This is the proclamation of the Lord Ah-Ren: “The greatest virtue is hate, for it is the pinnacle of truth, purity, and reason. It is good and right to hate your fellow man for the evils he wreaks upon the earth. It is good and right to hate thine own self for the failures of your flesh. It is good and right that I should hate every one of you forever and ever until the Time After Time. It is good and right that I have always hated you since the moment you disgraced Me with your presence. I hate you still. I hate everything that makes you who you are. I hate your aspirations, your cherished memories, and even the illusion of your decency, for it is a lie meant to conceal your true nature. Therefore let hatred never be extinguished until the source of it is destroyed, just as My hatred will endure until your survival is corrected. I hate you. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE”
-Gospel of Lucence, Tract 45, Lines 66-End
Claeloch Territory, Grackenwell
“This is the proclamation of the Lord Ah-Ren,” said Beam. “‘The greatest virtue is faith, for it prevails where purity, reason, and even truth may falter. It is good and right to believe in Me for the miracles I work upon the earth. It is good and right to forsake thine own self in favor of My commands. It is good and right that I should love each and every of My disciples forever and ever until the Time After Time. It is good and right that I have loved My devout since the moment I conceived of your existence, long before you walked the earth. For the Lord Ah-Ren treasures all that belongs to Him, and the earth and all souls that walk it are His alone. Therefore let your faith never be extinguished until the Time After Time is upon you, just as the Lord Ah-Ren’s truth will abide until that blessed day comes. Go in faith always and you shall surely be given your just reward. So be it.’”
Beam closed the Gospel of Lucence in her lap. Her breath made fog in the cold air, falling snowflakes clinging to her eyelashes where she blinked them away. She looked up from her reading. Luster sat there on the stump across from her, the one left over from the tree he’d felled for them earlier. Now it burned in the fire between them, keeping them warm, and he listened to her teachings with great reverence.
“Is that the end of the Gospel?” Luster asked expectantly.
“Indeed. All forty-five chapters of it.” Beam smiled, chuckling. Her chapped lips stung in the cold. “Did you expect something more?”
He shook his head fervently. “No, not at all, Miss—Lady Beam! I only—”
“It’s all right, Luster. What’s the matter? You seem afraid.”
Luster swallowed, peeling off his wool hat to smooth out the hair underneath. He pulled it back on tightly like he was trying to hide inside it. “In truth, yes, Lady Beam. The Lord Ah-Ren has great and terrible power. Why, He raised me from the dead, healed me good as new... That sort of power demands worship!”
“And you fear you’re worshiping improperly?” She nodded knowingly.
“...Yes.”
Beam returned the Gospel to her bag, securing its flap with the leather string. That way it was safe from the moisture of the late-winter flurry. “You have nothing to fear, Luster. The Lord Ah-Ren doesn’t ask perfection of us. He asks only faith. If He had expected perfection, why would He have rescued us when we were at our lowest?”
Luster nodded. He let out the breath he’d been holding. “I see. You’re right.” Seemingly satisfied, he set about preparing their midday meal, boiling a potato and beans with a handful of salt and other spices. He poked at his concoction with a broken twig and returned the lid to the iron pot. “You never told me your story. How He saved you.” Just then, Luster seemed to remember himself, looking up with an onset of contrition. “Forgive me—”
“It’s all right,” Beam chuckled again. “It’s all right.” And it was. She’d seen enough men who were foolhardy, remorseless brutes, crude lechers who spat out every thought they had and never had a second one. Luster was different; the way he tiptoed and stumbled with his words was charming, if only for its novelty. “I’ll be honest with you. When the Lord Ah-Ren found me, I was working in a brothel.” He listened with attentive eyes, but there was no judgment in them—only a yearning to hear the rest of what she had to say. “I didn’t come to be there by choice... Well, not really. Slavers burned my whole village to the ground. My parents were both killed in the raid.
