Book One: Of Suffering//Part One: Teine
1
LESSONS
Fire is where it all starts.
Dynamism nurtures life when the burning does nothing but take, never letting anything within its guzzling return. Fire was the element that split the heavens; no different than water, wind, or earth, except that in fire lived a child-like malevolence.
The saga can be traced back to some earlier tale, before words told of The Fall and monsters roamed the planet only to be decimated by a fire from the sky, and to the infinite number of tales that heralded that: though the narration ebbs in consistency to the completion of the tale seems to come to be meager with each lifetime, for all generations want the scenario chronicled as though the myth spoke of its own making.
As consequence the victims will be objected, the tribulation shall become nonsensical; and to the flame, great inamoratos will resort to simple mawkishness, and the greatest of devils are reduced to vague allegories.
Nothing is ceaseless outside of fire; waters shrink with eventuality, but fires burn forever. Through time and creations fire crackles, flesh goes under the flames and the separation between gospel and deception, fact and fiction, are intertwined into the crepitate of dancing conflagration that may have only one job as they sway with the wind: to make certain that in the record of creation, nothing comes back and the secrets left to the fires never creep through annals of oncoming epochs.
It’s rather whimsical then that where this story embarks is when the fires are forced to die by rival elements.
Somewhere between smoke and the ashes of the forgotten is a story to be told about loss; greater than sinners and saints, a story told in blood and mystery.
This story takes place in after the flames had burned flesh, the evils surrounding the fires have been forced away by sacred light, and the damsel in distress is saved.
There is a place of exhausted darkness.
This darkness, untended since the death of its owner three months ago, and now running riot beneath a blindingly bright late August sky that breaks away the gloom, exposing a familiar room with hanging lights burning bulbs of electricity, turning the scene sweltering once the eyes come into focus past the lights, to the tan ceiling and the smell of lilac fulfilling the area like a garden.
This scene is indistinguishable to the countless of others in the fugue state of the viewer. Her back so close to the grave that the passage of the slow breath from her lungs and dawdling exhale pushed with a stifled wheeze out of her flaring nostrils.
And with this woman, who lie to the mattress and can still smell the fire and the fogging smoke, but cannot recall what occurred, turns up with the deftness of the living dead, feeling every joint and muscle move languidly with her beleaguered efforts and from this morning she can hear the birds, nesting in the oak tree outside, chirping their song of daybreak, a song she’d rather not hear.
Her name is Dahlia Solomon, but to everyone else she’s just Dahlia. With so many foster parents and adopted surnames, the only way people could recognize her is by Dahlia. She is thirty-three, and has worked for years working as an occult investigator. It’s a job she takes no pleasure in, but with its lack of money and rewards, she knows she is doing something few would have the courage to attempt, a job that may explain the cuts and needle marks down her arms of her porcelain skin.
Her arms and legs burn, telling her what dream has already confirmed. She barely remembers the fire as she approaches the door of the bathroom, opens it, and at that point in time—not quite exact but there is no greater appellation—her world takes flight.
The fire called to one face she hoped she hadn’t remember, a face she had a blood connection to: her father Belial. Several times he told her in dream that he’d come after her when she least expected it. He kept to his promise even when she worked every spell she knew to keep him in his pit where his fellow devils toiled with sinners while she kept with her place far from him. It would only be a matter of time before the gears on the clocks and the planets aligned for him to make his move and put her in a position that would leave her utterly defenseless against him and in New Jersey, it had. But Belial had shown little interest in connecting with his daughter like a father should to close over those decades of neglect. He sought pain. His world was pain. With pain came desperation; in desperation came the will to be bent and broken and reshaped fashionably. He had her and now she was here staring at how the sunbeams reflected through the light of the window. How often had she told herself not to slip because he would do anything he needed to get to his daughter, to make sure she was daddy’s little girl? She would not go back there, now that she knew what awaited her; now her father was reaching out to mold her after smelling her burned flesh, listened to her agonizing cried and applauded her pain. Staring out into the window and walking forward the phantom of flames could still be felt along her body, steadily taking charge of her slow moving pace, as if she might encounter the inferno again if she didn’t watch herself. There was little sign that her father was in the present. This place was safe against his lure. She worked every nook and cranny so as to not invite the unwanted in her seclusion from the world.
Murmuring in her mid-morning piss, there was a noise near the front door, followed by someone coming upstairs in slow and relaxed steps. She knew devils didn’t properly try the doors, primarily this early in the morning. Dahlia finished her business and went to the door, trudging back to her bed where she would repose her aches, then out of the backdrop she heard him, he was clearing his throat in the living room to feed the fish. It was his routine. Feed the fish and tend to crazy Dahlia, and that was what he did, making his way on the hardwood leading to her noiseless bedroom, interrupting the silence with his clapping dress shoes.
