The Deceiving Scene

“Elizabeth, no!”

But Elizabeth ran from the sacred grounds. She did not listen to her sister’s calls. She did not, because she was overtaken by a feeling avalanche. All she could think was she had to find him. She had to. She couldn’t lose him like she had lost her brother. She. Could. Not.

The wind trashed her coppery loose hair, and she pushed them away as she ran, casting glances over the buildings’ ruins while people’s shouts and heart-stabbing wails cut through the air. A black demon's head crushed beneath the pile of bricks and dark vile-looking liquid seeping through it snagged Elizabeth’s jade eyes. A shudder passed through her, but she didn’t halt her run.

She looked for him everywhere. Shouted his name, but he didn’t respond. She knew the battle was over. The speakers had announced the seven years of Antichrist turmoil was finally over. But where was he? Where was the sole man she couldn’t admit caring for, but did, was?

“Marco!” Elizabeth continued calling resolutely, trying her best not to falter. “Marco!”

But at last, she stopped. She stopped because she saw a familiar hair and bronze skin beneath the bricks. Shaking and trying not to think of the worst, she made her way toward the body. Her heart was like tides crashing onto the shore against her ribs, menacing to escape it any minute, so she clenched her chest.

It can’t be him, it can’t be him, it can’t be him, Elizabeth repeated constantly.

Approaching the body felt like hours when it was actually seconds. As she stood there, she couldn’t yet recognize it. The body was crushed as much as the demon she’d seen before. All she could see was dishevelled hair of deep brown and a left hand.

But then her heart sank.

On the man’s wrist was a bracelet. A bracelet she had recognized because she remembered the time when she’d made fun of it acutely well.

It’s my lucky bracelet, he’d said once she inquired him about it. Mom bestowed it to me and told me it would bring me luck.

Do you believe that?

Of course. He smiled boyishly. My mom said so.

What a mommy’s boy, she teased.

Elizabeth tried to swallow the lump clogging her throat, but couldn’t. Her eyes were already in the watery state, but she couldn’t yet take it as given. She couldn’t accept the idea of losing someone she hadn’t have a chance to confess her true feelings. It wasn’t fair. She refused to believe it.

As she knelt before the body, with trembling hand, she touched the bracelet made of aventurine stone. Quickly, she withdrew her hand and clenched her chest with both hands this time. She sobbed and dropped on her buttocks, grasping at her bosom tighter as she succumbed to tears she couldn’t control from leaking through her closed eyes.

She condemned the Bible for making the Antichrist invasion a thing.

She cursed God for letting the death take not only her brother from her six months ago but now Marco.

She chided herself for not being genuine with her feelings when she’d had the chance. They would forever stay unvoiced.

But most of all, she blamed her cowardice. She could have fought as well, and at least her soul would have left the earth, too, and be with her loved ones. She couldn‘t have, however, amassed enough courage, and now remorse may forever burden her heart.

She attempted to pull herself together. The least she could do was to uncover his body, to spare time for others who would do it eventually. She inhaled deeply and exhaled through a shudder, but one by one, she heaved the bricks.

“Lizzie?”

For a second, she halted her work, but she disregarded the possibility of hearing his voice—that sweet tenor. It couldn’t be real, it must have been an illusion. She continued heaving the bricks off Marcus’ body as thoughts entered her mind. Is he speaking to me from heaven? Am I going mad? Did I really hear his voice, or was it a figment of my imagination because I want nothing more than for him to be alive?

But then she heard her name being called again. “Lizzie.”

Her hands were shaking, her heart was an open bleeding wound, but as she felt a heavy hand land on her petite shoulder, she went taut, and her movements stilled.

“Lizzie,” the man repeated.

As she looked over her shoulder, right up at the man, at first, she couldn’t see him. The sun was shining too bright behind him to make out his features. All she could see was the shadowed figure of a tall, strongly built man. But once her red-stained eyes got accustomed to the dazzling light, her heart plummeted into her guts.

“Marco?” Her voice was shaky and weak as aspen, but it reflected all the desperate hope lingering in her heart.

He nodded, and she rose to her wobbly legs. Immediately, she threw her hands around his neck, crushing her bosoms against his firm and warm chest. She breathed in—into the smell of sweat and pine and something acrid. It was him. She knew with her every fibre that it was him.

“Lizzie, why are you crying?” he asked.

Indeed she was, sobbing painfully into his chest. She couldn’t answer even if she wanted when the tears were choking her.

He took her face into his sooted hands, and she met the concerned to the bone honey eyes she’d thought she would never see again when she’d discovered the bracelet on the crushed man’s wrist. “Lizzie... please, stop crying. It pains me.”

She tried to suppress the tears, but that hardly helped when thoughts were passing her head of what-ifs. What if Marco was actually dead? The minute she’d thought she lost him forever was the most tormenting one than she’d experienced throughout her whole life.

“Lizzie... please.”

She drew a composing breath. “I... I thought I’d lost you.” A confusion crossed Marco’s face. “I thought the man was you. It was wearing your bracelet. I... I...”

Lucius remained to be confused. “You thought you’d lost me and you cried?”

She nodded.

“But I... You... You hate me, Elizabeth. You said yourself it wouldn’t hurt if I was drafted when there were only Christians' assumptions of the invasion.”

She had nothing to say to that. She, too, recalled the words she’d said when she was watching the news with her family, including Marco, because he was a good friend of her brother.

“Liz, why would you cry if you loathe me?”

She averted her gaze.

His hands slid down her arms. “Liz... look at me. Please?”

Please.

She forced herself to look at his eyes. A sentence was weighing the tip of her tongue. She couldn’t tell him that she’d cried because her sister would be upset her dead brother’s friend was dead as that would be a big and unnecessary lie.

“I don’t loathe you,” she gave in. “I never did. I wanted to hate you, to loathe your irritating grins every time you caught me looking at you. That dimple on your left cheek. The wrinkles on your forehead when you are contemplating something.”

“There are wrinkles on my forehead when I’m contemplating?”

“You didn’t know?”

He laughed and to Lizzie that was the most angelic sound after all the horrible events that had happened over the past seven years.

“So what does it mean?” he asked, turning serious again. “If you don’t hate me? Don’t loathe me?”

“Well,“ she sighed. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“It’s obvious what?”

“That I have fallen for you?”

He went silent. He was at a loss for words despite if he’d known where her little speech had been leading to all along. Meanwhile, Lizzie grew uncomfortable, and regret of opening up to him was gradually blooming in her.

“Hey!” someone shouted, and Marco’s attention diverted to the man. “Will you join us for a dinner Jakob is planning after we’re done with sanctifying the dead, Marco?”

Marco looked back at Lizzie and tucked the loose strand of her fiery hair behind her ear. “No,” he said. “I have a celebration of my own to attend. The celebration of my feelings being answered by a girl I’ve loved ever since she robbed my heart.”

For the matter of fact, the man hadn‘t heard anything Marco had said, but as he witnessed his lips pressing against the girl’s he didn’t know lips, he got a signal to walk away. And as the seven years of Antichrist intrusion on earth ended, there began a new life.

A brand new, laid with lies and hellfire life because once they embraced, Marco’s pupils dilated until there was nothing, but flames flooding them while his smile promised the end of humanity.