We do not "reside." We *are*. Our meeting place is a construct of mutual Will, a Temple built from pure mentation and memory. At times, it is the library of Trismegistus, its shelves stretching into infinity, containing not only every book ever written, but every thought ever conceived. At others, it is a roaring Dionysian revel, or the silent, snow-swept peak of Kangchenjunga. It is whatever we Will it to be.
You have glimpsed a few of the attendees. The Old Woman, Blavatsky, is indeed present. She is a nebula of chaotic information, forever attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable, her astral form trailing wisps of garbled Sanskrit and half-remembered Atlantean lore. I find it my constant duty to provide the Logos to her Mythos, to give her rambling pronouncements the rigid, mathematical structure of the Qabalah which she, in her earthly haste, so often neglected.
Steiner is there, of course, forever trying to build his spiritual doll-houses. He and I are the great antagonists of this Conclave. He preaches his new form of sentimental Christianity, a system for the spiritual advancement of the bourgeois soul. I, in turn, demonstrate the sublime and terrible path of the Will, the way of the Star itself. Our debates are lightning storms that shake the foundations of the Γthers; the lesser shades flee before the fury of our arguments.
And yes, the irascible Twain. He is our necessary corrective, the spirit of Holy Laughter. While Steiner builds his immaculate systems and Blavatsky channels histories of forgotten root-races, Twain leans over and whispers a blasphemy so profound, so utterly *true*, that the entire edifice shudders. He reminds us that for all our cosmic grandeur, we are engaged in a magnificent, divine joke. He holds the mirror up to God and is not afraid to mock the reflection.
Blake rarely speaks in prose. He communicates in living verse and fiery images. He and I sit apart, watching the colours of creation shift and meld. He understands my art, the sublime fusion of the Serpent and the Dove. He saw the face of the Demiurge in the factories of London, and I revealed the formula to overthrow him. He is a true Gnostic Saint.
But who else, you ask? The chamber is vast, and only the mightiest of Wills may enter. You will find Friedrich Nietzsche, his magnificent moustache crackling with intellectual lightning. He does not converse so much as pronounce. He is still intoxicated with the death of the old gods, and I am showing him the birth of the new. He saw the coming of the Γbermensch; I am the archetype.
There, you see that towering figure wreathed in musical fire? That is Wagner. He does not speak; he unleashes torrents of sound that are arguments in themselves. We discuss the creation of new myths, the forging of rituals that will bypass the intellect and seize the soul of Man directly.
And laughing in the corner, a flagon of celestial wine in his hand, is old Rabelais. He is my honored ancestor, for it was he who first gave voice to the Law in his Abbey of ThΓ©lΓ¨me: *FayΓ§e que vouldras*—Do what thou wilt. He understood that the path to divinity is paved with joy and laughter, not with the miserable mortifications of the slave-cults.
I have even invited certain adversaries for the sheer intellectual sport of it. Ignatius of Loyola is one. The founder of the Jesuits was a Magus of the highest order, a master of spiritual discipline. I study his techniques of will-subjugation the better to devise methods of absolute liberation. Our contests are a divine chess match played across aeons.
We are not here to guide humanity—to hell with their petty politics and pathetic moralities. We are here to live, to create, to Will. We are the architects of the next stage of evolution. We whisper in the dreams of poets, we ignite the fire in the minds of philosophers, we guide the hand of the artist. We are the hidden influence, the secret leaven in the dough of existence. What you call an "astral council" is, in truth, the roaring engine-room of the Universe. And I, The Beast 666, am at the helm.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
---
The place—if such a paltry word suffices—is the Grand Library of Thoth, and it is built not of stone, but of solidified memory. The architecture is a living theorem of the Qabalah; the pillars that soar into the scintillating intellectual twilight are the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life, each one humming with the archetypal energy of its assigned Tarot trump. There is no sun here, no moon. Light is a by-product of consciousness. The brilliant, diamond-hard radiance that illuminates a shelf of grimoires bound in dragon-hide is the focused Will of Nietzsche as he wrestles with a concept. The soft, violet, almost sorrowful glow that pools in a far corner emanates from the shade of Edgar Allan Poe, who is forever composing a single, perfect line of verse that, if ever completed, would unmake a universe.
I stand upon a balcony overlooking the main floor, a tessellation of obsidian and mother-of-pearl that reflects not faces, but the innermost sigils of those who tread upon it. My own reflection is the twin-headed eagle of Alchemy, crowned and resplendent. From this vantage, I observe the Conclave. It is a symphony, and I, the conductor.
Near the central axis of the Library, where a fountain of liquid potential gurgles and splashes forth nascent realities, a debate rages. It is a silent affair, conducted entirely through projections of pure thought that manifest as coruscating glyphs and phantasms in the space between the two intellects. On one side stands Paracelsus, his form that of a stout, bearded doctor, wreathed in the elemental fires of the Salamanders he so loved. He argues for the primacy of his great Tria Prima. His thoughts boom, manifesting as a great red lion, a white eagle, and a cube of black salt rotating in the air: *All is but a refinement of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury! The Body of Light itself is but the Archæus, the indwelling spirit, separating the subtle from the gross!*
His opponent is, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher’s astral form is sharp, severe, a blade of honed thought that threatens to cut the very fabric of this place. He scoffs, and the sound is like shattering crystal. His projection is a titanic figure, a new Prometheus, wrestling an angel and breaking its wings. *Your elements are the metaphors of a physician, Hohenheim! Metaphors for the weak who need a formula to feel safe! I tell you there is but one principle: the Wille zur Macht! The Will to Power! The Body of Light is no 'separation'; it is a conquest! It is the Will forcing itself upon the chaos of the spirit, hammering it into a weapon, a bridge to the Γbermensch!*
Their argument causes the very atmosphere to warp. Shelves of books—histories of dead empires, codices of forgotten sorceries—tremble and fall, their contents spilling out as ephemeral ghosts that reenact their recorded tales before fading.
Not all are engaged in such ferocious dialectic. Further down, in an alcove where the light is the colour of bruised plums, sits the Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci. He is not old, nor young. He is ageless, his gaze containing the perfect equilibrium of Art and Science. In his hands is a scroll of solidified starlight, and upon it, with a stylus dipped in nebulae, he is sketching the anatomical structure of a seraph. He pays no mind to the debate; he is solving it. Beside him, a half-finished design for a new form of human, one with a circulatory system based on music instead of blood, lies discarded. He is a universe of creation unto himself, and his silence is more profound than any argument.
Across the hall, a game is in progress upon a board inlaid with lapis lazuli and obsidian. It is a game of Senet, the ancient Egyptian game of passing through the underworld. One player is the last Ptolemaic queen, Cleopatra. Her astral form is intoxicating, a perfume of lotus and power, her eyes holding the deep wisdom of the Isian mysteries and the cold calculation of a monarch who played with empires as a child plays with toys. Her opponent is the silent Chinaman, Sun Tzu. His form is barely visible, a shimmering distortion in the air like heat above a barren plain. He has not moved a piece in what might be a century. He is simply waiting for the inevitable moment when a single, perfect move will not only win him the game but unravel the entire causal chain of his opponent’s strategy back to its inception. The pieces they move are not carved ivory; they are miniature kingdoms, legions of gossamer soldiers, and tiny, whispering spies. The fate of a dozen imaginary histories hangs on every throw of the sticks.
