Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls by Mark Teppo

prepared themselves for the next realm, the world of light and wind that lies just beyond the arch (or, in the case of the Marseille deck, that lies beyond this field of coins, round-headed disks covered with ornamentation so that they almost seem like flowers).
    The Ace of Cups is the Grail, of course, but in the Marseille deck, it is a miniature castle resting on top of a golden base. A chapel perilously perched above the firmament.
    When I touched both cards, they merged into a single image: a chapel with stained-glass windows. Not far, a voice in the Chorus whispered. Close enough to touch.
    The image vanished when I took my hands off the cards, and they stayed quiescent as I re-assembled the deck and put it away. I sat in the sun, drinking my coffee, until the cup was empty and my bones were warm.
    Close enough to touch. The same thing the Chorus had told me over and over again when I had gotten close to Kat in Seattle last fall.
    Very funny indeed, Old Man.
    He had been pushing me for a long time. How much longer was I going to let him manipulate me?
    We all pass through Yesod, he had said. The Ninth Sephirotic globe, one step up from the fleshy death of Malkuth . Knowledge realized. Wisdom gained. One step closer to God.
    Maybe I was asking the wrong question. How much longer was I going to let anyone manipulate me?
     

VI
    From the outside, the building was a nondescript rectangle, but inside, the walls came in, forming a shallow transept. The nave was obviously more narrow than the width of the building proper, an architectural illusion so as to provide a sense of depth to the shallow indentations of the transept. Tiny niches along the outer edges formed a blister of bubbles, filled with stained glass. As the church was sequestered between other buildings on the street, the stained glass wasn't windows, but panels that were lit from behind.
    The church was a small chapel, tucked down an alley about a mile from the cemetery. A sort of locals-only church that wasn't on any of the tourist maps, nor were there any indications on the street that a place of worship existed down in the alley. I found it because the leys converged on it, currents arcing off the main flow into this nondescript alley.
    The place was lit by soft lights, recessed in the floor behind the row of column arches set off a few feet from the walls. Mounted to the western wall was a massive cross of wood, and hanging peacefully, as if asleep, was an equally enormous Christ figure. Tall candelabras stood in attendance on either side of his nailed feet, and light from the candle flames danced on his skin.
    He was made from glass.
    I knelt on a prie-dieu in the front, resting my forearms on the padding rail, so as to get a better look at him. The work was clever in that the scrap of cloth covering his waist was real as was the crown of thorns on his head, and his features and hair were a mix of paint and colored glass. Unless you had some experience with the luminous qualities of glass, you wouldn't realize what the material was. It would be easy to leap to the conclusion that the way the light reflected off his skin was from a divine influence, that God Himself blessed this church and this idol of His son.
    I hadn't been in a church in several years, as I typically didn't have much reason to traffic in their sort of communal psychosis. Like all modern religious spaces, they are a confusion of profane noise and sacred reverberations. It is difficult to find a space that is pure in its harmonic resonance with the energy flow, as most secular-based religions have spent centuries codifying their blindness. Occasionally, you could still find a place that wasn't completely moribund—the Grotto, outside of downtown Portland, for example—but most of the nexus points are no longer located beneath the old holy stomping grounds.
    Our temperament shifts, over generations, and while we never lose our fear of the unknown, we hide from it in different temples