The Light

            She could hear his voice now, delicately haunting her ears, texturing the darkness that surrounded her.  The whispers were pain, and it no longer mattered whether the words were lies or truth.  She was certain now there had never been a difference.

            A horn triumphed in the distance, and drew away in its diminuendo the ghostly marauders of the fatted Snake with their wicked steel-barbed whips and feral beast-witch spells.  The damp soil beneath her swollen cheeks caught her prayers as it conveyed the invaders’ passage, and then their flight, her heartbeat in her fingertips finally overcoming the pounding of hooves on the earth.  Her lungs burned and her legs quaked as she ascended the stair, and the journey consumed an eternity to the memory of her plummet.  The whispers lied as they told her that the familiar brownhide boot that had crushed her jaw and toppled her into the pit had been an angel.  She withheld a scream as she freed her broken arm from the blouse-sling she had fashioned in the timeless dark below, and with all her might heaved at the rotten oak of the trapdoor. She pulled herself whimpering beneath the ceramic-tile rug, a lump and a husk, a blemish to the perfect order of the time-frozen room.

            The pale sparks of morning sunlight jaundiced the world.  An immutable stratum of ash and dust steadily settled over the bare sawhorse and the iron anvil, the dented tool-bench and the cooling rack.  Two hafts of wood and a single wire tong broke the scummed surface of the oil and ice-water barrels.  The forge’s embers crackled and sent searing black jets outward in a fan to scorch a blue linen soaked in blood.  His blood, the whispers cackled hysterically.  She understood the twisted humor in her husband’s mangled, kneeling remains.  The untouched sword by the door stood alibi to his cowardice.

            Still, she prayed for him. 

            The morning she drifted over the village of Ladrais, a solid ghost awakened to the horror of eternity by its silence.  Rather than the traditional cup, only a sip of the sacramental spirits broke her broken lips as she came upon each body.  Even so, her mind was muddled with drink well before the sun attained zenith.  The whispers echoed the whole of the death chant for every corpse.  She confirmed with mortal voice only one word of each recitation: fallen.

            She found them all, with dizzy certainty, led from each to the next by the call of oblivion and the litany of God Above.  She found them all, as she knew she must.  The Light of God’s Chosen.  It too was a lie.

            With one hand she bundled together brush and furniture, left it in the narrow spaces between the tired timber homes of her Ladrais.  She recalled the warning of the wandering Ecumen, who had four days prior bid and then begged them flee the hungry Snake, who enraged by his brother had set to march to swallow whole the western kingdoms.  The Snake, the winnower foretold in the Lord’s prophecy, the Eternal whetstone of the Chosen.

With one hand she soaked rags and bright summer dresses and collared shirts in smithy oil and bacon grease and painted the walls of the village.  She remembered the solstice visit of the Duchess Belinda vel Grayvorn, witchwife to the Serpent.  How the monarch had joyously laughed at the dirt-painted village children recreating the Great Beginning, and the first Sacred Turning, and how she had broken fast on the first day of autumn with a single breadfruit torn from a raptor’s claws under the iron-eyed statue of Lanai, and how a single tear had slid down a flushed cheek as the royal had whispered to herself in the quiet darkness how cruel it was that such glorious heathens should perish.

With one hand, she collected together an open vessel for each member of the village, and brought them to the church sepulcher to be filled with the Heat of Life, and carefully poured the volatile liquid into each beaker and chalice, each decanter and basin, and allowed the vaporous souls of her true family to escape their earthly confines into Heaven.  She summoned her own soul, old creature that it was, and demanded of it the memory of her grandfather, who with his solid ash cane and his somnolent eyes would speak the future into a child’s ear and transmute the terror she had always found there into something more honest.  “Spare no concern for the Snake, Yula,” he would say, “It is the Serpent you must always fear, for the Serpent is a creature of mystery and deceit, of the wondrous beauty of human viciousness.  The Snake is power only.  The Snake merely strikes.  It is ugly.  The Serpent, though, the Serpent corrupts, and it is breathtaking.”  And then he would tamp out his pipe and draw nebulous figures in the still smoking ash, and speak of the duty of the final Chosen to spread God’s Truth to all men.  “Yes, Yula, even the Serpent must hear of it.  Especially him, for…” and here he made a low theatrical pause, and with a flourish swirled the viscous smoke that hovered over the figures, then descended into them, altering them into the shape of men, “At the heart of that Eternal corruption, more fundamental even than its darkness, is change.  The Serpent’s element is motion, and nothing, not even our Lord’s power, can move the heart of man as purely as the Serpent.”

            With one hand, against the dying sun, she set fire to Ladrais, and watched as her world burned.  She sat placidly as the flames lashed her skin and burned evanescent patterns into her eyes.  The roar of the flames drowned out even the whispers in her mind.  The church exploded, shards of colored glass and rock and flaming wood splintered the sky and dug into her skin.  She did not flinch. 

When the flames finally died, the smoke choked the stars, and she could see nothing.  The silence of the charred city, the absence of motion even in the air, only enhanced her inner torment.  She was beyond shivering.  With certainty, it was frightening to be alone in the dark, but how much more terrible it was to be alone in the Light.

Author's Note

Does the repetition in the final paragraphs sound awkward? Is too much backstory given? Too little?

Any other advice always welcome.

Reviews

[DreyaArt]

Well, I must say, at first I was transfixed,it really called to me, but as I hit about the middle I kind of started to lose interest. Like I felt really confused as if I were stumbling around in a daze or something. Not saying that the writing isnt good, its just, to be honest I didnt even read paragraphs 4-second last. I read the last one. sometimes i do that though just because I get the drift of stories really easily. But this one, I was just confused so I wasnt really paying much attention.
Maybe just try to explain things a bit better? like, why was her cheeks swollen? and what on earth is the dark and the light? like she fell, at the beginning, she was running up stairs to a trap door? but then thats where I was just like..lost.
anyways good writing though

[Omegax45]

This was very deep. To answer your questions, it feels like that time was moving too fast around the end. Why did she burn her village? Was her husband dead, or alive and had fled in her time of need? It's still pretty good, though.