Savage Divinity

Word Count Total: 27156 (Note to Bahen - Just got your review. Will try to remember to double space from now on. ^^\'\'))



Through this, over that, winding across time and space, making his way slowly – he needed to be slow so as not to lose the Angel-stock following him – back to the familiar territory of Sempra, that luscious green land that he knew and could recognize. He could navigate there. It was home.



But this place… He preferred not to think about it.



Steps and steps, repeating the same motion again and again, winding his way around the world that he barely recognized until no man\'s land faded away into a place he knew, until they were in Sempra and all things familiar were once again there.



"Stay by my side. We\'ll have to be quick," he instructed. The edge of the camp was guarded by sentries, and no matter how lax they were, they usually were around to greet anyone returning to camp from a raid. And since they had seen – or heard – Royal\'s party move out earlier, they were sure to be on the watch for returning Vilyte.

As if things couldn’t get harder. But he had a plan. A clever plan, that should work, assuming that he could get the rebellious Angel-stock to agree with him in what he wanted to have done. He stopped at the edge of the border and stopped the other as well. "This is what you need to do," he said quietly. "You will stay here. I will go in. If you make so much as a hair\'s breadth of movement from this spot, they will see you. Try to stop breaking, if you can. That\'s all I can do. A protection circle – one of the last ones, mind – and I shouldn\'t even be showing it to you. You\'re invisible to the world right now, but if you leave it\'s small bounds, they\'ll be able to see you again.



"How do I know you\'re not lying?" the sharp voiced Angel-stock asked. A good question.



"I am not lying," Reson said, enunciating each word carefully to make his point. "If you want to see your brother, you will stay here. Do not move. I will return." He hesitated. "You\'re just going to have to trust me. Can you do that?"



There was a sad glint in the Angel-stock\'s eyes. "Can I do any less?" It was a question Reson would ponder later on, but for now, he took it as mere acceptance and walked out of the circle of protection, slipping among the tents, going in the general direction of his own. He couldn\'t make it all the way there without being seen, and he knew that, so he concocted a story. Not a very good story, all things told, but a story nonetheless, that should make it seem a little more believable that he was returning without the rest of the party.



I will say that I was in a fight with Coris. Which is true. I will say I was jealous over a ballad of his. Again, true. I will say that in my temper, I abandoned my tent and decided to go out with the hotheaded rebels. Anyone and everyone knows Royal\'s group; it\'s believable enough that they\'re still out hunting for Angel-stock where I returned home, contrite.



Perhaps not contrite, but…something. Eager to make sure that things were all right. He made his way through the multitudes – not really multitudes, but enough to make the campground seem overcrowded, even now – and had to stop only a few times to play out his story. It felt like lies, memorized and recited, though the truth behind them was strong. Not apparent truth, if one considered them deeply enough, but truth in its most skewed form.

Finally he made it to the tent, and he slipped inside, closing the tent flap behind himself and looking about. Coris was noticeably absent. His eye went to the bed, traveling up from the foot of it, towards the head, taking in every inch of pale, rumpled coverlets. It too lay empty.



Frantic, Reson tore through the rest of his tent – not that it was quite big enough for such a venture, but he made the attempt all the same – before reaching the heart wrenching conclusion that the Angel-stock had well and truly disappeared. Coris, he thought. Coris should know where he is!



Furiously, he tore out of the tent, running the length of the campground to the other side where the Song Master\'s tent resided. Without bothering to indicate his presence in any way, Reson yanked the door flap open and poked his head in. Coris was there, playing his harp gently.



"Reson?" The Song Master seemed quite undisturbed by the interruption of his presumed quiet time. "Reson, is there something the matter?"



The redhead nodded, still catching his breath. "The Angel-stock," he managed to gasp out after a moment. "Where – where is he?"



"Isn\'t he back in your tent?" Coris seemed quite confused. "I left him there."

Reson shook his head. "No. No. Was just there. He isn\'t. Gone. Vanished." Still gasping, but less so now, his faculties slowly coming under control as dread began to build up within. If the Angel-stock had disappeared…if this Asher had disappeared… "Are you sure you don\'t know where he is?" he pressed, eyes skimming the length and breadth of the Song Master\'s tent, as if expecting the Angel-stock to simply appear from nowhere, smiling and crowned with jewels.



Coris stood swiftly, setting the harp down even as he did so. "Let\'s go," the Song Master intoned grimly.

The two of them made their way back across the campground, towards Reson\'s tent yet again. There was a conspicuous absence of people scattered across the grounds, as if everyone had chosen that moment to simply disappear. The peculiar quiet chilled Reson\'s blood, sending it running icy cold through his veins.



"Vilyte Reson! Vilyte Coris! Come quickly –they\'ve found a spy!" someone racing by stopped long enough to call at them.



