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Darkside of Zion
Prologue: Screams of Martyred Saints

Prologue: Screams of Martyred Saints

The Afterlife is a place of bleakness. Where all acts of violence that end in death, anguished screams and crimes against humanity resonate in cycles for all eternity. Every act of cruelty and slaughter continues side by side with its victims spirit. Watching their death again and again in an endless violation of torment. Spectral fire lights a world of spiritual paralysis and strange vistas. Despite dark clouds and constant drizzle that burns the eyes with ash, it is an arid land of parasitic insects and bloated corpses. The Gnosis of cut feet and whipped faces sing praises to the madmen who peel the joy of life away with drudgery while fascist insects feed on the life of the people.

A land of howling ghosts and mournful poets. Incantations lost to vile Tophets. Bogamils flayed bodies flap in the firmament, eaten by solar snails and squids from beyond our atmosphere. Satan creator of the universe has misled the mundane minds of the materialists, hiding in the guise of a radiant soul. Actually a parasite of untold hunger like billions of societal tape worms withering in the unknowable nature of Tetragrammaton. A blind maniac who was betrayed by his own zealot scribes among the temple assassins. His wisdom of the East lost to censors and sodomites. Forgetting the “Mother of Time” and the mysteries of their evil God’s crimes.

Biting wind whips through splintered trees that house vultures, rain turns deserts into sickly swamps full of jackals and crocodiles. Water here is stagnant, plant life dead. The hills are littered with crosses holding the long desecrated corpses of whole villages. Hermits and holy-women chant from funeral cairns and mountain tops, untold wisdom falls to the deaf and unwritten songs. 

Every spirit that has ever lived and gazed at the stars in wonder lives in this place. Be it lizard or some future herald of this planet way off in times yet unconceived by our mortal minds. Mystic gnosis of the Albigensian crusade violated, just as the Midianites were vandalized by the homeless hordes of blood letters under the madman Moses who came down from the mountain with a lust for genocide. Cruelty and destruction have been the only doctrine since the bronze age collapse.

Intelligences never named or peaked beyond the black cosmic ancient seas laugh at the folly of our dogmatic violence and foolish repression. Many versions of this world and others share an afterlife that is not all suffering but humans bring what they understand, to be mocked by creatures far beyond our knowledge and small primate wisdom. Cackling crimson alchemy performed on infants who don’t grasp the significance of the surgical initiation to the vampire god’s lust for children.

There is a strange paradox of stories going back to epochs so distant they defy our ideas of time its self. Neolithic tribes farthest conscious thought are but a blink in the eye of the deep time represented here. Beings so ancient that lived in societies far more advanced than ours. Still mournfully ended up below the sediment. Experience and lore lost to cataclysms unremembered. 

Past cosmic events pale in comparison to the rise and fall of far out vistas when our solar system goes supernova and fades into a final darkness of space dust. Wizards and Sorceresses shades remember lost canticles. Singing the names of the creator dragon and etherial spirits in songs remembered only by the centipedes, jumping spiders and flying lizards. Wisemen dug up from ancient graves are scourged by pseudo spiritual profiteers, who speak long winded lies about their ownership of others homes and teachings. 

Bellow a blood red sky, in a landscape devoid of color, live souls lost in their own dreams. Suffering endlessly in their final moments of existence played over and over again in a cosmic echo. Like a mean spirited joke only a madman can grasp. Echoes of eternity clash with the charnel reality few can fathom, and all would lament their transgressions to escape limbo in this pit of despair. Crazed lunatics laugh at the insanity of it.

Ghosts have no rest here. Wars and plagues of the past rage on. A regiment’s final charge during the last gasp of Napoleon, play out beside the defeats of the Punic wars. Protestant and Catholic purges play out beside ancient ethnic cleansing of the children of Canaan. A strange folly of so many more advanced cultures that once shared our planet. Cradles of multiple societies obliterated by fools and geologic processes while the universe was still young. 

The Spanish Inquisition thrive here. Papist crusaders seeking gold and political advantage. Genocidal henchmen with mummified corpse decay urge on settlers circling children with accelerants. They laugh at each others shared goals of silencing voices under guise of security and disappearing families they could not control. 

