The Forsaken stole life where so ever they had a mind to. Fostering fear and trembling like an old worn out curse curdled with time. In days gone by living men and women were offered to the Shadows in a desperate attempt to placate their ceaseless plundering of souls. It did no good and the few with courage enough to oppose them were taken in the night, every last one.
Beauseant
I
“Beauseant,” she whispered low, “be glorious, my love, be glorious.” Thin moonlight struggled through cracks in the shuttered window tracing broken lines, white and stark against the dark stone of the chamber as she whispered throatily, “Beauseant my love, be glorious.” The soft light of a glowing candle sheened her hair falling free about her face in a tangle of black and copper-bronze strands. “Beauseant be glorious.”
His eyes strafed her soul his smile cut like a knife aching through her heart.
“Beauseant,” he answered, “be glorious; always.” His voice cracked like old, dry chocolate.
II
The moon stood argent. Dawn not yet a glimmer not yet a sigh in the black sky. He looked at her through tired eyes, fatigue drooped his shoulders his feet felt leaden, his thoughts melancholy. “I wish I could just blow away like a leaf on the wind, like dust caught in a swirl of light.”
“Beauseant,” she said from the depths of their bed, “Beauseant, be glorious my love be glorious before you die.”
“And if I leave,” he said, “if I just turn and walk away will you remember me?”
Candlelight caught in her round, dark eyes shining like damp river stones. “I will remember you,” she husked, “I remember them all, so many,” she voiced sadly “and so few, would that your kind could live as we, but alas seemingly it is not meant to be. Think on the summer,” she said “think on the colours of love we shared. Beauseant,” she mumbled sleepily, “Beauseant, be glorious my love before you die, be glorious.”
He looked down at her sleeping form and thought on how he came to be here and why he could not leave, even though he knew that to stay would kill him, soon rather than late. He did not love her and yet he stayed, dying a little more each time she dipped her head snuggling close her cheek brushing his shoulder as she nuzzled his neck whispering “Beauseant my love, be glorious.”
III
He read history at Cambridge with passion then suddenly, inexplicably he dropped out. His parents, titled and wealthy were appalled. “I can’t stand this cloistered life I lead. I have had enough,” he said, “Wallachia is where I long to be.” He bundled his freedom up in his wallet and ran, wondering not for the first time why no one had made the connection before him. Perhaps, he thought with a thrill of fear, perhaps they did and then they disappeared too.
IV
The history of Eastern Europe fascinated him. Legend said the Forsaken once lived there, roaming the countryside of Wallachia, terrorising the people, stealing the souls of the unwary until, Clovis descendant of Charlemagne found an ancient text written in Greek and Latin moldering in the library of an all but forgotten abbey, lost amongst the towering peaks of the Wallachian mountains, and used what he found to drive the Forsaken away. But that was a long and ancient time ago, and he thought that perhaps at least one of the Forsaken had later returned to its favourite haunt and lived there still, and he had to find it but could not say why; other than it was a driving, compelling desire within. Like a heart lost lover determined to reach his love no matter what distance no matter what obstacles lay between; only, he could not explain why not even to himself.
V
It started in the library, Cambridge dozed in the sun. He asked the librarian, a petite ash blonde with startlingly dark blue eyes if she wouldn’t mind printing out a list for him. “I need to go though all the books on Wallachia for my studies,” he said, blushing furiously beneath her somewhat disconcerting gaze.
“No problem,” she said with a bright flashing smile, and a few moments later handed him a list. He thought about asking her out, but lacked the courage to make the first move. “Let me know if you need any help,” she said to his retreating back. He raised his arm and waved in reply before disappearing in the stacks which just about equaled, if you joined all the shelves together, miles and miles of books, but he couldn’t find a one, not on Wallachia even though the printout in his hand listed twenty three by author, title, publishing date, library catalogue number, the number of the stack and the shelf on which it stood. He thought there must be some mistake, as it turned out there was not; even so not one of the twenty three books could be found. He decided to investigate, to satisfy what was now a gnawing curiosity. He forgot about the girl with the midnight blue eyes and her white porcelain skin and as time went by he forgot a lot of things and maybe for a while he forgot his life. He loved history. He would centre his thesis on a little known period of Wallachian history. Oddly no books on Wallachia could be found, therefore with his doctoral thesis in mind he now had no choice but to travel to Wallachia and conduct his research on the ground so to speak. Then suddenly he decided to leave the mellow halls of the university, and without a word to anyone he set out on the freedom road heading for Wallachia with the sound of a wind chime in his head and the midnight blue of wide round eyes staring down at him in his dreams.