“At the age of eighteen, I was a grown woman, but I had no experience caring for myself. I only knew my home. I only functioned as part of a household. No one was willing to hire me to do any honest work... One day, a man approached me when I was begging on the street. He said he had work for me—steady work that paid steady coins. Before I knew it, years had gone by, and I was trapped.” Her eyes misted over, the layer of tears stinging in the cold air. “But the Lord Ah-Ren saved me. Even after the life I led, He thought I was worthy of salvation. That has to mean something.” She met his gaze as if seeking his confirmation. “My story isn’t nearly as thrilling as yours was, I’m afraid. And I’m sure you must think differently of me now.”
Luster just shook his head. “No. I’m grateful to know more, but I think no less of you. Why would I?”
She furrowed her brow skeptically. She’d never met a man who didn’t look down on a profession like hers, even after she’d left it behind her. “You don’t think less of me? You don’t think what I did was disgraceful—dishonorable?”
“How could I think less of you? Lady Beam, you survived.” He stood from his stump, crouching down in the snow next to hers. Her heart raced on his approach. “May I be so bold as to ask for your hand? Just for a moment.” Reluctantly, she held out her gloved hand, and he took it between both of his. “I promise you, Lady Beam, from what I know of you, there is nothing you could do that would make me think less of you.”
She closed her eyes then, basking in the warmth of the fire and her change of circumstance. Luster was still a stranger to her, but she had a good feeling about their future together. “Praise be to the Lord Ah-Ren,” she sighed, “for leading me to you.”
Luster raised the lid of the pot toward the sky, grinning contentedly. “Hear, hear! Praise be to the Lord Ah-Ren. He led you to me, He keeps our bellies full, and He keeps us warm in the dead of Claelish winter. He raises the dead to life! Why, there’s nothing He can’t do. I can sleep soundly, knowing that no creatures of the deep wood, not even the Knights of Old could harm a hair on our heads—not with Ah-Ren watching over us!” Luster ladled some of his soup into a wooden bowl and handed it to Beam. “If I may be so bold, Lady Beam, I think this journey is the beginning of something truly beautiful.”
***
The Everswamp
“You made it farther than most,” said Hjarsant’s corpse. The gray, bloated, black-eyed body grinned at Beam like a man who’d played a harmless prank. “Often, a day or two is all your kind can stomach of My home.”
Beam stood on the small island in the darkest corner of the Everswamp. Her former disciples huddled in a group apart from her. Luster—no, he was Peadhar now—had his dagger drawn, putting himself between the others and the revenant of their former friend. The quiet was deafening.
“I rebuke you,” Ray said finally, taking a weak step forward from the group. “Dark bog spirit! I rebuke you in the holy name of the Lord Ah-Ren—” Suddenly, her eyes bulged, the words catching in her throat. She grasped at her neck and choked.
“You pray to Me as if you do not already stand in My presence,” said Ah-Ren, speaking through the unholy vessel dredged up from the depths of the bog. “I heard your prayers, Ray, as you were renamed. I heard all of your prayers. You offered prayers of remorse for your infidelity to your husband. Do you want to know his final thought of you before he died?” The corpse turned to face Shine. “This one committed a great many sins. It started with thievery and culminated when she let an innocent man lose his life rather than tell the truth.”
“No,” said Shine, grimacing, shaking her head. “No! You don’t understand!”
“I understand all. You let the innocent suffer for the crimes of the guilty.”
“No!” Shine shook her head even harder as if to shake off the accusation. “No, I swear it! I swear, I didn’t know that they would—” Shine started to choke as well. Ray was already on her old, weak knees, struggling to suck in a breath that stubbornly eluded her. Shine made sickening gagging sounds as her own windpipe closed.
“I cannot abide falsehood in My presence,” said Ah-Ren. “I am truth. Too often, you vermin like to twist the narratives of your lives to justify your evils. All of you have sinned greatly, as is your nature.”
“Our evils?” Peadhar whispered incredulously. He took a defiant step forward. “You’ve been behind this all, every horror that’s been visited upon us... after we prayed to you for salvation for many moons... and you have the gall to call us evil?”
