A Warrior's Redemption (The Warrior Kind)

by Stanton III, Guy

  “I don’t understand! Why is the boy important? He’s just a harmless boy! Let him go, as he’s done nothing wrong!” I said angrily shaking the chains binding my hands in front of me.

  “My dear boy you don’t understand the rat’s nest that you’ve become involved in do you! The boy is more important than you know and far more important than just a common brigand such as yourself!”

  I looked at Larc not understanding and then back to the governor as he began to elaborate.

  “We would have preferred his mother, but alas she slipped through our fingers years ago.”

  “My mother is dead!” Larc said defensively speaking up for the first time.

  “No, she’s quite alive and well actually. She is a member of the Valley Lander high council. In charge of their security sector, such as it is.” Mused the governor.

  “We suspected that the boy was still in Kharta, but we lacked knowledge as to where he might be. The boy’s father had outlived his usefulness, and the decision had been made to terminate him, when we received word through our sources of the intended rescue of the boy and his father. The father may have outlived his usefulness but the boy; however, is still quite useful to us. Through him we will manipulate his dear mother to allow our agents access to strategic points of interest, which will aid us in our invasion of the Valley Lands. What do you think will get the picture of the new state of affairs across to his mother the best, a finger or a whole hand?”

  I lunged for him gaining several steps up the dais before I was jerked back to the bottom by the guards behind me.

  The governor got up with some effort, “Roric you too have outlived your usefulness. The only reason that I don’t end your miserable misbegotten life now is that your demise has been requested by other important parties in a much more exciting manner so I am led to understand. Take him to the high priestess! She has requested an evening’s time with the famous outlaw before he meets his demise in the arena tomorrow. No doubt this evening’s entertainment will make the pain of what you will be losing tomorrow all the more acutely felt by you!” The governor said as he began to laugh out loud.

  His laughter was soon followed by the echoing chorus of guards and courtiers up and down the hall.

  Chapter Four

  Temptations Lane

  I was led back out of the citadel and into the city. Larc had been drug off into the inner depths of the citadel kicking and screaming. Anger coursed through me hotly, but I kept it from showing and passively followed wherever my captors led me biding my time until a chance to escape presented itself.

  About an hour later found me climbing the stairs of the temple of pleasures, as they were often called throughout the Zoarinian Empire and neighboring lands. My steps, the steps of an unwilling man were far different than those of the eager steps of the frequent visitors of this place. The sounds of drunken revelry spilled out of the temple balconies and polluted the evening air. I had no desire to see what I would inside. In short these temples of pleasure were an abomination.

  They were populated with the fair youth of the empire. It was considered a great honor throughout the land of the Zoarinians to be selected as a temple girl or boy. The position brought wealth to their families, who sold them all too willingly to the temple magistrates. The boys and girls were raised to attend to the carnal and ceremonial needs of the temple consortium and its body of believers.

  A believer was anyone who could pay enough to the temple magistrates to buy their way into the door to enjoy the forbidden pleasures that lay within. The temples were viewed with favor by mostly all Zoarinians, as they brought entertainment and diversion from the stresses of everyday life to the general populace, and wealth to those in positions of power.

  It was the desire of almost every Zoarinian to at least see and participate in what lay beyond the gilded doors at least once in their lives. Those who had visited once felt the desire to return even greater and labored their lives away to fund the continued attainment of the ultimate in self gratification. The depravity didn’t stop there, however.

  The children, who resulted from the frequent liaisons of the temple priestesses, were sacrificed to the gods of the Zoarinian Empire upon birth. It was believed that these acts of innocent human sacrifice in homage to the gods of the land renewed the land by keeping the land fertile and the people healthy. It was a custom that was observed by many outside the temple grounds and throughout the Zoarinian Empire. In their way of thinking more sacrifices could only be a good thing in terms of having continued prosperity. Not to mention freeing the parents from the need of caring for unwanted offspring.

  Thinking over all I knew of the customs of these people, as I was led up the stairs I shook my head in denial of their lunacy. I thought of my own mother and tried to picture her offering me and my brother up as sacrifices and I just couldn’t. My parents had something in them that had set them apart from these people and they had been hated by them for it. With the Creator’s help I’d become just like my parents had been. That is if I survived long enough to.