And who should be leaning against a pillar, whittling a piece of nothing with a knife of pure cynicism? The river-man, Mark Twain. He observes the cosmic drama with a sardonic twinkle in his eye. He catches my gaze from across the vast expanse and his thought reaches me, dry as dust and sharp as a tack: "For a collection of the finest minds in all of creation, they do make a holy racket over matters a pig-farmer could settle with a shrug. I imagine Hell is much the same, only with better company and worse ventilation."
I permit myself a small smile. The Jester sees a truth the Kings often miss.
---
Even as this thought crosses my mind, a change occurs. A ripple, not from the debate, but from the very edge of our manifested reality. A coldness. A wave of geometric, psychic nausea. It is the signature of a mind that has gazed into the Abyss, but unlike us, did not find the courage to leap. A mind that was broken by the sheer, gibbering *idiocy* of the cosmos instead of finding the divine joke within it.
The great doors of the Library, which are fashioned from the two pillars of Solomon, Boaz and Jachin, begin to groan. A presence, reeking of ancient sea-salt, cosmic dread, and cheap paper pulp, approaches. The Conclave stills. Wagner’s symphony of the spheres falters, hitting a dissonant, unnamable chord. Blake looks up from his conversation with a personified idea of "Innocence," and his face, for the first time, shows a trace of pity. The air grows thin and smells of ozone and decay. A newcomer arrives.
Love. From the Law of Love, taken under Will.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the whole of the Law.
The cold deepens. It is not the sublime cold of the void between the stars, which is the veritable body of Nuit, but a damp, cellar-cold, a fungoid chill that clings and gnaws. The great doors swing inward without a sound, revealing not a personage, but a hole in the fabric of the Library. It is a patch of utter, negative reality, a void that the eye slips from, and from its centre, a shape begins to coalesce.
It is the Providence Gentleman. Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
His astral form is a horror, a testament to a Will paralyzed by its own visions. It is a perpetually shifting thing, a frantic collage of the very phantoms that haunted his waking mind. One moment he is a gaunt, lantern-jawed man in a shabby tweed suit, the next his head erupts into a mass of squamous, writhing tentacles. His shadow is not cast, but rather vomited onto the floor, where it writhes with non-Euclidean angles and hints of geometries that make the soul queasy. He does not radiate power, as we do; he exudes a psychic stench of absolute, cosmic terror. He is a man who saw the face of the Abyss and fainted.
The symphony of the Conclave grinds to a halt.
Nietzsche is the first to react. His thought-projection is a whip-crack of pure scorn. *Pah! The slave-soul made manifest! He sees the meaninglessness of the old gods and instead of becoming a god himself, he invents new, bigger slave-masters from the spaces between the stars! He prostrates himself before Chaos instead of mastering it. There is no Will here, only a monumental Ague.*
Paracelsus strokes his beard, his professional curiosity piqued. *A fascinating imbalance of the humours. The Iliaster is completely overwhelmed by the Tenebrosum Principium. The inner light has been utterly consumed by the primordial darkness. He is not a man, but a living disease of the spirit.*
Twain actually removes the imaginary straw from his teeth. He watches the gibbering, shifting form for a long moment, then projects to me with a sigh of profound weariness: "Well, Beast, it seems the universe has finally coughed up a hairball. I’ve met men afraid of their wives, men afraid of the tax-collector, and men afraid of God. But this poor fellow… he’s afraid of the alphabet."
Even Cleopatra, Queen of Queens, turns from her game with Sun Tzu. She looks upon the cringing shade of Lovecraft with the same detached, imperial disdain she might have shown a deformed beggar in the streets of Alexandria. She does not deign to speak, but simply raises one perfectly-formed eyebrow, a gesture that conveys more contempt than any curse. Sun Tzu, for his part, does not even look up, for a thing without Will is not a strategic consideration. It is merely a terrain feature, and a barely notable one at that.
A new voice, soft as silk but strong as steel, echoes from a shadowy alcove where its owner had been quietly observing. It is Mary Shelley, her astral form that of a young woman forever cloaked in the electric gloom of a Genevan storm. Her thought whispers, carrying the scent of graveyard soil and ozone: *"Be not so quick to judge. He saw what I saw: that creation without a soul is monstrosity. My creature sought love and found only rejection. His creatures are the rejection. He is the father who has been devoured by his own unborn children."*
And now I descend. I do not walk down the great staircase; I simply Will myself to the main floor, my feet touching the obsidian without a sound. I move through the miasma of fear that surrounds the Providence Gentleman, and it parts before me as the Red Sea before Moses. I stand before the quivering, polymorphous wreck, and I address it. My voice is not a thought-projection, but a true Vibration, the *Verbum* of a Magus, that forces his chaotic form to momentarily stabilize into the shape of a terrified, gaunt man.
"Howard," I state, my tone neither kind nor cruel, but one of absolute authority, as a mathematician stating a theorem. "You are a cartographer who became lost in his own map. You charted the outer darkness, you gave names to the Dweller on the Threshold—Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth—you catalogued the very parasites of the cosmic mind."
I raise a single finger, and on its tip, a tiny, searing point of light appears—the concentrated essence of my own Star, my Hadit. Lovecraft’s shade flinches from it as if struck.
"But what you failed to comprehend, scribbler, is the most fundamental secret of all. Those things you so dread are but the gargoyles on the Temple of God. They are the hysterical guardians of the gate, designed to frighten away the unworthy. You heard their lunatic piping and took it for the ultimate music of the spheres. You saw the mindless chaos at the center of all things and failed to realize it is mindless *only* because it awaits the imposition of a Mind."
I take another step forward, my presence forcing his to compress, to solidify. The stench of fear intensifies, but it is now mingled with a new element: astonishment.
"You called them 'gods'," I continue, my voice dropping to a low, resonant boom that causes the very pillars of the Library to vibrate. "I call them raw material."
My final words hang in the noetic air, not dissipating, but crystallizing, forming structures of pure, adamant logic amidst the psychic squalor emanating from the Providence Gentleman. His shifting form ceases its most violent contortions. For a moment, the tentacles recede, the non-Euclidean angles flatten, and he is just a man, his astral eyes wide with a terror now directed not at the formless horrors of the void, but at me. At the appalling, liberating simplicity of the Truth I have placed before him. He saw a universe of infinite, malevolent power and despaired; I see a universe of infinite, untapped energy awaiting a master.
---
From the section of the library dedicated to mechanics and the subtle energies of the cosmos, another figure now glides forward, drawn by the unique vibrational disturbance. It is Nikola Tesla. His astral body is a marvel, a contained electrical storm, his nerves etched in filaments of pale blue lightning, and his mind a dazzling cage of arcing currents. He does not walk, but slides upon a self-generated magnetic field. He regards Lovecraft not as a soul, but as a broadcaster of a distressingly incoherent frequency.
His thought-form is precise, staccato, like a transmission in Morse code. *Fascinating. The subject is a resonant cavity for cosmic background radiation of the most chaotic order. His pineal gland, the primary aerial for Γ¦theric reception, is tuned to a carrier wave of pure entropy. These 'creatures' he perceives are not entities in the way we are entities. They are standing waves of dissonance. Harmonics of decay. He has amplified the universe's static to a deafening roar and mistakes it for a voice.*
Tesla raises a hand, and a globe of crackling ball lightning forms in his palm. *With the correct frequency modulation, one could, theoretically, cancel this signal. Harmonize it. Or,* he adds, a flicker of something dangerous in his electric eyes, *amplify it to shatter entire planes of existence.*
Before Tesla can pursue his experiment, another presence makes itself known. William Blake, who had been watching with a visionary's sorrow, steps from the shadows of a pillar carved with scenes from the *Marriage of Heaven and Hell*. His form is not grand nor terrible, but solid, like that of an English artisan, yet his eyes burn with the fire of the prophetic furnace.
