Oin serf background

It was hard to describe what happened when I unleashed Ohr Ein Sof, because it wasn’t just a gathering of power or a tremendous attack, though it was also those things. It was the Light, given shape in the world in a more…honest? Real? In a truer sense then what was created by Lux Aeterna. The thing is, I didn’t know what the Light really was or where it came from or how it worked. There wasn’t much I could really say about it, because the Light was above even Keter, which in and of itself lay above the mind’s ability to comprehend; it was quite possible that any attempts to truly describe or understand it were doomed from the start.

Nonetheless, I gave it my best effort.

This world and everything in it was the ‘Kingdom.’ It was the Light given form, thought applied to action, the culmination of a process—the result of the Tree of Life. The Sephirot, in a sense and among many other things, represented the flow between two ends of a spectrum, the process in which one became the other. On the one hand, there was the Light, something even I didn’t understand except in a vague sense; it was the true form of this world, the underlying principle behind everything, the source and the end point. Everything in this world was part of the Light, in a way similar to how matter and energy were interchangeable; different states of the same thing. Was there more to it than that? Almost certainly. But that was the general idea.

But the Tree of Life went both ways. Things flowed down it to take shape in the world in ways both literal and metaphorical, and they flowed back up to…do something, I guess. There was no way of knowing what was up there and despite dying, I had no memory of it, or at least nothing my mind could make sense of. Whatever came after death and before rebirth was presumably up there somewhere, which was something I found both fascinating and terrifying. To me, it was like a box holding the answer to something people had wondered about since…probably as long as Mankind has existed, but there was only one way to open it. That seemed fitting in a way; the saying went that if you stopped learning, you started dying—which was applicable to me in a saddening number of ways, really—but in light of the existence of souls and reincarnation, I suppose that death itself was a lesson of sorts. I hoped it was one I’d learned from the first time around, if so.

Ohr Ein Sof, however, was something special—the Light Without End, flowing both up and down the Tree of Life. The materialization, or reduction, or creation of the Light that should exist only above Keter within the world of Malkuth.

My Light, specifically.

The moment I initialized the skill, my power turn in upon itself. My Aura seemed to shrink back into my skin, along with the light around me, energy spiraling down into the center of my being and then up, up, up, through the gateway of Sahasrara and then far beyond it. For a moment, I felt like I’d vanished, as if I’d been consumed by it and sucked down some kind of cosmic black hole, pulling in everything around me in the process. I felt it when I stopped being ‘me,’ as I was reduced to pieces that were hard to label. A will, perhaps, a thought, an awareness—and then nothing so easily defined. In the end, I was nothing but ‘something that exists’ and ‘something aware of its existence.’ I wasn’t reduced to nothing, per se, but to a state of ‘something’ that was both infinitely distant and unspeakably close to nothing.

And at the same time, I became something else. As I was boiled down to nothing but ‘Me,’ everything I was became a part of ‘Me.’ My memories, my beliefs, my power, my will, my actions and intentions, my hopes and dreams, my body, my voice, my skills—everything ‘I’ was revealed itself as nothing but a part of ‘Myself’, luminous and unending and without anything to distinguish it from the rest. If you boiled everything away and reduced me down to the most basic level, beyond physicality, action, mind, or will, this was what remained.

‘Me.’ Not even Jaune Arc or Jian Bing or Keter or anything else created by the labels of the world, but simply ‘Me.’ Or, perhaps, ‘Metatron,’ for whatever difference it made. And for a period of time I couldn’t recognize, much less understand, that was all I was.

And then the process reversed, and everything that had been subsumed rose back to the surface. I existed, thought, remembered, understood, and was, in that moment. I was here, alive, human, and real again, in a way I could understand.

But all that I was or had been? I brought it along for the ride.