kitab al-a'rad: the swarm angels

04.02.48: “...the swarm angels; I believe, are not a plurality at all. There is but one swarm angel, who repeatedly returns to the same small section of o-time at certain bifurcating moments in order to move as a multitude. I believe this from examining the fingerprints left in the black honey coating the eyes and mouth of one of our team, who was unfortunately too slow to sound the pulse-bell in time. All the fingerprints are the same; a spiral leading to the center of the finger. I feel similarly certain that this beast is following us across the desert; either it is protecting or seeking information as to the crida, traces of whom lay all over this area. We are seeking a hidden city, a city burrowed into the earth...”

05.19.48: "It is said that the Secret Name of Metatron is actually Gabriel: there is a face which is shown to the world and a face which no one will see, there is a being of presence and a being of absence, each only knowable by the companionship of the other. Consider, then, how this is with worlds, how for there to be a present-place there must certainly be an absent-place, a ghost of chalk and aether in a place we cannot travel. There are those, however, who walk between, who find passage into this place, and from it emerges in new forms, in places unimaginable. Consider these dualities; there must be between all things something other, something by which we can distinguish form from form, shape from shape. I had taken eight steps toward the bidju, my fists stuffed with pine needles and mirror-stones, and I saw as though overlaid atop the world of substance the spinning of a blackness not the absence of light, but the opposite of light; a devouring mechanism entering into this world to clear the way for the Swarm Angels, forming patterns in the absent world. Yet in all this I knew the place where I was not in the world of substance, nor in the world of absence. I was in a space between. I was in a nowhere-place, and I felt a cold wind deep inside me."