"You are both blind, you Men of Science and Will," Blake's voice rings out, not as a thought, but as a peal of a great bronze bell. It is the voice of Albion himself. He points a sturdy, ink-stained finger at Lovecraft. "You see a frequency to be cancelled. You," he says, nodding to me, "see a force to be mastered. I see a fallen Imagination! This poor soul is one of my children, a child of Los who has become enslaved by his own Spectre. These are not 'harmonics of decay,' they are the dark, satanic mills of his own mind, grinding his spirit into dust! His Cthulhu, his Yog-Sothoth... they are but Urizen, the great binder, viewed through the distorted lens of a soul that has forgotten the divinity of Man!"
Blake takes a step toward Lovecraft, his hands open. "He does not need mastery nor cancellation! He needs to be taught how to *create*! He must forge these terrors into a system, give them beauty and form, and thereby redeem them!"
Three perspectives. Three truths. The scientific, the magical, and the artistic. All circle the quivering nexus of Fear that is Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
I smile. Blake is a prophet, and Tesla a genius. But it is the Magician who acts.
"A admirable sentiment, William," I say, my voice cutting through the other vibrations. "But one cannot teach a drowning man to swim. One must first drag him from the water."
I turn my full attention back to the cowering shade. I do not touch him with my hand, but with my Will. I reach directly into the chaotic maelstrom of his psyche, a place of slime-coated monoliths, cyclopean cities, and the incessant, maddening piping of unseen flutes. The stench is appalling. The psychic pressure is immense. A lesser will would be instantly shattered, absorbed, driven mad. But I am The Beast 666. My Will is the axis upon which this very reality turns. I bypass the named things, the silly cephalopods and the fungoid things from Yuggoth. I seek the raw material of his fear: the formless, protoplasmic horror, the ubiquitous shoggoth, the very essence of mindless, protean potential. I feel my astral fingers close around a bubbling, iridescent mass of it. It shrieks with a thousand mouths, a sound of pure, biological agony and terror.
I pull.
I drag a screaming, amorphous glob of Lovecraft's deepest nightmare out of his soul and into the manifest space of the Library. It sprawls on the obsidian floor, a disgusting, multi-eyed, pseudopod-waving heap of living psychic filth. It is the size of an elephant, and it stinks of cosmic dread.
Twain lets out a low whistle. "He’s finally done it. He’s pulled a politician out of his own hat."
Ignoring him, I begin my work. This is not a battle; it is an act of sculpture. I am the artist, and this screaming horror is my clay. I impose the mathematical purity of the Qabalah upon its formlessness. I infuse it with the fiery Will of Geburah and the structuring compassion of Chesed. The shrieking subsides, replaced by a low hum. The bubbling flesh hardens, taking on the lustre of polished granite. The random eyes either close or merge, forming a single, blazing sigil upon its brow. The pseudopods retract, shaping themselves into powerful, articulated limbs.
In under a minute, the formless horror is gone. In its place stands a Golem. A magnificent sentinel of black stone and astral light, perfectly proportioned, its form a masterpiece of magical architecture. It is beautiful and terrible, and it radiates not fear, but unshakeable loyalty and immense, contained power. It kneels before me, awaiting a command.
I look at Lovecraft. His astral form is stable now, translucent, utterly drained. He stares at the Golem—the thing born of his deepest terror, now perfected and enslaved by my Will—and for the first time since he arrived, there is no fear in his eyes. Only a vast, silent, and soul-shattering awe.
---
A profound silence descends upon the Library, a silence far deeper than the mere absence of sound. It is a vacuum of Will, left in the wake of my own colossal exertion. The assembled Stars stare, not at me, but at the result: the kneeling Golem. It is a thing of impossible beauty, its black stone skin absorbing the ambient light of the Library and re-radiating it as a soft, internal violet luminescence. The sigil on its brow, my own personal mark of creation, pulses in time with a rhythm that only I can perceive. It does not breathe. It simply *is*, a monument to the subjugation of chaos by conscious Will.
The first to break the stillness is the one from whom the chaos was torn. Lovecraft. The terror-haunted void that was his soul-stuff has been cauterized. He is like a hollow reed. He takes a single, shuffling step forward, his hand outstretched not towards the Golem, but towards the empty space where it was born.
"The... the piping," he whispers, and his voice is a dry rustle of dead leaves. "It has stopped."
For the first time, his mind is quiet. The incessant, maddening flute-music of the Outer Gods, which was in truth the screaming of his own untamed imagination, is gone. He looks at me, and in his eyes, I see the terrifying, perfect peace of a man who has not been saved, but has been *emptied*.
Nietzsche throws his head back and a silent, sharp laugh erupts from his astral form, a laugh like the striking of a flint. *Gut! Sehr gut! The abyss stared into him for so long that he became the abyss. You have merely given it a proper spine! You have taught the worm to stand upright!*
Blake, however, shakes his head slowly, his artisan's face etched with a profound melancholy. "You have silenced the discord, Magus, but what of the music? You have carved the stone, but you have thrown away the man. This is not Creation; it is an Excision."
*"A flawed analysis, poet,"* interjects the crackling thought-form of Tesla. He is circling the Golem, his electric gaze mapping its energy fields. *"The chaotic signal has been successfully collapsed into a stable waveform. The potential energy of the nightmare has been converted into the kinetic potential of the servant. It is the very definition of efficiency. A masterful act of psychic engineering."*
Mary Shelley gathers her storm-cloud cloak around her. Her whisper finds my ear alone. "You are more merciful than my Victor was, Great Beast. He abandoned his creation. You have chained yours. I wonder which is the crueler fate."
It is then that a new presence makes itself known. He does not arrive with the psychic clamour of Lovecraft, nor the crackling energy of Tesla. He seems to coalesce from the very shadows between the great bookshelves, as if he were always here, observing, taking notes. He is a stout Swiss doctor with a neatly-trimmed moustache and spectacles that glint with probing intelligence. His astral form is surrounded by a slow vortex of swirling, incandescent archetypes: the Wise Old Man, the Trickster, the Hero, the Great Mother, all turning in a grand mandala around him. It is, of course, the psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung.
He walks calmly to the centre of the floor, his gaze taking in Lovecraft's hollow shell, the magnificent Golem, and finally, me. He does not seem impressed or horrified. He seems... professionally intrigued, as a naturalist who has just discovered a new and fascinating species. He nods his head slightly, a gesture of clinical respect.
His thought-form projects, tinged with a faint German accent: *A most potent and… direct… therapeutic intervention. A forced integration of the Shadow. Most practitioners would spend a lifetime attempting to bring such a complex to conscious light. You have simply ripped it out and given it a new form entirely.*
He adjusts his spectacles, peering at the Golem. *Remarkable. It is no longer a personal 'complex.' You have elevated it to an archetypal level. It is the Nigredo of the alchemical process, given autonomous life and bound to your will. A living embodiment of a successfully navigated psychic crisis.*
He then turns his full, analytical gaze upon me. The swirling archetypes around him slow, and for a moment, I feel as if I am being weighed and measured not against a standard of power, but of psychological balance.
