Rise the Phoenix

by Ely Page

  Rodan reached out for the binoculars and Dylan handed them over.

  “Those are other fallen angels,” Rodan said, looking through the binoculars. “They are the last of their kind. They chose Satan over God, Hell over Heaven, and darkness over light. This fight will be the toughest we have had. If we do not get help from Heaven, I fear we will all perish.”

  As Rodan gave his grim view of what may come, Dylan did his best to brush it off.

  “Archers, release the cinchers!” Dylan commanded at the top of his voice.

  Everyone with a bow and arrows shot off the arrow that was made by Leah. It would cut more than stab; the arrow tip would expand on impact and, if it hit in the right place, it could slice the head clean off of a wambei.

  Hundreds of arrows took to the sky, and as they started to arc back down toward Earth, Dylan gave the signal to march forward. The yelling that Dylan heard from the soldiers made him feel that if they did indeed all die, it would not be without a fight—a fight that they all had left in them.

  Rodan quickly ran past Dylan and all the others. His timing was perfect, as the last arrow hit a wambei right in front of him. Rodan jumped over the body and landed in the path of Satan himself. Instead of taking straight to arms, the two of them conversed briefly.

  “Ah, hello there, God’s little pissant,” Satan said condescendingly.

  “We will destroy you!” Rodan said, brushing off Satan’s snide remark.

  Satan laughed the evilest laugh anyone had ever heard. “That’s not going to happen. See, I have all of my demons and minions at Heaven’s gate right now, making sure no one gets out so I can crush the last of the human filth right here, right now, with ease.”

  The conversation ended when Rodan pulled out his sword of gold. He made a quick thrust, nipping Satan’s flesh at the side of his torso. This infuriated Satan, and he used his supernatural strength to pick up and throw Rodan a hundred yards.

  By this time the fighting was in full swing. The wambei were doing their best to try and bite and claw the humans to death. With fighting this close, Leah’s arrows were ineffective. All the humans had become excellent sword fighters, since that was the best way to sever a head in close combat.

  Porter liked to get close and dirty. He had the shortest sword in the whole militia. At just twelve inches in length, it was more like a big knife, but he used it with such force that he could cut right through a wambei’s neck like slicing a piece of bread.

  Dylan ended the existence of three wambei when he approached Satan. Leah saw what Dylan was doing and panicked; she thought that she was going to see her husband die right in front of her. She didn’t know what to do, but that decision was made for her when a wambei scratched her back and then drove one of its claws into her back, leaving her almost defenseless immediately. She tried to crawl out of the way, but she was quickly losing strength.

  Ben saw that Leah was down. “Dylan!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

  Dylan stepped away from Satan for a moment as Jim, Rich, and a few others all attacked the beast at the same time. He looked to where he’d heard Ben shout his name and his heart sank. Laying on the ground was the love of his life, the mother of his children, and the toughest woman he had ever known.

  He was momentarily frozen in shock, his heart stopped. Then Dylan quickly ran for Leah, but he was stopped before he got there by one of the fallen angels. He was spun around. As he spun, everything seemed to move in slow motion as everyone around him, everyone he had ever had called friend, was slaughtered.

  He saw Ben fall right beside Leah. He saw Jim get his head crushed by Satan’s right hand. He saw Andy and his wife killed by an onslaught of wambei. Dylan couldn’t fight his capture. He was paralyzed.

  Dylan was brought before the lord of darkness.

  “You, you are the reason for all of this. You are the cause of Frank’s death, and you are the cause of Alice’s death. You have caused so much pain and suffering that I will not let you take another step toward my home!” Dylan spoke with fierce conviction even though he was unable to move.

  Satan was listening but seemed uninterested. The giant lord of darkness was going in to rip Dylan’s head clean off his body with his bare hands when Rodan stepped in front of Dylan, protecting him.

  “You know something, Rodan?” Satan said, easing up a little. “You are really pissing me off, almost as much as when you betrayed me and fought against our righteous cause, sending me and all our fellow soldiers to Hell.”

  Rodan didn’t show the emotion he was feeling.

  “You could have joined us, and together we could have ruled Heaven for millennia instead of waiting for the disgusting humans to betray their creator and open the gates of Hell, allowing me to wipe them out.” He grinned from horn to horn. “Suicide by Satan has a nice ring to it.”

