Lament Messiah

A villain's last moment in life.

 

I will never regret anything I have done.

 

 

It's cold in here, a place lined with steel. Rather advanced for our time, but then, it's a hidden place. It's a place where secrets lie unseen and embedded into the very walls. Literally. Someone, or something, has etched a singular language into the curved mammoth walls. The light behind them lends a ghostly atmosphere.

Here I am, waiting. Soon I will die.

 

Was that the end from the very beginning? Crouching down, I stare at something I cannot see despite being in front of me. If I were to blink and focus my vision I would see it, but my mind is elsewhere and takes my gaze with it. I wonder if I had the actual intent to die, any suicidal urges, but I don't think so. What about me suggested the idea?

 

Yet it is the role of every villain, to die. And I am the devil incarnate, they say. I am that terrible to them.

 

Well, not true, not in the sense that people take it. I am neither possessed by the devil nor do I even believe in the devil. Humanity is its own greatest evil, and I have proved it. Broken by my own feelings, I gave in to the closest thing to madness I could get, and lashed out like a child. Self pity...I thought that was the one selfishness I could be allowed to have.

 

 

I will never regret anything I have done.

 

 

Thrumming footsteps soften the rapid clink of metal clasps in armor. He's here. Pushing off my knees I rose, cloth shivering in a whisper. I've always favored long things; they can be wrapped around me like cloaks that warm, and in this vast chamber where the walls rise into darkness, it is cold.

 

A loud SNAP precedes the flash of lights (And let there be light!). I can feel the pressure on my back, ever delicate and painless. As a breath leaves me armored knees drop with a single sound, as if they were one, to a equally hard floor. Tiny hinges and gears click into place as weapons are cocked. I hear the heavy breathing of someone who has run, and is being driven beyond emotion. I wonder if I planned this.

 

“ Enos!”

 

I wonder how long it has been since I heard that name. People have only ever callen me the devil incarnate, the black tactician, and indeed I have been. To the best of my ability I have manipulated every emotion humans possess to push them to war, to madness, to set off a chain reaction in which every person affected turns around and attempts to destroy another, or ultimately themselves. I have laughed without restraint in the face of it. I have let myself be immersed and drowned. It's such wonder seeing the ways humans harm one another, and none is more pure than when the body is untouched but the heart is sore and wrung. I loved it all! I always wanted to see what would happen if I simply nudged then let go, seeing what would happen.

 

Humans are best left to their own devices. It leads to their destruction.

 

“ Turn around...Enos!”

 

Do they loathe to shoot me in the back? When it comes to villains of my caliber, no hero is loathe to do that. I turn my head to run parallel with a shoulder, but I do not turn. Why do people expect me to obey? I would not be a villain if I did.

 

“ Enos...”

 

Methuselah. Our mother and father died of fever when we were still so young. As we grew older, Brother Methuselah, perfect since birth, became a Warrior of God. The Holy Warrior, the Saint. Whatever. I didn't pay much attention. Everyone else already was. The entire village swarmed about him like worshippers to God and was in a perpetual state of awe and devotion. Euphoria. Methuselah came back from a battle dripping in blood, they threw up their hands and sang wordless praises. None ever noticed that Methuselah wasn't there. Instead he would be in a shadowed room, sitting on a bed motionless because his wounds must be carefully tended and his strength is gone.

 

I know. I always tended his wounds.

 

No one will believe me, but I never envied Methuselah for his blessings, never coveted his powers or his exalted status. I miss that flowered cape beside the sea, where there is green and yellow and the grass whispers comfort with the wind. No, I only envied Methuselah for being 'special'. With or without the blessings he was like the rest of the world, outgoing and talented and having something he could turn into a livelihood so his future was never uncertain. He was well loved. Not like me, who was quiet, shy, therefore scorned because shyness is just some silly thing anyone can surpass with but a thought...if anyone noticed me at all. I don't think they ever did. I never once heard my name.

 

I will never regret anything I have done.

 

“ ENOS!”

 

The chamber amplifies his voice and adds an echo. At last I turn in accordance to his will. The leather on my feet slides about the metallic floor, drawing out a soft hiss. In the turn a hanging end of a cloth moves against my face, but the rest of it is bound to my head, where the length of it is wrapped once, twice, then left to hang. I like the soft color green. Light moves across my cheek in a golden panel, illuminating amber flesh. Soon, a gray-blue eye. A nose, mouth, the whorls of an ear, the line of a jaw, the curve of a neck, the feathery spill of hair lying against it, flowing along the descent to the shoulder, the burgundy of a coat with cream-colored lining. I dress closer to the time in which Methuselah and I were born than he does.

 

He and I stare at each other, my eyes half-lidded. We don't seem separated by the length of bridge and colored steel between us, or the soldiers that kneel at his feet, ready to fire. All around, the secrets glow.

 

“ ...Enos, what are you doing?” he says. Throwing out an arm in his emotion, Methuselah cries out, “ This place is forbidden!”

 

I laugh softly. “ Which is the whole point,” I say. Looking back, I lifted a hand to brush the back of it against a solid object that cannot be seen, yet it is there. I feel the coolness against my skin. “ All that is forbidden...is but a secret that no one must know, to keep them innocent. Not knowing is innocence.”

 

“ Enos...”

 

“ I will strip the world of its innocence. Rather than being born knowing nothing, mankind shall know all from the first. They will enter this world knowing all the dangers and sorrows. When infants cry, it won't be that they're hungry.”

 

“ Enos...” As usual Methuselah is easily horrified. “ Why?”