  The Creator must surely hate the activities of these people? All I could wonder was why He hadn’t already torched the place! These people were certainly deserving of destruction, even as I had been for my sins. I had turned to a different path, but I doubted that these people would ever do that as they loved the twisted lives that they led and had no desire to change.

  “The city remains because I have those yet within it that are faithful to Me”.

  Came the whisper into my consciousness that answered my question and sent a ripple of awareness through me that my Creator had not forsaken me, but was even now here with me in this ordeal. It comforted me to know that I didn’t have to face what lay beyond the doors ahead alone and I felt strength flow through me at that awareness and I lifted my head to face the future head-on with renewed confidence.

  Completing our journey up the wide steps we made our way through the open doors of the temple. Fires blazed brightly in the temple keeping the cool evening air at bay. Vibrantly colored silks and crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings and the massive pillars of the temple halls, while vibrant tapestries adorned the walls. The richness of the surroundings set off the scenes portrayed around me. Some sights and sounds brought disgust to me while others threatened to enslave me with the tempting pleasure they offered.

  Trying to control a body I suddenly hated, because of its betrayal of me I turned my head forward and concentrated on two pillars at the end of the long hall that we were traversing across. The women here were very attractive, and the sight of their barely clothed bodies or completely bare bodies for some as the case was threatened to overwhelm my senses. The seductive welcome in their eyes and the sensual grace with which they moved was as provocative as the sight of them. The activities of the men around me however acted as a slap in the face, in terms of keeping my perspective of the wrongness of this place alive in my consciousness.

  I was filled with disgust as I saw what they were about in various places in the hall around me. Their activities reminded me of the vileness that had only been too common in the dungeons of the arena, when men had forgotten the created purpose of their role in creation and settled for something less and unnatural. Boys being used in the place of women was horrible and yet the room was filled with such debauchery and worse. Even the women were inordinately focused on giving each other pleasure, which made no sense to me.

  Was this display of hedonistic wantonness supposed to be the example of what the world should be more like? If it was I wanted no part of such a world, where everything that had been created so perfectly had now been reversed into shameful self degradation of an individual’s created glory and purpose.

  It was as if in the height of immoral decadence, which was on display all around me, that the beauty and rightness of one man and one woman enjoying each other had been twisted into a thousand disgusting lesser forms of affectation. Why would a man hunger for something
other than the beauty of a woman, and why would a woman settle for the affection of another woman, when only a man could ultimately fulfill and complete her deepest needs?

  I thought of my mother and father and the way they had been with each other. My mother had been a beautiful woman too, but she would have looked completely out of place in this hall. Not for any lack of beauty on her part, but simply because she wasn’t the kind of person to share herself with anybody else other than my father, who she had sworn herself to. Often as a boy I had covertly observed instances where she would simply look deeply at father or say something softly to him, which usually resulted in an unexplained absence by both a short while later, that would often last hours.

  Witnessing how they had been with each other had both relaxed me and made me want the same in a relationship one day. My mother hadn’t had to dress as these women did or display half the open eroticism that they displayed to completely overwhelm my father. I had never seen him once regard another woman other than my mother. What they’d had was special in a way that wouldn’t and couldn’t be understood in a place of such moral reversal and discontentment with what was naturally ordained to be.

  The beauty of these women only went skin deep and knowing that helped me to disregard any earlier desires I’d had for them. The women that had drawn seductively toward me seemed to sense the change in my demeanor towards them, and like candles extinguished their looks of open invitation disappeared and were replaced with disinterested looks of hostility as they moved away to partake in pleasures elsewhere.

  Feeling the weight of the spirit of the place lift off of me with my denial of it I noticed something about the place that I hadn’t seen before. In the bare open areas of exposed wall between the rich tapestries, shadows danced.

  The shadows numbered many more than the people moving in front of the light given off by the many fires throughout the great hall. There were thousands of them! A sudden chill swept through me as I heard the sound of terrible laughter ring throughout the hall drowning out all else. The sound of it almost paralyzed me during mid step so frightful was I at the sound of the laughter.

  “Peace Roric, you can hear them, but they can’t touch you as I have sealed you to My purposes as long as you remain faithful to My will.”

  I felt peace settle over me at the words I felt pour into my innermost being, even as the sound of laughter grew louder and more hateful in its pitch all around me.

