Marcus had long since grown impatient with his fellow clergymen. Though not personally a member of their order, the Root clerics had treated him as an honored guest from the moment he’d stepped aboard their station. Like most theurgists, Marcus respected the Root clerics for their particular Great Work, said to embrace the serenity and essence of old Earth before her abandonment to the void. Their mission, the spread of life through the galaxy, was as noble a cause as Marcus could have envisioned. Their pacifism was legendary among theurgists and helped spread the rumor that all theurgical spell casters shared the same ethos.


    But something was wrong.


    His labors carried him away from his family on a daily basis. Though never invited to participate in the Root clerics’ sacred rites, Marcus was put to work with administrative duties. Long nights spent sorting through minor disputes had weighed on him for the better part of a year. Lately, his work had piled up each day despite his best efforts to head it off. He’d seen his family less and less often, and they’d allowed him to chat with Alaya and Gaz over comms less frequently. It was good to know they’d settled in a different Cluster, Yillian Cluster, but he would have liked to see and speak with them.


    None of those things bothered Marcus, none of those spoke to the discomfort he felt. What troubled him was the way he felt he was being managed. As an administrative adjunct, there were pieces of information pertaining to the functioning of the station he could have used, should have been trusted with. But still, three quarters of a year later, the Root clergy forced him to submit local Net requests through another cleric, who would either deny the request or provide the information in the form of a data file.


    Then there was the fact the Root cluster kept him away from the hangar. Marcus’s duties gave him a glimpse at the station’s import and export logs. Large amounts of material, much of it redacted, moved in and out of the station every day. Why redact that information? When he’d asked to see the hangar, he’d been denied. The second time he’d asked, they’d told him to stop asking.


    No one single thing had unsettled him, no this discomfort was born of the aggregate of those little inconsistencies. Perhaps some factional conflict divided the clergy? Or maybe some of them had decided he was a security risk? He knew the last part was unquestionably true. The security risk Marcus represented was why his family lived aboard the Root station, why the clerics in charge curated Marcus’s information so thoroughly.


    Without knowing what was wrong, he had only suspicions, suspicions which Marcus sought to confirm right this moment. Forbidden to use the bulk of the Root clergy’s resources, Marcus was still permitted the rights of a guest priest. As such he now headed toward a small sanctuary along one of the moving branches of the Root, conveying him inevitably closer to his goal.


    It was a tiny chapel, austere after the fashion of his own order. More to the point, some considerate Root cleric had draped the walls with multi-colored prayer flags and left a bowl of incense in the center of the altar at the far wall from the entrance. His home altar, though smaller than this, contained only a few more sacred accoutrement of his faith.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Such decorations made for superfluous distractions for the laity and the novice priests. But for someone like Marcus, who’d mastered the fundamentals of theurgy, even a paltry few objects could significantly empower his magic.


    Marcus folded his robes carefully and knelt down in front of the altar. After several deep breaths, Marcus leaned forward and breathed across the top of the incense stick which awaited him. The fire of the Dharma left his lungs and ignited the stick of incense to produce a red ember on the tip.


    Halfway to the necessary mental state, Marcus chanted for a few minutes, quietly enough audio sensors would have strained to make out the ancient Tibetan syllables he’d uttered. One or two Root clerics would know the language as well as he did, but none of them worshiped in the same manner. It was pleasant little reminder of his own path, the route his devotions had taken.


    It also opened his inner eye. It had been far too long since Marcus had consulted the Daikinis and the Boddhisattvas.


    A shining blue figure appeared before him, in other traditions, he would have been called the gatekeeper or the warden of the future. But in his tradition, the man with his little black hat, white robes and black curly beard hair was the great uniter of the Dharma, Dorje Chang.


    What should have happened was the uniter should have burst into a rainbow fan of light, which Marcus would have stepped through to receive a glimpse of the future. Instead, Dorje Chang expanded.


    His black curly hair grew incredibly quickly, covering his body and turning his blue skin as black as the void itself. Glowing golden eyes sunk into Dorje Chang’s skull, turning them red and bloodshot. A beatific smile turned down like a candle laid on its side in the heat of a solar passage. Then white fangs appeared at the bottom of his lips and rivulets of crimson blood began to drip down his chin.


    The figure now stood on one of its many legs, the ground formed of the body of the poisons of Samsara. Gore encrusted entrails circled the figure’s waist in place of its pure white robes and the blood from that skirt ran down and pooled around the figures representing aversion, the demons.


    Transformed now from the conveyor of the Dharma to her most ferocious wrathful defender, a lesser priest would have trembled before the form of Mahakala. But Marcus had met the wrathful one before, just never by surprise.


    He bowed his head to the one who’d sacrificed virtue itself out of concern for the Truth.


    Mahakala spoke: “Seek your family by the red thread of Upaya, seek the truth by the white thread of the Namshe. Seek freedom in the form of a lost one, bound to another Sangha. Do not trust the Root priests for they have made union with the forces of avarice and aversion.” In the time it took the great master to speak, he’d grown from the size of an idol dancing upon the altar’s surface to something larger than the room, larger than any section of the Root station Marcus had visited save the hangar itself. The master finished his speech. “And seek your freedom in the light of the Void, cast by your former home.”


    Marcus was forced out of the room and onto his back by the apparition. Outside in the hallway where he’d entered the prayer room, he found the Root station in its natural form, rather than in the shape of mobile hallways and platforms. Branches with incredibly large circumferences moved and twisted through the space he could see.


    At his left lay a red line, the same kind of thread the master of his own order had given him when Marcus had taken his oaths of office. At his right lay a white thread, the same he’d earned the day he became a fully initiated priest.


    Without a thought, Marcus jumped to his feet and pulled on the red thread, following it along the branch he stood on, which itself drifted slowly away from where the wrathful deity he’d summoned had burst and began to stalk the branches.


    Something was dreadfully wrong, but the only concern Marcus had in the moment was for his family.