 

The question they all ask, the answer they never have. I suppose it's for the best.

 

“ Enos!”

 

I grin. One hand is thrown back, slapping against the object behind me. For a moment they all see a creature that is a machine grotesque in its size and purpose, illuminated for them to see. After that they can't hold back, not any longer. Panic and terror are wonderful causes of impulse. Gunshots sound in each its own individual blast, rapidly gathered together.

 

I do not possess an immortal body. When the bullets hit my form thumps against the object behind me. I crumple. I fall as if I mean to sit down, sliding against the object behind me. Suddenly there is cheering in breathless relief and half-believing; so the devil falls! I can see their shadows dance as my vision begins to blur.

 

Pain...nothing compared to what used to be inside me.

 

Breathless cries precede Methuselah. He lifts my head and my shoulders before they too can fall, and asks again with a look of pain, “ Why? Why did you do all this? Enos, why did you do all this...simply to make the whole world hurt? We have never done a thing to you!”

 

Lies.

 

No, my hazy mind corrects me, truth. No one has ever done a thing to me. No one.

 

“ Why?” He cannot fathom the reason why. “ Enos!” He's becoming insistent. Poor Methuselah, always having to know. “ Enos!” I look at him as my life drifts away. A breath comes quietly, unhampered by blood or weakness.

 

“ I wanted to be kind.”

 

Enos stares, unbelieving.

 

It had been much clearer that day.

 

I will never regret anything I have done.

 

I never envied Methuselah, but as quiet and timid as I was I still had a quick temper. That day Methuselah angered me with his foolhardy righteousness, risking his life simply because someone, anyone, asked him to. I told him he was a fool, people were just being lazy and using him to face the challenges they themselves could so easily take. He was babying them. DID HE THINK I COULD SEE HIM BLEED FOREVER! But Methuselah didn't care, he didn't care at all about my misery.

 

That was my mistake.

 

We stood on the cape that day, the place untouched by frequent admirers, but that day we had witnesses. On another day those witnesses came with friends, with family, they took me away and beat me until there was a lake of red. Do not touch their Savior, they said, do not show anger to the Warrior of God. How dare I be so presumptuous, how dare I act as anything above a shadow. DO NOT TOUCH THE HOLY ONE. Do not raise one's voice. I did not deserve to be in that presence. How dare I be in that presence. How dare I, how dare I, how dare I.

 

It was then that I learned...no one had the desire to be kind. How I yearned for someone to treat with kindness and comfort with love, but I had no one, no one at all! No one would look at me, no one would see me, no one would accept me for who I was, instead of desiring that I be their perfect ideal in every way, even if I would know them for but a single minute! What did I have to lose? No, what did I have to gain? I had nothing, and it would never be anything different.

 

I threw it all away, the shyness that caused everyone treat me with scorn, the desire to be kind. Releasing every emotional inhibition, I desired madness that would take away my awareness of this world. I could not be hurt by what I did not believe existed. Somewhere along the way...I forgot about it, and I enjoyed what I was doing. It didn't matter if I remembered what reality was. Who would care and scold me? At least, with everyone hating and fearing me, they saw me! They really looked at me. By being what I detested most, I got what I wanted.

 

“ Enos.” He feels my life leaving, what remains of it. Methuselah shakes me. “ Enos!” His face is just like mine, exactly like mine, because we were born together, one after the other, two of one. Somehow my fingers have managed to reach the hair so like my own. We have both lived much longer than normal humans, a thousand years at least, until our hair turned white with the faintest sheens of golden brown. Yet otherwise we are as young as that day everything changed. He as blessed, I as cursed, not as a twist of fate or a touch of classic drama, but by our own choices that we made while knowing full well the consequences.

 

Well, I did. I'm not sure that Methuselah has yet realized that there is danger in caring for others. You have to be careful not to do everything for them. Let the people suffer the wounds they can survive.

 

...Well, that is my reason. I wanted to be kind, but there was nobody for me to be kind to, and later on no one wanted me. I was the devil incarnate. No blood was spilled, but I did such evil. I want to cry, but God has never heard my prayers. Perhaps I selfishly did too little to grant them myself. Perhaps it's all my fault. People have always made me feel so.

 

Oh, God, if only for this moment, somebody tell me, even if it be a lie, that it wasn't my fault back then, to be shy and worried and wanting to be kind. Tell me that, though a coward, I desired to love with everything I had. Tell me that I was human. TELL ME THAT I WAS LONELY!

 

“ Enos!” Enos...

 

All I had was loneliness. All I had was the pain in my heart, it was the only thing that never left me, and it made my mind clear. Though the world may curse and bury me to be forgotten, I knew what I wanted, even if it would never exist for me and only for the rest of the world.

 

I so badly wanted my brother to stop bleeding and be clean of that hot and frightening red. I was so scared that he would die. It didn't matter if I only ever saw his back, and he never turned around to show me his face. He was in pain and that had to stop.

 

I will never regret anything I have done.

 

Even if no one knew I wanted to give somebody the love that I had. Call me the devil! If he doesn't exist, then I will take up the role. It doesn't matter. I have loved as I have lived, with all my heart and longing, my hidden pride. I will never regret anything I have done, because I already have enough regrets. I was, as I am now, only myself.

 

...There I stand, alone on that flowered cape. Have you, like the world, already forgotten me?

 

Reviews

[Taylor H.]

I really loved this story. It was a little confusing at times but this was very intersting. Is it like a story abotu a god brother and devil brother? great job