  Curiously I looked around the place. The laughter was deafening, but no one here seemed to be hearing any of it. Not even the guards, who prodded me along gave any indication that they were hearing what I was. Were they all so unaware of the foul spirits they were keeping company with?

  There was no peace in this place, other than the peace I felt within my own soul at the steady words of encouragement spoken into me by my Creator. What must hell be like when all those lost and led astray, by their own desires of self-gratification became aware of where their paths of pleasure had taken them and whose will they had been so busy accomplishing while alive? What must the full weight of the emptiness of their lives and actions feel like, when it became clear to them as to what they had missed out on for all of eternity?

  It was scary to know how close I had come to making the same mistake myself. It was even scarier to think of falling back into my errant ways and rejecting the ways of the Creator, who I was just now learning to serve. I said a silent prayer for the futures of all those around me, in that I prayed that they would wake up to the reality that I was even now beginning to see as plain as day. Who knew perhaps it had been someone’s prayer for me that had steered me back onto the right path in life.

  We at last came to a pair of double doors at the end of one of the long halls. One of my guards stepped forward and knocked on the door.

  “Enter.”

  Came the muted reply from within the room. The guards swung the double doors open and I entered the room, which was shrouded in darkness. A single candle on an end table near a shuttered window cast its glow feebly out into the room.

  “Leave us!” Came a sharply spoken command from a darkened corner of the room.

  The guards shifted hesitantly as they glanced at each other uncertainly, “Go now!”

  The guards hastily exited the room closing the heavy doors behind them as they left. Many a man, who had defied a temple priestess or even just displeased one had found himself dead or wishing that he was. My own family had fallen prey to such a vindictive action by a priestess once.

  I stared into the darkened corner of the room where the voice had come from hoping to discern who or what resided there.

  As if in answer to my probing gaze a voice softer and more feminine than it had sounded before replied, “You have your father’s way about you that is of a certainty.”

  A shadow separated away from the darkness of the corner of the room and became clearer as it came into the dim light of the candle and was revealed as a beautiful woman. She carried herself with grace, and dignity, which was hard to imagine in a place like this. She was resplendently dressed in a scarlet colored gown that echoed the temple’s opulent embellishments. Her choice of clothing, while provocative was not what I had expected of a high temple priestess. She was more covered up rather than less, which puzzled me considering the attire or lack of it by the other women I had seen so far. I was puzzled about it, until I gazed into her eyes and face.

  Her face was evenly proportioned, with clean straight lines and skin that showed no signs of wrinkling or the effects of a hard life spent surviving in the elements. Deep blue intelligent eyes gleamed like faceted sapphires from her face. It was her eyes that hinted at what made this woman more formidable than any other woman in the place. I felt the impact of her gaze on me like fire! A man could easily loose himself in a pair of eyes like that. Panicking somewhat, I broke eye contact with her and made to step back but the door was there. I pressed back against it wanting out of the room.

  The priestess said even softer than before, “And his self control too.”

  I looked at her again quickly and saw that her face had changed. Her face was now filled with a look of sorrow and remorse I would never have expected to see in a place like this.

  The realization of what her words hinted at flooded me with anger, and in two steps I was across the space between us with my chained hands wrapped around her throat. She made no move to resist as my hands tightened on her throat.

  “It was you that destroyed my family! Everything that’s gone forever and that has happened since is because of you, isn’t it?” I cried out, giving her a violent shake.

  She nodded even as a single tear welled out of the corner of her eye and slid down her cheek. As the tear touched the skin of my hand and dissipated across it so did some of my anger. ‘She deserves to die, and pay for what she has done!’ Came the angry thought coursing through me as I suddenly felt resistance to killing her.

  My hands tightened further around her throat as I asked, “Tell me why I shouldn’t end your worthless life here and now?”

  “The children!” She responded half choking, which caused me to see that I was practically strangling her to death.

  I loosened my grip some and she gasped for air. Sensing that it was somehow wrong to kill her in cold blood I stepped back disgusted at myself and puzzled at her answer as well.

  “The children? What about these children?” I asked roughly.

  Moving to a chair in the room she sat somewhat stiffly down onto it, as she felt at her throat with a hand.

