There was once a pastor in a small town, a town which housed some of the most steadfast and devoted people, this included the pastor who cast off his worldly titles and names as proof of his devotion, and that town excelled in every aspect. They all worked for the betterment of their community and themselves. They would try their best to help those in need; bringing them into their church to feed them, house them, and show them love they haven’t seen or felt in years. With each addition to their church, their town flourished. Love was in abundance in Paradise and it was in everything. Such a town could only expand and spread its influence outwards, and so it did. Towns around it slowly fell to its influence, adopting the norms of Paradise and then eventually handing over administrative tasks to the people of Paradise. Then those towns would truly become a part of Paradise, children taught a history that was younger than them, younger than even some newborns. Dissenters were removed from the picture. The Pastor would turn what to his flock was heresy and turn it into miracles, into the lifeblood of Paradise.
Growth.
Among the Pastor, today, were dissenters and residents of Paradise. All bound, all in various forms of terror inside Paradise’s newest church. This church’s artwork seemed to stretch out Christian canon with new content. Many of the crosses in the churches of Paradise were bound in barbed wire painted a brown color, if seen from close you could see specks of blood on the “thorns”. Stained glass depictions of a crucified Christ looming over the Roman Empire that was now devoured up by rose bushes, with vaguely human shapes wrapped in those roses. Heaven in portraits is shown as a city reminiscent of the rose-covered Rome but in the skies with humanoid angels with flowers for heads looming in the backdrop, no real humans in sight, just thorny flower bushes.
The right-hands of the Pastor walked in, flowers were growing on their faces. The dissenters looked at this in disgust, in horror and some with a strange calm that’d only get stranger.
The Pastor himself looked quite normal, young for a pastor but nothing out of the norm if one ignored the context.
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“Some of you still feel the grace of Our Father in you, all of you have taken the Sacrament however. Even though I am a man of Faith, I understand your fears. To see so many blessings and miracles manifest in your life after a divine draught-”, he paused and all but the dissenters chuckled at his joke, “-and I might have been fine with you lot being outside of grace…until you threatened my flock. Until you schemed and connived against your fellow man.”
A woman tried standing up but was knocked to the ground by one of the right-hands. She tried again, and was knocked down again. Over and over again she tried, the room’s attention shifted to her.
The Pastor finally said “Let her stand, Lucas. But help her up”. Luca complied however he kept a firm grip on her.
She cleared her throat, the mote of spotlight the Pastor regained was lost. She looked straight at him and he did the same to her.
“Pastor, I know you’ll have all your ways of explaining this and so I won’t try and argue. Just let us die as people and not as…things.”
Luca’s grip grew tighter, the flowers on his face shifted and fluttered ever so slightly. The Pastor clenched his teeth and his fist tightened.
“I am a man who can listen to reason and the fact that you didn’t even want to try that says alot about your cause.”
The other dissenters looked in terror at the Pastor, some the second he stopped speaking looked down as if the pressure was pushing on their head.
“I give up. Break me first, spare me and spare them that at least.”
The Pastor was foaming from the mouth, his teeth covered in blood. The woman looked at him with a resigned tired look that just seemed to enrage him further.
“Have it your way.”
“Lucas.”
And without another word, the flowers in Lucas’ face grew. They enveloped both him and the woman, the same happened to the others. The Pastor’s face twitched inhumanly from absolute rage to joy, he massaged his face yet it would revert back to rage without fail.
He was the only one left in the room, at least person-wise. The other living thing in the room were flower bushes. And once he had gotten control of his emotions, they were the only thing that remained.