Demon of the Black Gate

The demon floated over the plateau as a menacing storm, its thoughts as incoherent as the vapors. The visions of this land were not retreating. The void eluded him and the cyclical darkness of the land was thin and without permanence. The longer the demon’s awareness remained undimmed by the void, the more the place it found itself bred familiarity. The skies, the waters, the creatures that lived in it. The rage was diminished, but the anger continued. It had been cast from the formless walls of one prison for the bright cage of another. It could not return to the void. Something held it in this place as surely as a tether. The elements know no time and the drift of the demon across the land was one it would be unable to measure. The sky was bright, ‘sun’, when another thought crossed the demon’s consciousness: the creature, the woman. There was a splash of chimera, of a time shattered by the gravity of the void,but they were too erratic to recognize, so the fresh image froze in its mind. The vision would not dissipate and the attention drew it like a magnet back to the east.

The torrential rains and gusty destructive winds of the demons passage struck randomly on the lands, footsteps of the gods. Rumors and news of the storm spread as witnesses and victims reported the shape and visage of its unheavenly nature, and the ‘eye of the storm’ took on a new meaning.

It was the clamor of vicious thunder shaking the ground that first woke Cerra. It mattered not that she was blind, she rubbed her eyes as anyone would clearing the motes and dreams from their eyes as consciousness returns. The rumble of troubled skies reverberated with an angry growl, and dashes of heavy rain came in thrashing waves. It ceased suddenly, the last thunderous report came like a collapse.

Cerra threw back her quilted blankets, and quickly felt for the robe that was kept on a hook nearby. The raw silk texture felt wonderful as she slipped it on her bare skin.

As she left her small bedroom she heard the leather flap in the kitchen window. Kamir was in. She went to the door that opened to the front porch, Kamir padding behind her. She opened the door tentatively. Stepping out, a blue white glow hung like an obscured moon, breaking through the veil of black. She caught her breath. She kept her eyes on the glow and inched carefully to the first riser of the short flight. She let herself down, sitting on the porch step, gazing at the glow. The incandescence hung near where she knew the lake to be and grew closer, like the moon elongating, the clouds dispersing, until a man walked through the glow, carrying the aura with him. The apparition approached, swirling wisps of blue and white, steps seeming to float. The man may have floated in her eyes, but her ears heard the rumbling collection of earth moving, a small tremor with each step.

For all his discordant nature, the demon left no tracks. He was of the earth. The earth remembers.

Kamir crouched intently at the folds of her robe, pressing to her hip. He was in a near tremble, a low growl barely discernible. He was ready to inch forward, not cowering back. She lightly stroked between his shoulder blades.

“You brave little man” she murmured, trying to make her voice a reassuring purr. “I’ll be fine.”

If she had actually seen the molten form of rock and vapor approach she might have quavered. A hot gust caught at her robes as the demon stopped, facing the cabin a few feet from the porch. Cerra could feel the heat of him on her bare skin. The swirling vision of him continued to appear in her eyes, gases collected and formed to life, contained in the atmosphere of his being. She was captivated by this forgotten sense. She was captivated by the man that stood before her. For all the curious and stern look of the face, there was the nakedness of his form. If she shuddered, it was not from fear.

“I heard you come in.” She had to say something, and it was the first thing that came out. Kamir let out a worried mewl, barely heard, but she could feel the rumblings through her fingers.

The demon looked at her for a moment. Threads of words sorted in its thoughts.

“I am here.” The demon made a statement. A place that could exist in any time. Here. The words came out, a practice long forgotten. Meanings. Connections. The demon caught the low warning from the black cat crouched at the woman’s side. ’Cat’ a word ringing with jolts of familiarity. The ... house ... and as though on cue the woman captured the word for him.

“At my cottage.” She had a sudden insight. “Do you know where ‘here’ is?

The demon needed no time to respond. The question had been tearing at him since his awakening.

