Author's Note: Hey fam, I want to thank Youtuber Jacob Geller, Robert W. Chambers for The King in Yellow, and Planescape: Tides of Numenera for inspiring me. A special thanks to PitifulScream97 for their feedback and editing help as well as Silver Channel 98’s Ire of the Pyre which kept the fires burning while editing.
Please listen to this warning. This is going to be unnecessarily cruel to someone who doesn’t deserve it. That’s how it always seems to be with these victims. There is nothing kind about this topic. I cannot portray it as anything else. You were warned. Content warning: Frank depictions of panic attacks, heights/acrophobia, and severe body trauma/immolation.
I startle awake from that fuzzy state right before sleep fully takes me. The hypnagogic effect jerks me back from the threshold between the sleeping world and the waking one like a person about to plunge off a skyscraper. That jerking awake sensation has been happening with increasing frequency these past few weeks. The previous night’s anxiety has finally caught up to me and here I am nodding off on what is supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life. I quietly glance around the room to see if any of my bridesmaids have noticed, but most are caught up in the excitement of the conversation and the elation of the day.
Ashley is the only one who sees.
Ash and I have been together through thick-and-thin. She was the obvious choice for my maid of honor. We had known each other since we were in the 3^(rd) grade. She can tell when I’m out-of-sorts and always seems to know what I need. She waits until my eyes meet hers and she gives me the most imperceptible of nods before gathering up the rest of the party and ushers them out of the room under the pretense of checking on the state of the catering which has been setting up the venue since the crack of dawn.
As Ashley leads out the rest of the bridal party, she gives me an over-exaggerated wink that makes me grin even though I feel too nervous to smile. It’s at times like this that I wonder if my life would have been different if I followed her and enlisted in the Peace Corps fresh out of high school like we had always talked about. Our friendship survived through the trials and tribulations of distance because we knew we would always be there for the other. I was there for her when she got back from the Peace Corps and struggled to reintegrate. Ashley knew I needed a moment to myself and gave it to me.
The cushioned chair suddenly feels stiff and uncomfortable. I stand up, careful not to catch my white dress on the studs of the leather chair. I leave my heels by the ankles of the chair and feel the carpet beneath my feet. Instead of soft, the carpet feels coarse and crusty from congealed mimosas and crumbs. The wedding dress I had spent the better part of this morning getting into feels constricting and too tight around my chest.
I just need a little bit of air to calm down. I can’t have another panic attack.
That uneasy feeling follows me out into the hallway as I creep towards the door that leads outside. I can hear my bridesmaids and mother on the other side of the building. I pass under the banner that reads: “Aiden and Cynthia Welcome You to Their Wedding”. I take a moment to smell the floral arrangement. The hyacinths and hydrangeas are overwhelmingly aromatic, and I suddenly realize how stifled my breathing has become. My heart has started hammering in my chest and despite hyperventilating, I feel like I'm out-of-breath.
It’s fine, everything is going to be fine. I just need a moment.
The door groans out a weak protest as I open it and step out onto the parking lot. The concrete feels warm under my feet. The wedding is still a few hours away and the parking lot is empty except for our cars and quiet except for my rapidly increasing respiration. I can’t seem to catch my breath. I fill my lungs with air and try to slow my racing heart, but I am out of breath. I repeat everything I told myself last night, but it feels hollow: “It’s just nerves. You love Aiden. Everything is going to be fine. You just need to calm down and be happy.”
I love Aiden Fenian. I met him in the medical program in undergrad and was smitten. He stayed with me even after all the trouble I had in Junior year. I remembered him holding me and telling me that everything was going to be fine and I believed him. Aiden stayed with me and three years later, when he popped the question with a nervous voice, I blissfully said yes. Everything felt like the beginning of a happy ending.
So then why am I so nervous?
The concrete is hot under my feet and I suddenly have the inexplicable urge to feel the grass on my toes. I walk from the sun-baked concrete, over the asphalt, and step onto the lawn. The grass is covered in morning dew and feels cold against my sweaty skin. My heart is hammering in my chest and despite the fact that it’s about seventy-five degrees, my skin is clammy and cold. I try to suck air into my lungs, but my dress constricts around me like a python. My heart thunders in my chest as my head suddenly feels light and dizzy.
