The Second Coming, he reflected, then felt the enormity of the phrase which stretched far beyond even his advanced mental capacity as a reborn Hidria.
Colt’s face wavered before him in the blackness of space, then exploded into dust. “And you will soon see why His return will change all things,” she said. “You’ll see how far His Word has reached, to every corner of every universe and everywhere in between, yet still misinterpreted over and over into bloodshed, oppression, and all manner of evil.” She shimmered in the starlight and danced through a gas cloud.
The Great Colt appeared before him once again, but her face was now a rotting skull with maggots crawling through her eyes and mouth.
This is how we all must appear in the eyes of God, he thought.
It was a whole new universe open to his mind, and he needed only to endure this peculiar cosmic suffering to attain it. A trial more terrible than any battlefield or enemy dungeon imagined in the most perverse minds of the troubled galaxies. A sonic prayer emanating from his cries of agony, and hoping that the God of the universe would not turn a blind eye (or rather, ear) to him in his time of need.
“Then show me,” he said.
Her maggot-filled mouth curled into the wicked grin of the first Watchman, and then he was suddenly stretched out in an X on two intersecting pillars with nails pinning his wrists and feet. His shoulders slouched forward, slowly breaking him with his own weight, and his forehead was opened with pincers.
Crucifixion, he realized, crying out in agony when his weight began to violently drag him toward the foot of the pillar-cross and his appendages slipped further into the nails.
He was on a dead planet emanating a dull-orange heat haze, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of aliens of all conceivable constitutions. Each one was in the throes of crucifixion. The flatlands between two short, barren mountains were filled with their screams.
“The Great Sacrifice,” Colt proclaimed. She stood at his feet between the three remaining Watchmen, who were now resplendent in full ceremonial armor with the red, wooden masks that identified them as the Devil’s Honor Guard. They were larger in stature in their own realm and—against all odds—far more terrifying. Nuri was further dismayed to see that the other six Red Masks that Colt and he had slain in the ancient temple were still alive, tending to the hapless souls condemned to suffer excruciating deaths for all eternity.
Which meant he could only be one place in all the universes. The one place distinctly separate from God.
“Tscharia,” the first Watchman grinned, jerking a spear from the stomach of an insect-like alien in the row across from Nuri. He examined the tip of the blade theatrically, attempting to fill Nuri’s heart with dread and thereby summon the screams in his heart. The screams and hopelessness that fed the damned and the stewards of the corpse fields, in other words. Nuri was already filled to the brim with agony and terror, however, even though he finally understood the necessity of the macabre spectacle.
The other two Watchmen from the temple stood on either side of the cross and stripped him naked, brandishing whips they’d left in the acid trenches beneath each crucifix and flicking them at his leg to make him squirm deeper into the nails. His weight drew him further and further down.
“You are not Hidria,” the first Watchman mocked. “Hidria cannot be killed so easily.” He laughed maniacally and the other two started whipping him with the hooked, acidic tips on cue.
“AAAAAGGGGGHHHH!” he screamed, gasping for breath.
The pain was white-hot electricity in his brain mixed with the feeling of black infection. Tscharia’s atmosphere dug into his soul through his bodily wounds with its poison. He wouldn’t last long.
“This is what He endured,” Colt said calmly as the Watchmen took turns whipping him. “This is the final piece of His perfect context. This is the ultimate lesson He teaches about empathy.”
The Watchmen growled whipped with greater intensity. Under any other circumstances, Nuri would have been either dead or unconscious, but Tscharia did not allow for such conveniences among its prisoners, nor would his body go into shock and numb his pain receptors while they were torturing him. He would simply have to endure.
“He came to Earth and told us that the greatest directive of Omega is empathy. To love your neighbor as yourself. And then He demonstrated the greatest empathy, to lower Himself to a corporeal form and experience a despicable death at the hands of those limited by their opinions on the mind of God. To free us. To save us. To teach us the same empathy, and that we do not know better than the Divine Infinite.”
The Watchmen took their black blades and made small incisions in his stomach, then flung acid over his skin. Nuri screamed and began to weep.
“All of these creatures,” Colt continued, unperturbed, “are the Divine Incarnate. He has lowered Himself to the forms of each of these alien species and redeemed them through His blood the same way that He did on Earth. Through that sacrifice, He has achieved the ultimate empathy. The ultimate context. The ultimate knowledge of every brand of fear and agony.”
The first Watchman lifted a massive axe from the ground and regarded it distractedly before his attention was pulled away by commotion a few rows over. Nuri glanced in that direction and saw a few blurs of movement followed by what appeared to be weapons fire, but he was in too much agony to care.
“Now, you have empathized with Him,” Colt said. She’d crossed the aisle to his feet and wiped the blood from his shins with her robe. “Now you have the context of what He endured for the sake of His people, not what He inflicted the way that the Duri do. He willingly fell into the depths of Tscharia and redeemed all, and He will return to do the same when the universe reaches the Omega Point.”
The first Watchman heaved the mighty axe over his shoulder and brought it down onto Nuri’s thigh, separating his right leg and causing him to slip further still. He could no longer breathe. His lungs were collapsing.
