A black blade split through her body and cut into Nuri’s abdomen before he could dodge the point. He cried out and fell to his knees, holding his stomach as black blood spilled onto the floor.
“Even now,” Colt continued unabated. “You can end your suffering through violence, and it would be a just end for your foes.”
“Self-defense,” he muttered, struggling to his feet and hopping back just in time to avoid a slice with the black blade that would have ended his life. “That’s what you mean. Self-defense is permissible.” He scoffed bitterly as he parried successive blows from two of the wraiths, who it seemed could no longer see or hear Colt. “Then Omega has no better justice system than the courts of Man.”
Colt shook her head sadly while Nuri shouted and went on the offensive yet again, clutching his stomach as blood dribbled onto the stone floor. “You still don’t understand. It’s not self-defense. It’s sacrificing some of your purity and goodness for the good of others. It doesn’t matter what form it takes so long as the one performing the sacrifice has a broader perspective of the action’s ramifications. That is why only Hidria are capable of purveying Justice and Truth in the galaxy. Not solely because their form gives them superior combat intuition and abilities, but because humans and humanoids are not possessed of souls capable of understanding the essence of the universe.”
As she moved toward him again, Nuri backed away, sensing another surprise attack from the Watchmen while she distracted.
“What is the sacrifice, then?” he demanded. He limped dramatically. He knew he couldn’t last much longer against the four of them. He simply didn’t have the strength, and the Watchmen were formidable foes, indeed. Their prowess was the scourge of peoples throughout the galaxy for a reason, although Nuri supposed the Called had committed far more atrocities in their short history than the Watchmen in that same period of time.
“The sacrifice is of your selfhood. You must be willing to die for those you do not know, even for those who have let the Evil One twist their hearts and minds.”
Nuri caught a swift jab from the nearest Watchman and spun off nimbly enough to bury his laser blade in the creature’s back. The hideous wraith collapsed to the floor with black bubbles frothing from his mouth, gasping for breath.
“You must be different than them,” Colt continued, gesturing toward the dying Watchman and the three that remained. “You must only kill those things which will cause substantial suffering to the galaxy, not those who seek to offend the Divine Infinite with words, ceremonies, or preferences. They are all innocent in His eyes because it is their human lack of comprehension that prevents them from knowing God and seeing the Truth of His ubiquitous, omniscient presence. They cannot know the nature of Omega because they are utterly incapable of doing so. Why, then, should they be punished?”
Now that he understood the fundamental flaws of the Duri order, Nuri didn’t believe people should be punished for dissidence, even if it came in the form of direct mockery of the Holy of Holies. But he was also tiring of the charade and specifically the performative nature of Colt’s lectures. He was beyond weary of the trials and couldn’t understand why she chose to prolong his suffering and prevent him from gazing on the face of his Creator at last. The supplemental data, he thought, could be covered once his identity had been ascertained.
“Hidria kill with compassion, empathy, and humility based on their broader understanding of creation.”
He danced away from two charging Watchmen and blocked the ensuing strike from the third.
“Do you understand now?” Colt pressed. “Do you see how it isn’t self-defense? Do you see how trivial the perceived sins of Man are in the context of infinity? Do you see the responsibility you’ve been given?”
“Yes,” Nuri grunted, shouldering one of the three Watchmen backward and spinning into a kick so powerful that he felt the creature’s bones crack beneath his foot. Just as he raised his blade to finish the stunned demon, however, Colt sprang into action. Before he could process her movements, she twisted his arms behind his back and held his humming laser blade a centimeter from his throat.
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. You are still like the Duri, trying to rid yourself of an inconvenient distraction.” She withdrew the blade and stared solemnly into his soul. “They will show you what it means to sacrifice, though. They will show you the true meaning of misery so that you know how to recognize it and prevent it from infesting Omega before we all reach the endpoint and are reborn.”
He began to mouth a protest, but she opened his chest with the laser blade before the words formed on his lips and threw him to the floor.
Gasping, he lurched against the wall, trying desperately to stay a step ahead of the Watchmen while his life fled through his stomach and chest.
“You destroyed me,” he choked. “Why?”
One of the Watchmen grinned cruelly, then struck him hard with the hilt of his black blade, sending jolts of pain and broken synapses through Nuri’s body.
“I told you,” the first Watchman laughed, lifting his head by the hair and spitting in his eyes. “Before the day was over, you would see Tscharia.”
Colt’s form wavered and disappeared. He drifted into unconsciousness soon after. The last thought he had before the Watchmen dragged him roughly down the hall, cutting little triangles out of his back as they went, was that the Duri Masters had been right all along. The danger of the trials was falling victim to Colt’s blade. He’d worried over it in the beginning and known not to trust her, but he’d let himself be diverted from the true nature of his mission.
Has it all been a lie?