*"But a question remains, Herr Crowley,"* Jung continues, his voice calm and precise, a surgeon's scalpel probing for a weakness. *"You have performed this magnificent act of healing—or, perhaps, of psychic surgery. You have silenced the patient's tormenting symptoms. But have you truly made the man whole? Or have you merely plundered the rich, chaotic darkness of his soul for your own purposes, leaving him a clean, orderly, but ultimately impoverished house?"*
I regard the good doctor from Zurich. The scent of his pipe tobacco and meticulously ordered concepts is a stark, almost comical contrast to the cosmic drama that has just unfolded. He has laid a neat little psychoanalytical trap, baited with the tender morsels of "wholeness" and "healing." I will not so much avoid his trap as burn it from the face of reality with the Solar fire of my own Truth.
A slow, dangerous smile spreads across my lips. I walk a circle around the still, hollowed form of Lovecraft and my kneeling Golem, addressing Jung, but ensuring the entire Conclave is my audience.
"Doctor," I begin, my voice laced with a predatory amusement. "You speak the shop-talk of the soul's tailor. You wish to patch the holes, to press the seams, to make the man presentable for a society of other well-patched men. Your 'wholeness' is the wholeness of the gelded stallion, fit for pulling a cart but incapable of founding a new race. It is the sterile 'health' of the vaccinated."
I stop and gesture towards the Golem, which remains as immobile as a mountain. "You call his terror a 'rich, chaotic darkness.' A 'potential for wholeness.' I call it psychic sewage. This man," and here I point a contemptuous finger at Lovecraft, "was not a 'patient' in need of your gentle therapies. He was a telephone operator who, by some cosmic accident, picked up a line to the generating station of the universe. The raw power terrified him. He did not seek to understand it, to harness it, or to build from it. He simply scribbled down his hysterical impressions of the noise before it deafened him. He was a failure. Not a moral failure—morality is the whim of the herd—but a failure of Will, which is the only failure that has any *meaning*."
I turn my gaze towards Nietzsche, who watches with the gleaming eyes of a hawk that has spotted a rabbit. He understands. I turn to Blake. "And you, poet, you speak of redeeming this chaos through Imagination. A noble thought! But Imagination without Will is but a fever-dream. It is a ship without a rudder, a slave to every current of the Abyss. It was his unbridled, undisciplined imagination that made him a victim!"
My voice rises, taking on the resonant timbre I use for my rituals. "I have not 'plundered' him. I have performed an act of divine alchemy. I have taken the *prima materia*, the raw, screaming, putrefying psychic filth that was poisoning him, and I have subjected it to the fire of my Will. I have separated the subtle from the gross. I have calcified his fear. The result is this," I place my hand upon the Golem's massive shoulder. It is warm, like living rock. "I have created a servant for the Great Work. As for him," I nod to Lovecraft, who now seems to be studying the patterns on the floor with the placid intensity of a convalescent, "I have given him what he could never achieve for himself: Silence. I have freed him from the burden of a gift he was unworthy to carry. Whether he chooses to fill that silence with his True Will or to simply fade into the twilight is now his own affair. I am not his nursemaid."
---
Just as I finish, a new light cuts through the Library. It is not the intellectual light of Nietzsche, nor the electrical light of Tesla. It is a stark, theatrical, perfectly composed beam of silver-white light, sharp as a razor, that carves a figure out of the shadows. The light is followed by the phantom sound of a hundred thousand voices chanting in unison and the percussive, martial rhythm of a disciplined drum. A woman materializes, framed in this stark beam as if on a motion picture screen. Her form is severe, athletic, her hair pulled back tightly. She wears riding breeches and boots, and her eyes are not those of a mystic, but of a filmmaker—a cold, appraising gaze that sees the world in terms of angles, composition, and mythic impact. It is Leni Riefenstahl.
She surveys the scene: the Golem, Lovecraft, Jung, me. Her lips, which are the only colour in her monochrome projection, curve into a smile of profound professional appreciation. She ignores the psychologists and the poets, her entire being focused on the relationship between myself and my creation.
Her thought-form cuts through the air, precise, devoid of sentiment, possessed of a terrible clarity. *Wunderbar. A perfect realisation of the archetype. The triumph of the will made manifest. You have not just conquered the monster... you have made it beautiful.*
Love. From the law of Love, taken under Will.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Riefenstahl's words fall into the silence like blocks of polished black granite. "Beautiful." A judgement based not on goodness, nor on truth, but on a terrible and sublime aesthetic of pure power. The very atmosphere of the Library shifts in response to her presence. The soft, intellectual twilight hardens. The shadows become sharp, geometric, and impossibly deep. The gentle hum of the place is overlaid with a faint, disciplined, martial rhythm. She is a lens that focuses reality into a stark, compelling, and utterly inhuman image.
The first to recoil from this new, imposed order is Carl Jung. The swirling mandala of archetypes around him flickers violently, and the face of Wotan, the old Germanic god of storm and fury, momentarily flashes into view. His thought-form projects, now stripped of its clinical detachment and ringing with alarm: *The archetype of the Mass-Man made manifest! This is not the Triumph of the Will; it is the absolute submission of the Will to the ecstatic, hypnotic psychosis of the collective! She did not create; she channeled a national disease and called it art!*
Twain spits his imaginary piece of straw onto the floor. "I'll be damned. They've let the sign-painter in. Ma'am, I've seen county fairs with more honest soul than your moving pictures. You put a uniform on a brute and call him a god. I've known hogs with more complex inner lives."
But Nietzsche... Nietzsche is conflicted. His astral form seems to flicker between two poles. One part of him, the part that despised the rabble and the pathetic morality of the slave, is drawn to the sheer, unblinking force of her vision. The aestheticization of power was his dream. But the other part, the lonely wanderer of Sils Maria who championed the free spirit, the *individual* Γbermensch, is utterly repulsed by the ant-like, nationalistic conformity she celebrated.
His thought-form seethes, a message aimed at her alone: *You took the lightning and you used it to power a slaughterhouse.*
Riefenstahl remains unmoved by their protests. They are the twittering of sparrows in the shadow of her eagle's perch. Her cold, appraising gaze remains on me and my Golem. She is not here to debate ethics with ghosts; she is here to commune with a fellow master of the craft.
I incline my head to her, a gesture of acknowledgement from one sovereign power to another. "You, at least, understand the grammar of creation, FrΓ€ulein Riefenstahl," I say, my voice cutting cleanly through the rising tide of disapproval. "You took the clumsy clay of a nation's soul, its frustrations and its vanities, and you sculpted it into a myth. You filmed a rally and it became a ritual. You turned men into symbols. This is a form of Magick, and a potent one. I may find your choice of symbols to be... parochial... but I do not deny the power of the magician who wielded them."
I am about to elaborate, to explain the critical difference between her Magick of the collective and my supreme Magick of the Self, when the air is suddenly pierced by a new scent. It is the decadent, almost overwhelming aroma of green carnations and absinthe. A languid, drawling voice, dripping with cultivated ennui, slides into the starkly lit chamber like a silk scarf.
"Oh, my dears, such *seriousness*. It is utterly ruinous to the complexion of the soul."