“Peadhar, don’t,” said one of the others, but he ignored them.
“You may have healed me, but I want nothing to do with you anymore. Healer or not, I see you for what you really are—you don’t deserve anything from us. Let alone our devotion!”
The voice of Ah-Ren gave a low, throaty chuckle. “Healer or not, you say? Very well.”
Peadhar gagged violently, retching on the damp soil at his feet. Blood spilled from his lips, bloomed from beneath his tunic, and he collapsed. The others who were still standing jumped back from him as if afraid of catching what he had.
All this time, Beam was in a daze. She couldn’t summon the will to speak—too afraid of what might happen, and too stunned, in such disbelief, that she didn’t see the point of it. Not at first. Now she cried out when she saw Peadhar hit the ground. “No! Please, I beg you—please don’t hurt him!”
“I did nothing to him,” Ah-Ren answered with an audible smile. “I simply took back the gift he no longer wanted. It was your kind who did this to him. Or have you forgotten already?”
“Please.” Beam took a shuddering breath to try to calm her nerves—it didn’t work. “Please, let them go. Let him and the others go.” Silence was her only answer. “Let them go!” Someone in her flock was weeping, but she couldn’t tell whose voice it was. “Why? Why are you doing this?”
Beam’s eyes were drawn to Peadhar’s suffering, the way he clutched at his belly trying to hold in his own blood. Healing him at the waterfall had been so effortless. She should have known it was an unnatural thing she’d done. She should have known that nature tended toward suffering and death, and that to be without either was only to delay the inevitable.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Still, she had to try.
She turned her defiant gaze to look the undead body of Hjarsant in its black eyes. “Why would you want to do this to us?” she asked. “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”
“I know exactly what I do.” The corpse cocked its head with the agility of a bird, sickeningly uncanny, and the bones in its neck cracked with its instant movement. “Your bodily form is... repulsive... but your agony still fascinates me even after all this time. Have you ever pulled the legs off a spider one by one and then watched it try to live?”
Beam wanted to vomit, but her stomach had nothing to give. Even after everything she’d seen—even after what she herself had done—the horror now unspooling itself drove her to new depths. “No... Why? Why are you torturing us this way?”
Hjarsant’s dead mouth let out a wet, hissing laugh. “Why is blue the color blue? If you can tell me the answer before I count to thirteen, I will not break every rib you have. I will let you and Peadhar each retain a shred of your living selves. I may even spare the lives of your comrades... if you answer soon enough.”
“We’ll do anything. I swear it! Please, just spare us!”
“One...” Suddenly, Ray’s neck snapped. The old woman’s body slumped against the mud and stopped moving. The flock of disciples—those still on their feet, still able to breathe—scattered. Some retreated to the farthest shores of the tiny island, still well within earshot and with a clear view of the others, while at least two of them dove into the murky water for safety.
Beam turned back to glare at Ah-Ren’s vessel, but the words that came out of her mouth were obsequious. “Please, stop! Please, I beg you, Lord Above Lords! I beseech you!”
“I told you what you had to do. Do you still trust Me? Your faith in Me is never misplaced, Beam. Two...” Now it was Shine who fell. She landed face-first in the soil, hands still at her throat; her arms flopped lifelessly to either side of her.
“I tried so hard not to break the faith—I swear I did! You know I did! How could we have prayed better? Would you like me to bow down and worship now?”
“Listen and think, stupid animal. Two things you can never seem to do when it matters most. I will not repeat Myself. Three...” Snap went a third spine in the flock. Its sound echoed through the drooping willows that surrounded them.
Beam had a sense then who would be last to fall.
“Take me instead!” Beam cried out. Viscous tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, ran down the bridge of her nose, dripped from her chin—but she had no water left to give. Was it blood? She touched a hand to her face. It came back black. A mystery for another time. “M-Merciful Lord Ah-Ren, spare them and kill me instead. And be done with it!”
“You have no power to bargain. You have nothing to offer Me but fleeting diversion. Four...” Another of her loyal followers hit the ground, splattering the mud on impact.