VI
Sitting aboard one of the last steam trains still in service as it puffed and rattled its way across a vast panoramic landscape he reviewed his sparse store of information. Of the twenty three writers who authored various books on Wallachia over the course of more than a century, from travel to collections of folk tales, myth and legend to the curiosity of history, religion, war and politics each and every author had later mysteriously disappeared never to be seen or heard of again. Twenty three disappearances spread out over more than a century, well he thought, you just wouldn’t notice would you. I mean nobody would, right. All twenty three writers had traveled to Wallachia and returned to England to author and publish their books and then at one time or another had returned to Wallachia never to be seen or heard of again, and that was just a little bit creepy if not outright sinister. Driven by an almost obsessive desire to solve the mystery he abandoned his safe, comfortable life and set his face toward the unknown. He had no idea why he did that, only that he must, as though some force far greater than he led him on, drawing him irresistibly toward Wallachia like iron to a magnet, like a bird to the sky sealing his fate in some as yet undiscovered tomb.
“Beauseant.” He sighed, “be glorious in fear and uncertainty, be glorious in love, be glorious in thyself, be glorious in life and death and the blade you become in service to something you have no name for.”
VII
The Forsaken stretched voluptuously. “Come,” she crooned, enticing him back to her bed. “Beauseant,” she murmured throatily, her pale breasts gleamed like polished marble in the scented light of a glowing candle. “Beauseant,” she said, “be glorious.”
He moved towards her like an aching sadness in bemused repose. Dreamily drifting, spirit weighted in flesh. I am dying; he hummed distractedly, each night a small death. On leaden feet he shuffled close breathing in the elusive fragrance of her alabaster flesh. Each night a small death, he thought, to the silvery bell like sound of chimes echoing far and away inside his head. She lingered, tasting; blissful in the warm all over sensation of drawing forth the élan vital the life force of her lovely but inevitably doomed lover, each night a small death. “Beauseant,” she husked, “be glorious my love, be glorious in life be glorious in death.”
He smiled at the sound of her voice. He sighed to feel the warm vibrancy of her body in the comforting cradle of his arms. I was drawn here for a reason, he thought, a reason not yet clear, he murmured drowsily, eyes closing in sleep, the fatigued spirit howled in the wilderness in his soul leeching out on her every indrawn breath. Shadows have teeth; everyone knows when Shadows fall in midnight the teeth in the Shadow glisten white as bleached bone in moonlight white as the turned eye in the Forsaken, and, he mused dreamily, the Forsaken is a Shadow; a Shadow in the sun, a sooty razor thin slit in the air. It can slip through where only a shadow can go, and back again, Shadow made flesh, he shivered.
VIII
Wallachia, a riven, haunted time defying land of towering snow capped peaks, swooping valleys and tumbling rivers; an old land of empty castles and eerie abandoned abbeys and chapels of grey weathered stone perched high in impossible places: a land of meadow of meandering stream and farm, a land of towns and cities and slanty bars of hazy green-gold light filtering through hushed cathedral like forests. A land of cruel bloody history, a land soaked in old blood and fear, this very land where Shadows have teeth. An old evil, legends claim was driven away. An evil that said it would return and, be not recognized in the greater evil it prophesied one day would afflict the land. You will stagger, it said, you will nail your soul to the door and drown suffering saints in blood.