“The Duri have not experienced this sacrifice. Their doctrine is motivated by their own conceptions of right and wrong and increasing their strength, not by the message of the Divine Infinite.”
The first Watchman groaned in delight and brought the axe crashing down again, this time severing Nuri’s left leg at the thigh. Without legs to support him, his body dropped and collapsed his lungs completely. His back was broken. The stumps below his waist spurted blood all over the ground, even covering Colt. She didn’t flinch, though, and the Watchmen savagely lapped up his blood.
“Do you understand now?” Colt asked, stooping to grab a spear from the filthy ground.
You killed me, he thought at her, knowing he didn’t have the breath in his lungs to articulate it aloud.
“As we all killed Him,” she replied, gesturing toward the billions of Messiahs in the corpse fields. “You understand His sacrifice, then, as much as is possible.” She reared back with the point of the spear pressed against his ribcage. “The fundamental truth of the Hidria transformation is that you cannot be reborn unless you first die.”
He lifted his head to look her in the eye and held her stare as she drove the spear forward into his chest.
“So, yes. I’ve killed you.”
He was distantly aware of the Watchmen leaving his side as the commotion intensified several aisles over, and then his consciousness was sucked out of his body and he was rocketing through space again.
You are no longer human, Colt told him as he retracted all the way back to the Alpha Point on the desert planet. The first temple, built by God Himself to teach those who answered His Call. You are Hidria.
He closed his eyes against the fury of deep space and relished the lack of pain in his body.
I am Hidria, he declared.
And then, he was standing in the ancient temple again where he’d started, holding his own severed head in one hand and his laser sword in the other. Instead of the Watchman at the intersection of hallways, though, Colt awaited him with a warm smile.
“You a
re here at last,” she said. “You’ve completed the trials.”
Her presence was startling. He’d seen her physical form before, but he realized then that it hadn’t been her true incarnation. Now when he looked at her, he felt his vitality. No living being had ever been so present with him, and it made him tremble.
She stepped forward to meet him and gently took the head and blade from his hands, setting them on the stone floor and guiding him down one of the corridors.
“Now, you are ready to gaze upon the face of the Divine Infinite.”
22
For a long while, they walked the labyrinthine corridors in darkness. Nuri said nothing. The experience of Tscharia had shaken him to the core and all human worries had been stripped from his consciousness as his old body melted away. He was awed by the new, complete form that had replaced him and could focus on little else but processing the sight of his new being. It was nearly unrecognizable. Where there wasn’t scarring from the black blades of the Watchmen, his skin bore the same blue-white luminescence as Colt’s, making him wonder if his eyes also glowed with the same unnatural, pupil-less vibrancy as her stare. Otherwise, his only concern was following his spirit guide through the darkness.
He would never know how long they traveled the snaking corridors, which often bent back on themselves the way that they had come and thereby destroyed any mundane sense of progress Nuri felt along the way, but he was comfortable in that unknowing. Perhaps the destruction of expectation was a lesson in itself, he thought. A dose of humility directly to his soul before he learned the Truth at the heart of everything.
As if the rest of the trials have not been humbling enough.
In truth, he couldn’t remember a point in his life when he’d felt as insignificant as he did now that he’d been exposed to the complexities of his faith and the failings of his religion.
Is that the aim of all this?
He realized he might never know for sure and took solace in that ignorance. There were some things, he supposed, which fell outside the scope of Hidria understanding, and if that were true, it was probably that way for a reason. Even a transubstantiated being couldn’t know all.
Only while humanity dwells within you, a voice told him. If you were wholly transformed, you wouldn’t have these questions. You would either know the answer or you wouldn’t wonder because you would know it wasn’t important. He suspected Colt was addressing him as she observed his inner dialogue from the sidelines, but he was too distracted by the transformation to ruminate too deeply on the source of the unsolicited response anyway. It could have been God for all he knew and he wouldn’t have recognized it in the moment.
And what if it is?
His fascination stopped short at the thought. All at once, the air became heavier and a high-pitched ring sounded off the close walls of the corridor. His skin prickled and a dizzying electricity sizzled in his veins. Colt, however, didn’t seem to notice.
“Is He here?” Nuri asked after a beat. He felt the same shudder of Divine recognition he’d experienced in his old life only with a thousand times the potency. His mind was nearly crushed by the breath of creation filling the corridor. It was nauseating.
Colt glanced back at him and the totality of her being only heightened his wonder. “He is everywhere. Always.” He gaped at her, waiting for her to expound for greater clarity, but she evidently had said all she wished to say on the matter.
Maybe I’m supposed to know without asking, he thought. Maybe that’s part of the final test. Seeing if I can block out all distractions to recognize the true voice and presence of God amid a sea of fantastic circumstances.
With that, Nuri lapsed back into silence for a long time. He’d already been humbled by Colt’s calm acceptance of the long journey through the temple and felt foolish for wondering about the location of the presence of God when—as Hidria—he should have been fully aware of the Divine’s ubiquity. He knew the idea of it, of course, but confronting the reality of an omnipresent entity was another matter entirely. It was like the difference between knowing your human form would inevitably die one day and actually feeling a laser-blade slitting your throat. His soul had fallen into a state of hyper-reality. Hyper-awareness.
