by Greg Curtis
His aunt, his single god fearing and proper aunt had been an abusive alcoholic, who kept none of her words, and who taught him that there could be no such thing as family for him. That he was alone, should always be alone, for only then was he safe. She had also shown him that there was no God in religion, only suffering and lies. Finally with her very death she had shown him that even the minor amount of support she gave him, would all be taken away sooner or later. Only what he could provide for himself could be trusted.
His so-called friends on the street, as they had robbed and cheated him blind, and then betrayed him to the police, another set of lessons in that single subject. But at the same time his successful thefts, the ones where he’d never been caught because he’d never told anybody, and planned to the letter, they taught him the safety of secrecy and planning. His only safety.
And then the only woman he had ever dared to love, Sam, who had first broken through some of his terrible barriers. Not all, for he hadn’t been willing to fully trust her, but enough so that when she left, he had been shattered once more. Sam too had betrayed him, leaving him behind for a drug induced paradise, and ultimately death. Sam too had sworn she loved him, and yet she too had betrayed him. With her death the thief had come of age, and for more than twenty years since he had reigned supreme.
And why not? The thief never let anyone in, and therefore he never got hurt. The thief had succeeded in doing things no one and nothing else ever could, every success, just more evidence of his rightness, while everyone else had failed.
Those early obscenities of his life, had marked Mikel for eternity. Yet until Sherial had come along, he would never have understood, never have seen what was so basic. That he was alone. For no matter how capable he was, no matter how full he could pack his life with money and success, no matter how secure he became, and with the knowledge of the good he was doing, he was alone. Would always be alone, until he let another in. And that was something he could never have done, because, whenever he let anybody in, they hurt him. They betrayed him. They left him.
But now he knew, in Sherial’s wisdom, that he had no choice. His life until now, had been half a life. A life cold and alone, barely worth living. A life as self-destructive and pathetic for him, as it was successful in material terms.
He knew two more things as well. He knew it was a life that had to end, for his own sake as well as Sherial’s. And he knew that Sherial was the one thing he had always prayed for, even when he had screamed his rage at God. Especially then. She was the woman who would never leave him, never betray him, never hurt him. She was the anchor he needed, the warmth he ached for, the friend he yearned for, and the guide he had to have. Above all she was his destiny. It was time for him to be with her, to stop fighting her.
It wasn’t easy for him, even knowing what he was fighting for and what he stood to win, but finally he understood that this was what had to be, and he was sure. Somewhere deep within him a decision had been made. He had decided to live.
Together Sherial and Mikel started dismantling the fortress of his paranoid barriers, breaking down the walls that isolated him, letting Sherial in to be with him, to make him whole. And all it required was absolute honesty, as he showed her everything there was to see about him, his life, his dreams, his fears, his good and his bad.
As each and every one of his own barriers fell, so he found himself knowing, feeling, loving more of Sherial. Barriers he discovered in awe, by their very nature work two ways. Keeping Sherial out of his thoughts had kept him from knowing hers too, and that he learned had been a devastating loss. The shear ecstasy of her innermost being, the fragile ethereal beauty, the rock-solid powerhouse of her faith and love, and the overwhelming joy of her goodness and humour. How empty his life had been, and he hadn’t even realized. Against Sherial, the nameless monsters of his mind fled like phantoms in the daylight.
It wasn’t an easy thing to do, going against so many decades of training and secrecy. It hurt. It scared him as nothing else could. And it left him somehow naked and ashamed as he revealed everything he was to her, to himself. All his petty fears, his hatreds, all the dark festering emotions, exposed to the sunshine of her sight. He felt lower than an earthworm remembering things he had long forgotten and hidden even from himself. He imagined Sherial running away as she saw what he was, and couldn’t blame her. But as he exposed his hidden darkness too her, so too Sherial showed to him her own image of him, of his goodness. It seemed for every failing in him that he could unearth, she could find some spark of decency, which she blew into a raging fire.
Two images, one so bleak it made the demons look like lambs, the other so golden it glowed like the sun. It was hard to accept that the two of them could be one and the same man, and yet they were. Somehow the two seemed to merge, to balance out, much more on the side of light than dark, leaving him with a sense of wonder as he discovered himself, and joy as he discovered Sherial.
Difficult as it was, Sherial was there with him all the way, helping, soothing and loving, making it easier and easier. For once the first of the barriers of fear came crashing down, the next became easier, and so on. And each barrier that fell allowed her to merge that much more with him, a reward beyond all understanding. For with every barrier that fell he also knew her better and closer. From that he found the way to trust her, and his love just ballooned in his soul. For the first time he understood that in giving himself to her, he was losing nothing and gaining everything.