Oil Wars make homes into birth defect ravaged orphanages with depleted uranium. Marauding conquests have fields of burning bodies in endless roads of death and dismemberment. How many times have Toulouse burned or the name of Merovingian blotted from history? Celtic burial mounds glow from miles of stolen lives beside the sinking sinking battlefields of futuristic trepidation, leaving scapegrace art projects for rapscallions and scallywags whose only joy is butchery and picking their spiritual cavities with cleaved animals spines, drunk from the hostility of rotten minds. 

Cavemen with their lost visions and ancient philosophers far out transgressions scrawl litanies for  translucent ghosts passing side by side in the spectral procession of the vibrant night sky. Healers do what they can to fix the horrors of fools and Pharisees. Vulgar remembrances to the creeping forgetfulness of deep time, a scale so vast it confuses even the brightest minds.

Ancient Sanhedrin pogroms in the Book of Joshua. Early gnostics and fugitive Saints are witnessed by crying gods from time immemorial. War profiteers crimes in Vietnam and Gaza howl forever. Long memories of crimes along the silk road, invasions of Afghanistan and Yemen. The dirty wars and US slave trade executions echo here among drowning bodies of Witch Hunts and torture of the Mexica. Songs lost in the night tide.

The Roman siege of Masada and mass suicide happens side by side with WW1 Ottoman purges of Armenian Christians. All acts of genocide are remembered here. Intentional mass starvation of India and Ireland make generations wail lamentations. As if the atrocities of colonized native peoples never ended while ghastly voices howl for salvation. Infants held by mothers frozen in pits are trampled by cavalry in snowfields covering mass graves.

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In a valley of dry bones, deposed Prophets shamble down rows of crucified Saints. Beside dying martyrs with broken legs nailed to trees, schizophrenic faith healers and psychic mediums from the Leaper colonies do their best to ease the pain of these political criminals. Last rites here are accusations, hurried assaults in an endless graveyard. This is the afterlife, the night lands, the netherworld of twilight.

There exist several armed camps specific to this place. The radical followers of King Sorsos the sorcerer once named Solomon the Wise, his zealot Sanhedrin. His wicked followers bring fire and desolation to their neighbors. Untold wisdom was wiped out by the Abrahamic death cults. How the earlier sages must laugh at the most ghoulish of mistranslated and perverse faiths.

Guided by fabricated documents and an invented history. Cruelest are the fallen angels devoted to corruption, study of magic and financial crimes described in the Talmud. Where humanity has no protection from the Blood Letters. Sicari executioners have mass murdered children of the Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Amalekites, the Girgashites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Samaritans and the Perizzites. 

Sages and mystics hunted by menacing hounds, while assassins stalk homes of farmers for any man of military age with out cause or evidence. Hidden among caves and eagle nests in the hills are the cult of the Cathars. The persecuted Gnostics and Essenes who remember the ancient ways of the Goddess cult. Suffering in a civil war and purges endless centuries before time as we know it. 

Souls seeking some kind of solace and meaning to existence flutter in the wind, finding only obscure Gods without benefit of knowledge or wisdom. The torment of existence leaches any good intentions from even the heavenly chorus or wise hermits living among the ruins of lost ages. 

Few remember the days of ecstasy and merriment. Where nymphs and satyrs frolicked in pastoral meadows of plenty. Where song and wine was the promise of eternity after a life toiling bitter cold to tend to sick crops. 

The doom came with The Fisher King, an entity of no ill will or spite. Just an absentminded God who prefers impersonating the dead to avoid contact with the seekers. Long ago in earlier Epochs there was some method to the madness, for too long the inmates have been running the asylum. Wicked whispers and forgotten moments of lust are remembered here, vipers who braid whips with the leather skin of the dead call forth names from the Book of Life and the Book of the Dead.

The massacres of Monotheism turned a vibrant paradise into an arid wasteland where staving children rob tombs and sell relics of the past to have stale bread and water to satiate their starving bellies and malnourished bones. The militarism of the radicals knows no end, wealth of generations was squandered into endless wars against invented enemies. Hounds yelp in anticipation of chasing the naked condemned through brambles and thorns, tearing bones loose from cringing phantoms called from ever-sleep to face trial by maniacs.