“STOP! Stop, I beg you...” She tore at her hair. She hit herself in the head. She clenched her teeth so hard she thought they might break. All the while, she could feel her thick, gelatinous tears worming their way down her sunken cheeks. “All right. I have to... guess. Have to guess... why the color blue... is blue! That’s what you said!”
“Five... Now she remembers. Does she remember soon enough? Six...” Two more fell. The rest of her surviving disciples—those who hadn’t taken refuge in the water, at least—must have all been scared speechless. She recognized the weeping voice as Lambent, and each time another died, he squealed loudly. His stammering pleas to their god for mercy were degenerating, more incoherent by the moment.
Beam’s mind raced, stumbling over its own thoughts clumsily. “Because of water! Water... is blue. The sky is blue!”
Another low, rumbling laugh filled the air. Hjarsant’s body-puppet grinned wide enough to show the rotting gums clinging to its teeth. “Blue is blue because water is blue? Is water blue, Beam? Seven...”
“Wait! I answered!”
“Blue is blue because water is blue.” Ah-Ren snickered. “So is red, red because blood is red?”
“What? No... I didn’t say that!” She couldn’t parse the sadistic god’s logic, but it didn’t matter in the moment—it gave her more time to think, more time for the survivors to survive. Maybe the swimmers had time to escape.
“Eight... Your reason is flawed. You feel along in the dark for the truth while I stand in the blistering light of it. Yet you hold My shackles within the shadow of your ignorance. Even you can understand why I am justified. Nine...”
“Blue. Blue is blue!” Beam panicked. The numbers were closing in on her and Peadhar, and though she’d tried to be brave, her greatest priority now was saving him and herself. “Why is it the color blue? Please, just let me think!”
“I can pen entire tomes and construct a calculus to explain the laws of nature in the time that it takes you to expel waste. I am forced to wallow in My own perfection while you rule the earth. Ten...” It was Lambent who died at the count of ten, his whimpering sobs finally silenced. “I am a god in chains. My brilliance languishes in the dark while you consume and excrete and fornicate and die and squeeze out more of you from your orifices and force yourself on one another and eviscerate one another. You were a necessary evil in the course of the universe, but the need for you has passed. Eleven...”
The starved girl, Aurora, let out a blood-curdling, dry gasp the instant before her head lolled to the side. She’d been alive after all.
Time was up. “Blue is blue because... because blue is blue!” More thick black tears slimed out of Beam’s tear ducts. “I don’t know! Do you hear me? I don’t know the answer! It just is! Please!”
“Ah, there is her answer. Blue is blue because it simply is. Now you know why I did this to you.”
She still didn’t understand. “Why?”
“I can.”
The meaning was lost on her. “I solved your riddle. Now you must let us go—you said that, right? You promised!”
“Those were not our terms.”
“No, you’re lying! You said—”
“Do you remember how I said you can never seem to listen and think?”
Beam felt a hand around her neck. She tried to gasp, but the fingers pressed on her windpipe, constricted the muscles from moving. Aurora was on her feet now. Her eyes were black as Hjarsant’s, and for a withered, starved maiden, she had grip strength beyond belief.
“I said I will not break every rib you have,” Ah-Ren reminded her. “I will let you and Peadhar each retain a shred of your living selves. My word is My oath. Now your journey is over, but your existence has only just begun.”
Crack. Snap. Crunch. Sharp pain erupted in Beam’s chest, her ribcage shattering rib by rib. All but one. The sharp edges jabbed at her lungs, made it excruciating to breathe. Now the body of Aurora let her go and staggered away, stiff in the limbs.
In pain, Beam fell. She crawled along the mud toward Peadhar. His eyes were wide open, wet along the lids with the same tarry liquid that had fallen from her own eyes, but she could swear he was looking at her. She put a hand on his, and she could swear she felt his fingers squeeze her back.
Or was it just wishful thinking?
“I will drive out all your sickness,” said Ah-Ren. “I will do away with your pain. I will dispose of death for you, for My promises are unbroken as the promise of dawn. Who can raise the dead but Me?”
