Baal

He stepped off a cargo ship with no port of registry, a golden crescent on his brow and not a single bag, and the oldest dockworkers found themselves bareheaded before they knew why. One of them swears he prayed to him once, a young deckhand, on a storm night when the ship should have gone down and didn’t; people tell him he drinks too much, and he answers that he was already drinking back then and it never made him pray to anyone else. When asked about his origins, he smiles the way you close a temple: politely, and from the inside.

Baal works where the night runs hottest: packed dance floors, basement clubs, the hours when people dance to forget there’s a tomorrow. Partygoers spot him from across the room — the gold-dusted mane, the belt of stars — and something ancient kicks in: they give everything, with the fervor of people saying thank you rather than paying a bill.

Each night graduates that way from party to congregation, and every congregation leaves behind a pilgrim’s take. From there he drifts through parties he never organized, slipping from one VIP booth to the next without an invitation, and walks away each time with a number, a first name, one more follower. Nobody infiltrates quite like a passing deity: no one dares ask who let him in.

He has the long memory of someone who once had temples, and the undimmed appetite of someone who wants them back. His ambition hides from no one: reclaim, city by city, everything the centuries owe him — or everything his legend claims they owe him, which amounts to the same thing on the balance sheet. In the dead hours, he climbs to the rooftops to watch the dawn like a cordial enemy, and jots down in a notebook the faces he crossed the night before: he spots talent the way sailors once spotted stars, to know which way to row.