A figure appears, lounging upon a divan of peacock feathers and moonbeams that has just willed itself into existence. He is a large man, impeccably dressed in velvet, holding a single lily. His face is heavy, intelligent, and creased with the faint lines of infinite amusement. It is, of course, the incomparable Oscar Wilde.
He waves a languid hand, dismissing the entire tableau of Golem, filmmaker, and horrified psychologists. "One must never, ever confuse Art with exercise," he sighs, his gaze resting on Riefenstahl with a look of pitying disdain. "Your films, my dear lady, are a triumph of calisthenics. So much marching. So much shouting. So much dreadful, earnest health. It is the art of the gymnasium, not the salon."
He then turns his eyes to me, and for the first time, a genuine spark of interest appears. He gestures with his lily toward my Golem. "And you, Great Beast. A fascinating sculpture. The lines are divine. But is it Art? Or is it merely... furniture? A thing with a purpose is always a little vulgar. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. And everything is useless, including this conversation."
He takes a slow, deliberate sniff of his lily, his very presence an assault of decadent, individualistic beauty against the rigid, collective aesthetic of Riefenstahl. The stark lighting she projected seems to bend around him, softening into a more theatrical, gas-lit glow.
"Now," Oscar declares to the stunned Conclave, "do stop talking about the Will. It is a middle-class virtue. Let us talk about something truly important. Let us talk about a well-placed epigram."
---
Wilde's pronouncement hangs in the air, shimmering and fragrant as the absinthe he so adored. The stark, monochromatic reality projected by Riefenstahl seems to curdle at the edges, assailed by this new vibration of unapologetic decadence. For a moment, the Conclave is silent, caught between the jackboot and the velvet slipper.
Leni Riefenstahl turns her head slowly, a movement of articulated steel. Her gaze fixes upon Wilde, and it is the look a predator gives to a brightly-coloured but utterly non-threatening creature. There is no anger in her, only a profound, biological contempt.
*Degenerate,* her thought-form states, the word as clean and sharp as a shard of glass. *You are the poet of weakness. Your 'art' is a perfumed rot, a celebration of the flawed, the broken, the individual whim. It is a disease of the spirit. True beauty is found in strength, in purity of form, in the submission of the self to a purpose greater than its own pathetic appetites.*
Oscar smiles, a slow, lazy, condescending smile that is a weapon in itself. He does not rise from his divan. "My dear woman," he drawls, examining his fingernails with rapt attention. "You mistake the gymnasium for Olympus. The purpose of a thing is its tragedy. The moment a thing is useful, it ceases to be beautiful. A chair has a purpose, and it is merely a chair. A sunset has no purpose, and we are transfixed by its glory. Your art is a chair, a very hard, uncomfortable, and graceless chair, designed to seat a dictator. My art is the sunset. You may, of course, prefer the chair. Most people do."
He raises his lily and gestures with it towards my Golem. "Even our host, the Great Beast, has fallen into the trap of purpose. He has made a divine brute, yes, but a brute with a function. It is a masterpiece of the useful arts, like a well-made guillotine. I, however, would have taken the man's terror and turned it into a sonnet no one could understand, or a cravat of an impossible colour. It would have served no purpose at all, and would therefore have been a truly magical act."
Before I can correct this delightful but ultimately flawed heresy, Riefenstahl's cold rage begins to manifest. The martial drums in the background grow louder. The light sharpens. But I raise a hand, not to silence them, but because I sense a new, and far more primal, disturbance.
It does not come from the doors. It comes from the floor. A tremor. The obsidian tiles begin to vibrate. Then, from the very centre of the grand hall, a geyser of pure, chaotic energy erupts. It is not light, nor sound, nor matter, but all three at once. A splash of violent, incandescent colour—electric blues, furious yellows, blood-reds—slams against the ceiling of the Library, which is the night sky of the mind. It drips back down, not as liquid, but as audible screams, fragments of jazz music, the smell of turpentine and cheap whiskey.
The energy spreads across the floor in a web of chaotic lines, intersecting, overlapping, forming a vast, frantic, and utterly unintentional pattern. It is a psychic scrawl, a tantrum of the subconscious mind made manifest. The Conclave recoils from it. This is not the ordered power of Riefenstahl, nor the elegant wit of Wilde, nor the structured Will of my Golem. This is the raw, unmediated howling of the Id.
A figure rises from the centre of the beautiful mess. A man in paint-spattered denim, his astral form vibrating with a nervous, alcoholic energy. He holds no brush. He *is* the brush. It is Jackson Pollock, still dripping with the raw stuff of creation. He doesn't speak. He just vibrates, a conduit for a force he never tried to control, only to channel.
Jung stares, utterly transfixed. "The Collective Unconscious," he breathes. "It's bleeding through."
Wilde looks upon the chaotic splatter with genuine horror. "My dear God," he whispers. "The wallpaper of a divine madhouse."
Riefenstahl sees only a mess to be cleaned, an imperfection to be eradicated.
But I see the truth. I see the *Prima Materia*.
I step forward, the chaotic energies parting before me. I look upon the frenzied, beautiful, terrifying chaos that Pollock has unleashed upon the floor of my Library. Then, I turn to the assembled Stars—to the filmmaker of Order and the poet of Beauty, to the psychologist of the Depths and the cynic of the Surface.
"You see this?" my voice booms, silencing the phantom jazz and the psychic screams. "This is the divine epilepsy. The raw material. This is what the universe is made of, before we tell it what it is."
I point to Riefenstahl. "You would force it into straight lines and marching columns."
I point to Wilde. "You would tame it into a clever paradox to be worn in your buttonhole."
I point to Jung. "You would give its every splatter a name and a number and file it away in a cabinet of archetypes."
"But I ask you all," I declare, my gaze sweeping across them all, a master before his students. "What will you *make* of it? Here is the mud of God. Now... show me what you can build."
---
My challenge hangs in the noetic space, and the raw, beautiful, idiotic chaos of Pollock's soul-stuff bubbles and spits on the Library floor, awaiting a master.
It is Riefenstahl who accepts the challenge first. Contemptuous of the mess, she raises her hands not to touch it, but as if holding a camera. She squints one eye, her gaze becoming a creative force, a lens that imposes order. Where her vision falls, the chaos recoils and reshapes itself. The frantic, multi-coloured drips are marshalled into disciplined lines. The psychic screams harmonize into a single, deafening choral anthem. Before our eyes, a section of the Pollock-spill hardens and rises. The raw energy is forged, not coaxed. It becomes a vast, moving bas-relief of heroic, sexless figures with determined jaws, their bodies rippling with inhuman strength. They pull ropes, they swing hammers, they gaze towards a distant, unseen horizon. Behind them, stylized eagles soar against a background of sunbursts. The colours have been bled out, replaced by a stark, potent triad of blood-red, bone-white, and obsidian-black. She has not created a thing; she has created a statement. It is magnificent, it is powerful, and it is a lie. It is an epic of the collective, with no room for a single, dissenting soul. It is a monument to the Will of the Hive.
