Her flesh continued to rot away into smoke, and that smoke turned the metallic blue Nuri had grown accustomed to seeing in the trials.
She is returning, he realized. This was never the Corpse Queen. This is Colt Incarnate.
She knelt in front of him but her legs were swept away before they grazed the ground. She gently cradled his chin and drew him closer to her glowing eyes. Despite his training and his knowledge that the hideous face before him was nothing more than an illusion designed to distract him from the trials and teach him a lesson, Nuri shuddered and shrank from her touch.
Colt continued unabated. “No matter how hard you pray or train or wish, you will never be able to understand the true nature of God.” She paused as her fingers melted from his beard then swept back into her hair and turned to a brilliant, alluring white. “Not as a human.”
“Who is this?” the alien commander demanded. He turned to his soldiers. “This is not the Corpse Queen. Shoot her!”
The soldiers only stared. They couldn’t see this emanation of Colt any more than they’d been able to perceive her guise as the Corpse Queen. It wouldn’t have done them any good to see her, anyway. Blaster rifles wouldn’t harm Colt, nor any entity from the other realities.
Nuri stood and stepped away from her. “I will not be human, then,” he said. “I will be Hidria.”
Colt had reverted completely to her smoke form. She shook her head sadly at him, stirring the air with half-realized light. “You say you know God exists, but that is not enough. You do not understand how closely knowledge opposes belief. You see them as two separate ends, meaning that knowledge and faith are mutually exclusive, but they are not. Only Hidria truly understand the paradox of faith versus knowledge in this reality, and that is only because they have access to other planes of Truth.”
Nuri shook his head in frustration. “You were sent here to confuse me. It is your sole purpose in this reality. You are here to obfuscate the truth and make me question myself and my faith.”
“That’s how you understand my role because that’s the way that the Duri Masters have described it to you. Just remember that I cannot muddle unshakeable knowledge or faith. My purpose is to pose these questions to you to judge whether your faith is a true extension of self or merely the result of Duri indoctrination.”
“The Duri are dogs,” the alien spat, fuming. “You will all burn with your bloodshed and false mysticism!” He turned to his soldiers and gestured toward the door. “This dog has led us astray. This is not the Corpse Queen and he is not Hidria. We need to leave this filthy place and find the true Queen before it’s too late.”
“What about the stranger?” a soldier asked.
The commander turned back and regarded Nuri and Colt for a moment. “Leave him be. He won’t give us any trouble.”
With that, he left the mausoleum and never looked back. His soldiers lingered a moment longer, watching Nuri and debating if they should follow their commander’s orders after hearing him interact with a being they could not see.
That’s the trouble with faith, Nuri decided. That’s why he could see her and the others weren’t. They lacked both knowledge and faith.
Finally, the soldiers followed their leader into the aisles of tombs, although one of them promptly returned and dropped Nuri’s laser blade and blaster roughly on the ground beside the confused primate sacrifice, who apparently was free to go, as well.
“Thank you,” Nuri said. He felt much more himself now that he was in the familiar presence of Colt’s ethereal form. The panic and doubt that had risen in his chest had receded. He was comforted by the idea that he’d caught up with the right path to God’s infinite divinity somewhere on the cemetery planet.
Colt began to drift toward the lone tomb at the far end of the mausoleum and Nuri retrieved his weapons so he could follow her.
“Do you understand why you were brought here?” Colt asked.
Nuri nodded. “To show me that I cannot meet God as I am because His nature is beyond human perception.” He nodded back toward the entrance as he followed. “The soldiers couldn’t see you because they lacked both faith and knowledge. The commander only had faith without knowledge, but that was enough for him to see you. If my faith is truly unshakeable, I will be able to recognize the Divine Infinite and know His ubiquity, even if I do not know His existence.”
“You claim that you already do have knowledge of God.”
He inhaled deeply. “Misguided arrogance,” he admitted. “Pride dwells in the tongue of the dead man. I thought that I truly understood, but I didn’t. I am still human.”
Colt drifted into the closed tomb. The top slab melted away to reveal a black hole beneath it that stretched beyond his vision. “You cannot know God as a human,” her voice echoed up to him. “To survive the trials, you must be more than human.”
Hidria, Nuri thought grimly.
He closed his eyes and fell into the emptiness of the tomb in her wake, surrendering to the fall even as he realized that he felt much further from his destination than when he’d started the trials with the severed head of the Evil One in his curled, hungry fist.
Prime. I need to figure out how to reach Prime.
But was Prime truly his destination, he wondered? What if Prime itself was an illusion? What if the true reason Colt had brought him to Operandom was because she was a queen of lies and had devised an ingenious, circular argument with no answer to distract him from his calling?
That is why you must have faith, Colt’s voice flashed into his head. Whether your faith is in me or your own instincts, you must follow that faith to its logical conclusion. You can have doubts and still be strong in faith, but you cannot be weak in faith and juggle your doubts without crumbling beneath the weight.
“Nonsense,” Nuri groaned in the blackness. “Drivel.”
He supposed she was right.
The darkness swallowed him whole.
