1866

‘And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on that great Day’ - Jude 1:6

There comes a point when you dream about it, when the drill of the memories infect your mind when you sleep, piercing down through the skull and weaves into all of what the mind wants. The urge to look through it but in the end of these dreams, I always burn them. I burn every telescope before I can look through it and I then awake.

However, in waking dreams, I’ve ripped telescopes from mens hands even to the reverberation of begs and shouts from their mouths to keep it as their flow of value. They share secrets: lies for the price of 2 Thalers. Their houses are removed from the foundation of the earth with more reverberations of their wives and children as a punishment for having one a telescope and a spread of lies. This is my duty to complete as a finger from the hand of the emperor. They were looking upon the angel of god as those who do not know him.

“The devil! The devil!” They cry as I drag them to the stake. I hold their hair tight as feet and knees scrap across the ground. If such were true, why do they wish to view him? Such an enemy of man should be shunned and removed from the earth as do his worshippers; the ones who blaspheme god in his name. This is not about preserving perfection or glory but disrupting lies and false beliefs.

“He whispers to us to kill our brothers, sisters, all! I beg you! I beg you to see! May god forgive you! Beg him for forgiveness!”

I do not, for this is my redemption. My honor and my glory is in the work of the lord. The fires blaze with intensity which melt down the metal and glass, which sear the skin off bone, pulling screams from strained throats. Metallic tubes deform and crinkling in the heat, cracking the lens inside both human and man-made things. No insights and no tongue for lies to roll from.

Rumor of such liars mostly leads to nothing but the punishment of the rumorer. However, we listen and for this new rumor, I go for myself. For this man was furious with righteousness.

The beasts of burden carry my and my men out into the countryside where rumors of a telescope is located. A man from where this rumor comes rides with us and for a moment I doubt his allegiance to us but our men are enough for an ambush of peasants and that alleviates inner tension.

The sky is dark from the cover of rolled up clouds that intertwine and a day which comes to his end. Torches come alight as we come out of the twilight. “There!” The man pointed out to a small house on the flatlands in the shallow deep blue of dusk. “They are there!”

I have my men ransack every house in search of more while I, and the man, come to the main house of question. His wife is the first to come out with a rifle aimed at us. 

I take it, she’s hesitant to bring harm; weak with doubt.

I move in. I come face to face with a man I once knew as a friend. Man of my youth, parted from a fork in life long ago. 

I snatch his arm and pull him out with little resistance. 

“You will see it and when you do, you’ll come to realize your faults.” He says to me.

No. 

No I will not. I know what is in the sky; the last star which has been said about it. The reason I long for my wife is a simple one: those who corrupted her mind with their accursed lies from those who follow the opposing force in the sky. She had to reconcile with a lost mind and for mercy, I took her to the sea with words of flattery and driven intonation then fired a rifle into the back of her head under a starless clear sky. I begged myself to end this all but my only redemption is to make sure that no other shall lose their cognition and soul in a veil of lies, looking through that telescope. I was praised, hailed as a man of great loyalty by the emperor himself and the men of my league. If true or not, I will stand by the righteousness I give to the world where no man shall corrupt it.

We burn the house down, including the rest as well as a great statement for their possession and allegiance. In a moment of confusion from whom I got the telescope from, I tuck the telescope into my satchel then return back. I know not why a man of another age has gone so far astray from common ties and upon my curiosity, I harbor great danger for myself.

Through the night, I glanced at my satchel on my shelf while listening to the night rain beat the ground outside. The bag sits crinkled before many open and empty cubbies. I groom my whitened beard with steady fingers while nothing but the prospect of utilizing it crosses my mind. The prospect is most entertaining.

Tonight is not the night and so I wait for the next. The next day is just the same as the rain falls, and the weeks go by until the first day of 1866. A new year with turmoil spreading across the country that when I come into my space again, I take remembrance of the satchel, untouched with an urge to be opened. I take it and handle the content inside. It’s cold to the touch and easy to handle so much so that an overcoming urge to raise it up and peer through influences me to bring the small end to my eye. I look through the telescope. I scan the sky. 

Everything is enlarged in an unsettling way. Details that seem impossible at this distance become seen. Cracks between bark of a tree, feathers of a bird’s still wings, and a sky whose blue is lost to the corruption of new colors of which soon is overcome with black.

As a wonder of why my lost friend had done such a tragedy, I hold up the telescope to see the sky and I come to deny what was before my eyes. No one angel but five of them. Five set in a hexagonal formation with peculiar attention. Strange ringed things with too many eyes and too many wings. They are lit without logical tonality but one where there are more directions to gleam in that I do not know of that I am not allowed to see, nor allowed to know.

I see no god in them. They are the gates of hell.

I drop the instrument and back away from their all seeing sight, even stumbling to my detriment, I hear a crack in my knee.

For days, while I sit and heal, I ponder on all I did because in my dreams the search of breaking all I did warred in my mind. Strike the hand that directs where I shall go. Cut out the tongue of my father that taught me. I wondered if I killed my wife for a breath of air when I was in a whirl of winds.

I could not go out, get on my horse and scour for more that revealed something of which I do not know because one glance uproots a decade where doubt fills the cavity. Of what that something is, I cannot know, but I cannot lose my grasp. I will not lose my grasp of all that has developed in me yet what I feel is so strong that when news comes of another liar, I refuse. I sit on the chair with a broken telescope in my dead hands. Hands with no purpose but to invoke thoughts of peering through again upon devils that rule in the sky and why I ever followed them and to my sudden defiance, they questioned; men higher than I.

“You question what god’s angels say?” The response came and I’m thrown in a loop again. In a loop that ties me to an existence of no response from before a revelation.

“Have you mercy on the worshippers of Satan, those who blaspheme god?”

With the voice of silence, the hand of the emperor waves me away and as I’m taken out the chamber, he shouts to his followers; his demons. “The lies of the devil plague the Northern Holy Roman Empire and not one is safe! Not one!”

And now, they take me to the stake and even if I wanted to run, I couldn’t. They’ll take me to the stake with my telescope and long after I’m gone, flowing in winds as ash, I hope one by one they’ll see what I saw. I hope that one sight is the new discovery: doubt. I hope the urge to find for themselves and what they work under plunges deep and I wish it not out of love, just of spite. A spite beset with fear beset from doubt.