Throughout he felt the pain of the brand, as he had known he would, if anything even more than before. The demons, desperate now, wouldn’t let this go unpunished, they couldn’t afford to. They were putting everything into it. But they didn’t worry him. The pain was irrelevant. He also felt strength flowing into him. A large and terrible strength, greater than any he had ever known flowing through his veins. Not all of it was his.
In part there was his own strength, newly discovered. The power that he had locked away from himself for all these years, denying it as he denied the existence of God. For he like everyone else was of God. To deny the Lord was to deny himself. The Lord was good and so was he. It was that which had allowed him to achieve all he had. He was a good man. He hurt when others hurt, and he helped them. Something so simple and the basis of everything he was, yet he hadn’t understood. Had he accepted that long ago, he could have been so much more.
Then there was love, infinitely strong and unbearably sweet, surrounding him, permeating him. The love that was God’s love. The love that was also his, and which he had also denied for so many years.
In the centre of it, in the centre of everything, and above all else at the core of him was Sherial. There as she always had been, had he only but had the courage to look and accept.
He saw too that there was a greater presence all around him, a presence he couldn’t understand, but also one he knew he wasn’t meant to. This was life, goodness, the universe as Sherial saw it. How, he wondered, could he ever have missed it? Such grandeur, such wonder, such goodness! Had he not had work to do, he would have fainted.
No amount of pain, no evil, no hatred, no suffering could overcome him while he held this wonder close to him. Once he truly accepted the reality into his heart, the brand fled him like a scalded cat, for it was in fact, he finally understood, a tiny demon, sent to torment him, to cause despair and suffering and above all to distract him from the truth; from Sherial.
No demon could have stood against the strength that filled him.
As he watched it flee with eyes born of Sherial’s goodness, he finally understood the rest of it. The unending battle of the angels and the demons, and the reason the six of them had been let go, for he suddenly knew they had been. For through each and every one of them the love of an angel shone, and that was more dangerous to the demons than anything else in existence.
A greater reason still for the fallen to let them go, had been their fear. The threat of death of them might bring the far greater might that was the ang
els in to protect them. The angels couldn’t fight, but they could save. It was forbidden for them to enter, yet utterly natural for them to love. Given sufficient cause they just might enter no matter the difficulty, and their simple presence would be a force the demons could never stand against.
The angels couldn’t wage war and yet he saw, in a very real way they did. For everything they did, that they were, that they held dear was an anathema to the fallen. If the angels entered the pit, the demons would have to face that, and they couldn’t. The demons while easily capable of killing their humans couldn’t risk the consequences. Thus they had instead tried to sever the bonds between the humans and their angels. That was the brand.
The fallen he discovered in astonishment, couldn’t even afford to kill those angels and the humans they’d captured, for that too might bring consequences. For no one and nothing dies without the Lord being present. And even if he did nothing, the mere presence of him would be more devastating to the demons than a nuclear bomb. They feared that as they feared nothing else.
Instead the demons had tried to corrupt their prisoners, feeding off their strength and turning them into other demons. It hadn’t been particularly successful as campaigns went, for their prisoners wouldn’t give in. They were grey, not black. The harder the evil forced them, the more their goodness resisted. And as they became weaker, the demons themselves had to stop feeding off them for fear they might die. The humans too, mortal though they were, again could not be allowed to die in the pit, and thus their lives had been extended and extended again. It was ironic. The demons, evil and twisted as they were, had in the end been forced to keep their victims alive.
The acolytes he suddenly realised, might have been physically destroyed, but their souls too lived, somewhere in that dark demesne, screaming in fear, pain, self-pity and no doubt, regret. But on some level they too existed. The fallen could not afford even their deaths.
For the first time Mikel also understood the nature of the war being fought, and it was as nothing he, or perhaps anyone not of the heavens could have imagined. Instead of a true human styled war with blood and gore, battlefields and front lines, these two groups opposed each other on a spiritual level; goodness against evil. Neither side ever suffered casualties in the human sense. No one died, nor was even injured. Instead they simply gained and lost strength. The war became more a pushing exercise than a battle. Good and evil literally repelling each other.
As one side grew stronger so it pushed the other further away. The extent of each group’s territory marked their success more clearly than any battle line. And the demons for all their vaunted strength and power were losing and losing badly. For they didn’t want to be stuck in their little pits, they wanted it all. They wanted the entire universe. They simply didn’t have the strength to extend their boundaries. Instead of expanding, hell was getting smaller.
One day, perhaps even one day soon, he dared to hope the demons would find their little holes so small they no longer existed.
Yet, despite its strangeness, he understood it truly was a war. A struggle of epic proportions. Instead of attacking the other side, the angels tried their level best simply to make themselves and their charges, humanity among them, stronger. The demons in their turn, unable to actually attack what was inherently stronger than them, simply tried to resist and subvert their good work.
It was a losing strategy from the start, since no matter how many they managed to corrupt and convert; they could never overcome the Lord. Then again, that was something they could never admit. To accept that would be to accept that they were both wrong and weak. To accept that they truly were fallen.
