Thud!
THUD.
Zorak hit the floor and cut every connection to The Deep and the entity the moment Bol and Cheryl were gone. He had been ready to risk attracting attention, but he was glad they hadn't forced it. If they had, things would have become worse than any of them could handle.
As soon as he fell, Zuri released the Phase Veil charm. She stopped feeding it energy, and the shimmer around her flickered once, twice, and collapsed. The particles in the air settled, color returned, the blurred edges of the room sharpened, and her resonant frequency shifted back into the normal layer of reality until she was solid again, visible and touchable. The charm crumbled in her hand and drifted to the floor as dust and ash.
She rushed to Zorak's side and knelt there, her hands hovering over him, not knowing where to start. Blood pooled around him. His face was swollen, his jaw dislocated, his nose broken, and there were deep gashes across his scalp where Cheryl had ripped out his hair. She could see at a glance that he needed care immediately, and she started to get up for the first-aid kit.
Zorak's hand caught her wrist, weak and trembling. "Not here," he said, his voice rough, barely a whisper.
It was a miracle they hadn't drawn attention on a Sunday afternoon. He had no idea whether the building was empty, but after the damage they had done, they couldn't stay. Zuri looked around at the wreck of apartment 3B and gritted her teeth.
Unlucky bastard. Just die.
She cursed Makun in her heart, and cursed herself for being too kind. Then she slung Zorak's arm over her shoulder, hauled him to his feet and helped him out of the apartment, following his directions.
Makun sat cross-legged outside the diner, meditating. He had spent seven dollars on a plate of fries and beef, which left him six fifty. The food had given him energy, but not the kind he needed, so he had decided to try meditating, something like what the book described, in the hope that it would give him something.
With his eyes closed, he tried to feel the particles. He had seen them ever since that first painful opening in his forehead. On Friday, after he woke on the bathroom floor, he had watched them drift through the air like dust in sunlight, faint and translucent and everywhere, and he had tried reaching out to touch them, but they slipped through his fingers like smoke.
Now, sitting still, he wondered what happened when the particles came close to him. He activated his Sight with the familiar strain behind his forehead, and the world shifted. The particles appeared, drifting and flickering, moving in slow currents around him. He watched them closely as they floated toward him, passed straight through his body and carried on out the other side, with no resistance and no interaction at all. He tried again, concentrating harder, willing them to stop, to stay, to enter him. They drifted through him unchanged.
Makun frowned. There has to be a mechanism for this. If spiritual energy existed, if mystics could gather and refine it, if advancement was possible at all, then there had to be a way to draw the particles in and make them stay. He didn't know it.
That brought him back to the book, which had already given him some very important things. He knew the goal of a mystic, and it made sense to him, though he wasn't sure everyone shared it.
He knew there had been eras when powerful beings walked the earth, before the Suppression and before the Veil came down, and he wondered whether it was connected. Were the myths we learned at school true? The Titan Era, with gods and titans clashing, Zeus overthrowing Kronos and mountains shattered by their battles. The Age of the Aesir, with Odin hanging from Yggdrasil and trading an eye for wisdom while Norse gods walked among men. Ancient Egypt, with pharaohs performing rituals and speaking with entities, temples built on spiritual ley lines and gods descending into mortal forms. Were those beings mystics who reached the Source, practitioners who climbed the ladder? Or something else entirely? He didn't know, but the connection seemed too strong to ignore.
He knew about the Suppression too, the system that kept mystics hidden and the organizations that enforced secrecy with brutal efficiency, and about the Veil, the barrier between the physical world and The Deep that dulled humanity's spiritual awareness. And today he had learned the Four Paths of Comprehension, the ways of climbing the ladder toward the mystic's famous goal: meditation, ritual, lived experience and external resources.
But what is the ladder? Where is it? What kind of ladder leads you to the Source?
Those answers were surely in the book, maybe even in the next few pages. But he had a feeling that with his meager energy he would soon be unable to turn the pages at all, two or three more at most, and if he hadn't learned how to start practicing by then, it was useless. He needed other sources of information.
But how could he pay? Not everyone would be as interested in him as the veiled woman had been, and what did he have to offer? Nothing. Where could he get information without trading for it? The Night Market? No. That's literally a place for trading. Then, he thought, Zuri. She was a good option. But before going to her, he would read the book until he couldn't turn another page, and he still had to prepare his questions for the veiled woman he was meeting tomorrow.
He took the book out of his sports bag. Nothing had changed; he could see his energy being drawn into it as slowly as before. He turned the pages.
THE TIERS OF ASCENSION