Midnight
The study was dimly lit, as always. The darkness harboured strange truth and weird answers, and any of those would be very welcome. Karl Maria Willigut folded the letter back into its envelope, and slid the envelope back into the drawer. Then he switched off the lonely light bulb, and let darkness take back the night. He leaned back in his chair, and let the constant, low drone of rain drumming against the window fill him with peace and serenity before his thoughts collapsed over him.
It had been three long, arduous years since he had last read that letter. It was very upsetting. The Guido of the letter was not the Guido Von List he remembered. Whatever turned the former into the latter must have been a very potent force, to fright Guido Von List, the man who conversed with Gods, into fearing death.
It must have been the War.
Oh, yes, the War. He himself had not escaped unscarred from it, the horrors of the battlefield viewed with the third eye would remain with him until the day his flesh will part from his bones. The memories began to attack, to breach the intentional barrier he had erected in his mind, and he had neither the will, nor the want to stop them. They fell over him like a tidal wave, the constant tak-tak-tak of the machine guns, the slow, unbearable pounding of the artillery, the smell of rotting mud filled his nostrils and ears again. He felt the cold metal of the gun on his hands again, and began to sink back ever deeper into the memories of the monotony of the trenches. But with a burst of willpower, he dispersed such mundane memories. While his ability to meditate and re-live events of the past, even from times as old as the first memories of his germanic blood, when his people were not even in Europe, was very useful when he intended to use it, this was not the time for a nearly instinctual slip back into those dreaded years. Some memories, however, stubbornly refused to be ushered back beyond that mental gate. Memories of the third eye are hard to control.
Before his eyes, he saw the battlefield, bathed in the auras of black despair, bile-yellow disgust, deep-blue hatred and mostly, gripping, cold, white-blue fear. He saw the white explosions of lifeforce every time someone was shot dead, and the slow, darkening trickle every time someone got a fatal wound. Suddenly, the images form the only Lazarett he ever had to visit flashed up: dirty, grey floors only cleaned up well enough to eliminate the obvious splatters of blood, crowded, stinking halls filled with utter boredom for the lucky ones and pain and suffering for the unlucky, and the astral counterpart to all this: deep sadness, sharp pain, and numb resignation formed into an amalgam that filled him with the urge to vomit even after all these years, and those disgusting.. things that moved around in all this astral filth and consumed and regurgitated it endlessly, burying the filed hospital in a grave of despair and woe. He had to force himself to slip out of this memory and took a sip of wine to keep his stomach at peace.
And such memories were only the beginning. The eastern front was relatively safe and clean, with religion deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of all combatants, and priest clearing up some of the accumulated filth, although unknowingly, while singing their prayers or comforting the dying. The west, was different. Atheism had eradicated and overwritten much of the instinctive spirituality of soldiers, even though he had to admit the wisdom of the old saying: “There are now atheists in the foxholes”. But still, in the east, almost every dead body had sent its soul into its rightful place in the Umbra, with whatever psychopomps they believed in, or however those appeared to them, busily ferrying the dead. In the West, for every two christians, or in some cases, moslims or animists, whose strange rituals of passing into the beyond surprised him, there was at least one soul that did not know what to do and out of fear or regret or whatever motivation remained in their last seconds, refused to step into the Gates. He saw again how these souls, often stranded there in great numbers, relived their last minutes, making eerie ghost-charges against similar foes over the battlefield, regardless of what was going on in the physical world. One such memory of souls storming against each other in corpse-white deadlight while the guns were silenced so that the bodies may be picked up burst up from his mind, and made his shudder. These souls then slowly began to lose their memories, their personalities, and this peeling away only served to fuel the brewing astral storms that enveloped the whole world, feeding off the warlike emotions and the motherly and womanly anxiety of the soldiers and their mothers and wives. Then, as they had lost every attained memory, every attained feature, and were stripped down to their very essence, those stubborn enough refused to disintegrate and slowly drifted towards the Gates to pass into the Umbra. Those who were weak of mind completely dissolved into the storm, the candle of their existence blown out forever.
It was no wonder that with such forces at loose, the Old Order was torn apart like a thin sheet of paper in the wind. Guido was right about that. And not just in the metaphysical. Germany was torn apart by an unfair peace, that only served to whip up jingoism, revanchism, and disgust for diplomats and politics. And the Spartacists, those damned communists commanded by that bitch Luxemburg had nothing better to do than to engulf a burned-out country, their home, in flames again! Germany had to be strong, and united again, and smite those responsible!
But he did not agree with Guido on one subject: the Gods. Willigut had seen enough of what the gods were capable of to hate and resent them with every part of his being. Man could not have brought such folly as the War upon himself, even though he did agree with Guido that humanity was dumb and rotten to its core, but there had to be tricksters, bringers of mischief, and enjoyers of suffering behind this, not mere humans. Gods whispering into ears to end the War? Hah!
So the Gods turned away from us? Good! So new Gods, hungry Gods, gods made out of our own filth now seek us to worship them? Good! They shall be at our mercy, and we shall abuse the power they granted us to destroy them all. Humanity will suffer and many will die? Good! Let the weak, the meek, the unfit perish, let humanity be reborn in these fires of purification! Then, we will destroy our Gods, all of them, and shall be Gods ourselves!
Why would Guido argue against such a thing? Had old age and angst turned his spirit weak and humble? Perhaps. He will find out when the time is right.
He took another sip of wine, and opened the windows. The cool autumn air soothed the fires burning in his heart. Maybe he was a bit too quick to condemn his old friend to senility, maybe the new Gods are not to be trusted. But neither are men. He needed to search for allies, for a base of power, but where?
Thule and Vril were both still recovering from the shock of the War, and squabbling amongst each other like spoiled children, disorganized and very far from being powerful or influential.
And those nazis. Perhaps they had potential, but they were still weak. And that Himmler. He was looking more for a court jester than a true occultist. Bah!
Now, it was time to wait.
He closed the window, and went back to his chair. He closed his eyes, and let the memories loose again. He would need another bottle of wine.
Intended background music: Bohren & der Club of Gore: Midnight Black Earth 