  Rodan didn’t know where to go with what Satan was saying, and he also didn’t understand why Satan wasn’t attacking him. He decided to play the game and hope that stalling Satan would help what was left of the fight around him.

  “If you needed all the angels you could get, then why let me wipe Eligos from existence?”

  Satan frowned at the mention of the fallen one. “Eligos, sadly, became too much of a liability. He was going to blow the whole thing that the rest of us had been working on since the day your God sent us all to the underworld. Eligos just loved toying with humans. It had become too much of a distraction, so you actually did me a favor, and you are going to do me another one by taking my place in Hell when I ascend back to Heaven.”

  With that, Satan grabbed Rodan by the arms and picked him up. He shoved Rodan’s face into his own, letting the five points of his horns penetrate through Rodan’s flesh. Satan then ripped Rodan’s body away and threw it down on the ground, leaving bits of skin on his horns.

  Dylan saw the whole thing and was horrified. He felt complete disgust and contempt, and Satan looked at him with a satisfied smile on his face. He picked some of the flesh off of his horns and then stepped on Rodan’s body, crushing it as he walked straight for Dylan.

  “You’re next!” Satan said with a deep, penetrating voice.

  Dylan was still frozen. He didn’t know if it was fear or shock or if a demon still had hold of him, but he couldn’t move. He was oblivious to the fact that the only one moving on the entire battlefield was Satan.

  Satan picked Dylan up off the ground and brought him to eye level. Dylan thought he’d seen almost everything in the last five years, but nothing compared to what he saw in the eyes of the underlord.

  There was a flash in the sky in the near distance that stopped Satan’s attack toward Dylan. Soon the blood-red sky and haze that had signaled the arrival of Satan and the wambei were gone. There was nothing but blue sky as far as the eye could see. Dylan wished he could turn his head, but he could barely move enough to breathe.

  Satan looked up at the suddenly bright sky; he then looked back at Dylan with panic. In an instant, Dylan’s mind faded to black. He knew nothing of what happened, but he no longer felt pain, just emptiness.

  Dylan’s lifeless body was thrown to the ground like a rag doll. Satan looked up at the sky again. Fear crossed his mind as a golden beam of light came down and touched the blood-soaked ground in front of him. The two fallen angels had met at Satan’s side. They too were in fear as a single figure started to descend.

  Dressed in the purest of white robes and simple leather sandals, Jesus touched down on the Earth.

  Satan buried his fear and brought out the hate he felt for the son of God.

  “What are you doing here in this cesspool of humanity? I am trying to clean it up!” Satan greeted Jesus as they stood face-to-face.

  Jesus did not answer. Instead, he looked at all the dead that lay around him. It disturbed him greatly to see the carnage that the master of the underworld had unleashed unjustly.

&nb
sp; “How did you get past my army?” Satan asked curiously.

  Jesus locked eyes with Satan. “Our Father dispatched them. They are awaiting your arrival at the final battle,” Jesus said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Don’t you call him ‘our Father’—he is nothing more to me than a tyrant that needs to be removed.”

  Jesus did not respond; he just stood there, toe-to-toe with Satan. Then it was made clear to the fallen angels flanking Satan’s side that the two were in deep, silent communication. That was even more evident when Satan began to appear physically angry, but unable or unwilling to attack Jesus.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Satan let out a blood-curdling scream right in the face of Jesus. Jesus did not flinch or even blink an eye. Just when the ears of the people who were in close vicinity of the scream started to bleed, Jesus put his hand up and touched Satan on the forehead with the palm of his hand. It was over in a flash of bright, white light. The earth shook violently. Satan had disappeared. The two fallen angels quickly followed as Jesus touched them with his thoughts.

  Jesus stood still for a moment. He then turned slightly and held out his hand.

  “Dylan, come with me,” he said.

  Dylan’s lifeless body began to move. Jesus walked over to Dylan, standing a few feet away. He looked over at Hope’s gate. The children and their caretakers were standing there, looking at the one figure on the whole battlefield who was still standing. Jesus waved at the onlookers with his bright, golden glow. The children waved back; the adults, on the other hand, seemed to be in shock.

  With a wave of Jesus’s fingers, Dylan started to get up and move toward the Lord and savior of humanity. Jesus put his hand on Dylan’s shoulder; it was the single greatest feeling that Dylan had ever experienced in his life. So many good, pure feelings flowed through his body it was almost overwhelming. In an instant, the fact that Dylan had been dead just a moment ago was completely wiped from his body and mind like a bad dream.