20
On the morning of the trials, Nuri walked along the riverbank alone. It was a ritual he’d performed hundreds of times since he’d arrived on the mountaintop, but this walk was different, and not just because it began a full hour after he normally completed his route and returned to the cabin to start his lessons. It was different because he suspected it would be the last time he ever looked upon the surface of the river. There was no room for personal indulgence or reminiscence after one had answered the Lord’s summons. If he succeeded in the trials, therefore, he would have no reason to visit the planet where he’d trained in the ways of the Called. The greater galaxy would be his proving ground and his sole occupation. Likewise, if he failed the trials and survived, he would be relocated to one of the Duri military facilities on a staging world and aggressively expand the reach of the Duri Order until he outlived his usefulness or an enemy blaster outlived it for him. Either way, his training was complete as of that morning. His life as he knew it was over.
One final visit.
In another hour, he would enter the sacred temple on the forbidden mountain. A host of attendants in ceremonial garb would escort him from the main chamber to a crypt in the deepest recesses of the mountain where he would lay across a cold, stone altar. A series of sterilizing fluids and opiates would be inserted intravenously at strategic points in his forearms and brainstem. After that, his vision quest would begin in earnest beneath the watchful eye of his Duri Master. A bittersweet watch, to put it mildly. It was to be their last spiritual journey together before Nuri was transformed and a new recruit was brought in for the Duri Master to break.
And then I will be Hidria, he thought.
And what if you fail?
He frowned and crouched beside the flowing water to hear its taunts more clearly, but he was not deterred. In the years that the river girl’s voice had dwelled within him, he’d grown accustomed to the challenges arising from the depths of the cold water. His walks were undertaken as much to center his conscience towards her objectivity as it was to purify it, and hers was the only voice of dissent in his life. Her ideas mostly made him uncomfortable, occasionally angered him, and almost always directly contrasted with his deepest-held beliefs, but they were refreshing in their own way. Though he never would have admitted as much to the Duri Masters lest they deemed him weak of faith and pr
one to undue acts of mercy to the unworthy, he considered it important to have some experience with the humanizing aspects of the heretics if he was to fully understand them. His Duri Master had always warned about the dangers of viewing the cleansing victims as anything more than direct threats to the Divine Infinite, but Nuri thought he would be a blind soldier indeed if he didn’t recognize the strengths and weaknesses of his enemy, and he saw no merit to blindness in combat. Understanding may have creaked open the door to doubt in more than one Called soldier through the years, but Nuri didn’t see how it could be avoided if he wanted to survive.
The Duri Masters do not understand the way you do. They do not look their victims in the eye as they perish, and when they do, it’s after the souls of the heretics have begun their journey to the Omega Point.
Nuri shook his head. No, he said firmly. Not to the Omega Point. After they’ve begun their journey to Tscharia.
The condemnation had once been nothing more than reflex while his mind was still in the process of molding to the Duri teachings, but now he truly believed the sentiment behind them. All enemies of Holy God were bound for Tscharia, and all enemies of the Duri were enemies of Holy God.
“And how do you distinguish between friend and enemy? Where is the space for innocence in between? Shouldn’t there be a spectrum even in the strictest of religious laws?”
“There is no in-between. There is no spectrum and there never will be. If you are not for us, you’re against us.”
The girl sat beside him on the river bank and touched her naked toes against the surface of the water. “What has become of you? You once questioned the Duri teachings. You rebelled against their hypocrisy. By any definition, you were against them. Should you have been killed outright for your unbelief?”
Anger stirred beneath the perpetual stoicism he affected when his face was exposed, but he’d come to expect the emotion whenever he engaged the girl, who was no longer truly a girl. Sometime during his own journey from an angst-ridden boy to a devout servant, she’d transformed into something else entirely. A woman, surely, but more than that as well. She no longer even approximated a human entity in physical dimensions. She was a specter.
Nuri said nothing.
“How do you gauge the threat level of a child in these heretic colonies to the will of God?” she asked.
He exhaled slowly and stared into the water. “Nothing can threaten the Divine Infinite, least of all a child.”
“Then what is the purpose of the cleansings? If no one can threaten God, then what to God is the dissent of a flea? What are you killing for if not the Divine Infinite, who requires no help from creatures like yourself?”
Again, Nuri said nothing. He had learned better than to address every provocation she threw in his direction. Therein lay the path to his Duri Master’s crisis of faith through The Divine Incendiary, he knew, a failing which was more and more difficult to turn a blind eye toward as his adherence to Duri law grew stricter. Someday, he would no doubt be forced to reveal his Master’s weakness if the sin persisted, but he hoped he would be beyond the reach of such trivial matters by then.
No sin is trivial in the eyes of God, he thought.
Somewhere far beyond the veneer of radical ideology slathered over his conscience, the rebellious Nurisarma wondered how that could be true since all men and women were sinners by nature.
Are we all bound for Tscharia, then?
Where is the redemption in that?
