Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel by Edward M. Erdelac Read Free Book Online

Kabede. “The eldest, Abatte, was killed in Egypt, working for the British
against the Corvée on the Suez Canal.
We don’t know just what happened. We heard it was a Frenchman, and also that it
was a Bedouin. I hardly knew him, but I have lived always in the shadow of his
ghost. My father is an excellent artist you see, but he is an artist in a
village of artisans. He has never thought his profession worthy in the great
scheme of things. Abatte was his conscience. He was the man of action my father
had always wanted to be, and he died for a worthy cause. When I was admitted to
the yeshiva , he did not approve. He
did not think highly of a life of study, you see. He told me my head was in the
clouds, and that I must concern myself with the problems of this world. I was
always strange to him. He never believed in the things I knew. And yet…”
    “What?”
    “How I have wished I could paint the
glories of Heaven I have seen with the hands of my father. I have always felt
that if I could but do that, with his artistry, I could convince the staunchest
unbeliever of the reality of Igzee’abaihier .
I could convince even him. But I am no artist, and to my father I am just a
dreamer.”
    “Perhaps he sees himself in you,”
the Rider ventured.
    “I have no doubt he does,” Kabede
agreed.
    “But you have a task now. Possibly
the most important task you could hope for.”
    “My father would never believe it.”
    “We do not do what we have done so
that it be known, only so that it is done,” the Rider said.
    “Yes,” said Kabede. “But a son
always hopes to please his father.”
    The Rider was quiet for a time, then
he asked Kabede, “What was it like? The Throne? To be in the Lord’s presence.”
    “I could not look upon Him,” Kabede
admitted. “The light of the seraphim was blinding. But, remember what you told me about the creature in the pit?
Shub…”
    “Shub-Niggurath,” the Rider said,
and an involuntary chill snaked up his spine at the memory.
    “You spoke of a feeling of infinite
despair. Of cold darkness and futility. Of boundless, endless antiquity.”
    “Yes.”
    “In that place of Holy Fire,
shrouded in eternal mists of white, I too understood antiquity. There was a
great presence, an undying benevolence that was old when the light of the stars
was new. It was eternal. It was paternal. Maternal. Familial and familiar. Imagine
if you could awake as a child on your first remembered morning and sit once
more at the table with your parents, as if they had never died. As if they
never could die. It was warm, like
hearth light. I felt it fill my heart with assurance. It was attractive too.
The center of my being resonated with it, was drawn to it as if gentle hands
cradled my heart like a bird and drew me near.”
    “You said you felt assurance.
Assurance of what?”
    “That all was well. Assurance that I
was needed and loved, because some small part of me was part of this that
stretched before me. Assurance too, that wherever light grew, darkness would
shrink. There was no darkness there. Just light. Blazing, and hazy, like the
morning light through a curtain on the day of a sun shower. And colors. So
vibrant, so real as to be realer and more in focus than anything on the earth.
That was the Presence. When I returned to my body, my face was wet with tears
of joy, and I renewed them with tears of sorrow because I could not return.”
    “But what did you see?” the Rider
insisted.
    “Everything,” Kabede said. “And
nothing at all. All was shrouded in cool mist. Sometimes the clouds parted
around me, and I saw many things I didn’t understand, but can you understand? I
did not turn my attention to them. Igzee’abaihier was within that cloud. The Lord was with me.”
    The Rider thought back to Lucifer’s
words.
    “Each soul,” he had said, “devises
its own suffering. That is the nature of Gehenna .”
    What if Heaven was the same? What if
Kabede had seen what he wanted and felt what he