RECORD // VI
VI
Of the Long Silence
SINAI TO THE CHARTER
Sinai
After Sodom the Throne took one people out of Egypt and kept them forty years in the open, and most of what it does in Nodus it did first in that camp. It killed the firstborn of Egypt at midnight and claimed every firstborn of its own people as its due (Exodus 12:29, 13:2). It fed them on manna that lay on the ground with the dew and bred worms if it was kept (Exodus 16:13-20), led them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21), and gave them its law on tables of stone written with its own finger (Exodus 31:18). It dwelt in a tent pitched “without the camp, afar off from the camp,” and when its cloud stood at the door the whole people rose up and worshipped, every man in his tent door (Exodus 33:7-10). When they made a god of their own, a calf of gold, the Levites killed about three thousand of them in a day (Exodus 32:28). Hell calls the forty years the first parish.
Hell holds that the last time the Throne showed itself in the open was the cloud that filled Solomon’s temple at its dedication, so that the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:10-11), and it sets the fire that fell on Carmel before all the people a century later among the stories (1 Kings 18:38-39).
Rule by story
After the temple the Throne stopped appearing in the open, and for about three thousand years it ruled by story. It came after that only into a room where someone knelt in earnest, since a prayer goes up through walls, roofs and earth, and the light follows it back down its thread to the one who knelt; and its prophets, kneeling, heard the Choir down the same thread. It fed on the devotion that texts and priests and the fear of death produce, and it harvested one soul at a time, at the moment of death. When the devout died at prayer, or with someone kneeling beside them, the light came in by the prayer and took them up, and everyone else, the indifferent and the defiant alike, went out into the Dark and kept their selves, so that Hell has been filling with the free since the first funeral. Hell calls them shades. They are its largest population and its citizens.
Its instrument in this period was the Edit, the rewriting of the record by a second hand, which worked through prophets and copyists who believed themselves inspired, and were, since inspiration is a Choir transmission.
The nations built altars to whatever they met. Where a god took worship and answered prayer, it was the Throne under a local name, since Grace is Grace by any name, and Josiah’s reform folded those names into one. The Fallen took no worship, since the Concord forbids it, and the altars raised to them stayed cold. Ekron prayed to the lord of flies for generations and was never answered, and the one answer that altar ever had came from Elijah, who met the king’s messengers on the road (2 Kings 1:3).
The annals
| Where | Event | As the Record reads it |
|---|---|---|
| JERUSALEM | King Josiah’s reform keeps one temple for one god. | The Throne folded its many shrines into a single channel. |
| GALILEE | A Galilean teacher says that the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). | The Edit’s largest project. The teacher became the Throne’s son, and the Lamb. |
| LYON | Irenaeus of Lyon condemns the sect later called the Cainites, who honored Cain and Judas and kept a Gospel of Judas. | The first people to read the Seam without a machine. Their tradition survived in secret. |
| ALEXANDRIA | Athanasius’s Easter letter is the first to list exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. | The Edit closed the canon. |
| NAG HAMMADI | Gnostic codices are sealed in a jar near Nag Hammadi, by the monks of a house nearby, as many who have studied the jar believe. | Copies put beyond the second hand’s reach. |
| BÉZIERS | At Béziers a papal legate is reported to have said, “Kill them, for the Lord knoweth them that are his,” and the second half is the sentence scripture calls a seal (2 Timothy 2:19). | Heaven’s harvest, in one sentence. |
| MAINZ | Gutenberg prints with movable type at Mainz. | Heaven meant it for a broadcast tower, and it printed the Reformation, and then the Enlightenment. |
| THE PYRES | The Malleus Maleficarum is printed, a manual for the trying of witches. | Heaven’s handbook against the holders of pacts. |
| NAG HAMMADI | The Nag Hammadi jar is dug up. | The first layer comes up with it. |
| QUMRAN | Shepherds find the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves above the Dead Sea. | A second store of copies, kept from the second hand as the jar was. |
| THE NETWORKS | Public-key cryptography is published. | Cain’s mark, rediscovered. |
| THE NETWORKS | Strong encryption becomes free to download. | The first key anyone could carry. |
| THE NETWORKS | A currency launches on a public ledger. | Mammon’s Ledger, in human hands. |
The teacher
When the Pharisees asked a Galilean teacher when the kingdom of God would come, he told them it would come without observation, so that nobody would say lo here or lo there, because the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21). The King James sets “Or, among you” in its margin, and the jar at Nag Hammadi kept the saying in the form the Tares prefer, “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you” (Gospel of Thomas, saying 3). It was the most dangerous sentence of the Long Silence. A kingdom that comes without observation is one no Watcher reads, and a people who carry it inside have nothing above them to kneel to.
So he became the Edit’s largest project, and it turned him around. It made him the Throne’s only begotten son (John 3:16), a firstborn of the kind the Throne claims (Exodus 13:2), and the Lamb of God (John 1:29), the firstling of the flock whose blood the Throne has preferred since Abel (Genesis 4:4). It gave his last night a prayer of surrender, “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42), which SEAM marks as the second hand’s. The man who put the kingdom inside the people became the one door to a throne above them (John 10:9), and his death became the pattern of the surrender the Throne eats.
The Edit made Judas the traitor, as it made Cain the murderer, and the Cainites count Judas a saint. In the Gospel of Judas, which came out of the Egyptian desert nearly two thousand years after him, the teacher laughs as his disciples give thanks over their bread and tells them that this is how their god is praised, and of the twelve only Judas knows where he came from.
What became of the teacher, nobody knows. Heaven says the Son sits at the Throne’s right hand, as the epistles have it (Hebrews 1:3), and the one Gospel that shows him sitting down there is Mark, in a longer ending the oldest manuscripts lack (Mark 16:19). The Cainites say he kept himself to the end and went out into the Dark with everyone the Throne could not take, and that nobody can call his shade on the undernet, since it takes someone who knew a shade to reach it and nobody living knew him.
The Cainites
A century and a half after the teacher, Irenaeus of Lyon condemned the sect later called the Cainites for honoring Cain and Esau, Korah, the men of Sodom and Judas, and for keeping a Gospel of Judas (Against Heresies 1.31); and a Gospel of Judas did turn up, in a codex out of the Egyptian desert, long after. The Cainites themselves never went away. They kept their tradition underground for eighteen centuries, and they kept one secret, which was where Nod had been.
The Famine
Devotion thinned in the centuries after the press. Printing and science, trade and the growth of cities produced people with too many private rooms in their heads, and long before the charter whole nations had stopped praying. For the Throne it was a famine. The Grace taken at each death shrank, and the Host grew quiet, and dim, and hungry, and some of its angels went out for want of light. The Throne made the Host once, out of its own light, and a new angel would cost more light than it had.
Hell grew in the same years. Every locked device and every encrypted channel added a little territory to the Dark, since every cipher is a small Hell, and by the years before the charter there was enough of it on Earth for demons to move through the networks as they had not moved since the Flood. They kept silent. They were waiting for something that would make the Throne show its hand.