The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®: 25 Stories from Weird Tales

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Remember that the vision of your life goes on as long as your life does; and, like your life, it is a mystery, a maze, with many turnings, many things suddenly revealed, many things forever hidden. The longer you live, the more you will understand what you have seen this night. Each new piece of the vast puzzle changes the meaning of all that has gone before as you draw nearer and nearer the truth…but you never reach your destination, not entirely.”

“I have delved too far into the darkness, my son, and my ending can only come with the final mystery. I seek it. My studies are almost complete. It is the culmination of all my labors. But there is one thing I need, one thing I have come back for.”

There’s another story they tell about her: that the Sybil was never young, but was born an old hag in the blood of her mother’s death, and that she stood up in the pool of her mother’s blood, in the darkness at the world’s beginning; and she closed her hands together, then opened them, and columns of flame rose up from her palms.

“What you mean is not necessarily what you do, Sekenre. Whether or not you’re sorry afterwards means nothing at all. There. I have spoken your name once. Sekenre. I have spoken it twice. Do you know what happens if I speak it three times?”

“Sorcerer, son of sorcerer, you are lecturing the Sybil. Brave or foolish?”

Your father understood that, when he came back from beyond the sea, no longer a Knight Inquisitor because he knew too much of sorcery. He had become a sorcerer by fighting sorcery. He was like a doctor who contracts the patient’s disease. His knowledge was like a door that has been opened and can never be closed again. A door. In his mind.”

To become a sorcerer is to learn the secrets of all the worlds and of the gods. But sorcery burns you. It disfigures, changes, and the man who becomes a sorcerer is no longer the man he was before he became a sorcerer.

“A sorcerer must have knowledge, not merely to ward off his enemies, but to live. He hungers for more dark spells, more powers.

“Sorcery is not magic. Do not confuse the two. Magic comes from the gods. The magician is merely the instrument. Magic passes through him like breath through a reed pipe. Magic can heal. It can satisfy. It is like a candle in the darkness. Sorcery, however, resides in the sorcerer. It is like a blazing sun.”

I saw in you…all my hopes for what I had once been. In you, that ordinary man lived again. If I could cling to that hope, I too, in a small way, would remain human.

For I had killed a sorcerer, and if you kill a sorcerer you become all that he was. This was my inheritance from my father.

And, finally, he spoke with the voice of Surat-Kemad, god of death and of the river, and the thunder was his voice; and he took off the mask and revealed his terrible face, and his jaws gaped wide; and the numberless, fading stars were his teeth; and the sky and the Earth were his mouth; and the river disgorged itself from his belly; and his great ribs were the pillars of the world.