Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls by Mark Teppo Page A

ranks at the same time, a few years back. Though Antoine's family—like Philippe's—had been part of the organization for several generations. I was a recent recruit, a promising mutt found scrounging for scraps in the gutters of Paris. He and I and a few others made a little coterie of young turks.
    Hermes Trismegistus, in one of the dialogues recorded with his son, Tat, spoke of a great basin lowered down from Heaven. It was filled with Mind—a word rife with many connotations that had occultists and philosophers arguing for centuries—and it was only through man's focus and will that he could achieve a purified state. One that allowed him to bathe in the basin and be covered with the luminous dew of God's Will. Or some such thing.
    Metaphor aside (or not, depending on what you believed in), we sought the basin, whether the archaic artifact or some modern facsimile. That was our reason for seeking initiation into the inner mysteries of La Société Lumineuse: to be worthy of illumination. We had purpose and direction—for a little while—and then emotions got in the way.
    Those basal desires that forever infect the flesh: lust, jealously, fear, greed. Always fighting those demons that haunt our bodies, aren't we?
    It was a combination of lust and jealously that did us in. Assisted by the vibrant presence of Marielle Emonet. Daughter of the Old Man. Which wasn't to say that there weren't others who were interested in Marielle. Her proximity to the Hierarch alone made her desirable. In an unenlightened throwback to our medieval roots, there was an unspoken belief that she was the prize. She would be given to whomever the Old Man selected as his successor, which failed to bring into consideration a number of things. Not the least of which were her temper and her willful independence.
    I hesitate to say she enjoyed playing Antoine and me off one another, but it was such an ingrained response that it happened almost involuntarily. Clarity on the tangled trinity of our relationship came grudgingly in the years after I left Paris, and I realized I was a means to get under Antoine's skin. She liked me well enough, but in the end, I was a message sent to the other man: Marielle would make her own choice, and Antoine needed to respect her opinion if he ever hoped to have a future with her.
    But outside the contest for Marielle's affection, Antoine and I had been friends. I seemed oblivious to the aristocratic heritage that the others deferred to, and the respect I had for him was that of a peer, of a fellow student of magick. He frightened me because of what he knew and what he could do, not because of the rich stock of his bloodline.
    Who knows what he saw in me; maybe it was as simple as the fact that I didn't cater to him, that I asked him to earn the right of my respect. Once or twice, I had cracked that armor of his and Seen inside, and that I could—and had—may have been part of the reason he had adopted me into his little clan of magi. I was a wild card, and Antoine—like the Old Man—knew the best place for wild cards was at one's side. Who knew what mischief they could cause if they weren't Watched?
    Well, sleeping with the girlfriend, for one.
    Shortly after my Journeyman trial, Antoine and the others had tried to embarrass me. We took a little extra-curricular excursion to a tiny village near the Swiss border where the locals still believed in werewolves; I had thought it was to celebrate our initiation into the first circle of the society, but that wasn't the case. They had tried to frame me for the death of a local, setting me up to be a target of local superstitions. I went off-script, and left them with a mess to clean up, and during the course of that engagement, I stripped Antoine's shields and showed the rest of the gang that he was twisting all of us. All our threads.
    No one was too happy about that.
    Antoine and I were wary of each other for several months after that, finding excuses to dodge the other,