Break the Sky
By Sam Acheson
PROLOGUE – A VOICE LIKE THUNDER
In a way, it all began with a voice. His fathers voice, deep and powerful, that caused all those bones in his chest and buzz and hum along. When he was young, Sebastian Barclay believed he could feel it -his father's voice- in his soul.
Sebastian's earliest memories were of his father's voice; and the shadowed outline of his head, looming above him haloed by the light of a single bulb; like what Sebastian imagined when certain of his friends described God. The stupid person's God, his father said. The god who couldn't be touched, worshiped by the ones who didn't know.
His earliest memories were the voice, and his task.
Most fathers tell their sons that they can grow up to be president. Gregory Barclay, it must be said, was not most.
“You have one task, my son,” he would boom in his peremptory way, as massive and powerful as his son was small and shivering. Sebastian was always cold, growing up. Even later in life, even now, he remembered the chill even when he remembered nothing else.
“How long do I have?” Sebastian would ask, in the flat singsong of a child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
“You have all the days of your life,” Father would intone “You may need every instant, for your task is to wake the Gods.”
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The task was like a family heirloom. The first to own it was Vespasian Barclay, whose beetle-browed and scowling visage was in some way more familiar to the child than his own; he saw a mirror seldom, but the glowering face of his honored ancestor gazed down on Sebastian as he slept in his tiny bed, his long-dead eyes gazing at the boy from under several hundred years of cracked and milky lacquer. The oil painting took up most of the slanted ceiling of his tiny attic room. That portrait was also like God, to him; furious eyes gazing down, viewing everything with a disgust that bordered, always, on violence.
Since 1356, the task had fallen to many. All had failed, of course, dying with the burden of a futile and wasted life. They were, Father said, in Hell, even his honored ancestor, even his grandfather. A special Hell, for those who broke an oath.
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“Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“On the pain of eternal pain, and eternal regret: by your secret name by the the marrow of your bones and the salt of your blood, do you swear you will find the Gods and wake them?”
“I swear.”
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Sebastian couldn't breath. Hands like hot iron bars held him under; his eyes were clenched shut because opening them stung, but he knew he'd see up through the quicksilver surface of the water his father's head, a shadow in the single bulb's murky light. He thrust his hands up, clawing at the thick-muscled arms that held him under, but they didn't so much as flinch.
“Speak it!” the water seemed to bellow as it pressed on his chest like a heavy weight “speak it with your mind!”
It wasn't any use. He wouldn't be able...the words were...his clawing grew weak, and frantic, and then...
The boy went limp under the water; but from the tips of his middle and index fingers from both hands, little bits of steam were curling. Not much, but just enough.
Gregory Barclay pulled his unconscious son out of the tub with a rough sort of tenderness; toweled him off with the boy's favorite faded and threadbare blue towel, and carried him up the narrow staircase to bed. He had worked hard, after all; he would need his sleep.
The boy was seven.
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But Sebastian is older now. He is eighteen, and strange, and numb. He is far from his Father; far from the voice of thunder and the cracked and furious eyes of God. He goes through his days in a sort of haze, unwilling to remember, unwilling to think on his task; because remembering is pain, and he found a quiet, endless nothing to be preferable, for now.
He goes to school, a small college in a small town, and mostly he is ignored. Of those that notice him, some think him shy; most think him odd. A few, the most observant, find him frightening, in a way they can't quite articulate.
He is collected and unobtrusive and acts much older than his age. Underneath the surface of his icy and hard-won calm, cracked and crazed like the lacquer on an ancient portrait, something else burns bright and steady as a star.
Fear.
One God sleeps beneath the earth;
Four Gods are null, awaiting birth.
Six gods walk, and they intend
To hear the story of the world, end
-Vespasian Barclay
Esoterica, Vol III, pg 387
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