Part 1 [the alchemist]

The dust in the air would float up, emerging from the shadows in the room. The few rays of sunshine that squeezed through the tears in the velvet curtains would set the little particles ablaze. The little pin pricks burned themselves into his eyes, one after the other, in an odious cadence. Lorenz felt tortured by what he felt was a mockery – he, he needed the shadows to think, for it was in darkness that his desires had been awakened and it was only in darkness that they would be satisfied. His lust, his feverish want for the ultimate revelation of man – it had transformed him into a creature of night. Like his subjects in the retort, he had been reduced to base matter; his soul had turned into a black, shrivelled thing, the likes of which shun any heavenly promise of light.

There was a universal truth beyond all truths, and it constituted the very essence of his art. The heavenly splendour that reigned beyond the luminaries, beyond the Ain Soph, replicated itself across all orders of existence, so that even in the crassest of materials a shadow of its glory could be found. And were one to find and extract that likeness, through an exercise of extreme patience, over hours and days and seasons of careful applications of the most sacred Technology, one would, surely, find themselves holding the very essence of the Holy One. For, as the parched lips of the alchemist would mutter through calloused, burnt fingers, "that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below".

And yet... he kept his gaze firmly fixated on the sparkling dust. The trajectory of each despicable particle was of particular interest to him, as it arose like an excellent example of the order of things. All base matter strove towards heaven, as moths were drawn to light; and subjected to a process of transformation, it was allowed to gaze upon the holiest of holies. But that contact, it was merely a favour bestowed upon the worthy, a most cruel one, for it revealed the inescapable abyss that separated the material from the spiritual. As much as the sacred spark was present in all the sensible world, it ought to coexist with something equally potent, and violently opposed to it: the unhallowed, profane essence of Matter. Written with invisible ink on the jade surface of the Tabula all alchemists were doomed to miss it at first glance; yet the hand of experience would slowly reveal the secret – the most terrible secret of their craft: they would not, they could not, become one with the Spirit. They had been born debased, excrement; their immortal soul the only guarantee they had of ever receiving the most important of Sacraments, but as the dust could never become a particle of light, they were also doomed to never ascend beyond their limitations.

The operation of the Sun, accomplished, was to bring the blackest of nights, as light shines brightest when it's surrounded by pitch darkness. He understood, somehow, that his present state was just a first step in a ladder that would take him to the most glorious and most painful experience his debased nature could partake in – a fleeting moment of alignment with the Creator, a mere glimpse into His Glory, before the reveal of his insignificance, of his powerlessness. He'd rise, stand erect and be crushed. The mere thought conjured tears in his eyes, made his chest swell with indescribable emotion. Oh, how the Perfect Glory humbled him...!

As his fingers reached for the scroll, he felt himself break into laughter. The scroll was old, yes, but it had been worn down even further under his obsessive gaze as he read and dissected and disentangled the strange symbols. Its teachings were forbidden, the product of centuries of incestual dealings among heretic sects. It was only because of his untarnished reputation that its purchase had gone down without complaint from the Magistrate. Perhaps, had they known of the frantic search that had led to it, of the obscure dealings and disreputable experts he'd communed with, they might have reacted differently.

He was acutely aware of the history that trailed after the scroll. For some, its origin had been in a pact a monk had made with the devil. Others had it that it was one of the many texts that had been present in the Temple when Solomon was king; that the very hand that had first manifested its covenant was that of Moses. That it had been kept safe by the Egyptians in their famed library in Alexandria. And they all had a bit of truth to them; its scribes after all had been like fisherman casting their nets over the river of Time, fishing out what had grown in the waters fed by both earthly civilizations and the folk that lay beyond. The likes of such produce were, on one hand, the product of happy accidents on humanity's part; its contributions to the big, flowing stream unconscious for the most part. On the other hand, there were fingers purposely sinking into the waters, fingers that came from below and that belonged to those that had nothing of the divine in them.

The lords, as they had once been called; the Watchers of the Luminaries. The heretics had dreaded their existence; for they were, according to their doctrine, proof and cause of the reality of evil. Their reasoning was as follows: if God was pure spirit, unknowable and beyond any conceivable thought, who had made a world composed of the very antithesis of the essence of God, if not for some other lesser being? Who would make the world, imperfect and riddled with evil and suffering, if not a cruel god, a capricious demiurgos? And who, if not for these wordly rulers, would reign supreme over it, delighting in the plight of humanity?

The sigils on the skin whispered the truth to the essence of humanity: that they had been made from dust, and by accident had been animated with the divine spark. That they were made to crumble in time, perennial, like the poor copies they were. If that thought was enough to turn lesser men away from Nature, it was twisted enough to send his mind into a frenzied spiral of theories and assumptions. As it had been once, it could be again; and as dust had turned into Man, perhaps this black earth, separated from fire as the gross and the subtle are sweetly turned against each other, ascending and descending to receive the force of things superior and inferior would – perhaps- rise to take a name of its own.