“How can men decide what offends God? How can men deem the minutiae of colonial law a direct threat to the omnipresent influence of the Divine Infinite? If the existence of conflicting ideologies so offended His delicate ego, would He not eradicate the threats Himself?”
“He does eradicate those who offend His Holy Name.”
“He doesn’t,” the specter insisted. “Men do.”
“His Called warriors,” Nuri agreed. “Men and women charged with the sacred task of purifying the galaxy so it may be reborn.”
The specter rose from the riverbank and stepped into the water again with her back turned. She waded deeper as he watched her go. “This will be the last time you see me this way, so please listen and understand. The Divine Infinite cannot be threatened nor offended. These are constructs of Man.” She glanced once over her shoulder. The electric blue glow of her pupils made him shudder, which was no small feat given his training. “If you believe in an entity capable of creating all things in all realities, then you cannot possibly believe such a being would be susceptible to the spears and bullets these so-called ‘heretic’ colonists hurl at you. It is your ego and your doctrine which prevents the unification of the galaxy. Man cannot purify any space or any soul, only the Divine Incarnate, but communion is another matter.”
Nuri said nothing. She waded deeper into the water until only her glowing eyes showed above the surface. In another moment, she would be nearer the shore of the forbidden mountain than his seat on the riverbank and her words would be swallowed by distance.
“You can only be purified through utter transformation, and you can only be transformed through knowledge of God and the universe. Remember during your trite ceremony that you cannot accomplish anything but through surrender, and if you do, you may find your path regardless of the meddling ego of Man.”
Trite?
Nuri rose and angrily cast a stone into the shallows. “Your heresy goes too far,” he growled, emboldened by the solemnity of the trials and his own pride at being chosen for the vision quest to find God at the heart of reality.
She smirked maddeningly and floated back in his direction. “I ask again, what to God is heresy? Who decides what constitutes a threat to the Divine? Would you kill me for mere words spoken with a human tongue? Wouldn’t destroying a creature into whom God Himself breathed life run counter to His interests?”
“You speak beautiful nonsense. Leave now before I’m forced to turn you in to the tribunal. There is no truth in your poison.”
“Only because your understanding of God and religion is limited to absolutes. Like the Duri, you’ve falsely intertwined religious institution and politicking with reality, and that leaves no room for the interstitial space where knowledge of the Beginning and End dwells. What to the Divine Incarnate is the method of worship and thanksgiving? Is it worth killing over?”
She floated toward the forbidden mountain again. Her form began to dissipate before his eyes.
“What, to God, are the Duri?”
He waded into the shallows himself, desperate to catch her before she disappeared so he wouldn’t be left with the sickening rot of doubt pooling in his heart, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. Once again, she’d left him devoid of argument.
“The Duri are human, and like all humans, they cannot know God. We are all corrupted by a lack of His perfect context.” Her form was little more than a whisper on the wind, a slight discoloration in the morning sunbeams, but her voice was as strong as ever. “To survive the trials, to know God, you must not be human.”
Hidria, he thought. I must be Hidria.
By the time he opened his mouth again, she was gone.
Nuri said nothing. Instead, he returned to the cottage in silence and prepared himself for the death of his old life.
21
For a while, he simply floated through space.
He had the sensation of being dropped down a long flight of stairs, passing out of the turquoise luminescence of the ancient temple into a pit of darkness which gradually changed from black to red to orange, and then his consciousness, his sense of self, expanded over nebulae in the heart of deep space. He felt his brain flex again. His skull struggled to keep pace with the rapid growth but fell miserably short. From beyond himself, he watched his head burst open from the strain and expose the pulsing gray matter beneath. The pain was extreme but the clarity that accompanied the expansion was equally formidable.
Has it all been a lie? he asked, again hoping that Colt would respond.
; But he was alone in the endless vacuum, doomed to spend eternity in a state of simultaneous expansion and separation.
Not eternity, he realized, focusing on the pull of his body. A force moving towards something greater. Until we all reach Omega.
He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant but he knew it was true. He felt it at the very core of his being. He was no longer bogged down by the constraints of human comprehension or the necessity for an explanation of the impossibility of eternity, of an entity with no beginning and no end. For the first time in his life, he truly realized a critical component of knowledge was not necessarily the retrieval of facts but the mysteries and questions themselves. Every aspect of creation would always be a mystery to some extent regardless of data and context. Yet another paradox of the Divine, he supposed. He could experience the perfect context of the Almighty and still not know everything there was to know about reality.
That must be why there are so many interpretations of the scriptures, Nuri thought.
He felt the pleasant tug of his new form toward the Omega Point, where everything past and present would be reborn at the end of the universe. He’d always felt that pull at his heart, sending shivers down his spine in small moments when he reflected on the existence of a Divine Infinite, but the sensation had never been as strange or invigorating as it was right then. It was the total reconciliation of intuition with genuine knowledge. For millennia, the expansion of the universe had been considered the indefinite precursor to the slow death of all planets, but now he knew the truth.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 24