Godly Conversations

A miasma rested over the village, reeking of rot and decay, ominous in its permeability. Upon Wolder's broad set shoulders, responsibility weighed down heavily. He was to anticipate the most terrifying of possibilities as he stared into the mist over the sea. A civilization of mundane peace, generations who had never seen war, men who hadn't touched a blade their entire lives; now they all looked to him for protection.

"Chief." Damian had walked in behind him. In the distance, a conch sounded its wailing cry, announcing blood and death. Flickering lights, over the sea. The time had come. Wolder steeled himself even as a chill ran down his spine.

"We will try to parley first. You and I are going down. Hopefully whatever savages we have to face can at least understand what we are trying to say. Tell the men to keep flaming arrows nocked. If things go south, the conch shall be our signal." They each grabbed a torch and marched out of their makeshift headquarters on the rocks before the beach sands.

To think only this morning Wolder had been looking at the cheery sunshine and thanking his lucky stars. In his twenty years as Chief, they had not encountered warring tribes or had to struggle for resources. The Gods had been kind, and his reign peaceful, as his father’s and grandfather’s had been. 

His gratitude had been short-lived though, as his lady Helena delivered the bad news to him.

The trees and the wood spirits had stopped singing, she said. The light trill that echoed out of the bark of towering teak had turned into a shriek, and the singing spirits had stopped dead in their paths, faded and stunned, mouths slightly open. A bloody hue had overtaken the river, and on the trail back to the village, thrushes and sparrows lay dead. 

All omens of war. 

So the men had done their usual preparations, expecting the Yews or Krauts from the North. 

But then the sun had begun to dim, and the day seemed to speed up, as the sun set hours before it should. The river turned completely blood red, and escaping the lake, began to trickle down into the Black Sea. The sky had turned dark and the dense mist had taken over everything until the people began to fear for their lives and pray frantically.

A threat from over the Black Sea had been unheard of, at least for the six generations Wolder's forefathers had been chief. No one ventured into it and if some of the crazy ones did, they never came back. One couldn’t see the end of it from the shores, and as far as the people were concerned, beyond the black sea was where all black magic originated.

So Wolder stood trembling on the beach, torch in one hand, and the other on the hilt of his blade. He swallowed a lump in his throat and put on a brave face, the face of a leader. He was not one to put much stock in stories of black magic, but he knew that whatever came now was not his friend.

The flickering lights approached, and through the dense mist, Wolder could make out a boat. Someone who looked like a man, thankfully, disembarked, while the other lights remained in the distance.  

“Wolder Gray! Long time no see, my friend!”

Wolder still couldn’t make out the face, but the voice sounded familiar.

“Or should I say… brother?”

Suddenly the face came into the light of the flame. 

“Aegon?”

“Hello, brother!” he said, grinning menacingly.

“Don’t call me brother” hissed Wolder.

Aegon towered over Wolder now; he seemed to have doubled in size. Two massive scars intersecting in an ‘X’ ran over his face.

Damian drew his sword and pointed it at Aegon, to keep him from coming too close. Wolder frowned and said, “What are you doing here, Aegon? And did you sail the Black Sea?” 

“Now, now, is that any way to greet your brother Wolder? I’ve come back with glory, to claim what is rightfully mine!” he said.

“You want to be Chief, is that it? I thought you disappeared into the woods, Aegon. How did you even survive the Black Sea?”

Wolder looked at him with pity.

“Go back to where you came from, bastard. You have no claim! Don’t you dare call it rightfully yours!” spat Damian.

Aegon ignored him and stared down into Wolder’s eyes.

“The people will not have it, Aegon. Let go of this now. You have darkened this day beyond any we can remember for centuries! Come back, let go of this, please!”

“Is that it then? That’s your final word?”

Wolder nodded. Aegon was no leader, the world would burn if he took over the reins. 

“You leave me no choice then. Not that I expected you to give it up gracefully anyway.”

In an instant, Damian blew the conch while Wolder tried to pierce through Aegon’s chest. But he simply brushed the blade away with his arm, drawing a little blood. Flaming arrows shot through the sky at Aegon, and men began to charge onto the beach. 

Aegon stepped backward and threw his torch onto his boat, making it erupt in flames. And as the mist cleared a little, Wolder’s heart sank. Aegon had ten times the number of men he had, all foreign-looking with bluish skin. He had not expected this. Where had Aegon found such powerful allies, what had he offered them to get them here? The men rushed onto the beach while Aegon disappeared into the mist.

Wolder began to chase after him.