The weeks of sleepless nights punctuated by hypnagogic episodes merge with my growing anxiety and I feel everything bearing down on me at once. The burgeoning panic attack that I have been struggling with since last night washes over me in waves and all I can do is just weather the storm. My breath comes out in shattered puffs as I desperately try to slow my hyperventilation. The tightness in my chest clamps down on my frantically beating heart like a vice.
I am ruining everything like I always seem to do. I should just ru- No!
I slowly begin counting down from ten. At zero, I promise myself that if I can get it under control that I’ll go back inside and talk to Ashley or my mother. Ten. I am not going to ruin what should be the happiest day of my life by getting too into my head. Nine. I close my mouth and pinch my nose shut to block my airways before I try to breathe through it. Eight. The Valsalva Technique can sometimes stimulate the vagus nerve and trigger a parasympathetic nervous response that can slow breathing and the heart. Seven. I focus on the tightness in my chest and relax those muscles. I slowly work my way outwards by focusing on muscles and willing them to untense.
Six. I focus on my car and its license plate. I read the letters back to myself and try to memorize them in an attempt to draw my focus away from my panic attack and distract myself. Five. I think of three words that start with each letter on my license plate. I feel my heart rate dropping down. Four. I slow my breathing by controlling the inhalations and exhalations and keeping them to set timed intervals. Three. I whisper a mantra to myself that always seems to help when I’m going through it.
“Willows know what storms don’t: that the ability to endure harm outlives the power to inflict it.”
Two. That quote reached out to me from the oddest of places when I was younger, but it resonates with me and that’s all that matters. I know my mom wishes that I took the same comfort in the Bible, but there was always something unnerving about the Good Book to me. Like the words weren’t meant for me. No matter how difficult things get, I can get through it as long as I can persevere and outlast the storm. Bad times don’t last; I will make it through. I just have to weather the torrential rains of my panic and the squalls of my anxiety, and I will survive. One. My heart has slowed down and my breathing is under control. The tightness of my chest is fading like sparks cast from a fire. I blow out a long sigh of relief as the panic attack passes and I’m back in control. I can do this.
Zer-
“You’ll do.”
An all-too familiar feminine voice breaks through the sanctity of my mind. I had tried so hard to forget, but it always came calling gently in the night from the dark. I glance around startled, half-expecting to see someone standing behind me but no one is there. The Voice sounds like a mother calling you home after you’ve been out too long. She will not be ignored. It will no longer be relegated to the back of my mind. It is the Voice emanating from my closet late as a child that preceded many sleepless evenings.
And just like that, my panic explodes into the forefront of my mind. My waning anxiety swells and infects everything around it until it is the only thing left behind. The world is suddenly different than it once was, darker, clearer. My heart leaps into my throat and my stomach drops into a pit. My skin prickles and I reflexively tense as if expecting a strike. I want to sink and crumple under the weight, but I know that if I do, it’ll be the last thing I ever experience. All rational thought is obliterated until only one thing remains:
Run like hell.
I don’t know why I ran. It seemed like the thing I always do best. I explode off the grass, the stone and earth needling and nipping at my heels as I sprint towards the road. My family and friends are left forgotten in the church venue as my feet tear me away from them. The soft skin of my soles slap against the street as I sprint past trees, hedges, and parked cars. I know that if I stop, something terrible will happen so I charge forward.
My right foot catches my left and I sprawl out onto the street, the road rips and bites into my knees and palms as they take the brunt of the impact and scrape skin away. There’s no time to stop, tears well in my eyes as I scrabble to my feet, ignoring the road rash and blood rising up on my palms and propel myself forward. If I stop, I will die. I won’t stop. Can’t stop.
I feel the blood welling up from the dozens of abrasions on my feet that leave little bloody splotches in their wake. Every drive for self-preservation ushers me forward. I have to run, I have to escape. Her notice dogs my every step and I can only hope to flee and evade Her eyes. Something primal pushes me to flee and I follow its command.
