Blood of the Stars...
I walked along the gravel drive
for many a mile, until I came to a site--a grave site. Here I sat and watched
and waited. Many an hour passed while I sat, but finally, as of someone
in the distance, I heard a faint voice, followed by an echo. Turning about
I saw a beautiful young pagan, sitting atop the brick wall, a young woman
at his feet, begging, pleading for her release. He sat and he listened
to her entreaties, but smirked at her sorrow. While I watched, intrigued
by this sorrowful scene, I heard her cry:
"Please, please! You've gotten
all that you desire, you have no more need of me! He is gone! You have
gotten what you wished! Release me! Oh Heaven above! hear my cries! hear
my--"
"Silence!" cried he, a hard
look of anger coming over his fine features. "Do NOT entreat a heaven that
has no mercy! Do NOT entreat a heaven that denies all desires!"
The girl shrank slowly under
his cold fury, and whispered, solemnly, "take him. Oh, dear Lord, take
him under your wrath."
The pagan heard this, as he
was not meant to, and turned once again upon her. "You have lost your love.
There is no more of him to be found. Do not turn to a GOD that saw fit
to take him. He took him from you. Do not pray and worship a thing that
has betrayed you so."
There was a hard inscrutable
look about him and his eyes as he said this. And, before this look of impenetrability
she rose with a wrath and fury that equaled, if not surpassed his own.
"YOU are the one who took him! YOU are the one whose impregnable
idiocy stuck him down! It was YOUR hand! And now, it will be mine that
strikes you down..." this last was in a near inaudible whisper.
Before her words, his face
had changed from slight humor, to great wrath, to great surprise at the
last words.
He started down after her,
as something stopped him. He looked off towards the distance, into the
sky, and saw there something not meant to be described. The sky seemed
to be closing in around him, stars becoming larger and larger before his
eyes. Only he could see such a thing, for the girl and myself saw nothing
of it. He jumped from the wall, to the ground. But, as his feet struck
the ground, his head struck the base of the solid brick wall.
* * *
* *
His glazed eyes, looking strangely
about, fell on the face of the girl. She looked at him with no emotion,
no anger, no pity, nothing. As he was breathing his final breath, his whispered,
"the stars...." brought understanding to the girl. She knelt by the body
of her tormentor, and thought of the boy she had known. She had always
known he was not right, but she had never dreamed of such hallucinations.
But, now, as she looked at the stilled body of him, she once again felt
pity. This time, not for the plague of his own mind, but for the torture
his soul would undergo.
All of this I witnessed. And
now, as I looked at this sorrow filled creature, kneeling on the cold,
hard-packed earth, I wondered, would she end up as I? I was soon enough
to find out.
By Magdelina Zentz...
© 1997 Magdelina
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