14
It was morning. The entire village had assembled in the temple for the Duri Master’s sermon. As his pupil, Nuri was required to assist with the rituals preceding the service and then dismiss the congregation once their minds had been freshly saturated with what he liked to call scarecrow wisdom, or thoughts which appeared full-bodied but were nothing more than broad generalizations of relatable struggles.
Ghosts of the pulpit, he thought as he straightened his garments and prepared for the service. The spiritual equivalent of hot air.
Granted, Nuri had only been released from disciplinary cleansing the prior morning. He was still bitter and the wounds were fresh on his emaciated body. Therefore, every aspect of the Duri Order was subject to reflexive cynicism, and even with the threat of torture and starvation looming just as large as his scars and bruises, he found it difficult to keep those opinions to himself. In fact, the fatalistic urge to detail aloud the contradictions in Duri doctrine had nearly overwhelmed his survival instincts more than once that morning.
Maybe I’ll call it out during the service for all villagers to hear.
He imagined the fleeting seconds of bewilderment among his superiors, and for a moment, the fantasy seemed worth the shameful public execution that would inevitably follow. At least if he died, he wouldn’t be forced to make the choice that kept him tossing and turning each night.
It is not a difficult choice, the river girl assured him.
His gut told him she was right. Yet even on the heels of the order’s brutal punishment, his soul was torn between its purported destiny as a Called warrior and the identity he’d left beside his parents’ unmarked graves on Dublokee. At times, he thought he must escape his de facto imprisonment even if he failed in the attempt, but then he would wonder if God was merely testing his faith through misery. There was joy and godliness in suffering, the Duri said, and so by torturing Nuri both physically and spiritually, perhaps Omega was merely purifying him with greater intensity than his superiors.
At times, the idea of a special, targeted suffering gave h
im pause. Enough, at least, that he dared not venture too far along the path of doubt for fear of retribution. He may not have always believed in the Duri but he believed wholeheartedly in the Divine Infinite and had no desire to incite His righteous wrath, especially through willful negligence of a sacred duty.
The trouble was, unlike many among the Called, Nuri didn’t know what sort of path Omega had laid for him beyond the Calling, and if he dwelled on it long enough, he was prone to interpret any pull one way or the other as the Evil One’s deceit and thereby debate himself into apathy. Since the first seeds of doubt had arrived, he’d convinced himself any decision in which a choice appealed to him was a trap set by the Watchmen, and so even acts of charity made him suspicious of his own motives. There was simply no way to win. If, for instance, he helped an old woman in the market struggling to carry her food, he wondered whether it was truly out of the goodness of his heart or because he wanted to be perceived as the type of person who helped the needy? Was it for the purification of the universe or to stockpile his own credit in the Great Unending? In other words, were his ‘good’ actions driven by ego or selflessness? Were humans capable of complete selflessness in any action at all?
Whichever the case, he always managed to convince himself he was in the wrong regardless because there was no good in him and the realization was terrifying. He felt similarly reading the Old Book with the context of the New Book. Depending on the chapter and verse, he could make an argument that God was either inherently evil or inherently good depending on the reader’s predilections, and so in his weaker moments, he wondered if there was ever any difference at all or if it was merely a matter of semantics.
Heresy, he thought. Yet so long as he was tied to the Duri, there was no way for him to be certain it was not the truth. He could only answer the questions in his soul beyond the influence of the Duri faith.
So leave, the river girl suggested.
It isn’t that simple.
He knew freedom from the order could only be achieved through unprovoked bloodshed which was evil by nature, yet acquiescence to their decrees meant even more bloodshed and becoming lifelong accomplice to religious genocide of the New Manifest Destiny. He saw no benefit in choosing one side or the other so long as he still had his doubts. As with the cleansing missions, he thought it was always best to play it safe. To keep his options open.
Not now, he reproached himself. Distraction was getting the better of him again. He turned his attention back to the gathering crowd inside the temple.
There weren’t enough seats to accommodate the full population of the village, so Nuri had been charged with overseeing the requisition of chairs from the village proper. Although the lack of seating had been an issue for as long as Nuri could remember, the Duri Masters had never made an effort to remedy the situation and he suspected they never would. Doing so would have run counter to their theology, largely owing to the idea that servants of the Divine Infinite were purged through the solemn act of suffering to hear His Holy Word, and therefore, anyone who did not arrive on time to honor God deserved to atone for their sins by standing through the duration of the service. It was a noble fantasy, perhaps, but Nuri figured the order had ulterior motives which superseded the notion of self-sacrifice.
Typically, the order wouldn’t have tolerated such an oversight when it came to a sacred ritual, but the ultimate effect of crowding villagers into the temple three times each lunar cycle with hardly any room to breathe was that the sermons were perceived as nurturing an insatiable community hunger. Undoubtedly, it was the Duris’ aim to quietly strengthen the perception of space within the temple as a valuable commodity, which endowed the faith itself a political economy that further strengthened their grip on the locals. And with each favor gained by a smile or nod or any other display of the preference for which Nuri himself had been flogged and branded, the people were driven further to extort those affirmations. In this case, the Duri Order looked the other way at the sin of preference, for this was how the clergy emptied the coffers of their zealous, confounded followers. As with any religion tainted by man, Nuri supposed, all behavior was permissible as long as you were the one doing it.