  Jesus wrapped his arm around a stunned Dylan and led him off of the battlefield. Little did Dylan know, but all of the fighters who lay dead on the ground—including his precious Leah—began to stir. With a simple wave, Jesus brought them all back to life, all but Rodan, who was now in his rightful place in Heaven.

  “Your mother and father were great people with big hearts and lots of compassion,” Jesus said as they continued to walk toward a hill to the southwest of Hope. “I know your grandmother never told you what happened to your parents and that you have spent your entire life wondering what went wrong and if you were to blame. Well, Dylan, you are not to blame. Your parents were missionaries for the church; that is how they met. After they got married, they continued to help the less fortunate around the world.”

  Dylan was taking this all in like a sponge; he’d always wanted to know as much as he could about his parents. His grandma always told him that the reason his mom was dead was because of his father, but she would never say any more than that.

  “After you were born, your mother and father went on another mission to Africa. It was planned to be their last. Your mother didn’t want to go, but she was convinced when your father promised it would only be for a month. It was there that, unfortunately, your mother was raped and killed, and your father was forced to watch. He was then killed during a terrorist attack.”

  Jesus was silent for a moment, letting Dylan soak that in before he continued.

  “When your grandmother received the news of your mother and father’s passing and understood that she would never again get to see her daughter, she was devastated. She laid all the blame on your father for persuading your mother to go on one last mission while leaving you in the care of your grandparents. She turned her back against the church, against me and my Father, and for that, I can’t blame her.” Jesus looked very sad as he spoke. “I honor those who have died in the past for the sake of others, to defend the human race against tyrannical oppression and ultimate death at the hands of Satan.”

  “What about us?” Dylan waved toward the people gathered outside of Hope.

  Jesus looked at all those people and smiled.

  “What about us, the ones who still live now that the fighting is over? What is our purpose?” Dylan didn’t want to discuss his parents. What Jesus said about them meant to the world to Dylan, but he was afraid that he would break down and cry in front of everyone.

  “That is why I brought you out here and away from everyone else—to discuss the future of mankind on Earth.” Jesus turned to face the setting sun; Dylan turned and faced the same way. “I have returned to bring about a new age for humanity. While humans are fallible and it is in your nature to sin, us in Heaven love you so and will protect you as long as you believe in us.”

  Jesus turned to face Dylan again, this time putting his hands up on Dylan’s shoulders. A surge of power or something that felt so glorious Dylan would never be able to explain it, not even if he spent the rest of his life trying, went through his body. It was as if the almighty God had touched him through Christ.

  “There is one final battle far from here. It will be where I lived on Earth. That will be where the ultimate fate of mankind will be decided once and for all.”

  Jesus looked straight into Dylan’s eyes.

  “You, my son, will lead your people until it is time for you to come home with me. There will be peace for millennia. After that time, darkness will return to Earth and consume it.” Jesus changed his solemn tone quickly. “But that is a long time away. Your tribe, your people, will grow and spread, you will help repopulate the planet.”

  “How will we know what to do, or even how to do this?” Dylan asked, unsure what was expected of his tribe.

  Jesus placed the palm of his hand over Dylan’s heart. “You need to follow what is in here. Too many of the leaders this world had in the past followed their own ego, never considering their own heart or, even worse, the heart of someone else.”

  They stood in silence for several moments.

  “If you ever have any doubts, just ask, and I will answer you. But you have to be willing to look for the answer yourself.” Jesus looked up to the heavens. “I must go and fight the last fight now, but remember that I will always be with you and your people.”

  Jesus started to glow a bright golden color. Dylan wanted to ask a thousand questions, but he couldn’t even open his mouth. He was in awe as he and every single person watched Jesus turn to golden dust that blew away in the breeze.

  As soon as the shine of the golden dust was gone, a soft rain started. The rain was a metaphor for Dylan. It was the source of life and, at the same time, it washed away all life that was lost.

  The next day, the rain stopped for a few hours. It was long enough for Dylan and Leah to walk out of the gate, which was left open overnight for the first time since it was put up.

  Holding hands, the couple looked over the plain. Every trace of the battle just a day earlier was gone. They looked up in the sky and saw a double rainbow. When they saw it, Dylan knew the final battle was over and that Jesus had defeated Satan. Humanity would live on.