IX
There were odd days when his thoughts did not drag, when like clear water thought flowed free and the scholar in him wondered how the world could have gotten it so wrong for so long, well, he temporised, at least since Bram Stoker wrote Dracula back in 1897. Bram Stoker did not understand what he found, he wrote for an audience who expected high drama and adventure along with the prerequisite Victorian shiver and thrill of fear. He wrote for an audience who knew with certainty that God was an Englishman. Long years later Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee immortalised Bram Stoker’s Dark Count in the Hammer film Dracula and the world of books and film pretty much took it from there. But, it wasn’t quite like that, not in the real world that is, he at least knew that for what it was worth, and that wasn’t saying much. Even so for all his thoughts wandered, as his attention drained away along with his life force and the very real weariness of death closed in, he thought on what little he knew and never quite lost his hold on the thread that had drawn him from across the sea to this dread place in Wallachia. (That along with Transylvania formed part of present day Romania, the resting place of arguably the single most cruel and bloody ruler in history, Vlad Tepes III more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler, Drakúlá son of Drakul, being a title rather than a name. [Devourer later changed to dragon in an attempt to hide the true meaning of the word, Drakul.] The legend of the Brotherhood of Drakul [Brotherhood of the Devourer] predates ancient Egypt and is thought to be older than the emergence of upright man.) He was aware of all that and more besides but he could hardly credit any of it, and damn he was a scholar and nothing could be that old, he thought, but apparently it could; and like so many before him he thought wrong. “Beauseant” whispered in his blood, “be glorious”.
X
He was a scholar, he knew things but nothing he knew seemed to be of any use to him. He was dying a little more with each passing day; but he continued to doggedly uphold the very spark of his being knowing, if only intuitively, that he had been drawn to Wallachia and the tower that was somehow not a tower, for a reason. There had to be a reason, he argued with himself, otherwise I am doomed; otherwise I perish snuffed out like a candle and with as little thought. There has to be a reason, but is there, he mused plaintively, sweet Jesus, he thought in sudden alarm his gut swooping, don’t say I’ve got it all wrong else why am I here? He pushed his doubt and fear aside, his lethargic mind clicking into gear. He knew it wouldn’t last. His life force nourished and sustained the Shadow and ebbed away day by day, bone deep weariness of body, mind and spirit increasing, deepening in the wake of his diminishing ‘Vital’ the Áme, the essence of the soul. He wondered if there was something in what he had come to know about the Shadow people since his arrival in Wallachia, some snippet of information he had overlooked that might shed some light, however feeble its glow, on why he was here and the almost paranoid compulsion that drove him to abandon his former life, family and friends to end up in the remote highlands of Romanian Wallachia bleeding out his life force to sustain a creature not even Bram Stoker’s fertile imagination could envisage. There was something fundamentally wrong, as though the place in which he stood, the tower and its immediate environs were somehow out of place in time and space whilst yet occupying space in his own world. He had no training in science other than the obligatory high school physics, even so he was pretty sure that couldn’t be it; could it! But then, he wondered, how was it possible for the ancients to know and recognise what we thousands of years later do not. How do you explain that and of course he could not, but it was there written in stone and clay tablets nonetheless.
XI
The Babylonians named the Shadow Hakul, Shadow that Devours, Shadow of Souls. The Sumerarians (of ancient Sumer) called it El-Hal-Mrr the opposite of God and Nesh-Ne-Wy-Maat, Steals the Spirit or Shadow drinks life. The Assyrians named it Zak-Akkul, Drinks the Soul. The ancient Egyptians carved in stone at Şaqqarah south of Memphis Mek-At-Ar, Fallen from a Dark Star and Ap-Att-Othis, Devourer of Light (spirit) and Apit-Wasi-Bes, Shadow that steals the animation of life. Homer’s Greeks called it Vrykolakas. But it wasn’t, not really, it was something else, something far removed from Stoker’s story and description of the nocturnal terror Count Dracula. Though he did not doubt the Wallachian folk tales had roots in other, far more ancient recountings and writings spanning more than several thousand years.
XII
Beauseant whispered in my blood. It was our first night together; where we met, deep in the forest in the moonlight her pale flesh gleaming veined marble. I did not then understand exactly what she had done. A warm comfortable lethargy stilled my thoughts and my limbs. I lay in the moonlight the warm moist smell of the green forest in my nostrils and my throat. She was beauty personified, caught in falling moonlight filtering down through the trees, pale as bone. It was the first small death. I lay in languorous repose listening as she spoke with credible clarity of things I then knew not of, and yet, for all her strange talk I believed her every word, though I knew not of what she spoke. I lay captive, bound in chains of scented silk and perfumed flesh warm, firm and supple as a young tree, snared in the midnight blue of her wide round eyes that seemed to glow like dark lamps in the pale light of the misted moon. Her lips open and full, dark tresses falling about her face lowering over me with mystic intent her voice soothing to my senses quieting my beating heart. I fluttered then, in my soul like a light blind moth but she stilled me ere I rose and harmed myself, the melodic imprint of her voice leading me on sweetening my senses as I sailed the sea of her voice and words.