As they continued walking, the doors around them—all of which had remained closed to that point—finally revealed the realities contained within them. It was an unnerving change, most of all because he fully expected the environments to come crashing through now that they lacked a true barrier, unhinging the doors and unleashing cosmic chaos upon the corridor in the process. In some cases, no doors blocked the other worlds from spilling out at all, and those portals troubled him the most. The frames were little more than borders on moving pictures of universes Nuri had never dreamed existed.
And where do they all lead?
He studied each opening as they passed. It was disorienting to view such radically variant landscapes no more than ten feet from each other on either side of the hallway. Endless deserts on his left directly contrasted blizzards blown through the doorway on his right. Jungles rife with vibrant vegetation and bustling wildlife were paired with dusty plains and the coarse skin of giant monsters from another universe. Some doorways were submerged with a wall of deep ocean water and absurd aquatic creatures holding against an invisible barrier as though they didn’t see the doorway at all.
They don’t see it, he realized. Even in the places where there are no doors to hold them, they can’t see into the temple.
Colt glanced back and followed his gaze to the open doors.
“This is how our emanations appear at any given point in a designated galaxy.”
He frowned but continued to examine the doorways. “What do you mean by designated galaxy?” he asked.
Colt motioned to the nearest opening. “All Hidria are charged with protecting a specific galaxy. It helps us to keep total context within the constraints of our higher consciousness. Only God can oversee all galaxies and universes at once. We have been transformed—elevated—but there is still only one perfect being. Even now, after the transformation, you are still a sinner. Even now, you are limited by your flawed sensory perceptions.”
“Are these doorways how you’ve tracked my progress through the trials?” he asked.
“Yes,” she nodded. “But my true form remained here, waiting for you. When we pass through the doorways, we are merely emanations. To physically intervene, we still have to travel to the desired planet.”
“You mean in a ship?”
Again, she nodded. “Just as the Divine Infinite traveled to Earth through the vessel of a human male, we must journey to our destination by corporeal means. Again, it’s the only way to fully understand the ramifications of our intervention. By experiencing the scale of the universe, we understand the magnitude of our footprints upon it.”
Nuri nodded, continuing to study the alternating worlds contained within each door frame. With each new galaxy they passed, he found himself imagining what lifeforms existed in their massive, spiraling arms and what it would be like to live as one of them. He was able to piece the histories together with remarkable clarity using his reborn consciousness, passing several years’ worth of study among the native populaces in the time it took to cross one opening.
And then, at last, they reached a nondescript, wooden doorway at the end of the corridor.
“We’ve arrived,” Colt told him. She stepped forward and tapped her index finger against the rough surface. “A human will die as soon as this door opened,” she said, staring at him with eyelids narrowed to slits to drive home the implication. “Human minds cannot comprehend the fullness of reality on the other side. They would lose their sanity for a few moments and then their heart would stop completely.” She moved behind him and placed her hands on his shoulder, standing on her toes to lean her chin against him. “It is the face of God,” she whispered. Her lips grazed his earlobe and made him shudder.
All at once, the weight of the impending revelation
came crashing down on him. His knees buckled and he fell prostrate before the door. “No,” he groaned. “I don’t want to see. I’m unworthy.” He gulped back a moan. “I’m terrified.”
But even as he protested, the door creaked open.
“Please!” he cried out, shielding his eyes with his forearms. He was suddenly convinced that he wasn’t truly Hidria, that too much of his human doubts and ignorance remained to sufficiently process the vision of all things he was about to experience. It would be the end of him. He was certain of it. And on top of that, he would have defiled the perfect purity of God by laying his pitiful eyes upon Him.
He expected a furious blast of wind through the doorway followed by the melting of his physical form and banishment to Tscharia for daring to offend the sight of God. Instead, a silence enveloped the temple, powerful enough that it felt like his eardrums had inverted or else he’d gone completely deaf.
Keeping his arms locked in front of his eyes, he shouted to Colt, “What’s happening?” He hoped his desperation would inspire pity and abort the catharsis before it was too late. It was a futile exercise, though. His words didn’t penetrate the atmosphere. In fact, they didn’t even register inside his head. There was nothing but silence everywhere.
Is this death? he wondered.
It seemed a startling absence coupled with the fullness of everything, and he wasn’t certain what the conflicting realities meant for him. Still, he didn’t dare open his eyes. He’d decided his only chance for survival was to avert his gaze from the face of Omega and hope his reverence spared him from judgment.
Omega judges all things gently and with perfect context, Colt’s thoughts suddenly surfaced within him, not as a separate voice but as a part of himself. They were his own thoughts. Not merely occupying his mind but communing with it. He is not a malevolent being or nothing would be left in your universe. If He were the god of the Old Book, every minor slight would have spurred His wrath to the point of complete decimation.
Colt: The Cosmic Prayer (Hidria Book 1) Page 25