To cleanse a land of multiple Gods you must burn their sacred groves. Lynch the wise hermits and loving village mothers. Nail the elder healer to a post by a broken jaw in the village square. You must dash infant Amalekite’s brains in with heavy bricks. Make horrific examples of the local temple priestesses and fearsome heroes of renowned. Whose bodies are broken, spiritually desecrated, whipped and slandered by intolerant Zionists and sufferers of the plague. 

Fugitive Saints and holy Martyrs are stoned to death, crucified upside down, flayed alive for entertainment of the Scribes and Pharisees. The ancient standing stones must be toppled, those who escape with secret knowledge must be hunted. Then comes the community leaders, the teachers, the elders whose wisdom of ages is a threat. A familiar story with any sect of ambitious Zealots who profit from the losses of the powerless.

Once the first purge is done, there must be new and more radical interpretations. Peoples farther afield must be cleared, their wealth taken, their children enslaved. War makes many rich men, but that wealth is dependent on more battles and weapons to be forged. Armies to be clothed and riches to be looted. Gold and jeweled skulls are dashed off cliffs by grubby hands of the Sicari, Assassins and Sanhedrin. Self styled Saints, no better than Lynch Mobs and Looters, carving a new reality from the broken bodies of the ancients.

Any time of instability is answered with in-fighting stoked by Lords and Bankers tied to the Holy-men who shiver like rabid dogs at the thought of torture and tormenting their targeted groups. Gleefully terrorizing vulnerable ethnic groups and wiping out populations of Native school age families who could be deemed threatening if allowed to come to maturity. Whose property has no protections they must obey. Tribes who never had contact are set against each other to burn the world again and again. There is no need for a winner, the weakening and destabilization of the region is the ultimate goal. Many must starve for few to live fat in hidden sanctums and unreachable fortresses.

Withering winds and desolate cliff side habitations await the spiritual seekers. Strayed from the path of worldly passion, married to solitude in a unfeeling society that preys on ignorance. The last Prophet walks a road strewn with eviserated bodies from the most recent massacre. Piles of arms and legs litter as far as the eye can see. Lidless eyes of severed heads stare into oblivion from some place of last anguish and terror. Above in the sky great rings of spirits in endless procession wail lamentations from high in the atmosphere.

The last Prophet is seized by the Hooded Figure of the head Sicari Executioner. The former psychopomp of wayfaring souls is now a vicious hunter of followers of the old ways. The Prophet is dragged behind a horse over a rocky hill. Skulls and bones litter the ground. The Prophet is kicked between Angry Soldiers of the Sanhedrin with vicious dogs who tear into his flesh and cloak. Beside a great pit, dozens of Mothers wail, nailed to inverted crosses at the lip. 

Sanhedrin whip and spear several juvenile Lions into the pit as well. Great pots of boiling oil hold still more of the persecuted artists, poets and unwise speakers of truths unacceptable by the censors of Zion. Hands and feet of the child Martyrs dangle around the neck of the dying. Tied to fluted Corinthian columns from a fallen fortress on this site, women wailing are branded and scourged. 

Strangled pleas for mercy come from the Phoenician heroes, Gnostic scholars, hermits and Goddess tribe as their holdouts are finally wiped out for all time.

Beside a great fallen Watchtower, The Prophet’s hands and feet cut off and thrown into a pit with a dozen crying families pleading and praying for mercy, while crazed Lions savage others. The hooded figure wearing bloody rags of self flagellation reads the Death Sentence. 

Snarling faces raise large jagged rocks to smash the lucky victims to death. The glee of brutality and execution brings out the deranged. Thieves and bandits under the guise of Law scramble after spilled coins like corrupt police eager to divide up unreported findings. The ghouls flip through rare books for hidden notes before the Fires of Zion engulf history of the earlier Pagan traditions.

At the lip of space, the God Mercury floating, looks down on this death strewn world. It was not always like this. Cataclysms of plague after plague befell this world that was once a sort of limbo for souls in transit, now it is a maelstrom of fear and torment that few ever exit. Mercury falling like a star from the heavens, crashes in an oily black sea, sparking the world on fire.

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