XIII
She said. “Beauseant my love be glorious,” and “we of the Forsaken are few in number. None dwell here,” she said, “but I”. She smiled sadly and said, moonlight streaming her hair, “We are an old race, old before the first upright man ventured the savannah. You cannot imagine our time span, your minds,” she chided gently, “seem not yet willing to grasp such, and what your eyes, your very senses perceive, your mind does not and thereby renders yee blind. You have yet to accept and understand your own antiquity and you,” she laughed, “deny it at every chance. One day you will not but not yet my love not yet. Beauseant,” she said, “be glorious and listen.”
XIV
Her words shivered me through and I thought, if so you did not draw me to you, then who or what did and why? The silvery bell like note of a wind chime echoed in my head and for a moment so brief I scarce registered its presence, a faint trace of pale blue light flared behind my eyes and then it was gone, and I thought I had only imagined its presence. A line from an old book suddenly came to mind though I recall not who wrote it, ‘one day I will dream myself away like a wild swan here and gone.’
XV
She said, “we do not sleep in tombs, we are not the risen dead nor can we shape shift to bat or wolf, we do not fear sunlight the cross or the church and garlic is just garlic don’t you know. We are not the vampire in Bram Stoker’s book but you,” she smiled sadly, “might think we are close. We are warm and alive, we are here and when we are not, a razor thin Shadow remains to mark where we stand in the between place. We laugh and we cry we love and sometimes we die. Dead is dead” she said with a secret smile, “or might it be something else, something your science has yet to find, or has found but failed to understand. Time is different for us, you think a thousand years to be a long time. You do not want to know about us, we do not want you to know and live in fear of the day when you come of age and your science is equal to the task.” She continued, her wide, round eyes taking on a luminous glow as they caught and held the moonlight like drifting flakes of snow. Weariness threatened to swamp me in its rising tide, her voice carrying to me across a great distance. Moonlight seemed in retreat, the trees of the forest impossibly far apart one from the other and distant. I could hear wind chimes somewhere in the heart of the deep and the green though the air beneath the trees was hushed and still. Moonlight poured down in rivers and pools of silvery light. It was all so unreal like a dream too vivid, and yet I could feel the hard unyielding earth beneath my body. I did not then know of the small death and the perception shift following in its wake when the Forsaken ceases to draw its sustenance, the very nourishment of God she said, manna, ambrosia of the immortals.
She loved me then, perhaps she loves me still. And when finally the small death claims me, will she love my memory, will she even think of me at all. I like to think so when indeed I can think at all, because it seems to me that I might die before I find out why I was drawn here and offered up like a sacrificial lamb, like a song bird in a cage trying to sing its way to freedom unaware that one day it will die heart broken in a fading song falling down the sky.
XVI
She said, “Soon your scientists will discover a new physics in their study of monatomics and our secret with it. Our śacre benir, our sacred blessing, the very sacrament of our kind, the soul essence we steal from you, the spiritus áme, the animating force of life, to sustain life something must die. One day,” she whispered low and close for all I seemed to drift a world apart, “your scientists will discover a way to create the śacre benir and there will be no need for us to steal life. Then shall we stand forth. And when we stand revealed a thousand years from now we will wish we were hidden again, thin shadow in sunlight. Beauseant my love, be glorious.”
XVII
I arrived at Romanian Wallachia by railroad, an old Puffing Billy chugging its heart out to pull a straggle of coaches, complete with faded paintwork, threadbare fabric, the world’s largest tea urn and delicious sweet pastries.
XVIII
On foot I left the city and towns behind, drawn by some invisible thread ever deeper into the wild scenic beauty of the Wallachian heartland. Following a thin, winding trail that climbed and swooped high and low and ever on. I slept beneath the stars knowing I was utterly lost, and if I retraced my steps the trail would not lead me back again. Oddly, for all I was lost in a wild place I slept without fear. Breaking camp in the golden glow of the rising sun, I lost track of the days in a seamless warp of timelessness, eking out my meagre supplies in the hope that I would reach wherever I was going before they ran out and I starved to death.
