Free Advent by James Treadwell

for the glimpses of the living universe that had been allowed him, praising the great Author by whose generative spirit the world was inhabited, sustained and moved. What was magic after all, he would remind himself at these times, but the commerce and the interchange between mankind and the rest of the living creation? It was a simple truth, though many thought it occult: the world was alive, a body filled with spirit like Adam himself. In ancient days those who understood this were acknowledged and revered as the holiest of men, prophets and hierophants. He gave thanks that he had been permitted to achieve such a station.
      Though it hardly seemed like a blessing, in these fallen times. Now, those who called themselves pious looked askance at him. The magus pressed his lips tight as he knelt. He lived in a degraded age, a pygmy age. The new heresy preached that God’s creation and everything in it was fallen and corrupt. Everywhere people flocked to its banner. Educated men weighed and measured the world around them like the new anatomists, who thought they could explain human life by slicing open corpses and prodding the empty flesh. The clerk of Frombork studied the gleaming volume of the heavens and determined that the Earth itself, the whole sphere of God’s substantial creation, was a vast ball of dead rock spinning madly like a child’s top, hurtling through oceans of emptiness. Amid this dark theatre where ignorance masqueraded as philosophy, the magus felt himself utterly alone, blowing on the last fading embers of knowledge in the hope that some future day the fire might blaze up again. He had students once, but they were gone. Mankind had turned its back on him.
      Well, then. He was ready to turn his back on them.
      His eyes opened and twitched towards the ring. The greatest gift in the history of the world had come into his possession (that was how he put it to himself, ‘had come into his possession’, while he meant to pray, though on this morning his heart and mouth were equally empty of devotion) and he would safeguard it and, through it, himself. For ever.
      If he died, the gift and his art (which were, after all, one and the same) might be lost to the world. Mankind would forget that the universe was alive. No one would hear the echoes of the divine word that had spoken it into being. Adam’s descendants would eat dust and ashes.
      Therefore he had decided he would not die.
      It was indeed not an ordinary day. He was on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life, a magic that had not been done since the world’s long-departed golden age. He ought to have been exalted by wonder and reverent awe, but instead the thing he was trying not to remember, the farewell he so desired to avoid, nagged at his meditations, urging him to hurry, to seal the bargain and then be away, across the sea to England, where he could begin a new life.
      He opened his eyes to check the ring again, as though it might have been removed while he prayed. It lay on the table still: a gift, a burden.
      Prayer forgotten, he rose slowly to his feet.
      He picked up his staff and, with a motion swift and imperious as a swordsman executing a salute, raised it high and traced a circle in the air. He spoke three words and then rapped the floor with its heel.
      For a second the cellar room was flooded with a fiery light. It had no source, but seemed to stir with a restless motion of its own. Indistinct faces with lidless and pupilless eyes, smooth lips silently moving, flowed among it and then vanished, though strange reflections continued to flicker around the room: the curve of a silver bowl for a moment became a coppery cheek, the glass of a bottle caught the image of a stony gaze.
      He gripped the staff tightly in his left hand. The feel of the familiar instrument of his authority went some way to refreshing his wavering confidence. The business was begun. Now he could show no weakness, no hesitation at all, or