My body is drenched in sweat and my muscles burn with lactic acid from their exertion. People have begun to notice me, but they are unable to process everything before I’m past them in a flash. The train of my wedding dress trails behind me like my shadow as my feet hurtle me along the road. In my haste, I don’t know what I look like to the people watching, and I don’t care.
Their judgement is the last thing on my mind as I feel Her influence settle upon me like a funerary veil. The wisps of Her influence lance out and lodge into my skin like dozens of tiny fishhooks, pulling me skyward. I twist away and the sudden sobering pain tears a terror-shriek from me as I continue to manically sprint up the road, praying to a God whose voice I had ignored for salvation.
The burnt-out streetlamps pass overhead in a blur as my scream shreds the silence of that place. Car brakes join the choir of shrieks as drivers screech to a stop at the sight of me sprinting down the road as if I had been set aflame. I whip past them as the agony of my exertion fuels the horror scream bleeding out of my mouth like a baneful banshee. Every atom of my being, every fiber in my form urges me to keep running, and so I must.
I lose my footing and spill onto the street as the road takes the opportunity to rasp the skin from my knees and tear the toenail from my right foot. I twist to my feet and flee like a wounded animal, desperate to ignore the fact that I suddenly feel lighter. My bloody feet punch sanguine stains onto the asphalt as every instinct for survival urges me onwards. I scrabble forward and ignore the honking of horns and the shouts of worried bystanders.
I scurry down the street and round a corner onto an empty stretch of road with a copse of trees lining the sides. Sweat drips down and gets absorbed by the fabric of my dress. My spit is like tar in my mouth and the air tastes acerbic and acrid. Every muscle screams in protest as I continue my frantic flight. To stop is to die. I have to keep going, keep running, keep surviving.
I fall and come to a stop.
I wince my eyes shut, half-expecting my world to explode into a flash of light as my head bounces off the road, but it never comes. Instead, I feel light, almost weightless as I continue onward in the air as if my forward momentum is projecting me along the road’s surface like a bullet fired from a gun. I reach out to try and stop myself from hitting the ground, but I only succeed in my fingertips brushing the earth willfully for the last time. It is as if gravity has forsaken me as I careen forward and upward into the air.
I manage to pirouette and pull myself around just in time to protect my face and head as I careen through the canopy of trees that looms fifteen feet above the earth. The branches beat at me as I blow by them at an alarming rate. I claw out at the last moment in an attempt to find purchase, my heart sinks as the sturdy branch slips out of my grip and is wrested from me.
I continue my upward trajectory and now there is nothing to stop me from hurtling into the heavens.
In that panic-stricken moment, an old Bible verse screams through the rush of adrenaline and terror: “It is a dreadful and terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God.” My fingers claw out, desperate to find something, anything to grab onto before I am wrested from the earth. There is nothing, I am four dozen feet in the air and rapidly rising. I cry out for anyone, but no one can help me now.
I look down, hoping against hope that I’ll pass some water tower or radio antennae, but there is nothing and no one around. The earth continues to shrink beneath me as houses start to look like tiny little matchboxes and clouds begin to loom larger above me like grasping hands. My sweat drips off me and plummets one hundred feet to the uncaring earth below.
I desperately draw the thinning air from my surroundings into my oxygen-starved lungs. I gulp air and rack my brain for some sort of explanation or reasoning for my predicament. I find no answer. I continue to float upwards into the sky with no sign of stopping. I move around and look upwards, half-expecting to see some sort of UFO or whatever tractor beam has me in its clutches, but there is nothing there. Inexorably, I am drawn up into the heavens against my own volition.
There is nothing else I can do, but wait for my ascent to stop. It takes fifteen minutes for me to catch my breath and acclimate to my hopeless situation. In that time, I’ve floated up hundreds of feet and now the red pinto roofs of the houses below look like little red match tip heads. I scream out for my friends and family to save me, but it is far too late. I am already too far gone.