XIX
The forest seemed unending. The sun slid toward the west in a glory of rose and gold. I made camp in the warm, hazy light close by a sweet water stream. I saw her then, standing in the light her back to the sun. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What was she doing here in the middle of nowhere, a mature beautiful woman with extraordinary wide round eyes? My heart thumped. I called out but she did not answer and then, though I could hardly credit what happened, she disappeared even as I looked at her. I stared and stared. It just wasn’t possible to do that, was it? I gazed with firm concentration at the exact spot where she had stood and slowly realized I was looking at a thin black line standing vertical in the air, like a rip in the fabric of reality. It was so thin mostly I guess no one would notice it was there at all, blink and you would miss it. And then between one heartbeat and the next she reappeared smiled and said, “Beauseant, be glorious”, by way of greeting and I knew I had reached my journey’s end. But why was I here? I had no idea. She loved me then and I died a small death. Perhaps she loves me still.
XX
I know why I am here. I know why I was drawn, but I don’t know by who or what. I don’t know why I was chosen or if I was chosen at all. I don’t know how I can know that my search will continue or how I triumphed over the small death, or why I seek the Forsaken. About all I can say is that it has something to do with something I remember in a dream. Did I give promise, did I choose to follow a long time ago when God lived side by side with man? Where did the young God go? Did he take my promise with him? Did I promise to follow, is that why he calls? I can’t say I remember outside the memory of a dream but it seems that way to me. It feels right if you know what I mean. “Shadows have teeth,” a voice whispered.
“Beauseant,” she said, “be glorious my love.”
“Shadows have teeth,” whispered the voice in my head.
“Beauseant, my love, be glorious.”
XXI
In my dream I looked at the back of myself. I knew it was me even though I was different. You just can’t help recognising yourself even though sometimes self recognition is hard to confront. I stood naked except for a short, many pleated kilt, dazzling white. I faced out into a hot arid land. The sky stood high and hard like deep blue glass, the sun an aching ball of fire. My legs looked well muscled and strong. Wide shoulders tapered down to a trim waist. A mane of blue-black hair spilled down my back. Thick, ropy muscle defined my upper arms. I stood loose in the heat breathing easy, my hands lightly curled in fists. I carried no weapon yet sensed I stood ready to give battle. I moved forward on the balls of my feet executing a strange sort of part shuffle come gliding motion. I did not know my name.
The land was Sumer and I Sumerian. It was the dawn of time. Strange that I know the name of the land but not my own, perhaps I am known simply as The Sumerian.
I stop my forward glide and wait. The heat of the sun is a comfort on my skin, the coppery hue of which gleams, lightly oiled and perspiring. I am not sure what I am waiting for. The dream moves on taking me with it, spilling down in the hidden well in my soul. Something flickers and shifts but all I can see is a thin shadow outlined against the sun’s white glare. My observation is acute, preternaturally so, the result of arduous training spanning years, a mild sensation of heat gathering behind my eyes.
“Shadows have teeth,” the voice of the training master booms in my skull. “Take it anyway you can. Don’t think don’t feel just let your body respond and it’ll move faster than thought. That’s the trick boy, that’s the secret to surviving the Shadow’s attack. It’s damn near invisible it can shift in and out, you can’t follow you can only wait for it to show itself. It can’t hurt you in its shadow form only scare the love of God outa you. It has to show itself in its physical form to kill and steal your soul. There’s not many up to this mostly we die, but you’re up to it boy, I can tell. You’re maybe special, one of a kind you might say, like maybe the young God chose you himself. But you got to survive your first fight you got to try and use light to bring it down. Reckon if’n you can do that you’ll live to be the death of ’em all in these parts. And bloody good riddance I say. They’ve preyed on us folks with damn near impunity for long enough. The temple priests say you’re the one, now all you’ve got to do me lad is prove it else we’re done for an’ that’s the truth. Stands to reason now don’t it, you can’t fight what ain’t flesh and blood when it don’t want to be and the young God only knows what they are when they’re in that bedamned in between place. Fallen from a dark star they say but I’m damned if I know. They’re killin’ us boy, stealin’ souls and all the lives we ain’t lived. It’s got to stop an’ that’s the truth so you get out there boy. Offer yerself like a bloody lamb and win, cause if you fail its goodnight for the lot of us and that’s the young God’s own truth I’m tellin’ yer. Take it boy, anyway you can but use the light, you can do it. The light’s strong in you, maybe just about the strongest I’ve seen and I’ve seen an’ trained a few I can tell you. You’ve got it to do boy so get it done and let’s get this fair city of ours free of the cursed things.”
