Thief of Heaven - Prologue

New Mexico - the Sacred Wastelands, four weeks before Easter

"I come as a thief..." -- God, Rev 16:15


The storm builds from nothing. The vast expanse of the Apache sacred hunting grounds, sixty miles south southwest of Albuquerque, has been calm for six days; winds have been no more than playful zephyrs, the clouds no more than spry wisps. A full moon nears its zenith, while the sun is still falling to the west, where the horizon is serrated by dark mountains. It is here the winds wake.

In less than an hour the gusts rise from playful, to tempest. Their surging power scours plant, rock and creatures with sand and blasts of fine iron filaments. The yellow sun touches the horizon, discharging to orange, then red. With each spectrum shift to deeper blood, the winds build, reaching with desperate sweeps for full gale; pulling in from the surrounding atmosphere, every errant particle of moisture -- forging the moisture into clouds. The clouds circle, massing into storm.

When the sun melts into the glow-worm on the mountain edges, the storm is dark and full. The last ray of sunset reaches out its bloodline of light, touching the center of the unnatural event, as if igniting a fuse.

Lightning detonates.

A white bolt slams into a dry river bed, hitting the worn and smooth rocks like a solid.

Creatures, large and small and those which creep, and slither brace in the tremble; pressing bellies to sand, or retreat to hovels and holes. Crystals in the underdark of a cavern below the dead stream, hum and glow, powered by the voltaic lance; toning primal music with angelic voices. When the thunder hammers the surface, the lance is only an afterglow, and the crystals shatter in bedlam and chaos.

The storm is gone. As if the lance and hammer strike scared it away. All that is left are scattered clouds, a dying wind, stars, and a hole.

The hole is shallow, the aftermath of the lightning strike. In the hole is a man. He is kneeling, like a sprinter at Ready, or a servant before his master. He wears a black mantel, the cowl of which hides his face in shadows.

His clothing is from another time, an ancient time. In that time, the cloth and cut would have been common, and attracted little attention. It would be common clothing of a man in the city, not in the desert, or the wastelands. The clothing of a man who, while not considered wealthy, did not worry much about meals, or shelter. His pants are black linen cloth. The shirt is gray, and edged with red and silver trimming. His belt is wide leather with no buckle. The boots are soft brown leather; the soles have no heel.

The cut of the garment is loose across his form, but even with this, heavy muscles in the thighs, shoulders and forearms can be divined. They are not the muscles of a man who has built them, or sculpted his body for appeal, but the cords created by massive strain, and constant use – the kind of muscle which comes to life under the demand of moments; moments where either the hand holds onto the rope, or the body falls into the abyss. Simple moments. Defining moments.

As he stands and straightens his back, from under the half sleeves of the shirt, bright iron spikes are seen puncturing his wrists. The wounds are fresh; they drip blood on the scorched sand. The spikes are nine inches long and slight of one inch thick.

The man tips his head back to look at the moon, and scans the stars of the sky. Cloud wisps scurry away from his gaze, breaking up into the errant particles they were gathered from. He brushes the cowl with his right hand, letting it slide back from his head, revealing dark thick hair, light blue eyes, and a jaw line which as been carved by clenching back screams, during the simple and defining moments of his life.

A smile parts his lips as he notes the moon is between the Crocodile and the Hippopotamus. These are the constellations of his life, her constellations. He relishes these constellations, knowing they are about to change.

Around his neck is a simple leather thong, which drops beneath his shirt. At the end of this leather tether is a five-inch lead bar, about the same width as the spikes. The bar is wrapped with thick soft leather. At one time, the leather was stamped and delicately carved with hieroglyphs, painted with artistic care, but that was long ago. Years of wear, and use, have worn the leather smooth. Only traces of the pillar glyphs remain. He places the leathered bar between his teeth as he looks down at the spike in his left wrist.

The head of the spike is hammer worn, mushroomed, and presses into his skin just above the pulse line. The fingers of his right-hand find purchase between the spike head and his flesh, and he pulls the nail from his wrist with a clean and rapid jerk. The muscles of his jaw line do their work, as he slides the extracted spike under his belt to cross his spine.

The wound instantly begins to heal, and he watches it with fierce eyes; the healing of the wound much more painful than the spike's removal. The muscles of his throat press arteries against his skin, and his pulse throbs under the surface of strain. A wisp of moist heat licks out as the wound closes into a scar.

His healed left hand now grips the head of the spike in his right arm, and he pulls it from his flesh as well, placing the spike to cross the first at his back, but this time he buckles from the healing pain, knees landing in the scorched sand, groaning as the right wrist mends.


He breathes. At first the breaths are heavy intakes of the ozone tainted air. After a few moments of consciously controlling the rhythm he slows his lungs and heart rate. When his breathing regains its normal gait, he pulls the leather wrapped bar from his mouth, and lets it fall under his shirt to hang innocently at the end of the thong again. Gathering himself, he stands and walks out of the hole, and away from the scorched sand, the ozone taint, and the scattered rocks of the dead river.

Walking without haste for several hundred yards, rotating his wrists and shoulders, he comes across a smooth patch of sand. The surface here is the result of non disturbance, a place only touched by the wind, unblemished by plant roots, animal tracks, bones or jutting rocks to mar the sand face.  

A crow calls at the night as the man kneels beside this blank spot of sand. Somewhere a cat howls. He listens to the calls and searches the wasteland with blue eyes glowing like jacklights in the dark. Nothing in the area attracts his attention. Shadows move under the moon from bush to blossoming ocotillo, to rock piles. The nocturne of the desert night begins to play; scales rub against sand, throats call for mating, wings flap against the crossing of a zephyr.

