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

now.
    At least, that had been my experience with churches in the United States. Some of the older places, ones that had history going back a hundred years or more, still had the magick in their bones. Too many years of regular service, too many penitents praying for guidance, too many dreamers asking for some sign of the Divine. These sorts of echoes permeate stone after a while, and the stone never quite lets go.
    This church had some history in its bones. The building was clearly the oldest structure in the alley, and while the inside looked like it had been made over in the last hundred years, the leys still converged on it as if they had been redirected by several generations of foot traffic. Or maybe it was something else.
    What do you want me to See, Old Man? There was no answer from the Chorus. I was going to have to figure this out myself. Even in death, he was still teaching.
    Like all new students, I had struggled with the semantic distinctions the Watchers placed on certain words: seeing and Seeing; knowing and Knowing; Witnessing. This uppercase emphasis like we were reenacting one of Byron's Romantic epics. But, gradually, like all initiates, I came to understand the subtleties of our discourse. Language is an imperfect system, more so when you start working in several tongues at once (cultural mores start to become an issue; more than once I felt like I needed advanced degrees in history and cultural anthropology to understand the lessons given to us). Almost like Platonic Ideals, some words were echoes of older, more enlightened, concepts. An extra stress on the initial syllable (a capitalization, if you will) implied the higher meaning of the word.
    The distinction between seeing and Seeing, for example. I could describe the physical attributes and placement of all the objects in this church, but such a passive description failed to explain why they had been placed the way they had. Such mundane objectivity couldn't encompass the movement of energy and Will required to make this scene the way it was. Who made the Christ? Why had they chosen glass as their medium? What effect did that have on the congregation? Or on the energy patterns?
    Glass could distort or mirror, affording the viewer either a filtered view of reality or a reflection. It didn't have any identity of its own, forever slippery to the viewer. A perfect vehicle for inspiring meditation and personal reflection. Look upon my face, my children, look up and tell me what you see? asked the face of the glass Christ. What pains you?
    The echoes in my head.
    During the decade I had been running from my shadow, I had been using the energies of stolen souls to complete myself. I was whole with them, and while I couldn't quite ground myself like other magi and open myself up as a conduit point, I could still exert my Will on the world around me. I was a schizophrenic with a dominant personality matrix, and that ego consciousness was the singular point around which my world spun. The rest were echoes, trailing ghosts caught in orbit. But the spirit of Philippe seemed like it had its own satellites.
    Like looking in a mirror and seeing another mirror. And the more you compare that reflection to the endless parade of fainter reflections, you realize each one is subtly different.
    Could an organization have memory? Could it have the same sort of eternal life that a pile of old stones did? I didn't really know what it meant to be Hierarch of the Watchers, but the echoes of Philippe's history in my head had a peculiar edge that wasn't like other lives that I had absorbed. Granted, the Chorus was different since I had been changed by the explosion of souls in Portland, but my relationship with the memories—with the other personalities—was still the same.
    Each soul that has passed through me changed me. I was no longer who I was prior to being initiated into the mysteries, which isn't to deny the fact that all experience changes us. But profane experience