I brush aside the disquieting realization that I am being pulled up in a rapture of sorts. I thought only good people get raptured at the end of days? My mom was the most religious out of all of us. She sought succor in faith after my dad, Walter, had his first stroke. She prayed endlessly and even roped me into a few prayer sessions with her while we waited for her husband and my father to recover in the hospital. Her faith brought her comfort and kept her anchored. It only served to unnerve me.
I remember my mom holding my hand in hers as she read from a handpicked series of quotes and looped through them like beads in a rosary: “Our Lord, we belong to you. We tell you what worries us, and you won't let us fall.”, “Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” I pretended to be comforted, but the words only made me more nervous. They weren’t meant for me. I knew now that I belonged to a Mother of a different sort.
My mom attributed his recovery to our prayers which only served to deepen her faith. It brought control and comfort in her life while it destabilized mine. It felt like I was a sinner in the hands of an angry god who could crush my world at any moment if He ‘called my dad back home’. My reverie is broken by the realization that the air is growing colder the higher I get. Still, I continued to be drawn upwards in rapturous horror. Still, I continued to be called.
I turn my body towards the sun and feel its rays warming my skin as the wind plays through my hair. I close my eyes and imagine Aiden’s warm face. He had leaned in close during the mock wedding rehearsal and told me that we could always elope as my mother tried to ‘guide’ the priest into what Bible verses she thought he should use for a religious ceremony that I already wasn’t too keen on. The moment he whispered those words; I fell in love with him all over again.
Aiden loved me at my lowest, he was there when I dropped out of the medical program after another panic attack drove me into the hospital. Aiden supported me while I looked for work, degree-less and doubting my self-worth, and he kept me going when I would have otherwise sunk into depression. I am ripped from the pleasant memory of who would have been my husband as I hit the first cloud in my ascent.
It isn’t as painful as it is surprising. It is like walking into a damp wall of cold moisture. It beads along my dress and soaks into the fabric, leaving me cold and shivering as I continue floating upwards. It mixes with the dried sweat and slides down to my feet, stinging the dozens of scrapes and abrasions from the road. I glance down at my toes and see that half of the nail on my largest toe has been sheared off in my desperate flight from the Voice. Whatever blood was present has clotted and congealed on my skin. The moisture drips from the scabs and plummets thousands of feet.
I turn from the sun and twist my body so that I’m now facing the earth. While the temperature is rapidly dropping, the presence of the sun is only becoming more pronounced. I can feel it drying my eyes and lips. I can already see my skin starting to get sunburned. I try to shift away and distribute the light so it’s not constantly bearing down on my front half. The city below looks like it has been carved into small grids with winding roads appearing like blood vessels providing the circulation of oxygen to these tiny box-like cells of buildings and homes. I can’t stop imagining myself splattering to the soil should I fall.
An hour passes and I am drawn up further. I try to pull what little oxygen I can out of the air. As I draw air into my lungs, I feel the pressure shift and my ears pop as my body struggles to accommodate the barometric difference. How much higher can I go before it’s too late to ever return? What is going to kill me first? Is it going to be exposure as the sun saps me away into nothing but a dehydrated husk dying from exposure or asphyxiation as I suffocate amongst the stars? I try to brush that morbid thought aside and focus on something else, anything else. I fail and spend the next few hours slowly rotating in the air, trying to shield myself from the over-bearing sun and curled up in myself trying to stop from shivering as the air slowly grows colder.
Why did I go outside? The thought breaks through the fugue. I rub at my chapped lips and feel my slowly reddening skin seethe in response to the stimuli. None of this would have happened if I just stayed inside. I would be saying my vows and kissing the love of my life, but here I am. A bitter laugh cracks out of me and sounds like a loose bolt rattling around inside a radiator. In my dehydrated and exhausted state, I realize that running always seemed like the thing I did best.
