Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3), John Gold [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

it’s activated for the first time. The tip splits into four parts, making it look like a four-pronged wooden trident. The reddish shaft sprouts red thorns. It’s the kind of javelin you’d be proud to show off in Hell, where the demons would fall over themselves in envy of the red color, the needle-like thorns, and the fork on the end.

It’s the perfect time and place to figure out what to do with the key to the world of the dead. It’s definitely an item used in the ritual for opening the gate, but I have no idea where to find a description of the seal. Oh, wait—the seal!

I pull out my book on seals for summoning demons and get to work studying the guidelines used to create interworldly portals. Besides summoning demons from the Inferno, there are also descriptions of rituals for summoning them into the body of a victim, not to mention unlocking spatial portals for groups or individual use. You can create stationary portals between worlds and make contact with demons. For example, you can talk with anyone in Hell if you use the right victim in your ritual.

To summon a demon, you need to know their name and their symbol. But I can’t figure anything out there. The stationary portals and portals for large groups are much more interesting, however. Creating one means activating ten small seals and combining them into one large one. An intricate, hierarchical network connects the seals…and there I am, back to the issue of hierarchy. I spend several hours drawing different options on the floor of the lab until Femida cuts in with a comment she has after seeing them.

“Getting into Kabbalah?”

“What do you mean?”

“The ten primary elements: Deity, Light, Dark, Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Life, Mind, Space. Those three arrows you drew have the relationships between them wrong.”

I have to be careful to make sure I don’t scare her off.

“Keep going?”

“Deity created Light and Dark, from which Earth and Water appeared, and then Air and Fire. That gave rise to Life and Mind. They’re all Space elements, and the relationships between them are described in the Sefirot. I mean, all the diagrams are there. It’s called the World Tree.”

Femida is better off not knowing how valuable that information is. The diagram really does express the main principles behind the hierarchy, though it still isn’t complete. It’s missing the spirit world—the Gray Lands.

“Fem, do you remember if there’s anything in Kabbalah about the spirit world and how it’s connected to the Sefirot?”

“Nope. I mean, there was something about that, but I didn’t read it. There is one more element in the Sefirot, though: Da’at. It’s also called the invisible Sefira, the Keys of Knowledge. It combines Deity, Light, and Dark, the three highest essences. It’s at the base of the Pillar of Life.”

“And what’s the Pillar of Life?”

“Deity, Life, Mind, Space, and the invisible Sefira Da’at.”

“Okay, Femida, name your present, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Screw your presents! The javelin is enough—I don’t want anything else sucking my blood.”

The key, you idiot! We’re holding the key to Da’at, the Gray Lands! It’s a good thing I picked her as a partner. The foundation of everything—Da’at! All magic is built on the ten primary elements, and she just explained the interrelations between them.

For days, I draw a seal describing the picture of magic in the world. The hierarchy of magic elements couldn’t be more obvious. As soon as I figure it out, the connections between the magic elements start to make sense, too. I’m building a completely different, incredibly complex seal that describes the relationships between all the magic primary elements. Also, I have to involve the environment where the seal will be activated, though that doesn’t change the basic gist. Every little magic seal includes five or six levels, requiring an exact description of how they interact with the other elements. Ultimately, I have to draw nine small seals inside three circles responsible for location and environmental conditions. My head is about to explode from all the different powers working together in the right order.

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Once again, Claude makes me swim two kilometers. Then, it’s medicine, a lecture on human physiology, and a very important phrase right at the end.

“Healthy body, healthy mind.”

If you only knew how much that means to me right now…

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Finishing up the bases for the seal takes another ten hours. Femida is obviously bored, taking her stress out on the poor monsters in the area. Judging by the explosions, she’s giving her javelin a trial by fire.

The only part of the enormous seal left is the one responsible for Da’at, with no direct connections to any of the elements.

I’m staring blankly up at the ceiling as I lie on the glass floor. Nothing’s coming to mind. But even without noticing it, I merge all eleven of my streams of consciousness into a brain storm focused on what I know about the Gray Lands. My mind goes empty, I lose any sense of my own body, and I dive deeper into my thoughts.

The demons in Hell mentioned that the Gray Lands are on the other side of the shroud. That means that Hell is part of them—a location within a location. Given that there’s just one shroud for all the nine levels of Hell, it’s safe to assume that the location doesn’t have a clearly defined physical form or portal connection between the levels. They’re all on one plane. I also know that the souls of the dead go straight to the Gray Lands. To quote Hela, at least, that’s what our gods say. So, what do we have? Deity, Life, Mind, Space, and Da’at, where the soul goes after the physical body dies. The physical and mental bodies are linked. Deity, really, is an astral essence that can create a shell