“NO!” The word came out with force, a simple breath to make the word, but vehemence carried in its wake.

Cerra thought of her own dream-states and how real they seemed to her. In her dreams she had her sight. In her dreams she could fly. And where was she then? Where was she now? … staring blindly into the early morning, a glowing form interrupting the blackness of her vision.

“Here we are then. It is a most incredible moment, don’t you think? I can see you. And you are talking to me.” Cerra felt thrilled for some unaccounted reason. Kamir inched away with a low growl, leaving the cover of her light robe and nosing forward carefully, sniffing and assessing.

“Do you have a name?” She brushed back one of her wayward locks, leaning forward with rapt interest.

The demon ran the word around in its mind. A name. There was a word that it knew. One that had called it and would know it again if it summoned again. But for now, the word was as formless as his own identity that wavered in the elements.

“I have no name!” His thought burst from him in a formless anger. Forgotten memories, uselessly hidden in his lost consciousness. The demon bloomed with the heat of his angry confusion. The winds whipped at Cerra’s thin robe and tossed her hair to further abandon.

Cerra had jumped at the intensity of the reply and the deep resonance that boomed in her thought. The vision of him flared like a torch waxed by a sudden draft. She suddenly felt very naked, the raw silk clutched about her as she sat. The tremors of his emotion ran through her, mixing like a hot spice with her own. It struck her how anger and joy were so close. She knew she’d felt the touch of his mind. The heat from him felt like the pit fires at one of Jennson’s roasts and she imagined the glowing crush of coals and flame. That intuition would have been unerringly accurate had she but had the eyes to see.

The demon watched as his emotional wave passed over her, the color of her calmness whipping with its passing but remaining clear and unruffled.

“I’m Cerra.” she offered, pressing forward. “Can I ask what you are?”

The rumbling mass curled and moved, even though the vision of the young man remained constant in front of her. The air suddenly smelt of ozone like after a thunderous night on the prairie when the lightnings crackled with abandon.

“I am nothing.” came the answer, the rumble of his voice echoed the thought that came to her mind.

“I am everything.”

The voice was distraught, the admission of a desperate truth. The low booming roll of sound made her think of rockslides.

“I see a man.” she said. “But I think if I were to see you with the someone else’s eyes, you’d not look so comely.”

The complexity of her thoughts reached him, a frame from her mind that painted the picture of a sightless life, of blackness, of invented and fabled scenes. The demon saw her blindness, the lack of eyesight. If she could not see, it angered the demon that it could see too well. It saw a gruesome miasma of elements gone wild. It suddenly wished for her blindness. The comfort of the dark. The whirlwind of its emotion scattered the earth from the demon as it rose in a consuming swirling tower of air and stubborn dust as it shed the earth.

The last thing Cerra saw was the anguish in the man’s face before the entire body rose like a plasmic storm, the crackling embers sucked up into a vortex. The swirling wind blew sod and dirt and twigs at her, forcing her to duck down, clutching at her robe. Thunders racked the sky, as though colliding with the mountains.

It was over when the echoes of the thunder died out among the far cliffs. The man had dissolved in a flurry from her vision. The dark remained. All that was left was a eerie stillness and the smell of fired rock. Even the air seemed less dense, the life drawn out of it.

She was immersed in the dark again and suddenly felt very alone. It was a spiral she rarely allowed herself to sink in. The turns started to revolve in her mind when the purr and insistent pushes of Kamir rubbing against her thigh pulled her away from that despair. She patted her lap and the cat alit immediately, settling in a different turn, counter to her own. She found a smile, and stroked Kamir, her imagination recounting the sight of the glowing man walking naked towards her in the blackness of her sight. The fire of him stirred her, the question of his origins puzzled her. The stirs and puzzles had her body and mind alive even in the quiet reverie of the aftermath.

“Isn’t that just like me.” she murmured, her hand stroking Kamir’s head. “I get lusty for the first man I see.”