  “You were saying about the children?” I restated testily.

  Looking back up at me she began, “After your father refused all of my advances I felt gravely insulted. I was young then and full of myself. I made up my mind to kill him and the woman that he had chosen over me. If he wasn’t going to be mine, he wasn’t going to be anyone’s. You’ve seen this place and the living filth of its occupants! I loved it and all its unseemly
passions with all my heart.”

  I looked condemningly down at her, seeing through her words what had brought the end of all that I had held dear in life.

  Crying softly she continued, “Which explains why I sacrificed two of my own children to the gods of this land. I did it myself, with these two hands! Do you know how real a curse can be? I only became aware of the curse my life had become after I ordered your father’s death and received back word of its completion. Instead of joy at the news all I felt was a crushing emptiness. I threw myself into the acts of selfish indulgence that this place has to offer, but there was no joy in any of it. No peace! I became self aware for the first time in my life of just how meaningless my existence had become. I looked at everything that I had done and I was overwhelmed by the grotesque monster that I had become. I couldn’t stand it! The willful slaughter of my own babies and your family haunted me day and night. I made up my mind to end it all. I went to one of the high balconies of the temple. I was balanced on the railing of the balcony ready to jump when a warm breeze blew the scent of a nearby flower to me. The smell of the flower overwhelmed me with its fragrance. It was the first thing I had truly sensed in the weeks of grayness and internal misery I had been going through. It got my attention like nothing else had. It reminded me of the sweetness of spirit that I had lost. When you live as I had done you find out very quickly that there are powers that go unseen in this world. There is evil. This place is a place dedicated to the worship of that evil. The dark spirits of this place dominate the people within it. They revel at our carnality and our lustful desires. They feed off our foolish sins and encourage the people of this place to greater extremes of depravity. Why do we do this? Why do we serve such dark masters? Theses dark spirits create nothing but havoc and suffering wherever they go. The seeds of impurity spill out of this place and others like it and infect all that surrounds it. As everything is reduced to self expression and selfish desires, kindness of spirit is lost and the only love remaining is love of self. I was an instrument of theirs. I allowed myself to be used by them to do unspeakable things. All this was made real to me, as I smelled the created purity of the flower’s scent. There was no hope left in me that anything could ever redeem what I had lost, until that flower reminded me that there is a Creator. A Creator that made everything to be good. It was I that chose to use my beauty for my own selfish whims. It was I that made what was beautiful into a thing to be loathed. The smell of the flower let me know just how far I had fallen from the good creation I was created to be and I was about to jump, when a man’s hand appeared beside me as I stood on the railing. He asked me if I would like to step down. I asked him who he was because I had never seen him before and he did not look like a man who would frequent a place like the temple. He smiled and said, ‘I am the Son of the Creator and I would like you to look at that flower over there a little closer.’ I don’t know why, but I took His hand and let Him help me down. I followed the aroma to the actual flower and I was surprised. It was a single little blossom on a vine that was gnarled and almost broken off in places. I had assumed that the aroma was from the flowers planted by the temple gardeners as there are many flowers around the temple, but none had I smelled for weeks except for this one. The vine clung precariously to the granite of a temple pillar. It wasn’t planted in the fertile ground of the courts below, but it sprang out of a crack near the top of the pillar. The flower was the only one on the vine and it was small, but it was beautiful. I leaned closer to look at it and smell it once more. Peering into the flower the colors faded and were replaced with a reflection of my own face. Drawing back startled I turned to the man, who I hadn’t noticed standing there. ‘What is this?’ ‘Treorna, the flower and the vine represent your life.’ He had replied. ‘You have rooted your life in a precarious spot and the paths you have taken and the decisions you have made have hurt you severely, but yet you are very precious and not something to be cast away. Won’t you change your path and follow Me and let Me plant you in a sure place and give you the nourishment needed to grow and flourish into who you were created to be?’ He had asked kindly. ‘Me?’ I asked unbelievingly. ‘Yes.’ ‘But I’m filthy and I’ve done things! Unspeakable things! How can You want me after the things I’ve done?’ Looking at me He said, “What you have said is true. You are guilty of much and deserve death, but I offer you life. Follow Me and forsake your past deeds and do them no more and I will forgive you and give you a new future. One that will last for forever.”