Reson\'s heart stopped. He paled, looking to Coris. The Song Master\'s grim expression grew even darker. "Hurry," was all he said, all he needed to say. Reson nodded and the two of them took off yet again, this time following the errant messenger.



They crossed the grounds, sprinting at full pace to keep up with the Vilyte flying before them, heels barely contacting the ground long enough to leave any imprint. The sound of voices raised in jeering and screams of putrid delight grew stronger as they approached. Reson struggled to increase his speed. Beside him, Coris was running flat out, his strange old-young face contorted in an expression of mingled pain and fear, as if he were running for his own life, and not someone else\'s, and dared not stop.



The sprinting bodies continued forward. A huge bonfire had been erected. That was the first thing that Reson really noticed. He felt the heat pouring out from it, soaking skin and charring the air. The intense warmth was almost too much. He hardly wanted to get any closer. It was one of those things that was best to avoid, if at all possible, and his body was screaming at him as much as the rest of him was, to avoid that. But within the bounds of the bonfire, circled by its hugeness, he could see huddled figures. One, colored ashen, with grey hair.



"NO!" Reson screamed, the sound ripped from his throat before he was even aware he had spoken, echoing but dimly in the rest of the swiftly descending second night. The bonfire was actually a circle, set up in flames, wide enough for people to stand in the center, to stay alive until the intense heat burned all semblance of life from their bodies without ever contacting their flesh. The heat pouring out was unbearable from out here – what must it be like inside the inferno, mere feet away? He could hardly begin to imagine.



Reson flew down the hillside, racing towards the fire, shoving any other Vilyte who got in his way out of the way viciously. Their laughter echoed in his ears. It felt like they were laughing at him, as if they were calling his attempt futile. Trying to save them, are we? Trying to save the blood traitors? What is it to you, Vilyte? Why do you want them alive?



A thousand faces swam in his vision, all taunting. He could smell the fire, its smoky haze burning his eyes as he neared even as the heat pouring forth seared his skin. His face felt afire. Next to him, he could feel Coris, the old Vilyte on his heels, then beside him, facing the fire with the same idea that had stirred in his mind.



Get them out.



"Reson!" He hardly heard his name, barely registered the hand clapping him on the shoulder. It was dark hair that that hand belonged to, black hair, long and tied back for the first time, kept away from flames. Reson shook his head, still not quite sane. What he needed to do –



"Reson, how have you been?" That hand tried to guide him away from the flames. Coris was watching him, Reson saw. He could feel the old Vilyte\'s eyes staring hard at him, asking him, if this was what he wanted to do. He couldn\'t move. It hurt to think. And Nemsohiriel\'s hand was tugging on him still, trying to pull him away. To safety. To…away from what was right.



"Let go of me."



Nemsohiriel seemed not to hear. The hand did not loosen its grip; it may even have intensified.



"Let me go." More desperate now, louder, but not quite a fully fledged command. And yet the Vilyte General kept his hold. Furious, seeing the ashen hair bleeding into red and white leaping flames, Reson screamed his demand. "Let me go!"



Nemsohiriel didn\'t. Reson turned and hit him with all his strength before plunging forward, through the nested flames. They were hot. Liquid fire – flames that caught at skin and hair and stole the very air he was trying to breathe away from him. Gasping, he wound up inside the circle of flame, only slightly cooler than being within the inferno itself. He collapsed to his knees inside, his body coming to rest over the top of the one with ash colored hair. His eyes flickered up briefly enough to register that this was someone he knew. The Angel-stock he had meant to bring the ash haired one to – the one he had left in the circle of protection.



What are you doing here? he wanted to scream, but he couldn\'t, not when the other was barely breathing, and the three of them were more focused on withdrawing oxygen from the air than having any meaningful conversations. Breathe first, talk later – that was the important thing. Breathe. In, and out. In…and out. Breathe.



Reson looked up, and then wasn\'t looking up any more as the other Angel-stock came to his knees, the chestnut hair matching almost perfectly with the picture the flames made, dancing against the nighttime sky.



Is this how it ends, then? Reson asked himself. Is this what things are made of? Fire and life and death with a few oddments of friendship and lies and hatred, curled together in a pot and left to steep over decades; is that what this life has been? He was almost afraid to admit the truth of it to himself. I wonder if they will wonder of me. If they will ask themselves what I was thinking when I condemned myself along with the blood traitors. With another mouth, another set of lungs drawing on air, there was a growing lack of oxygen for use, and a pronounced increase in carbon dioxide. It was growing more difficult to breathe at all. Black spots faded in and out in Reson\'s vision.



