All Light Will Fall (20 page)

In a startled moan, the
angu
rose to their feet
again, blasting their hooves into the deep. The boat lifted suddenly. I saw the
waves turning, the sky spinning as the boat jumped and threw me into the water.

The rapids ripped around me, the waves tossing me left and
right. I couldn’t see. Everything was swimming. I was up suddenly, reaching for
the surface, then forced down again. Up again then down again, fighting the
vicious twist of the waves.

They washed me to shore, up into the midst of the battle.
And war, from where I stood, never looked so alive, so conscious, so wild and
unsteady.

One of the Meridian noticed me then. He was dark as ebony,
his beauty stark as midnight. His hair was bright and gray as the dusk. He
stared at me, with a look of confusion, then raised his weapon in attack.

I drew the p22, but I couldn’t move. For some reason I
couldn’t bring myself to fire. It was his beauty perhaps, or his fragile
glimpse of confusion. I didn’t know.

There was a shout suddenly and a piercing whiz in the air. A
flyer was coming down, ablaze with smoke, ready to crash into the riverbed.

I moved. He moved. The blast caught us. We crashed, one atop
the other. The p22 went flying.

Rock burst every which way. I threw the Meridian from above
me, pressing him low to the ground, shielding him almost.

Dust surrounded us. I was on my feet again and so was he.

I looked to the Meridian. He no longer faced me, his body
turned in attention to something else.

A bright mist rolled fast down the mountains. There was no
running as it came, and when it did, it came with a vengeance, ripping through
the trees and swallowing every high and low of the land.

The rush blew me to my feet. I reached out, my hands
pressing hard against the ghostly force. The light pushed back, tearing into my
skin. And I saw myself unraveling. My arms, my hair, every inch, and cell, and
follicle of myself vanishing in the white of the wind.

I remembered then what this was. That it was the hand of
Kurios, the might of a god blooming forth. It was incredible, and perhaps too
impossible to believe. Even with me standing here. Even with it so real to the
touch and so bright to the eye. And suddenly, in my faithless question of it
all, the world returned. Tree by tree. Creature by creature. The grasses
flickered to view. The sunshine tinkled back, ray by ray, in brilliant shots of
light. I blinked the dizziness from my eyes, breathing deeply to sooth the
tautness in my throat.

I was lost again in the fog. I saw only rock. Their shadows
stood tall in the gloom. But as I looked, I saw that those icy pillars had
faces, bodies, and that they were not pillars at all, but statues, the ancient
lords of the Meridian.

They were perfectly still but so beautifully in motion. A
hand here, held the air in an elegant caress. A body there, arched in a sort of
innocent pleasure, as if he were dancing. They were alive almost, their faces
alight with a glassy fire. Their lips were parted in silence but somehow still
seemed to whisper to the world of the living.

I wondered for a moment, if they were to awaken and find
themselves looking down at me, what they might say. I wondered if they might
tell me of Kurios. If man and Meridian, did in truth, share the same Heaven and
the same saga of Eden. Were we truly the fallen? Were we truly the shadow to their
beauty and the curse to their blessing?

Even so, what did that mean? Why would God taunt us so, with
all we could have been, with all we should have been? I did not know. I could
never understand it. Man could never understand it. And that was our greatest
resentment, our powerlessness to understanding why, our inability to rewrite
and design the truth ourselves.

The sun had yet to rise, and the air was cold and still. I was
alone. I had traveled for miles through a wonderland of snow. Sprouts of blue
and islands of green spread vastly throughout the valley. I went high across
the plains, beyond a herd of snow beast, and down through the hills, I came
upon a rivulet of white falls where large reptilian creatures rested lazily on
the riverside.

The land was quiet enough to shake me, and the sunrise had
long passed when I discovered the meaning of my heart’s unrest. It was the
silence, and all the voices of longing I heard in that silence.

Longing—it was more a curse than loneliness. Loneliness was
a dull and mellow pain. But longing was something else. It cut deep and burned
like a dry wound, never hidden and never healed. I wondered if this was how it
would always be. I wondered a fate where years would pass until I returned
home. Could I endure the wait?

Time, I knew, would do no good. It could simmer the pain,
but the longing would be unending. Mother and Fern, I imagined them suffering
the same pain. I imagined that in the night, when they curled up in comfort, in
a cradle of dreams, that the longing would come to them and dwell there forever
in the beauty of their sleep.

By midafternoon, I came across a canyon of deep blue ice.
The shining ravine stood tall in the clouds. I stood below the ice and peered
into the twisted passageways. There was no way around it.

A deep hum echoed long against the walls. My instincts were
howling for me to turn back. But the longer I went out of my way, the longer it
would be before I could ever reach Ellis, and I had to reach him. There was no
question.

