Confusion with his lord had long been a source of frustration. Still, confusion was the way of things in the murky air below. Confusion with the first or the second Adam had forced him to operate very indirectly. That was why his defensive work had to be so odd. He did love the bright sword — its keen edge was micron-thin but atomically serrated and those points did glitter so — but rarely did wielding it look like plain battle. The sword directed training and cut exercises rather than leading charges. More a parade-ground instructor than a general leading troops, his work was nearly all in mock-battles meant to prepare for the great dance.
Each of his battle-training plans were encoded on the sword in glyphs of practical and esoteric power. Each plan encompassing that range of discernment required for strengthening and weakening the bride where she must grow and change. Stresses and overloads arranged to first tear and then heal ever stronger. Objectives artfully designed to lead her through the landscape and teach her tactics. He had taught and trained the long tradition to understand many of the feints of the great enemy and truly she had grown in skill. Granted that hers was yet a training ground ability, it was maturing. Memorized maneuvers had good effect in battle and he often admitted real enemies to the arena that she could try her strength and the actual victory would become more secure.
The undead were one such plan and he still glowed a bit with satisfaction as he remembered it. The exercise had been so effective and the training so thoroughly victorious that he was quite certain the bride had internalized the lesson completely. She had desperately needed to get out of her own head and confront both the reality of evil and the necessary materiality of salvation. Heavenly minded indeed! She had begun to believe that all growth was intellectual, or worse, emotional and was ever fixated on thinking about the victory banquet or imagining the emotional state of exaltation. For years of her time it had been nearly impossible to get anything but words or sensations out of her. Chalmers and Finney and the rest had nearly done for the sacraments. Sensible in the extreme she had begun to merely feel her way through all the disciplines: arguing over semantics and emotional states and rarely acting. It had been a hard throw in the arena and winded she’d had to pick herself up, taste the grit of dust, the copper tang of adrenaline, and iron bite of blood, and learn to both wield and love the material of salvation.
Of course he’d needed to work through a man like Bram. Men of the islands had always been his best assistants. Tasting the salt air did wake one up so effectively. Michael had set him up with two dichotomies: sapping his vitality in childhood, leaving him bedridden, then offering him unusual strength in youth; and pairing Protestant theology with strong tendencies toward both the sacraments and the fae. Such paradoxes could only grow in Gaelic soil. His imagination fired by his intimacy with weakness and strength, his spirit earthy and mystical, he’d conceived the vampyre and feared his own audacity. He did not realize the full effect. What author could? In less than a generation thousands of priests were re-catechized by a merely literary phenomenon. Michael had rejoiced. What better defense of the Church could there be than a vaccinating exercise like Dracula? Those were heady moments seeing her practice reliance on blessed water, the image of the suffering groom, and the food of the altar.
Looking around the New World and the shambles it had made of his myth, pity filled him for Uriel, whose muse-efforts must endure these reversals rather more often. But none would pity him after tonight. The 19th century’s triumph had ended, and though much good had come of it, the 21st saw the end of the vaccine’s efficacy. He was not the only one delighted by glittering brightnesses but the baseness of this corruption, its numbing white-bread stupidity, the bloodless un-evilling of the monstrous galled him.
Michael was not out of maneuvers. The training plan would unfold further and the bride would put her dusty practice into practice. Tonight was the night. Tonight a grave in every New World city would be opened by the edge of his bright sword and the monsters would shamble forth. Tonight they would remember and trust again the true priests. They would flee to the Eucharist and to the holy places. They would trust and believe, or die.