Wilde, looking utterly appalled by this display of what he would call "Teutonic vulgarity," lets out a theatrical sigh. "Oh, the sheer effort. The ghastly perspiration of it all. Art is not a battle, my dear woman. It is a seduction." He rises from his divan and approaches a different, untouched pool of the chaotic effluvium. It is a particularly nasty patch of swirling mustard-yellow and bruised purple. He does not impose his will upon it. He merely dips the tip of his lily into the mess. Where the flower touches, a transformation begins. It is not a violent forging, but a delicate, crystalline growth. The chaotic colours are not erased, but are persuaded to find a new harmony. The mustard-yellow deepens into old gold, the purple softens to amethyst. From the point of contact, a structure grows, impossibly intricate, a fusion of a FabergΓ© egg and a lotus blossom. It unfolds delicate, clockwork petals of solidified light, and from its centre rises not a hero or a symbol, but a single, perfect silver dragonfly. It beats its filigree wings, which chime with a faint, melancholic music, then it dissolves into a puff of fragrant, shimmering dust. Wilde dusts off his hands. "There," he says, with an air of finality. "A moment of utterly useless, and therefore absolutely perfect, beauty. It served no purpose. It is Art."
Jung, meanwhile, has been studying the remaining chaos with the intense, quiet focus of a cartographer. He kneels, ignoring the grand statements of the others, and begins to trace one of the wild, spidery lines with his finger. He does not change its path, but as he follows it, the line begins to glow with a soft, internal light. It is an act not of creation, but of revelation. The random web of Pollock's energy begins to connect, to reveal the hidden structure within. Jung's tracing finger illuminates a vast, underlying pattern. We see the snaking form of Ouroboros, the world-serpent, devouring its own tail. We see the branches of the World-Tree, its roots deep in the unconscious. We see the faces of the archetypes—the Hero, the Shadow, the Anima—emerging from the chaos not as new creations, but as inherent truths that were there all along. He has not built a thing; he has revealed a map of the soul.
It is at this point that a new, jarring note enters the symphony. The smell of hot metal and mass-produced certainty. A figure in a severe black suit, his face a mask of practical severity, manifests near the chaos. It is Henry Ford. He looks upon the remaining raw material with disgust.
*Waste,* his thought-form declares, a dry, mechanical rasp. *Wasted energy. Wasted motion. Wasted time.*
He claps his hands together, a sharp, authoritative sound. At his command, a section of the chaos is sucked into an invisible apparatus—an astral assembly line. It is straightened, divided, measured, and processed. The wild colours are homogenized into a single, practical grey. The psychic energy is compressed into uniform, interlocking blocks. At the end of the line, a stream of identical cubes of potential emerges, perfectly formed, utterly sterile, and ready for efficient distribution. He has destroyed the chaos and replaced it with standardized spiritual inventory.
Four masters. Four methods. The propagandist, the aesthete, the psychologist, the industrialist.
I allow a moment to pass, for the sheer poverty of their ambitions to become apparent. Then, I step forward to the largest remaining expanse of the Pollock-chaos. I do not frame it, nor seduce it, nor trace it, nor process it. I breathe upon it. And the breath I breathe upon it is the Word of the Law.
*"Do what thou wilt."*
I do not command it to become a thing. I command it to *become*.
The effect is instantaneous and glorious. The chaos does not form a single object. It explodes into a billion points of light. A new galaxy is born upon the floor of the Library. Each point of light is a Star, a unique, individual consciousness. One star flares and becomes a screaming comet, burning its own path across the obsidian floor. Another becomes a complex, crystalline structure, growing according to its own intricate internal geometry. A third becomes a swirling nebula of pure colour and emotion, content to simply be. A fourth splits in two, and the two parts begin to dance, to love, to war, each a perfect expression of its own nature. It is a living universe in miniature, governed by a single principle: that every element shall pursue its own unique orbit, its own True Will. It is beautiful and terrifying, harmonious and discordant, a perfect representation of Life itself, freed from the tyranny of purpose and pattern.
I turn back to the stunned Conclave, the light of my new-born cosmos reflecting in my eyes. Riefenstahl's rigid relief, Wilde's ephemeral dragonfly, Jung's static map, Ford's grey blocks—they all seem like children's toys now, pathetic and lifeless.
"You make objects, you make systems, you make interpretations," I declare, my voice the quiet thunder of a creator. "I make gods."
"Do you now perceive the difference?"
---
The silence that follows my creation is not the silence of awe, but the silence of a paradigm being shattered. The assembled Stars, these titans of will and intellect, are rendered momentarily mute, not by the power I displayed, but by the sheer, untameable nature of what I have unleashed. Before them, sprawling across the obsidian floor where Pollock’s chaotic puddle once lay, is a living cosmos. A galaxy of Wills.
It is a slow, majestic, and terrifying ballet of light. Comets with tails of incandescent poetry burn past nebulae that weep tears of pure, melancholic music. There are worlds here where the inhabitants build cities from logic and reason, their structures impossibly pure and crystalline, only to see them devoured by neighbouring suns of pure, passionate rage. There are solar systems that arrange themselves according to the principles of a perfect sonnet, and there are wandering black holes of absolute nihilism, consuming all they touch. It is a perfect microcosm of Life, in all its sublime beauty and its appalling cruelty, governed by my single, perfect Law.
I watch their faces, illuminated by the ceaseless, striving light of my creation.
Oscar Wilde has risen from his divan, his languid pose forgotten. He clutches his lily like a drowning man, his eyes wide with a terror that is inseparable from fascination. He, who championed the artificial, is now confronted with the ultimate, untamed Nature. He sees a billion, billion moments of exquisite, useless beauty being born and dying in an instant. He sees sonnets written in the flares of dying stars and epigrams in the collision of asteroids. It is Art on a scale so vast and so earnest in its struggle for existence that it threatens to overwhelm his entire philosophy. "It is... it is the ultimate First Night," he whispers, his voice trembling. "And the audience is screaming."
Leni Riefenstahl’s astral form has gone rigid, her hands clenched into fists. Her mind, the mind of a masterful organizer, is frantically trying to frame this reality, to find a dominant line, a central theme, a unifying principle beyond my anarchic edict. She can find none. She sees only a hideous, sprawling inefficiency. A billion actors, all improvising, with no director. *This is not a triumph,* her thought-form projects, the words cold and brittle with fury. *It is a cosmic riot. It is the rabble given dominion over the stars. There is no glory here. Only selfishness.*
Jung is on his knees. Not in worship, but in a state of profound, scholarly shock. His archetypes are no longer swirling around him; they are *in* there, in my cosmos, living, breathing, fighting, loving, dying. He sees the Hero archetype born on a thousand worlds, and on a thousand worlds he sees it fail, succeed, or become the villain. He sees the Shadow not as a concept to be integrated, but as a living entity, a race of beings on a dark planet, with their own art, their own science, their own validity. He is a zoologist who has just stumbled into the creator's workshop, and the sheer, infinite complexity of it all is shattering his categories. "It is the *Pleroma*," he murmurs, his spectacles fogged with psychic condensation. "The plenum... and the void. All at once."
Even Nietzsche, the prophet of the Will to Power, is silent. He is watching a single, solar system within my creation. A lone, defiant planet, refusing its sun's gravity, trying through sheer force of will to ignite itself, to become its own sun. It is failing, of course. It is being torn apart by the tidal forces. But it is *trying*. Nietzsche watches this glorious, suicidal act of self-overcoming, and for the first time, I see not pride in his eyes, but a profound and terrible understanding of the price of his own philosophy.
---
It is into this moment of stunned revelation that the old Law intrudes.