I wonder if they shall sing of me, then. Or if Coris will add another verse to Uriel\'s ballad. The truth of things, maybe. And if others will ask themselves exactly what it means to enter death. I wonder…



"I\'m sorry."



xxx



Once I woke in mid-December, when the autumn I couldn\'t remember, when all the world was white with snow and the tree boughs set aglow. Once I woke in early June, to see the full and budding moon, when all the world was green with life and emptied so of futile strife. Once I woke in late end year when the season became so drear, to listen to the words of God when all the world will but nod.



xxx



Three hundred years past, three hundred years once, three thousand years hence – found and lost and found again. Life is hollow without the Word and the Word shall save you all.



xxx



Crickets chirping in the spring, crickets chirps bring everything. Beetles buzzing in the fall, beetles buzzing cheers us all. Poplars cracking in the snow, poplars cracking ever so. Life cheering summer sun, life cheering has begun.



xxx



When I think of death, I think of an ending. I think of something greater than I ever could be. It\'s final, but the mourning is not for those who leave us, but those who they leave behind. When I cry, I cry for those who can no longer. They are at peace; we still suffer here, in our own lives.

But what is life, then if these fanatics claim life is defined merely by death? If there is supposed to be a greater purpose in the life of every individual, then what is each individual purpose if we exist merely to die? Should it not be then, that our time in this world is a mere loan, to be treated as such? We are extensions of the one we choose to follow. God is too big for just one religion; he encompasses us all, takes us to heart and mind.



Talk with me, then. Speak to me. Pray with me.



Hail Holy Ghost enthroned above, hail Lord and Jesus.



Pray to Yaweh, worship above.



But most of all, please worship love.



xxx



Interlude

I don\'t know what dying is. None of us do. We\'ve never been alive, so we figured we could never die. Vilyte, or Angel-stock alike – none of us knew it was possible to truly die in Heaven. We are in Paradise! How could life come to an end? It seems impossible, but it isn\'t.



Hundreds have already died. Sword, and bow, and knife, and saber, and tooth, and claw have spelled the end of so many lives already. Blood, white and warm, has soaked the clouds.



You think clouds were always white. Oh no. Clouds were never white. They were pink once – beautiful peachy things, tinged with the rose hue of life. It\'s been our blood, emptying from dying veins that has rewritten the skies.



God left us behind. He left because He couldn\'t deal with us anymore. He said we were no longer His children. He wanted nothing to do with us anymore. We were not what he had created. He took the Four with him – Michael, Uriel, Rafael, Gabriel. He took them, and He might have gone on to another world to try to build his empire again.



The humans stopped worshiping Him the way they had in the days of yore. He lost Himself as we became our own beings. We are no longer His creatures, any more than humans are His any longer. We made our choice. They made theirs. He made His, and abandoned us.



But still, there are prayers that are raised to him – voices leak song outwards, crying out for mercy, for love, for peace. I wonder at them. The lyrics are familiar to me. I\'ve heard them in the story songs Coris used to use to teach me. I\'ve heard them all before. He used to make me memorize them along with him, you know… I wasn\'t very good at it, but I did what he asked me to. I tried. I memorized what I could.



I hated story songs, you know.



He never asked me if I wanted to learn them, but since he was always teaching me, I figured it was best to learn. Coris was an incredible Song Master – words came alive in his mouth. I could always learn from him, even if the learning was forced.



But maybe Coris was my own replacement of a god. I needed someone to look to, someone to trust. I needed someone I could count on, and someone who was touchable. God was no longer around. Not dead, but that\'s the closest description possible to offer. God is dead. He is gone away from us, having left us to our own devices.



\'Fend for yourselves!\' He might have commanded us. I wasn\'t around when He left. I don\'t remember, but Coris said he was, and that he remembers, and I trust him. More than I trust Him, at any rate.



Maybe that was why then.



In the middle of the fire, with two bodies around me, crowding close, pawing at my face, at my body, nails clawing through cloth and skin, and prayers erupting from lips, the one I called to wasn\'t a god of any religion. It wasn\'t a super human being with the power to make everything right once and for all. It wasn\'t even a person I thought could come help me. But the name was on my lips all the same. I called him, and he came for me, just as he has always done.



I called, and Coris came.



xxxx



His throat was raw from screaming. Through the flames, even as his vision was dimming, he could see the figure of red and white, a Vilyte more accustomed to holding a harp than racing through blazing fires to rescue. He looked to Coris\' face and smiled, but that was all he could manage before the overload of smoke and lack of oxygen and too many other conditions to consider, took him over.



xxxx



I thought we were going to die. I thought he had lied when he\'d said he\'d get Asher for me. He left…and I left. I wasn\'t going to wait for him to bring the entire Sempran army down on me, after all. I\'m not that stupid, though I do go haring off on stupid quests like this one. Stupid important quests.



Asher hadn\'t been too difficult to find. He\'d been in a tent, just like Reson had said he would be. It wasn\'t more than seconds of appearing and words to make him come with me. He\'s not a trusting individual, but when he gives his heart to a thing, he doesn\'t do it halfway. I think he had his heart set on escaping for a long time. Either that or his devotion to the army of Ten is about a thousand times greater than any other Commander I\'ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.