Due to the perpetual shortage, therefore, villagers arrived early to secure proper seats. It was a fascinating social experiment. Those in closest proximity to the altar were inevitably allotted premier social status and assigned to the highest echelons of holiness in the eyes of their brethren. Just as inevitably, those who prided themselves on this manufactured yet proportionally irrelevant relationship with the Divine through pew numbers then condescended upon the others, and those in the rear of the church or those who cared little for the social perception of their reverence for the Duri Masters had no choice but to accept this condescension from their betters. After all, they reasoned, these people sat closer to the altar, so they had a better understanding of God than anyone else. In this way, perception of holiness became reality within the hive mind. The men and women in the front pews became the elders, the heresy watchdogs who served the Duri under the guise of serving the community and serving God.
Standing at the rear of the church, therefore, was as far removed from the Duri Master—and God, by proxy—as a humble villager could get, and the Duri Masters were all too eager to encourage that unspoken belief. It followed logically that the lack of proper seating was an issue of supply and demand for the order, one which only thickened their veil of power and mystique. Had there been enough pews to accommodate the entire village populace, any empty seat would have been glaring. Even if the idea never materialized to the villagers on a conscious level, they would wonder whether someone knew better than they did about the rituals and if maybe they were fools for buying in to the Duri theology merely for the sake of a modest life protected by the Called soldiers.
Therein lay the problem, of course. Much like the rest of the human colonists who’d succumbed to Duri theology since its emergence during the New Manifest Destiny, the villagers hardly catalogued or questioned the motives of the Duri Masters once they passed a decree, especially with the Pontificates of the Front Pews shaming them into submission. Through great pain and years of ineptitude, humanity had once adopted a reflexive skepticism to anything and everything related to the Crown government and its Royal Space Armada, yet they forgot those hard-won lessons the moment that they were abandoned on the Galactic Frontier. Now, they simply accepted whatever the Duri Masters claimed the Divine Infinite had told them, no matter how seemingly trivial the shewing happened to be.
Yet how could Nuri blame them? What was wrong with desiring safety or a connection to God? Why would the villagers feel a need to question the lack of proper seating at the temple beyond quiet rumblings whenever they were the ones left standing against the cold stone walls or ruining their backs in the uncomfortable chairs Nuri fetched from the village proper? At face value, they would not have seen a great conspiracy hidden within the mundane discomfort, nor in the assignment of social standing based on proximity to the altar during the tri-lunar sermon. Yet to Nuri, it was another example of the way the Duri Masters controlled the populace in every subtle aspect of life until they were utterly broken. Until they lapped up anything and everything the order threw their way. Until they were too dependent on the order to speak against it.
The trouble for Nuri, however, was that, although he never would have admitted it aloud, he took an absurd level of pride and satisfaction in being included in the rituals. He cherished being front and center in his assigned role for all the villagers to see and know his importance. Put simply, he was proud of his assumed proximity to God through service to the Duri Masters as much as he protested his belief in the Duri Order’s methods (if not their theology).
In more enlightened moments, he recognized how his Duri Master was carefully winning him over with each menial task he assigned to oversee the successful performance of the Duri rituals. Participation was agreement. Despite the decree that praising and reflecting upon the Divine
Infinite should not be done for personal gain, he couldn’t help but enjoy an elevated feeling of self-importance when he made decisions or assisted the Duri Master in public, no matter how trivial the endeavor truly was. In that sense, he understood the Pontificates of the Front Pews. Respect and awe were addictive, and immersing himself in each for long enough got him to believe the external perception of his status was reality. He was Holy. He was God’s Chosen. He was Better.
The Duri Masters enjoy the same selfish longing, he often thought. I haven’t met one among them who joined the order out of a fervent desire to serve God’s interests. Those who did would long since have been silenced by the purging blaster bolts and laser swords of the Called.
Still, was that alone reason to entirely dismiss the basic tenets of the faith? The Duri did a lot of good in worlds who obeyed them, after all, and it was an inevitable truth of any religious institution that it was subject to the corruption of man. In fact, in Nuri’s eyes, a pure faith was utterly impossible. Yet so long as he stood on the winning side of the ideological war in the colonies, he was loath to speak such heresy openly.
“Brothers and sisters,” his Duri Master began.
The murmur of the overflowing crowd died down until the stone temple was silent aside from the steady rush of the river current just beyond the pulpit. Nuri took his assigned post to the right of the altar facing the congregation and bowed his head with his hands clasped behind his back. A light rain had begun to fall over the mountain range, tapping a rhythm off the forest canopy and the rushing river. Faced with such atmospheric profundity, he felt a chill build from the base of his spine to the hackles of his neck: the surest sign of God’s presence he could fathom since it only emerged when he contemplated eternity. Circumstantial evidence or not, it certainly did little to diminish his fear of angering the Duri Masters. If there was even a chance that they had the Divine Infinite on their side, who was he to question the veracity of their doctrine?
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 16