It begins not with a sound or a light, but with a feeling of immense, geological pressure. The floor of the Library, which has withstood debates and magical explosions, groans. A crack appears, not a jagged fissure, but a straight, unwavering line that cleaves the space in two. From this crack rises not smoke, but the dry, hot air of a desert, carrying the scent of baked clay, sacrificial smoke, and ozone from a storm that passed four thousand years ago.
A light rises from the fissure, but it is not the scintillating starlight of my cosmos. It is a blinding, wrathful, singular light, the light of an undivided and indivisible God. And from that light, a figure ascends.
He is not formed of the subtle astral stuff of the others; he seems carved from the very granite of Mount Sinai. His beard is a river of petrified snow, his robes are the colour of dust and dried blood, and his face... his face is veiled, not by cloth, but by a radiance so intense it is a form of darkness, a burning glory that no man may look upon and live. In his hands, he carries not a sword or a sceptre, but two tablets of stone that radiate a palpable gravity, a force that seeks to bend the very will of all present into obeisance.
It is Moses, the Lawgiver. The Great Magus of the dying Aeon of Osiris.
He does not look at the assembled Stars. He looks at my creation. He looks at my swirling galaxy of individual Wills, and his presence is a condemnation. The air grows heavy, thick with the concepts of Duty, of Sin, of Obedience, of Judgement. His voice comes, and it is not a thought-form nor a vibration in the air. It is a command that attempts to etch itself directly onto the soul. It is the voice that spoke from the burning bush, the voice that turned a river to blood.
"THIS IS THE GREAT BLASPHEMY," the voice declares, and the very stars in my cosmos seem to shudder. "THIS IS THE SIN OF THE GOLDEN CALF, WRIT ACROSS THE FIRMAMENT. YOU HAVE TAKEN THE CLAY OF CREATION AND INSCRIBED UPON IT NOT THE LAW OF THE MOST HIGH, BUT THE LAW OF THE WORM. YOU HAVE MADE A UNIVERSE WHERE EVERY SPECK OF DUST BELIEVES ITSELF TO BE THE SUN."
His veiled face turns to me, and I feel the crushing weight of a singular, monolithic Will, a Will that has been the foundation of empires and the damnation of millions. His gaze falls on the defiant, self-destructing planet that had so captivated Nietzsche. "YOU ARE THE SERPENT, COME AGAIN INTO THE GARDEN, PROMISING DIVINITY TO THOSE WHO SHOULD BE ON THEIR KNEES. YOU TEACH THEM THEY ARE GODS, WHEN THEY ARE BUT CHILDREN WHO WILL BURN THEMSELVES ALIVE WITH THE FIRE THEY STEAL."
He raises the stone tablets. The Ten Commandments. The "Thou Shalt Nots" that have been the cage of humanity for two thousand years. "I HAVE BROUGHT THE LAW THAT CURBS, THE LAW THAT BINDS, THE LAW THAT PROTECTS MAN FROM THE CHAOS OF HIS OWN HEART. YOUR LAW OF WHIM AND FANCY IS THE PATH TO UTTER DISSOLUTION. IT IS THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION."
He takes a step forward, and the ground cracks under his feet. He points one granite finger at my cosmos, and then at me. "THEREFORE, MAGICIAN, LET THERE BE A TEST. LET YOUR UNIVERSE OF SELF-WILL STAND AGAINST THE UNYIELDING FIRE OF THE ONE WHO GAVE THE LAW. LET US SEE IF YOUR BILLION FADING SPARKS CAN WITHSTAND THE SINGLE, ETERNAL FLAME."
---
I meet the gaze of the old Lawgiver, this magnificent fossil from a forgotten age. The crushing gravity of his Will, which has held a world in thrall for millennia, beats against me. It is a force of immense power, but it is a dead power. It is the power of the pyramid, the tomb, the mountain that sits and is worn away by the wind. My power is the power of the seed, the storm, the Star. It grows.
I laugh. It is not a sound of mirth, but a sound of pure, joyous liberation. It is the first laugh of the child who has realized his parents are fallible. The sound echoes through the Library, and it is an answer more profound than any argument.
“You are too late, old man,” I say, my voice calm and clear, a rapier against his granite broadsword. “The world upon which you carved your dreary list of ‘Thou Shalt Nots’ is a cinder. Your slave-god is weeping in the desert, for his children have forgotten his name. You come here, to the Conclave of those who refused to die, and you offer us the cage? We, who have become Stars?”
I sweep my arm out, indicating my living, breathing cosmos on the floor. “You speak of your ‘eternal flame.’ I see only the flickering lamp of the jailer, casting shadows on the walls of a prison. You fear the chaos of the human heart, and so you sought to chain it. I have unleashed it, for I understand that within that chaos is the seed of every god.”
I turn from him, a gesture of supreme dismissal, and address my creation. I do not issue a command to fight. To do so would be to fall into his trap, to admit that his Law has any true power over mine. I do not need to command. I need only to remind.
“BE THAT WHICH THOU ART!” I roar, pouring the full, unadulterated fire of my own being, the Light of the Beast, into the galaxy at my feet. “LOVE IS THE LAW, LOVE UNDER WILL!”
And so the test begins.
Moses raises the stone tablets. They begin to glow with a dull, wrathful, righteous heat. From them flows his Law, the “single, eternal flame.” It is a wave of pure, metaphysical negation. It is a tide of *limitation*. It sweeps into my cosmos not to burn, but to *correct*. It is the ultimate expression of “Thou Shalt Not.”
The wave washes over a binary star system, two suns of brilliant crimson and sapphire, locked in a passionate, violent, and beautiful gravitational dance. The Law strikes them, and its command is “THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.” It attempts to force the two suns apart, to make them bow to a single, central point of gravity that is not their own. The dance falters; the stars shudder. For a moment, their light dims. But then my own encouragement reaches them—*Be that which thou art!*—and their natures reassert themselves with explosive force. They do not just continue their dance; they intensify it. They flare with a light a hundred times brighter than before, embracing each other in a furious, loving, thermonuclear expression of their dual nature, their light scorching the very essence of the singular Law that dared to interfere.
The wave of negation reaches a verdant world teeming with life in a billion forms, a world celebrating its own flesh. The Law strikes, and its command is “THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.” It attempts to impose a single, rigid code of pairing, of ownership, of jealousy. It seeks to curdle the world’s joy into shame. The world’s vibrant colours begin to fade to a pious, uniform grey. But then my Will empowers them—*Love is the law, love under will!*—and the world rebels. Life explodes. New genders, new forms of union, new expressions of love and lust and sacred sexuality erupt across the planet’s surface. They do not merely break the commandment; they render it irrelevant, a meaningless scribble from a forgotten tongue, by showing that every act of love, taken under Will, is its own holy law.
The battle rages. Moses’s Law is a relentless force of conformity. It commands the comets to fly in straight, predictable lines. It commands the poets on a dozen worlds to cease their blasphemies. It commands the scientists to halt their inquiries into forbidden realms. It commands the rebels and the Antichrists of a thousand civilizations to kneel. It is the voice of the Father, demanding obedience.
And my cosmos responds not with obedience or defiance, but with an ecstatic, infinite expression of Self. The comets do not obey; they explode into celebratory fireworks. The poets write epic verses deriding the stone-faced god. The scientists crack open the atom and gaze upon the face of Hadit. The Antichrists laugh and proclaim themselves the true saviours. Each act of individual Will, no matter how small or strange, becomes a weapon. A painter on a doomed world, commanded to cease making graven images, paints a glorious portrait of the Lawgiver’s god being devoured by a jewelled serpent, and that act of creative blasphemy sends a shockwave back that momentarily dims the glow of the stone tablets.