XXII
The Forsaken couldn’t care less when upright man spread across the face of the earth. Man was a vessel of essence, a rude uncouth thing no more than that. The Shadows stood apart gazing with rapt contempt when armies marched. Later they looked on in wonder when prayers in stone rose from the sands, marveling at the ingenuity of man to build and shape and destroy its own kind. The Forsaken, uncountable years hoary with their breath, though few in number stood arrogant and disdainful of all humankind. The Shadows did not question why they were few in number, they were the long lived. They owned the earth when man was no more than a grunting beast, at least so they claimed. The truth however was far different. The antiquity of upright, articulate man was a secret millions of years old. A truth and a secret they would never reveal, never write down, though of course someone somewhere wrote it in stone and one day the stone would be found. The Shadow People stood arrogant. It was a mistake but they didn’t know that and when the killing began, they were few in number, perhaps they assumed we would not grow; perhaps they assumed our minds would never accept what our eyes perceived.
XXIII
The Forsaken stole life where so ever they had a mind to. Fostering fear and trembling like an old worn out curse curdled with time. In days gone by living men and women were offered to the Shadows in a desperate attempt to placate their ceaseless plundering of souls. It did no good and the few with courage enough to oppose them were taken in the night, every last one.
XXIV
And so it continued until the young God Oanes came down from behind the Evening Star. The young God taught a hardy few, chosen from amongst the Sumerians, a strange discipline of the mind and spirit. “It is the only way,” he said, “to kill a Shadow and live, yet it be fraught with danger, your survival,” he said, “will ever be a chancy thing. Shadows have teeth and you may only face them when they stand not like a thin slit in the sky”.
Oanes taught us well, even so, many died snared in the glamour of flesh the Shadow doth ever project, the glamour of form and facial feature the glamour of voice and wit. Some few of us overcame the glamour. Some few of us lived to give promise to the young God, his eyes luminous with pale blue light. I think maybe the promise is forever. I think maybe if a Shadow does not take me I will return and return again.
XXV
We did not defeat the Shadows so much as we reduced their number and they feared to lose more. I guess we simply drove them away.
The Forsaken fled to who knows where, to some distant land we know not of, there to start their torment afresh. Who can say who can know what Shadows might do? “Shadows” the young God said “aren’t right in the head”. Time went by and eventually the young God went away. Memory of him remains, even as the terrible memory of the Shadow is remembered in story, myth and legend. We were the first, men of Sumer were the first to fight the Shadow People. Under the aegis of the young God that is, without his aid I doubt a one of us would have survived or come to the discipline he taught.
XXVI
I stand now in Wallachia, a one time scholar of nothing much in particular, facing the glamour that will kill me. A prickly sensation of warm energy, chakra power rising up from within; gathering like an impending storm behind my eyes.
“Come,” she said with the small inviting smile I had come to know so well, “Beauseant my love, be glorious with me, know I love thee full well”.
Beauseant whispered in my blood.
I stared at her lovely face knowing not what to say or if I should speak at all. Tension built inside me until my every sense thrummed like a taut wire. Love flamed and smoked in my veins, an ache like nothing I had known wrenched my heart.
Beauseant whispered in my blood.
And then suddenly it was free, a sliver of sizzling yellow-white light streaked through the air so fast the eye could not follow, only register what was no longer there. It passed through her head leaving no wound to mar her flesh, a weapon of the spirit as I had once been taught. Her face registered alarm, bewilderment marred the blue midnight in her eyes. “Why,” she voiced in dismay, “my, my love.” Her voice broke on a sob. “Oh my love,” she cried out in despair. “Oh my love” she sobbed as though her heart was breaking. Suddenly as she fell back; an eerie, high pitched wailing sound rose up, beating against the walls of the chamber like captive wings struggling to break free. My hair stood on end, my face ashen; the chilling sound all but freezing the blood in my veins. I found it hard to breathe, my heart thumped wildly. The sudden wailing sound stole my courage, and then it changed, seeming to cascade down through the air in shimmering sheets, falling to a low, dirge like keening murmur, the very sadness in the sound weighting it down. A rending sense of ineffable loss tore through me, aching my throat, squeezing tears from my eyes. This cannot be, I thought, why does she not fly at me in rage and fury, clawing, shrieking and cursing my bones even as she dies. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. “Shadows have teeth” drummed in my head. “You’ve got it to do boy, fight or die is the only choice you’ve got left ---”.
