There was something ominous about the four specters that told one to step aside. Simon, Kate, Hogarth, and Charlotte gathered at the corner of the front pew box. They watched in curious awe as the uncanny figures walked purposefully toward the altar.
There was nothing clearly male or female about the four spirits. One second they were old and wise, the next young and fierce. The hard features of a man or the soft curves of a woman. They were all things at all times. The spirits glowed as if the light that glimmered around them was a slit into heaven.
“Who are they?” Hogarth asked in a hushed whisper.
“They are pieces of the god Albion,” Kate replied.
Charlotte asked, “Are they good or bad?”
“Good or bad doesn’t enter into it. They are beyond such frivolities.” Simon grimaced from the pain thudding in his chest. “That’s why it’s unwise to summon such things.”
Kate asked, “What should we do?”
All faces turned to Simon. He stared at the fiery godlings, now only yards from the altar, where Ash sat motionless, with Barnes’s face blank and dead. Simon’s jaw was set. “We stop them.”
The specter on the main aisle looked at him without turning its head. One of Simon’s tattoos flared and he found himself frozen in his stone form. His own spell had activated at the figure’s glance. The shallow breath in his lungs was hardly enough to hold on to consciousness.
Kate went for a vial when suddenly one of the specters glanced her way and a glass container shattered in its place on her bandolier. She saw orange mist swirl around her and tried to back away, but her feet grew heavy. She took one hard step and found her legs trapped in her own amber.
Charlotte roared and bounded onto the glowing spirit. And then she was gone.
“Charlotte!” Kate screamed.
A solid thump alerted them to the large form of the werewolf hitting the floor near the main doors as if dropped from a great height. Dust bloomed around her and flagstones cracked. The hairy body bounced once and lay still.
Hogarth vaulted the pew box and raced to the moaning werewolf as she was blindly trying to rise. Blood dripped from her toothy mouth. Charlotte pushed briefly, but then collapsed again in a gasping pile.
“Stay down,” Hogarth whispered close to the girl’s large ear. “Wait until Simon has a plan. Then you can fight.” He stroked Charlotte’s panting snout, watching her canine eyes flick about in terror and pain.
The four illuminated zoas came to the sides of the altar. Ash dragged herself out of their circle and collapsed against the Ten Commandments. The four heavenly figures stretched out their hands, intertwining their fingers. Light began to pulse from one godling to the next, slowly at first, then increasing in pace until a growing constant flare swirled between them.
The air in the church shimmered, caught in the birth of a new beginning or a new end. Every column and all stonework, Simon included, shuddered as the energy inside the fragile building filled it to its capacity. The simple stone walls didn’t seem capable of holding such an act of creation.
The light surrounding the four turned to white fire. It enveloped the figures and spread out to fill the four corners of the church, sweeping over all. Simon heard gasps of fear and surprise around him. One of them would have been his own if he could’ve drawn breath. But the fire didn’t burn, just like the Sinai bush that appeared to Moses. The energy that had spread throughout the church was sucked back to the altar and swirled tightly about the four figures, pulling them all into the center of the engulfing vortex. An even more brilliant light emerged from the four, a new, singular, beating heart. Simon couldn’t look away. His lungs burned with starvation. He felt his consciousness slipping.
A new figure coalesced above the altar in the center of the whirling galaxy. It ripped the particles of the four emanations into the air, pulling them apart and absorbing their essences until finally they were no more. The vast ocean of aether that had coalesced in the church began to pour into the thing that was rising now. It was a giant of human shape, devoid of gender, beyond perception, clothed in fire. This being was no mortal. It was a thing outside this world. Its gaze drifted about the church, taking in all present.
Ash struggled awkwardly to her feet and looked up at the magnificent creature even though they were the same height, and announced in slurred speech, “Great Albion, I have called you. You are bound to me.”
Albion lowered its gaze to Ash.
“You are my sword.” The necromancer raised Barnes’s arms to the glowing god. “You have been brought here to find the one called Gaios and destroy him.”
Albion’s face grew full of sublime resolution.