the strength,” said Li with a frown.
    “There isn’t any choice,” said Asher. The mere presence of the Leviathan was playing havoc with his restored powers, the creature seemed to transcend all boundaries, overrun all borders. “Virgo, it’s up to you to weave the verses together to send this creature back to the pit, Li and I will keep it busy, try to keep it from going too far.”
    Virgo looked at him quizzically for a moment, as if she didn’t quite recognise him, but swiftly nodded. “I have some verses in mind,” she said, “but I will need both of you to help. Perhaps the three of us in concert have enough power from the left side to contain the waters.”
    “We’ll do what we can,” Asher said, Li nodded her assent.
    Slamming her staff deep into the ground, anchoring herself in the crumbling cement, Virgo began to shout the words of scripture, sending them forth from her lips like arrows:
    “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in days of old, in the generations of old. Are you not he who cut Rahab in pieces and wounded the dragon?"
    This seemed to catch the attention of the Leviathan, as a titanic head snaked down towards Virgo, oily teeth gnashing and chomping. Li jumped into the air on a pillar of flames, raising a wall of fire and hurling it at their enemy.
    Asher felt the power deep within himself once more, the feeling of peace and oneness he had known his whole life, the feeling he had no come to call God. He touched this power and gave it a channel, reaching out into the surrounding city to find the edges, as Mercury had taught him so long ago. At the push of his mind, the divide between the molecules in the air strengthened and hardened, turning the air itself thick like mire. The Leviathan sluggishly crashed against the fire and recoiled, shaking its snake-like head.
    “Are you not he who dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; who made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?”
    It wasn’t exactly a victory, but they had slowed the creature’s assault, and forced it to take notice. Asher’s heart began to swell - they could really do this.
    The earth shook all around them, bricks fell from nearby buildings - Asher pushed them aside - but the tremor did not subside. Huge cracks appeared in the earth as the land tore itself to pieces. Two heads of the Leviathan, snaking at the end of mile long scaled necks, twisted away from the water and smashed into Manhattan. Turning to watch, Asher saw a tail, or a tentacle, suddenly join the skyline, bursting out of the earth what must be several miles away. Screams reached his ears once more as the reach of the Leviathan spread across the city.
    “We have a problem,” muttered Li.

Radiance 31 - He set the heavens in place

    In a time beyond time, Asher is suspended beyond all things. In no space at all, he floats in infinite blackness, the only substance in an eternal nothing.
    And Emma is there, smiling at her son, proud and full of joy, rare laughter creasing her face. They embrace, and laugh, and cry.
    “Mum,” says Asher, “I’ve messed everything up.”
    “No, no,” she answers, stroking his hair as she did when he was young, “everything is going to be okay.”
    “The Leviathan is free, my friends are dying, and it’s my fault.”
    “We only do our best,” she answers him, “but now you must set it right.”
    “How?” he asks, trembling in the black.
    “You already know,” she answers, “the father creates the mother, the mother crowns the daughter.”
    “Yes,” he says, “I do know.”
    And he does.
    His song still whispers in his ears, whirling around the cosmic emptiness all around, and deep within he finds the spark, the trace of holiness that burns within him.
    And just as the turning of the key creates the lock, and the door, and the palace, the seed creates the womb.
    In the palm of his hand, the shards of crystal begin to hum and vibrate, glowing with the inner light that is starting to shine in a time beyond time. As the fractal goes down and down without ending, so too the crystal shards contain the spark of all there is, each fragment has the DNA of the whole, and now Asher pours the energy of life through it.
    Radiance, emanating all around. A spark engraved in a ring of no colour at all, and the Palace of Understanding begins to be reborn. Crystal sprouts like grass, bursting all around and spreading and not spreading to the ends of all things.

Radiance 27 - Sound the horn

by Zeeksie, http://beloved-creature.deviantart.com/

8] Count seven sabbath years – seven times seven years – so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. 9] Then sound the trumpet everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. 10] Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. 11] The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. 12] For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.
13] In this year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own possession.
    -Leviticus 25

