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Any alchemist will tell you that it is in the oldest cities that all the power and wisdom of the ancients lies. Down copperstone streets that run like the arteries of the cosmic body or in buildings that rise like the haunches of prehistoric beasts, is the architecture of wisdom.

This wisdom is hard won, bitterly fought for by those aspiring to illumination. The blood and the sacrifice that attend this style of spiritual quest, into morality of dubious, questionable origins, paint the streets still. And while the coppery red has been washed away by rain and tears the baptism remains.

One place, one terrible place, I saw in my tutelage, haunts me to this very day. And believe me, I have seen darkness. I have enacted darkness. My fingers, my skin, my very essence are soiled. But this place, this place was something more.

It was the last place the very worst traveller must reach. I came there as initiate, I left horrified and destroyed. But I at least left. Others who came did so unwillingly, and their souls are stuck to the walls now like their withering forms, sucked into the oblivion of this wormhole without light and grace. That is the way of that place.

There is this place and I know it too well. They speak of the crossing over point, the channel or bridge across the abyss. You traverse there, through that door, in that place. And you must evade Choronzon, you must elude the fall. And if so some emerge as I did, but many do not.

It haunts me as I say, that place, in nightmares that tell me, over and over, that I have turned the wrong corner, taken the wrong path. But it is not true what they also say – there is never time to change that road that you are on, not after that place. After that place your course is set as is your fate.

As is mine.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2016