Before Aiden, relationships were short and bittersweet. They flared up like lit matches and burned away and went cold just as quick. I withdrew emotionally before they could get too serious. I hid from dreams and opportunities. I couldn’t even look Ashley in the eyes when I told her I wasn’t joining her in the Peace Corps. I ended up calling her a week before she left and told her I wanted to get a college degree instead. I dropped out of the medical track in college even though I was passing all my classes after I had my tenth panic attack. I keep asking myself, why do I keep doing this? Why didn’t I let people get close to me? Why did I hide my light from the world?
I wasn’t fleeing from them; I was running to Her.
The thought shakes me out of my fugue due to its alien nature. I know it came from some deep part of me, something that I hide away, a spark inside me that I try to smother. A Voice that I try not to listen to, a Voice that I try to forget. I had succeeded in forgetting about the Voice that whispered to me from the dark of my closet. Almost two decades of denial and childhood fear return with the memory of that motherly tone.
I cast that thought back into the depths and turn away from it. I spin back to the sun, wishing for another cloud to pass through in the hopes of wetting my lips if just for a second. I realize that doing so would drive me one step closer to hypothermia by making my clothes damp, but my dehydration still makes me wish. I drift off and desperately try to ignore the Voice beckoning me, calling me home.
I jolt awake and open my eyes to the horrors beneath me. In my daze, I momentarily forget that I am suspended miles above the Earth and a scream erupts from my chest as I remember my predicament. Vertigo washes over me and I find myself uneasily swaying in an attempt to balance my equilibrium. The world rocks and weaves and I feel my stomach sloshing with the shifts. I fail to control the nausea and the sick spews out of me and drops like a lead ball downwards as something that is bound to ruin someone’s day.
I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth and can taste the acidity of the mimosa mixing with the gastric juices from my empty stomach. I focus my attention beneath me. The city below me is so small, the area now looks like the strike pad on a tinderbox that is waiting for ignition. The aberrant thought sparks concern within me. Why did I think that? I tell myself that it’s stress and horror, but the fact that that description came readily to my mind doesn’t bring me any comfort.
I attempt to ignore my reddening skin or the tarry and swollen feeling of my tongue in my mouth. I try to not notice the discoloration creeping into my frigid fingertips. I tuck them under my arms and curl around myself to shield myself from the encroaching cold. I don’t know if it’s the lack of oxygen, but somehow I still continue to rise higher and higher. I should have asphyxiated already, but still I persist.
I am still alive because I still have use to Her.
This time the thought cannot be ignored or explained away. I shouldn’t know that, but the knowledge still exists. The comparison of cities to kindling brings everything into a dark light and in that moment, I know my purpose. It’s too late to scream. It’s too late to pray for salvation. It’s all over but the crying.
It is a terrible thing for a person to fall into the hands of a living god.
I find myself being turned towards the sun against my volition. I will my eyes to close, but She demands that I bear witness. In the distance, I see the gift She is going to bestow upon me, Her brutal benediction. They drift down from the sky like rain. In the dozens of droplets, I can see something off-white, slightly yellowed. I am unable to move, to flee, to escape.
I watch as a drop settles on my skin and rests there for a few seconds before the liquid rolls away, leaving the yellowish fragment on my skin no larger than a snowflake. I wipe at it and watch in confusion as the substance turns a small section of my skin gray. I become aware of three sensations in rapid succession. The substance smells strongly like garlic. I watch as a gentle wisp of smoke rises up from the material on my skin.
And then I feel the fire.
Everything happens at once. The fragment sparks to life and turns into a raging coal of chemical corrosion that licks my skin with tongues of flame. I feel a sudden moisture on my skin as three more blessings are bestowed upon me. I quickly brush off the smaller drops and feel them smear across my skin before they flame up in a brief flash of pain and flare out just as quickly, leaving tiny blisters from the heat with singed skin.
Her Voice tells me to count down from ten. It’ll be all over if I can just get to zero and keep myself together. I need to focus on weathering the storm. All fires eventually burn themselves out. I just need to persevere. I lie and tell myself that as I look up and see hundreds of marble-sized gifts lazily floating down to me from on high. Unable to move, I am forced to bear witness to Her glory.