    The George Washington Bridge loomed large above their heads as Asher found himself blinking furiously in the sudden bright sunshine.
    “We have to move,” Virgo said, taking him by the hand a starting to pull him down the road.
    “I can barely stand,” Asher said, supporting himself on a nearby handrail. “Anyway, Rahko’s half a world a way right now.”
    “After all this time, he still doesn’t get it,” said Li, her lip curling.
    “Asher, the Leviathan isn’t a big fish or a whale,” Virgo said, looking impatiently at Asher, “its the personification of chaos, more an aspect of creation that a creature of flesh and blood. It was imprisoned beneath the centre of the world but not physically - did you really think God actually went hand-to-hand with the Loch Ness Monster?”
    “But we were in Jerusalem,” he protested.
    “The physical and the spiritual are overlaid one on the other,” Virgo continued hurriedly, “but the point is that the Leviathan could rise anywhere and everywhere - and Rahko almost certainly tracked us here.”
    And just as Virgo finished speaking, a crash of waves could be heard above the constant hum of people and cars. Tyres screeched, car horns blared and people began to scream.
    “The Hudson!” shouted Li, and ran down to the footpath that ran along the river with Virgo in swift pursuit and Asher limping behind.
    And then he saw it, and for just a moment, Asher forgot to breathe.

Radiance 14 - Lamentations, Dirges and Woe

Whatever happened to Asher's father? Back in Chapter 1 Asher learnt that he was dead but never found out how. Read on to find out, in the final chapter of Netzach/Victory.

    Through strange eyes, Asher saw his father sitting in a hotel lobby, sipping at a glass of water and reading the New York Times.
    “Dad?” he tried to call, but no words emerged. This was only a memory, though not his own.
    His father took out a pen and began to fill in the crossword puzzle - that had always been a hobby of his, something Asher had never understood the appeal of. He had struck that familiar pose, chewing the end of his pen while he scanned the clues through his black-rimmed glasses. His father was just as he had been when Asher had last seen him - old, tired but alive.
    “Eliav, what are you doing here?”
    A warm familiar voice rang across the marble lobby. The eyes Asher was borrowing danced across leather sofas to the source - a dark-skinned woman in a red and gold dress, carrying a wooden sceptre at her side. Asher felt his eyebrow raise, though he wanted to inhale sharply - what was Virgo doing with Dad?

Radiance 11 - A spirit entered me

Today begins the third section of Radiance - Hod, meaning Splendour. If you missed it, check out the summary of part 2 and its corresponding behind the scenes.

Real life is catching up with me and so I may need to take a week off from posting Radiance in the near future so I can actually write some more. But have no fear, for some content is sure to be posted next Monday as normal, even if it isn't directly related to Radiance.

1] And He said to me ‘Son of man, stand on your legs that I may speak to you.’
2] As He spoke to me, a spirit entered me and set me upon my legs and I heard what was spoken to me.
3] He said to me ‘Son of man, I am sending you to the people of Israel, that nation of rebels who have rebelled against Me - they as well as their fathers have defied Me to this very day. 
4] For the sons are brazen of face and stubborn of heart - I send you to them, and you shall say to them: ‘Thus said the Lord God’. 

5] Whether they listen or not - for they are a rebellious house - they shall know that there was a prophet among them.
    -Ezekiel, Chapter 2

    New Yorkers really are an amazing breed, Asher couldn’t help thinking as he struggled to keep his footing while parrying lightning-fast claws. Anywhere else in the world they would probably be running screaming, or calling the police - even the army - when two strange figures attack a random person with sticks. Anywhere else it would be a major event.
    In New York they just assume it’s a flashmob, Asher thought miserably to himself as he stumbled backwards.

Radiance 9 - The bounty of the age-old hills

As Asher landed on his backside for the third time in as many minutes, it occurred to him that he might be wasting his time. Sitting on a large outcropping rock at the bottom of Central Park, he rested his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath.
    “Again,” said Virgo, spinning the Staff of Moses in her hands while her feet seemed to be everywhere at once.
    It was a beautiful Sunday, one of those days that made you glad to be living in New York City, when the sun was high and bright but not scorching. The tourists weren’t out in full force just yet but the coffee shops were already making a killing on iced coffees and frappuccinos. It would have been a good day for people watching, Asher thought to himself, rubbing his aching calves, from this vantage point, in this weather. The women were beginning to shed their spring clothes to make ready for summer and the season for sunbathing was just beginning. He could have sat on this rock, sipped at an ice-cold coca-cola and admire the view. But no, he was sweating from pores he never knew he had, aching from every muscle, trying to master the art of pole-fighting while being grilled on everything he was supposed to have learnt over the last few months. And from the look on Virgo’s face right now, it didn’t seem like he was doing well on either front - she looked ready to break her staff over his head.
    “Come on, get up, we’ve barely started,” said Virgo.
    “You’ve barely started, I’m completely finished.”