It was odd to see him, though. It felt like something was missing. The tent was…open, spacious. I\'m used to cramped quarters, myself, and I know that even Tenascus has only minimal space in his own tent. To see something like this belonging to an ordinary soldier was quite a shock to the senses. I didn\'t like it.



It seemed that Asher didn\'t much either. He came with me. I had no idea where to go, why we were going there. All that mattered to either of us was getting out of that hell hole. It was enemy territory and not the best time to be playing catch up. That was my first mistake, I think – trying to get more out of Asher than he was prepared to give all at once.



Raised voices always draw crowds. I don\'t know what it is about them – you\'d think that people would want to stay away, lest they too become the target of the voice raiser\'s abuse. But of course, people are strange; they congregated, and by the time I\'d realized my mistake, it was too late to do much more than smile and pretend at innocence. Pretend, because there was no way I could pull off the perfect innocent mask. I\'m not made for it.



Neither is Asher, if it comes down to it.



Both of us are devious, clever, intelligent – not innocent by any stretch of the imagination. We are simply ourselves, and damn us for being ourselves in such an instance. Asher tried to plead with them, once it became clear there was no such thing as mercy existing among the Vilyte of Sempra. Not that I needed to be told. Asher, it seemed, was the only one who needed the reminder.



There were jeers and cat calls and laughter and hateful screaming. \'For Royal!\' they screamed at us. As if we knew who and what Royal was. A Vilyte, I suppose, one of the bloodthirsty ones, intent on destroying our race because of what we are. A mix of human and angel – or if one wishes to be brutal, a mix of the neodemons and the original Four.



Descended from the Four –what a wonderful distinction; too bad it can\'t be something of more value to us. It won\'t save our lives, won\'t keep them from attempting to annihilate us in the long run. They call themselves the truer ones, the full bloods, bred directly from the Four. Unless they are suggesting sodomy, I don\'t see how such a thing is even remotely possible.



Nevertheless, that is what they claim, and what we cannot refute. Who are we to say they are not the pure offspring of an unholy joining, when we ourselves are the product of blasphemy? There is no right or wrong, no victor in the situation.



So they accused us of being half bloods – which we are – and of being traitors to God – which we are not – and condemned us by their own hands to die in the fire the same way God had spoken His commandments to Moses atop Sinai.



Condemned to burn – symbolic, to be sure. The fires of Hell, cleansing for our immortal souls, of which they claim we have none, akin to the kin we have on Earth. No souls, they claim, and so they are justified in purifying our bodies, in undoing the taint that they claim has been spread. Once the half bloods are eradicated for good, then God will return in His glory!



If such a solution were the only answer, I would gladly throw myself in the flames, as would many of my kin. They would do whatever necessary to recall God to His posting in Heaven, but it is not so simple. There is no right. There is no victor. There can be no victory.



When they came to us and condemned us, we went with them, for there was no way of escape, but we kept our eyes on one another. Asher was frightened. His eyes were large, like a young rabbit who has been sighted by a hawk for the first time. He was shaking, his body nearly rattling itself out of his handler\'s grip. For myself, I had three to an arm, pinning me to a slab of stone.



As a cruel joke, they asked us to recite our prayers. Cultural differences – we pray \'Lord, hear us.\' They call less directly, it seems, and for each mistake in words we suffered injury. Asher – God strike them for daring! – they abused more than I. He barely looked himself when they were through. Not bleeding – they dared not cause us to bleed. I heard one whisper our blood was tainted with witch\'s magic. They thought we could call to one another through spilled blood.



If only so much was true, I would have slit my own arm to call an army forth to save us. To save Asher. Not a soul so young deserves such punishment. I was more than mildly surprised he still drew breath when they were through with him.



Others had been working on something while these tossed us among themselves for amusement, faces pulled back into expressions of wild enjoyment. Anger boiled within. How could these creatures possibly expect to reclaim God with such displays of brutality? They were animals, beasts, barely tamed to harness. God had left because of these Vilyte, I decided. They had driven him out.



When them came after Asher one last time, I fought back. They broke my arms. I can still remember the sound as the bones snapped – the sharp sounds, echoing like gunshots. There is no fog in Sempra – there was nothing to temper the sound. It echoed and echoed and echoed, reverberating across time and space. I can still hear it. I will still hear it as long as I live.



There is little worse than being rendered helpless. They made me helpless. They made Asher their victim as I watched.









((Little note: I was raised with a Catholic background...so if it seems that there\'s ONLY Christian symbolism here...that\'s probably why. I\'m trying, but there\'s only so much time I can spend searching for stuff before I get sidetracked and off topic and...yeah. ^^\'\'))