Through the mist and the chaos of war, he screamed, “Aegon! Stop this madness! I’ll give you the village, just don’t let more people die!” This was a losing effort and he needed to do all he could to reduce the amount of bloodshed.

He made it to the village in a panic. Helena, and his son Fenyr; oh, he just wanted them to be okay. The village was in utter chaos. The blue-skinned people had made it here too and people were running helter-skelter, clutching their children, as homes spontaneously burst into flames. He cut down as many of the enemy as he could, trying to draw their attention while he looked for his family, but they seemed focused on destruction.

From the end of the road he saw his own home in flames and he rushed in. He called out, and he screamed desperately, “Helena! HELENA! FENYR!”

The house was empty, it seemed. They escaped, he hoped. He rushed out of the house feeling the sting of burn wounds when before his eyes, he saw Aegon.

And head locked in each of arms, Helena, and Fenyr.

“Aegon, stop this!” he pleaded. “We can talk this out, I’ll give in to your demands! Stop your people!”

Aegon simply smiled devilishly.

With one deliberate stroke of his dagger, he slit the throats of Helena and Fenyr.

As the bodies fell limp and lifeless to the ground, Wolder’s eyes went wide and he stumbled over. He drew his sword, and in a singular instant of rage and despair and angst, he decapitated Aegon’s laughing head in one fell swoop.

He clutched his wife and his son close to his body, in tears, their blood all over him.

Still, Aegon’s detached head watched and laughed. His body fell backward, spurting blood out of his neck. 

Still, Aegon’s head laughed.

The laugh began to echo, from the skies and the mountains, from the Blood River and the Black Sea. Water began to rise from the sea in many tiny streams and join the sky, and luminous clouds, heavy with locked lightning loomed over. Explosive thunder boomed everywhere, and the water seemed to be leaving the ground into the sky, as though the rain fell upwards.

Lights approached again through the dense mist, toward Wolder, floating, higher than humanly possible. When they reached the shores, they burst into showers of green fire, and that strange flame fell all around Wolder as he wept. 

Those heavy clouds began to descend at the shore, as the sky fell into the ground. The lush mountains twisted and cracked out of place, to separate from the ground, and then all the earth around Wolder began to crack. The mountains rolled into the embrace of the Black Sea, which rose a hundred feet high to engulf all land.

Men were nowhere to be seen anymore. The skins of Helena and Fenyr began to fall away until Wolder could see every artery and organ laid bare on the earth until they too were eaten up by the soil.

Wolder felt the warmth of life and love become extinguished. The blood of his wife and son and enemy that covered him felt alien, as though it had never existed, as though that which flowed through him was not really life. He was but a puppet filled with unreal despair, and life was but a fragile artificial thing, never meant to be or to breathe.

He could see the mountain through water, blanketed by the black sea, and like the cracks in the earth around him, a crack opened up diagonally in the mountain, and one singular eye appeared, glaring down right at him on his puny little isolated piece of earth floating about among other pieces of water and earth.

Around him, as things continued to disintegrate and transform, he asked in his mind, the one question, “Why?”

And the Eye answered.

“Everything is changing. You are but one grain of sand, in the endless oceans of sands, flowing through the hourglass of time, to be flitted from top to bottom and bottom to top.”

When he got an answer, Wolder became emboldened.

“Why is Everything ending?”

“Everything must come to an end, and new things must be born. Time is but an illusion, it all happens as it is written.”

“What new things?”

“Child, man is but one of the many lives that will breathe here. The age of man will end as the age of beasts ended, and the age of dragons ended, and a new age, an age of new life will come. Fish, perhaps. I would fancy that. As is written, of course.”

“But why did Everything have to end like that? With so much pain?”

“It is written, child.”

“Written by who, exactly?”

“Well, me, of course!”

“And who are you?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I am You! You are Me, and We, my child, are Everything.”

Wolder tried to speak, tried to ask, but he couldn’t.

Silence.

Then he asked, “So now what?”

“Now, Nothing.”

Everything around Wolder began to shift and fade and disappear; the mountains, the clouds, the Black Sea, and the Earth. The Eye looked right into his as all Light died out, and any physical sense Wolder had of his body, his beating heart, his skin and his touch, his smell and his hearing; all disappeared until he could only see, and all he could see was right into the Eye.

Then the Eye closed, and where it was, there came a flickering fire-like light, that he could only see faintly, as though it was behind a half-open door, and he was in a room of dark nothingness. 

But the room meant nothing to Him since he had no sense of place or touch or feel; He was only sight, and all he could see was that fire. 

So He watched that Flame flicker, transfixed, entranced.