But what if we got it all wrong? What if the young God --? Blinding blue light cracked stunningly in my head, --- what if --- trailed into silence.
She smiled, a wan, sere smile, ‘what if’ she seemed to say, ‘love can lift you away, what if the young God fell from a dark star, what if he deceived you. Oanes,’ a terrible smile dragged at her mouth, ‘is the dark inundation.’
XXVII
I caught my breath, my heart slowed from a gallop to a walk. There was a moment then, when I hesitated, when I thought maybe I should pull back and try to think this through. But it was too late maybe it was too late a long time ago when I stepped out on the sand tracking a slit in the air, a razor thin shadow standing vertical in the sun. Maybe it had always been too late.
A sudden vision, of old worn out, sad eyed angels with listless drooping wings, frayed and ragged, lost and lonely, cast out and abandoned trudging the scalding sands to nowhere, flickered and died in my head.
Outside the chamber I sensed the world move on, but within the chamber time seemed to be out of time with itself. There was something here beyond my ken. The stricken look on her face shivered me through. Her body seemed to rise and fall gently like an indrawn exhaled breath. The air shimmered around her. She was lost and vulnerable and oh, the look in her eyes seared my soul with burning brands. I knew then, and knew full well, with a sinking feeling in my gut that she was not evil and never had been, she was just different, the daughter of an ancient, long forgotten branch of humankind. You might think it isn’t true , that it simply could not be, but alas I regret to inform you, you got it all wrong. This old earth born who in some as yet unknown way is related to we who now stand sole inheritors, the single most dominant specie on earth. And yet who has not asked, what other divergent branch of humankind might there have been before us? Did they die out, did we replace them or did they merge and walk amongst us in various guise? Are you sure; are you certain sure such cannot be?
And I the cause of her death; and no, I do not think I am forgiven. I would ask her forgiveness, I crave it yet I stand here and utter not a single word.
She said, “We are not Shadows, we are not the Fallen we are not the living risen dead. We are the People” she sobbed brokenly. “We walked the sundered lands countless millennium before the first of the new born walked upright. We did not prey on you; we did not gift the small death to its last. We taught you much, we nurtured your growth and then you were many and we were few. You shunned our presence, you drove us away. Now, we are the Forsaken the fallen angel in the myth and memory of your kind. Beauseant” she shivered as though suddenly cold, as though all heat fled her body. Her strange midnight eyes luminous with tears, consumed with grief at the sudden shock of my attack, all colour had fled her flesh wan and pale with the sudden wrenching loss. “Oh my love,” she whispered sadly, “what have you done?” Her eyes, those lovely luminous blue midnight eyes held me fast. Tears sheened in the candle glow spilling down her pale cheeks gleaming like drops of quicksilver caught in the sun.
“Beauseant,” she whispered soft as the petal of a rose.
“Beauseant my love I am lost, lost to thee forever.”
“Beauseant,” she whispered low, “be glorious unto thyself. Be glorious my love, be ----.”
XXVIII
The thread tugs and pulls at me though I know not where it may lead.
“Beauseant, be glorious,” echoes in my blood, and like a ghost on my back her midnight eyes and the sound of her voice whispering “Beauseant” will haunt me wherever I go. Like a distant song in the wind it will haunt me forever.
The Forsaken walk amongst us.
XXIX
I did not return to my homeland. I seek the Forsaken. I seek forgiveness. I seek luminous midnight eyes.
“Beauseant,” she whispers in my blood, “be glorious my love, be glorious.”
It unites spiritual wisdom from the East and West to help readers experience Christ consciousness in the here and now. Combining the Oneness teachings of India with a fresh look at the New Testament.
A story with original photography, digital art, and illustration, about Son of Waves, 12 Dolphins to save the planet, David The Visionary on the beach in Tel Aviv, a digital messiah, and an internet of Love. Free PDF download.