He’d seemed to be in good spirits despite the situation. He wore a smile over his face, the same face he wore for nearly twenty years she knew him. Gabriel was his name and like her moniker of Dahlia, Gabriel was just that, a one named entity. His skin was dark-skinned, almost mocha colored; his hair was in a rounding afro-bob, and he had a fuzz of facial hair around his chiseled jaw. For wholly a minute she watched him enter lying there flummoxed, watching him step in with a box of sweets, whistling a song she had never heard, a song that could have been all the more his own if she was concerned.
Gabriel dropped the box beside her and greeted her with a kiss to her forehead. She didn’t want to speak to him. What would she say? She was frightened to know the gory details; the fire, the faces, the phantoms—they were all there, but she didn’t want to trace it back at all. But, the inquiry came from Gabriel, asking what she remembered. Her face grimaced and cringed, her teeth biting her bottom lip before she cursed him.
“I don’t even want to relive that.” Dahlia shouted, cursing herself as much as Gabriel, for the memory would not leave her no matter how hard she tried and she knew it.
In the moments they spoke it took Dahlia minutes to realize that it was Gabriel who had saved her from her father as he had always been there for the last twenty-seven years of her life, doing his job of guardian angel, keeping her breathing even when she was bold enough to take her own life, when the world was too harsh to live. There wasn’t much she remembered from it; most of what she remembered from waking up in her apartment to the last moment in New Jersey was a simple darkness, but it wasn’t enough since the home she had investigated was submerged in an ocean of darkness. But Gabriel informed her that mission was taken care of, in the angelic sense.
Dahlia sat up in her bed and reach for the box of pastries, sitting it on her lap as she flipped it open and starting in without concern of their aftermath. By the time she got into her third donut, Gabriel started in on the real reason he was here. Of course this wasn’t a gingerly meeting of interest. This was a way for him to push the new job he had in for her. He knew she wasn’t currently up to the gig; her position was slightly askew, she would probably need a few weeks of rehabilitation, but that didn’t stop him from bringing it up. For a total of five minutes he spoke of a missing girl in Rural Ohio, in a township of Winchester in Ohio.
“Fuck off,” she said.
Then, keeping his eye on the girl as she dove in the box for another donut, he started down the path of what this would do for her. But she came back at him before he could finish, chewed pastry in her mouth, cursing for being the reason she was in her current position.
He tried to reason with her, assuming that she would do this for a little girl, but Dahlia’s sympathy was gone and he saw it and for a moment he didn’t know why until he watched her finish her donut and dive in for another one. The frantic behavior, the jitteriness, and needless consumption, she was reacting like an addict. She was in pain and the only answer to her pain was her opiates; she needed them and as much as he denied her high, she was human and humans needed elation. The only way she would do this was if she could have her opiates. He hated when she got high. The way she acted, how her eating habits decreased because everything in the world was based around that inebriation. No matter, though, she always got the job done, even when she was lit up from her pills, her pipes and her needles. Gabriel asked what did he have to do. She said he didn’t have to do shit; there was no way she was doing this. Now he knew this was a game. Dahlia was leading him on and he didn’t have enough time to play the game, he needed to know if she was in or out, so he promised to pay for her drugs, to get her so doped up that breathing would be orgasmic. There was a break of silence. Then she raised the stipulations, demanding that he pay for her room and board in addition. He agreed to it, knowing there was no way he could say no to this job.
At the finale they came to an agreement, which was signed off with a handshake. Gabriel got up and left the apartment not before knocking on top of her mahogany dresser and telling her that she had some painkillers waiting for her when she needed to loosen up. He knew his girl and as much as he hated her activities of getting high when it suited her, he knew a painkiller wasn’t the end of the world. She had taken deadlier drugs that had put her in deep comas and had killed her instantly. Once he was gone she pushed the donuts aside and went for her painkillers. She didn’t need them right now, but it didn’t mean that three of them weren’t necessary to ease her anxiety for the time being. She didn’t have to use water; only novices and occasionists needed water with their pills. She was a stone cold addict. There was no cuteness in what she had done, the drugs she had consumed. She popped the pills down her throat and swallowed all three, in one gulp, letting them sink down her dry, pastry-stained throat. If felt like she was swallowing shards of asphalt. In this uncomfortable moment, the pain and anxiety would pass and the high would take her in its surf of delirium.