“The others are watching.” Sherial spoke to him, still in that language without words, but now he understood her so much more clearly, for her thoughts were also his. Looking around with his own eyes he saw she was right. They were all there, frightened and confused, hopeful and cynical. But above all they were there.
Slowly he dragged himself back to his feet briefly wondering when he had fallen. The smell and sight of sick told him his stomach had emptied itself in reaction to the pain, yet he’d never noticed that either. His body felt as though an eighteen wheeler had just run over it, but deep down inside he wanted to fly like a bird. He was soaring. But now was the time to keep his feet on the ground even while his soul soared.
Deliberately slowly he turned to stare at them, the message in his eyes secondary to the message of his face. For as he looked directly at them, they stared straight back, and all saw the clear skin of his face. His brand was gone and only clean healthy skin remained. The looks in their eyes were of terrible shock and disbelief, and just a little bit, of hope.
Acting on Sherial’s thoughts, Mikel ripped off his grass shirt, showing his back to them so they could see the marks of her hands, and he knew that they too would be changed. No longer raised mounds of flesh, they had flattened and merged with his own skin, seamlessly becoming one. Only the light of Sherial’s love shining through them marked them as anything other than normal human flesh. He no longer rejected Sherial on any level, no more did his body.
He looked around at the others, milling like a group of school girls before a ball. Some had varying degrees of understanding of what he had found, he could see it in their eyes, though they weren’t ready to accept it yet. Others were only confused. But all had seen his brand disappear. For the first time in a long time he saw sparks of hope in their eyes, outweighing the cynicism and defeat.
It was long past time to feed those fires.
“You and I -. We have all been the most stupid fools in creation.” The first words he had spoken aloud in a long time, and so utterly wonderful to speak.
“I am loved by an Angel. I love that Angel.” And he was. As he spoke the words aloud he felt their truth ever more powerfully. He looked around and saw that the others too loved their angels, though not in the same way as he loved Sherial. He kicked himself mentally for having made that assumption before. He had not been thinking clearly by any stretch of the imagination for the long months he had been stuck here. He hadn’t been thinking well even long before that. For they loved their angels in the same way that children would love their mothers. A sort of complete devotion, devoid of sexual attraction, but no less wonderful for that.
“Stupid sexist man”, he kicked himself mentally a few more times, but only mildly. He was much too happy to hold any anger, even at his own stupidity. Besides, he couldn’t help but smile as he felt Sherial’s amusement at his thoughts.
“Do you love Simony’s form?” He kicked himself again, as he understood her thoughts immediately and where they led, for she was right and then right again. Once more he hadn’t understood something else so completely obvious. Simony looked so very like Sherial that they could have been twin sisters, yet he adored Sherial’s form and found nothing even vaguely attractive in Simony. The difference was simply that he loved Sherial, therefore he found her the most sexually desirable woman in creation. Simony simply overawed him, therefore he found her frightening and alien. He was a stupid male.
Men and women could love and care for each other without anything sexual ever being involved. It depended on the essence of their souls and how they meshed as to whether there would be that attraction, not their form or face. Yet it was only because he loved Sherial in that way, that he had assumed the others did too. At least Sherial tried to console him with that notion. He wasn’t quite sure how correct it was. He was still a man.
The intimacy of their love was however, he realized, a measure of the differences between them all, and it had serious implications for the work still to do. Because he loved Sherial with both his heart and soul, because he had somehow joined with her on every level, was still joining, he had her protection, her love and knowledge to fall back on even where the others didn’t. Yet he was still human, still grey. It was the reason he alone would have to go back into that hellhole. It was also the reason he could with some degree of safety. Though he wo
uldn’t tell them that just yet.
“I am a good man. I really am.” The group stared at him wondering if he’d gone mad, yet also he guessed, understanding some of his message and trying to deny it, much as he had. Such treason couldn’t be allowed any longer. It not only undermined the rescue, it undermined them as well.
“Because I am good, I had the need to help others, to save them from what I had suffered. Because I had that need I became the greatest thief of my world, giving aid to the poorest and weakest, bringing at least mortal justice to those who would harm others. Goodness underlies all of my skills, - and all of yours as well. Whatever any of us does, goodness is what powers us, drives us. Pride, logic, reason, strength, power, everything else is secondary to our inherent goodness.”
“Above all else I am loved by God. As long as I believe this, as I accept that, no evil may ever defeat me. I can be killed, but never defeated.” And that was the heart of it. The brands could only work as long as the sufferer let them. Understand that simple fact, and they were powerless. Of course a bullet could still do a terrible amount of damage to him, as could a laser blast, a wolf bite, a curse or a mental or physical attack. That was why he needed these people. He needed their knowledge. He needed their support, and their backup.