After gaining familiarity with the night song, he settles on his heels and slides from his belt the iron spike pulled from his left wrist. With the tip he sketches a delicate Glyph on the smooth surface of the white sand. It is not a Glyph which any mortal would give meaning to, but rather a mnemonic symbol. Once complete, he lays the spike on the sand to underline the glyph and whispers, "Who am I?"

The tones of his query vibrate the sand-sketched glyph as a solid shape. An odd heaviness resonates out across the desert, depressing the natural nocturne. The landscape feels like is being pressed under glass. Then, with a rushing exhale from hovel and hole, the desert answers, "Soul Thief."

The heaviness passes. Night-crows call and take flight. Creatures that creep, crawl and slither return to pursuits of mating and territorial challenge.

With the spike removed from his right wrist he delicately traces another glyph next to the first. This symbol is more elaborate, and has a feeling of great age. Once the next glyph is complete, the man sits back on his heels, arms folded on knees, critically examining his work. He spends several minutes adjusting the details of the design, seeming lost in far away thoughts as he works. After achieving a satisfactory rendering, he underlines the glyph with the spike as he did with the first one, and whispers, "Where have I been?"

The heaviness this time is more than an odd feeling. The pressure bends branches and brings a flying desert owl to ground. The sands, the granite rocks, the collective life of the desert, inhales... Listening ... Remembering.

The desert’s answer is a litany of sounds from every throat and hollow. Words, whispers, cries, expand across the high flats and rush down the dead river gulches. Within the maelstrom are the desperate screams of horses, fierce battle clashes, steel cracking heavy wood, the pounding of hooves on soft sand, the wails of birth, the rhythm of hammers on iron.

"Jack the Daw." The desert names.

"Forever Jack." The sky returns.

"Sunset." The moon adds.

"Death." The dry river ends.

"Jack. Jack the Daw." The man whispers, nodding his head in slow agreement with the voices of the past, "The Forever Jack."

The man named Jack, picks up the first spike and twirls it absently in his hand. The desert returns to its normal night songs and mating calls. Gentle fingers of wind touch the flowering clusters of ocotillo. An ocelot caterwauls from across the gulch. The shadow of a cat runs across the sand, and ducks under a nearby bush.

The two etched glyphs in the sand represent the present and the past, the foundation of a future in the Living World, where time is felt, and experienced. His eyes trace over the etched lines, enjoying for a moment the illusion of permanence.

Drawn as the glyphs are, side by side, the lines and symbols appear to reach for each other across a vast distance of something more than space, or time. For every journey, the glyph for his past seems(feels) heavier, fuller, while the glyph for his present feels sparser, as if "Who Am I" is diminishing.

He stops the twirling spike, and uses the tip of the iron to draw a single line connecting the two glyphs. "It’s just a feeling." Jack says to the Eastern horizon, "just a feeling, nothing more." The glyphs are always the same, never more or less in design or purpose. How could they be different? Yet the feeling returns on each journey. A sense of ... urgency?... dread? No, not so open as dread, but darker than urgency.

Calming his pulse and lungs he concentrates on the glyphs together, allowing them to become parts of a larger pattern on the sand. He clears his mind of any lingering thoughts, any flaws of clarity, and then with a voice of power, and shadow, commands, "What is my direction." It is not a question.

The desert continues its natural rhythm. Jack waits, noting two thin lines slowly furrowing the sands from the top of each glyph, creating a triangle. Jack continues to watch with the calm expectation of repeated experience.

The two glyphs, Past and Present, fill with warm amber light; the pouring of hot forge gold into a foundry sand cast. Jack prepares, sinking his fingers into the warm desert sand. The amber fills, then solidifies within the sand cast etchings.

The formed glowing glyphs then rise from the sand castings, solid and complete. Individual lines from each rune brighten, separate and float to the top of the triangle, placing themselves into the empty space, creating a new glyph. His Direction Glyph.

Jack watches the process, feeling a growing pulse sensation in the sand around his fingers. When a new line finds its place in the structure of the Direction Glyph, the throbbing frequency in the sand around his fingers changes as well. The sound of his own pulse grows, beginning as a low tone from many miles away, then increasing to a rushing throb behind his eyes.

When the last line sets in the Direction Glyph, completing the picture, the electric pulsation in the sand and the beat of his own heart synchronize. The sensation is paralyzing.

Jack sees nothing for several moments, nothing but gray. No heaven, no earth, nothing. His senses are absorbed in a wash of rushing thunder; a flash flood of energy and time.

When the Direction Glyph fades, becoming a sketch in the sand, the roar in his ears subsides.

Jack leans back and sits cross-legged in the shadows, his awareness is now only a detached interest in the world. He looks up at the stars, and sees Virgo and Aries and Taurus are now in the sky, the constellations of his youth, her constellations, are gone.

He knows the word of the new rune. It is the name of a city. A city he has never been to, nor heard its name spoken, yet he knows the word. It's a Faus memory, a false recollection. One of thousands now in his mind, placed there by the storm of the Direction Glyph; bits and pieces thrust into his mind like grass blades piercing the trunks of trees after a tornado. Sometimes, he has found, when two try to occupy the same space in his mind, like the constellations, the old memories are push out, overwritten. His core language also changes, though he never notices this at first, because to him, it is the only language he has ever known.

He tries the name, feeling its texture and harmonic, "Chicago." The word resonates off his lips and for a brief moment seems alive in the air.

"Chicago." He repeats, this time with more force. Images flash through his mind: Moments of history, street names, gangsters, museums, wars, traffic, sky-scrappers, Pilsen, a church... no... Not a church.

He holds this image in his mind, focusing, pressing the Faus memory for understanding. A cloister. Guardians of a relic.

"Saint Jude." He whispers with recognition and predatory interest. The shadows hear the Soul Thief's enthusiasm, and tremble with intoxicated noir.

Jack smiles.