Ten. A yellowed ember lands on my left forearm and the liquid evaporates almost immediately, leaving a molten marble directly on my skin. I try to peel the sizzling and crackling material off of me and I can only watch in horror as the searing substance stretches like gum and clings to both my arm and fingers as it reacts to what little oxygen exists in this space and ignites. It stings, it clings, it burns. It’s a sticky fire. It’s become a part of me and I cannot escape.
Nine. I slap my hand down on another cinder that has landed on my right knee that has just caught fire and watch in relief as the flame is smothered as it singes into my palm. I slowly pull my hand away to try and examine Her blessing closely, but the instant I stop suffocating the ember, it re-ignites and continues to sear into me. She has given me a blessing, a baptism by fire. She has given me a choice:
I get to choose which parts of me are protected and which are burned away and reduced to molten slag.
Eight. The condensed inferno bursts with a dry pop and casts fractured burning, burrowing cinders from my knee onto my hip and calf. I slap my hand down onto my hip and knee before they can break apart into other fiery fragments. I wince as the flame is snuffed out, but I realize the instant I take my hand away, the blessing will ignite again like a phoenix rising from the ashes. The fire refuses to die.
Seven. Irritating smoke blossoms from the newly created crater in my calf and inflames my eyes and stings my lungs. I manage to break free and twist my body away from the sun and face the city miles beneath me in an attempt to escape the ethereal assault. I am engulfed in smoke and can’t see beyond a few feet. It doesn’t protect me as I feel a golfball-sized ember impact slightly below my right shoulder and begin to burn and eat away the skin on my back.
Six. In the time it takes for me to register the burning and burrowing sensation, it is too late to stop it. I can only watch in horror as the yellow sign sinks into the flesh of my hip and chews away into my abdomen. I dig my charred fingers into the ragged hole and manage to pull out a large chunk, but it smears and sticks onto my skin before it begins to react with the air and burn anew.
Five. It’s impossible to smother the half-a-dozen different flames that have begun to burn around my body. My dress serves as fuel and soon I am wreathed in fire. I burn like the sun. I try to scream, but the inferno engulfs my voice and I can’t hear myself over the din. There are no words for the agony I am experiencing. I writhe and roll, but the flames have embraced me and refuse to let me go. My tears evaporate along my face before they can reach the fire that has swallowed me.
Four. I watch in horror as a light leaks out of my abdomen and I realize that whatever has gotten inside me is still burning away like a coal mine fire. Through the agony, I numbly recognize that I am being consumed by the flames. I am being swallowed and burnt away. Through the torment, I suddenly feel a white hot pain bubble up deep in the hollows of my abdomen. In that moment I wish I voided myself because now instead I feel it boiling and roiling inside of me. The ire of the pyre gives no quarter, no mercy.
Three. I watch as my right foot stretches away from my body and points to the earth below against my own volition as if it longs to touch the ground once more. I realize that the heat is contracting the tendon and that is why my foot is moving on its own accord. Before I can react, there’s a sudden pop like a log cracking in a campfire and my foot suddenly goes slack as the tendon ruptures.
Two. I shouldn’t have run, now I never will again.
I see another tongue of flame descending upon me, but I can’t react. I am held in place. My skin and muscles are rendered innate by the high heat that engulfs me. An ember tunnels into my left cheek. I slap at it, but I am too late as it eats through the skin and begins burrowing into my tongue as an unimaginable heat flares up inside my mouth. My attempts to remove the yellow sign only serves to smear the yellowed symbol across my face forever marking me as Hers. There is a loud POP! as the high heat cracks something inside me. A tooth explodes like a popcorn kernel and sends cementum shrapnel slicing into my gums and the soft palate of my mouth. I scream and it only seems to fuel the fires that burn around and within me as I am consumed in every sense of the word.
One. Mother! Hel-
I find myself floating ensorcelled in an obsidian starless sky. I am in the court of Mother Night, waiting for my pronouncement. Her benediction has passed over me and now all that’s left is my penance for denying Her all these years.