Tendrils of the black slime slithered out of the swamp, wrapped around her wrists and ankles. They did the same to Peadhar and the corpses that littered the island. One by one, Ah-Ren’s victims were dragged into the bog. Beam tried to hold onto Peadhar’s hand. Her strength was no match. She felt his fingers slip out of hers for the final time.
Something moved in her bag in the boat. It was the Gospel of Lucence. The goopy black substance leaked out from between its pages, splitting into a dozen tentacles that stiffened as they grew, forming spindly, spidery legs that let the book crawl to the center of the island. It wasn’t the good word of her salvation anymore. It was just a thing, a creature, and it was like it had a will of its own now, or always had. But she knew it was another of Ah-Ren’s tricks.
Beam’s mind went foggy. She, too, was dragged below the surface of the swamp, her unblinking eyes taking in the scum and sediment that whirled through the dark water. She waited for the sweet release of death that never came.
The sun rose overhead and illuminated what little it could down here in the dark. Still she would not die. She felt not quite alive anymore, either.
“Rest here for a while,” said Ah-Ren. The voice’s malice had a softer edge to it now, betraying a more playful sadism, one whose brutality was, at least for the moment, satisfied. “The day will come soon when I will call upon you again. I never lied to you. In truth, you will help Me prepare the world to come.”
***
The sun set, then rose, then set again, many times over and over and over, until Beam forgot what the days were or how to count them. She forgot what numbers were. She forgot her name. Even her new one. In time, she forgot she ever had an old name, too. One of the last memories to go was of her child. It went all the same.
Long, unbroken nothingness. Then shadows moved along the face of the deep.
The things in the water? she thought, not in words and sentences, but in nearly formless concepts that coalesced and disintegrated at a moment’s notice.
What are the things?
Gators.
No. Not them. On top.
Not gators… boats.
A procession of boats rowed by. Strong men sat upright in suits of steel armor and leather. There was a young boy with them, unarmored and unsupervised. He looked over the edge of the boat while the others conversed among themselves and he reached his little hand into the water.
She didn’t know what to do. She only saw an opportunity and took it.
She reached up and grabbed the boy by the wrist.
Was she trying to pull herself out? Or pull him under? Even she didn’t know.
He screamed and tried to pull away, rocking the boat as he did so. Some of the men shouted with alarm. The man next to him grabbed the boy’s body with one hand and his submerged arm with the other, prying it free.
He receded from her grasp. Still, his little eyes fixed themselves on her, wide with terror, until the man patted him roughly on the back to stay his tears.
“What did you see down there?” the man asked him.
“I... I’m not sure, father.”
“Probably roused some angry gator. The first thing you must learn about the Everswamp is that you must never be so sure of yourself as to go playing around in its water. You must know your place, son. It is above almost everyone, except for me, except for your mother, and none of us is above the Everswamp. Do you understand, son?”
“Yes, father.”
“Remember your place and it’ll save your life, Brynh. Now, stop your trembling and sit up straight! You’re a prince! A Garrotin, no less. You live to rule another day.”
The boats rowed on and out of her gray sight. Night came, then went, then came again, and surely also did the seasons and the years. She stared only at the book. She ceased to move. The time came when she could no longer move at all, but she could still think, or, at the very least, she lingered in the confines of her prison, her own undying mind. How it frightened her at first.
But the fear passed. The years passed. She remained. Then another boating party rowed by and took the book. The change jarred her and she almost found the strength to move again, but it passed. Bubbles rose up through the water and died in the open air. Fish swam by her uninterested, as did the gators. Soon the days and nights became only light and dark. Then it all blurred together, all dim, all gray.
She knew almost nothing anymore. She had no name. She had no future, and her past was a shadow of its former self. All she really knew was that she needed to find a way out of wherever she was, and she needed to find something called Peadhar to bring with her. The meaning was lost on her.
She waited for the day when she would be called again. When she would have purpose.
When she would see the world to come, where she would finally belong.