TC34

“What are these changes, Lord?”

“Your identity as Avram will not be altered, but my memories as an eloah will be added to your own memories, and your memories as a young man of Kemen will be added to mine. My will shall be manifest in your mind always, and I shall see the world through your eyes. You shall be my living avatar, yet you shall ever remain free to act. Together we shall ratify our joining from moment to moment. But you must know beforehand these physical changes, once they have come to be, cannot be undone for so long as you live.”

“After I am changed will I look very different?”

“No, nearly all of the changes will be entirely inside of you. The sole visible change can be augmented with jewelry and justified as headwear.”

To help explain, El stood up and found a goblet in the kitchen.

He said, “Your mind is like a glass that you have filled with wine. The new glass will have a greater capacity but the first wine will remain. Even when the glass is gone that wine will remain, but not forever. Elohim share the same fate as all other living things, but we live so much longer than humans that I cannot even express the duration of it to you. Nay, I could not teach this thing even to the wise ones of Shalem! Your culture never had the need to ponder such magnitudes.”

Avram stood up from the cushion to stare outside while he weighed the words of El. They had the power to irrevocably change his life. In a way they had already done so. His father Terah, as a shade or otherwise, was not waiting for him out there cliffside. He knew now his father was lost to him for all time yet to come. That knowledge made the living so much more precious to him. Ulitmately, Avram’s explorer spirit won out, as it inevitably must. He returned to kneel before the avatar of El.

“O Great One, let it come to be as you say, this union of eloah and worlddweller. I am fully willing to do this thing! Yet do think I crave only to delay my own end until a time beyond all reckoning. Let us join that together we will both come to know many new things.”

T’oma and Heth were the boys’ names and they had taken to the road after a bitter family spat. With their father newly dead and their eldest brother Avram gone missing, their next elder brother Anath imagined himself to be the head of the family. T’oma was not so impressed with his brother. After all Anath was only older than T’oma by mere minutes.

The boys were looking for income, but they feared to resume the sort of work that crippled their father. Their closest kin insisted they do just that. On the seashore the boys wandered until one day they found themselves part of a growing crowd of people who had gathered to hear a new preacher.

And there was scattered in the crowd certain newcomers from the capital city of Adan, men of means who had come by their wealth by extorting pilgrims to the temple of Belial there. Nevertheless they boasted of their ritual purity, and they considered this new preacher a developing threat to their authority and their source of income.

Also present that morning was Princess Sarah, daughter of King Raphael, as well as Hashmal Imrael and several of Sarah’s other companions who styled themselves the Fallen Angels. They were all leather-garbed in what the Adanites took to be a mockery of the king’s soldiers.

Then T’oma and Heth saw the man at the center of attraction and discovered, to their great surprise, that he was their own brother Avram. A year and more had passed since they had seen him last. Yet so great was the crowd the boys found it impossible to draw near to him.