Ellis was alive, and I would not abandon him. I could not.
Because then, I would truly share my father’s blood. In the face of my father,
we would bare the same image, and I was not my father. I would stand by my
word. Not for chivalry. Not for obligation. But because it was my will. The
family I loved, they were my humanity. They were the stars to my wandering, and
I had wandered too long.

There was a beautiful snowfall on the labyrinth’s other
side. It fell gracefully like the cold tears of an angel. I wished Fern could
see it. She adored the snow. She loved the beauty of breathing, of watching
those white wisps of air soar into the cold. She said it was her soul and
spirit breathing. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the soul was not so invisible. I wanted
it to be. I didn’t want God to see me, or my shame, or my evil. Because if He
did, He would forgive me, and I didn’t want His forgiveness.Not yet. By the
wrongs in my heart, I still had much to suffer.

From the low of the hills, I spotted something. It was a
village, and rising quick from the icy gates, a black smoke billowed into the
air. In that moment, I felt something stir in my chest. It wasn’t fear, but a
feeling so close to it, and yet unlike anything I had felt before.

I entered the village, wandering down the long, centered
pathway. My mind was half empty at first. I was blind almost, blind to the
fire, to the dead twisted and turned sideways in the snow. Death, it was so
heavy in the air. In the burn of flesh. In the rust of blood.

A band of red-tags had passed through no doubt. The village
was rotted with their scent. But I only needed to see the death to know of
their presence here. It was instinct to them. Violence and blood was in their
design, and I knew not to despise them for their obedience, but ARTIKA for its
vicious will.

But did I have the right to hate? Had these hands not
killed, and had this heart not desired blood too many times before? It was
against my will, of course. It was ARTIKA. Even now, in this great massacre,
all of it was ARTIKA.

I always knew that the desires of the heart had the power to
outwit the mind. And that the desires of the flesh overcome both the heart and
the mind for most. But with myself, I knew not where my desires lied. My heart
is of hate, my mind tortured, and my flesh the flesh of a stranger.

I suppose that leaves my spirit. It is the only right I
know. It aches now to see this death, with a pain it never bore before. Seeing
it was all one mighty flash of history. War hating race and race loving war. It
would never end. Even when this world grew weary as the Earth, it would never
end. Because death had its desire and man had his.

I wandered through the smoky blur and saw the dead buried
underground. Their bent hands and broken fingers were tucked beneath the ash.

A hideous death, that’s what this was. A land made ugly by
the ghostly snow prints and the long trails of blood.

A lock of hair tumbled, swept south by the frozen air. I
followed it down a path of weeping faces that were overturned and buried in the
snow.

There was tragedy everywhere. The ice-bricked houses were
nothing but rubble, and the ground was strewn with the people’s belongings.
Shrouds of silk. Broken pottery. Animal hides. Wooden instruments. Colorful
spindles of lace and shiny relics of bronze. I saw a child’s small toy and a
tiny fur boot, torn and bloodied in the snow. And between it all, between those
lovely vestiges of life, the dead were still and silent.

I heard a cry suddenly, a mournful wail that sounded so much
like death. It was all in my mind, but still I could hear it. And never before
did death sound so deep, so dark, so haunting.

Then I saw her, a young Meridian girl hidden among the
rubble of a once beautifully crafted hut. Its icy walls had caved during the
carnage and had toppled over her body.

I knelt down in the snow, bending low to better see that
buried and bloodless face. There was such beauty to her, in the slight dip of
the nose, the flower bud shaped lips and the thin, carefully constructed brow
line. And I imagined, that her golden hair and that moonlit skin was even
lovelier with the kiss of life all around her.

I saw the tears from her eyes as well, frozen beautifully on
the hard of her cheeks, and I couldn’t help but think how precious they were.

I wondered if I had ever seemed so fragile. Perhaps I was
once, a long time ago when I knew neither guilt nor innocence. When I was but a
blessing in the womb. When I knew nothing but the softness of my mother’s bosom
and the harmony of her heart.

As I walked the carnage, the smoke began to clear. A dense
and eerie fog had slithered into the village. It dripped over the dead like a
liquid sheet, crystalizing over their bodies.

I came upon one of the houses where a dead Meridian lay half
curled out of the tall window, his frozen hand sprawled open in death. He had
been reaching for something, reaching for life, for his soul in the cold,
winter light.

From the door of the house, there was blood. Thick trails of
blue slithering from the gray of the house. I wished it wasn’t real, but death
was death, and once it came, it could never go back.

I looked away finally. I had seen too much of death. It was
a part of me now. In my heart. In my bones. In my blood. It was a living and
lonely death, and I could feel it feasting inside me. Because of all the death
I had come to face, lonely death was the worst of it all.

I made my way to the edge of the village. There were tracks
there in the snow leading north. I followed them into the hills. I knew not
why, but in this lonely smoky winter it seemed the only path for me to follow.