I float in the inky blackness. There is little left of me except charred crusts and blackened bits. There is no light in this place other than the gentle glow coming from within me as I smolder and molder, but I no longer feel the heat or the agony. My nerves have been burned away and whatever made me me has been reduced to ash and cinders, but I’m still here.
Still weathering the storm. The power to withstand pain always outlasts the ability to inflict it.
I gingerly flex my fingers and watch hollowly as the blackened tissue flakes away and reveals now-yellowing bone beneath that longs to reach out and feel flesh again. Whatever is inside me will soon get its wish. It will touch upon the lives of thousands, millions in a cruel chain reaction. There is nothing left of me other than what little spark remains inside me. I have been transmuted and transmogrified into something truly terrible that longs to show the world its light.
“I yearn to burn. I am incandescent!”
The darkened iris of an entity unfathomably large unfurls before me and regards me with disgust like I was a flea. No matter where I look, I cannot see the end of Her vast pupil as it stretches out into infinity and blots out the heavens themselves. I am a mote of light amongst her tempestuous torment. I am naught but a cinder in her firestorm. Her baleful gaze falls upon me and the weight of Her acknowledgement crushes me.
She speaks to my broken form: “My sweet child, why did you forsake Me? Why could you not bear witness and give awe? You averted your gaze from Me. You were derelict in your devotion; you faltered in your faith, so I have come calling to you gently as I have always done, like a mother to a prodigal daughter. You wanted to use My gift, but you denied My due divinity. We are going to show them something that they cannot look away from, that they can’t deny. You will bring My blessing to them all and they will all see My light. No more fears, no more strife. No more running. You will all shine like the sun and then you can all rest in the perpetual night wreathed in smoke and swaddled in cinder. I am going to use you for illumination purposes.”
There is no further delay in my sentencing. My fate has been settled and all that is left is the execution. I ran and hid my light from the world under a bushel. Now I am going to be made an example of. I am going to be used to shine a light into their darkened lives.
Like a fallen angel, I am cast shrieking from the heavens; I am a blazing meteor plummeting to the earth like wormwood.
The
clouds
whip
past
as
the
world
rushes
up
to
meet
me
at
an
impossible
speed.
I
scream
and
the
wind
tears
my
voice
from
my
chest
as
the
fire
accelerate
inside
me,
fed
by
the
wind.
My
last
cogent
thought
before
my
world
explodes
into
a
bright
flash
is:
Why
did
I
always
r
u
n
f
r
o
m
l
i
f
e?
I slam into the earth whose embrace I’ve yearned for after what feels like an eternity of agony. There is a loud pop like a log on a campfire as I break apart and become thousands of tiny embers that are sent into the sky that will soon float back down to rest amongst the kindling of this world. There is nothing left of my being except sparks waiting to convert the unfaithful and apostates.
Epilogue[]
Ashley stood outside the chapel and waited for the return of her best friend. She just needed a moment, but Ash knew she’d return. She always did. She didn’t know what made her best friend such a nervous wreck about everything, but she would always be there to pick up the pieces when she returned. That was what friends were for. Cynthia surely had her reasons for running, even if Ashley couldn’t understand it, she would stand by her friend and wait for her to come back.
The others had left long ago. Aiden was the last to abandon his vigil. Some days, he waited for hours on end for his betrothed to return, but she never did. He held a never-ending watch for the woman he loved to return to him and explain why she had left him at the altar. He returned daily as if he were expecting to see her car missing from the parking spot where it had begun to gather pollen from weeks of waiting. He left with red-rimmed eyes, a hollow man, promising that he’d call her later tomorrow to let her know he was alright. He wasn’t.
Damnit Cynthia.
Ashley breathed out a heavy sigh and cast her eyes upward at the dawning sun. Above her, a soft snowflake fell from the heavens and she caught it on her hand. It wasn’t snow, it smeared and left a gray ash on her fingers that smelled like garlic. She watched in confusion, and then horror as her skin began to bubble and she felt the light of Mother Night settle upon her soul.
Soon we will all know the light of Mother Night.
Written by EmpyrealInvective
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