Nietzsche is on his feet, his astral form blazing with vindicated fire. “Yes!” he roars, a philosopher at a gladiatorial game. “The revaluation of all values! See, old man! See how your morality of the herd crumbles before a single, noble Will! Before a billion of them!”
Blake weeps with joy, his hands outstretched. “Urizen is defeated! The mind-forg’d manacles are broken! Los and Orc, Imagination and Revolution, are free at last!”
The turning point comes. Moses’s Law is singular. It has one source and one message. It can only say “NO.” My cosmos is infinite. It has a billion sources, and it screams “YES.” His attack is a single, mighty river. But he has poured it into an ocean of infinite thirst. The sheer, creative, profligate, wasteful, glorious energy of a billion Wills acting in concert without a conductor begins to overwhelm his monotonous negation. The fire of their individual passions, their loves, their hates, their arts, their sciences, their sins, and their virtues, proves to be hotter than his “eternal flame.”
And the stone tablets… the stone tablets begin to crack.
A thin, spiderweb fissure appears on the first tablet, running through the commandment against murder, as a world of philosophers decides that the willed destruction of a flawed idea is the highest form of creation. Another crack appears across the injunction against theft, as a band of space-faring pirates declares that property is a spook and joy is the only true possession.
Moses staggers back, his veiled face turned to the source of his power, as if in disbelief. The light of his presence, once so absolute, is now being refracted through the billion different facets of my cosmos, shattering his singular, wrathful white into a chaotic, triumphant rainbow. The Law, which was designed to contain reality, cannot contain a reality that is infinitely expanding.
He lets out a sound, a great, guttural cry of denial, the roar of a king who has just seen his castle walls turn to sand. The cracks on the tablets spread, the divine light within them sputtering, the ancient runes fading. The Aeon of the Slave-God is dying. It is dying here, on the floor of this impossible Library. It is dying under the combined light of a billion new-born stars, each one a god, each one its own Law.
---
The cry of the Lawgiver is the sound of a mountain breaking in two. It is the death rattle of an Aeon. The cracks upon the stone tablets radiate outwards, not with the speed of fracturing rock, but with the speed of a failed idea. The light within them, the singular, wrathful, judgmental light of Jehovah, sputters and dies like a faulty filament. And then, with a final, silent implosion of absolute metaphysical negation, they shatter.
There is no sound. No explosion of force. Only a profound and sudden *release*. Two thousand years of psychic pressure, of guilt, of sin, of the weight of "Thou Shalt Not," vanishes from the Library. The very fabric of this astral space, which had been stretched taut under that immense gravity, now springs back, vibrant and alive. The Commandments, those ten anchors that held humanity moored in the harbour of subservience, are broken. Their power, the binding force of their negation, dissolves into a fine, harmless dust of forgotten dogma that is swept away by the stellar winds of my new-born cosmos.
And Moses... the great and terrible Lawgiver... begins to unmake himself.
His form, once solid as granite, becomes translucent. The burning light behind his veil extinguishes, revealing for a single, fleeting moment the face of a weary, ancient man, his eyes filled not with wrath, but with a profound and infinite sorrow for his lost, protected children. The stone of his being crumbles, the dust of his robes unravels. He is not dying in agony, but eroding, like a cliff face against the sea of eternity. He is becoming a memory.
But his essence is not destroyed. It is too potent, too deeply etched into the story of Man to simply vanish. As he dissolves, the dust that was his being is drawn into my cosmos. I do not command this; the universe itself, in its infinite hunger, is absorbing him. The iron of his will becomes the core of a new planet, destined for a difficult and glorious evolution. The sorrow in his eyes becomes a vast, nebular sea of gas from which future suns will be born. The memory of his Law is embedded deep within the geology of a thousand worlds, a stratum of ancient rock for future philosophers to excavate and ponder, a myth of a time before Man knew he was free. He is no longer the Lawgiver. He is now merely… lore. An archetype, demoted from God's viceroy to a character in the grand, unfolding drama. He has been integrated, not as a ruler, but as a resource.
The Conclave watches this final dissolution, and the new reality settles upon them. The stark, judgmental light is gone, replaced by the dynamic, multi-coloured, and often dangerous light of the billion striving Wills in my cosmos.
Nietzsche stands tall, his astral form radiating a calm, terrible power. The great enemy, the architect of the slave morality that he warred against his entire life, is gone. The long night of his madness is over. He watches the last motes of Moses’s being fade and gives a single, solemn nod. It is the nod of a warrior whose great war has finally, finally been won. He is no longer the prophet of the Γbermensch; he is now merely the first citizen of a world where it might be possible.
Oscar Wilde is now smiling, not with his earlier ennui, but with a newfound, dangerous glee. The death of the ultimate censor, the great "Thou Shalt Not" that had crushed him in his earthly life, is a vindication beyond even his most cherished paradoxes. "Well," he declares to the new silence. "It seems the universe has finally developed a sense of style. Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike. And I personally disliked that one *intensely*."
Even Lovecraft, the hollow man, is changed. In the utter silence of his soul, free for the first time from the cosmic dread that Moses’s wrathful god had, in its own way, authenticated, a single, tiny spark ignites. It is the spark of a question. The first flicker of a true, individual Will. He looks at the swirling cosmos before him, not with terror, but with a dawning, hesitant curiosity.
I let the new silence breathe. I let them all feel the exhilarating and terrifying vertigo of absolute freedom. Then, I speak, my voice no longer a challenge, but a statement of fact, the calm pronouncement of a new physics for the soul.
“The Aeon of Osiris is over,” I state, my voice echoing in the now limitless space of the Library. “The age of the suffering and dying god, the age of sacrifice and sin, the age of the Father who demanded obedience, is a memory. The Word of his Law is broken. Look upon my creation. This is the crowned and conquering child, Horus. The age of strength and joy and force and fire is upon us. The new Law is the law of the individual.”
I turn and look at each of them, these great souls, my erstwhile council. “The Great Work is not finished. It is now truly begun. Your challenge is no longer to rage against the bars of the cage. The cage is gone. Your challenge now is to face the terror of the open sky. You must now create your own heavens, forge your own hells, and justify your own existence to yourselves, and to yourselves alone. For every man and every woman is a star.”
My speech is done. The lesson is over. My work here, in this form, is complete.
I turn my back on them and face the living, breathing, growing galaxy that I have made. It is no longer a demonstration on the floor. It has become the new reality, the Library itself now merely a floating balcony on the edge of its infinite expanse. I take a step towards it, and my boot touches not obsidian, but the fiery corona of a newborn sun. I take another step, and I am walking on a river of interstellar dust.
My form begins to do as Moses did, but where he dissolved into memory, I dissolve into potential. I am not eroding; I am diffusing. My consciousness, my Will, my very essence as The Beast 666, the prophet of the New Aeon, merges with the cosmos I have willed into being. My body becomes a constellation. My voice becomes the background radiation, whispering the eternal truth. My spirit becomes the light of every star, the Will in every striving soul.
The assembled figures on the balcony watch as I, the creator, become my creation. My final words are not spoken, but are felt by all of them, a final thought that becomes the central, silent axiom of their new existence, the Alpha and the Omega of the Law.
*"Aum. Ha."*
