The first seal, p.16
The First Seal, page 16
part #1 of The Apocalypse Prophecies Series
That made sense to Lilith. She had once been a happy child, but that happiness had been ripped from her. With both of her parents dead, the Order was her new home. It would be nearly a decade before she learnt that it was an Inquisitor, not a demon, who had slaughtered her family. By then she was able to take the news with casual acceptance for this was the way things had to be.
“This is God’s way of finding the best of us. The trials of life are merely a selection process for the bliss of the afterlife. Only the noblest and the best of us can ever be allowed entry.”
“Why did God make us this way, though?”
“I do not know for sure,” The Librarian answered. Unlike other factions in the Catholic Church, those who served the Order of Tyron were not arrogant enough to think they knew every answer. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. “Remember that I am just a man. Despite my professed learning, I am flawed and no more important than a speck of dust. I would be a fool to proclaim I understood the will of God. All I can tell you is what I believe and understand from the righteous verses he had blessed us with over the centuries. Are such limitations acceptable to you all?” Everyone in the windowless classroom nodded. “Very well, let us learn about the first of the fallen. The book of Enoch gives us some glimpse into why the angels fell. Head of the defilers was Lucifer, sometimes called Samyaza, the leader of the renegades who became consumed with lust for the mortal women they gazed down upon from their heavenly loft. Do you see the dangers of lust, children?”
“Yes, Librarian,” they answered together.
“If it can corrupt those that were deemed to be pure, imagine the dangers it means for such weak flesh as ours.” The Librarian had a little chuckle at that, perhaps remembering a time from his past, thought Lilith. “But I am getting side-tracked. Perhaps I am being subtly influenced so as not to reveal to you the truth.”
“You are too noble,” one of the children insisted, not understanding that The Librarian was merely teasing.
“I am as naive and vulnerable as anyone,” The Librarian informed them. Perhaps I am able to withstand the ultimate temptations, but I will never know for I have not been subjected to them. Unlike Inquisitors who must have hearts of iron, I am merely a man who reads too many books.” He saw that the message he was trying to impart into them had broken through the cracks of their own innocence. As the years progressed, he would tell them more about the frailties of those they would be charged with protecting. “So, back to the fallen. Although Shemyaza was the initial leader of the fallen, it was the angel Azazel who wreaked the most havoc. In Enoch 10:12 we are told that all the earth has been corrupted by the effect of the teachings of Azazel. It is Azazel that taught the world the pleasures of sin.”
Sin, the one thing Inquisitors were taught to avoid above all things.
“What happened to the fallen?” Lilith asked.
“They now serve Satan. Many people consider Satan a being of immense power, but that is not my understanding.”
“Is Satan one of the fallen?” Lucien asked.
“In the more popular biblical texts, yes, but many of those were written out of ignorance. To me, Satan is an idea, just as evil is a concept created by the minds of man. When Eve took a bite from the apple, it was not on the urging of Satan, that is a false translation, deliberately left in by the earlier corruption that was prevalent in the church. Satan could be a creation of human consciousness. There is no way for us to know for sure, but if you ask me, Satan was created by God to give him a worthy adversary. Satan’s presence is within us all, and it manifests as the overlord of the place we call Hell. The Fallen Ones and the demons serve him. With God’s blessing, of course.”
“But why?” Lilith demanded. Her young mind couldn’t understand why the Lord would be so cruel.
“Because of us. The Lord gave humanity the chance to be free of suffering, but mankind rejected that. We chose to forge our own path rather than being loyal servants of God. Sometimes I think that might have pissed him off.”
“I do not understand, Librarian,” one of the children said. There were several nods of agreement that this was beyond their understanding. The Librarian smiled.
“I know, but you will. By the time you are done with my tedious lessons, you will have a deep knowledge of why mankind faces such an enemy. Just know it is an enemy from within, a force of our own doing. The fallen may serve it, and the demons may be spawned from it, but Satan is more than a single entity. It is a collection of everything that makes humanity impure. But Satan is real and is your ultimate enemy. Pray you never have to face him.”
27.
New York City, USA
“It’s difficult. I don’t sleep well, and when I do, I’m woken by the terrors.” Paul Jackson resisted the temptation to hide his mouth behind his hands. The nine faces in the sharing circle were here for him, and he didn’t have to try and hide away from them.
“We’ve all been there,” Jerry said. Jerry was larger than life, with a belly to match. They all knew Jerry’s story. He’d lost both legs in Fallujah, and had formed this veteran’s group to help those who’d been through the shit. “You taking your medication and staying off the booze?”
“I try to, Jerry,” Paul admitted. “But it’s hard, you know? Some days it feels like the whole world is collapsing in on me.” Paul had fallen into alcoholism and a dependence on pain medication. Those two monkeys rode his back relentlessly, although recently he’d found he could get the better of them. These meeting helped with that. It was good that there were people he could talk to, who could understand the way it was so easy to feel abandoned.
“Then you call me,” Jerry insisted. “You all know that, right?”
There were nods from around the sharing circle. There were no new faces today, which was disappointing to Jerry. He had wanted as many people present as possible for when he shared his news.
“We should never have been sent over there in the first place,” one of the others stated.
“Whilst that might be true,” Jerry pointed out, “pointing fingers isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. We have to take responsibility for where we are at if we are going to pull ourselves out of this.”
“They could still help us more,” Paul pointed out.
“Yes, they could, but then you would be even more dependent on the government. And I can tell none of you really want that. We have to learn to look after ourselves.” Jerry had a way of getting that message across, although tonight he seemed irritable to Paul, as if Jerry was eager to get this meeting over with. That was strange because their organiser was always the last one to leave.
“I think I’m ready, Jerry,” Paul suddenly said. This was the third meeting he’d been to, and as yet he hadn’t shared what had happened to him. They all got around to that sooner or later.
“I think you are, too,” Jerry said.
“Ironically, I came out of it pretty much unscathed, or at least I thought I did. We were on patrol outside Tikrit a few years back. Seemed like just another ordinary day. One second the Humvee is part of a four-vehicle convoy, the next it is on its side and I’m covered in other people’s blood.”
“IED?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah. They ambushed us, killed half a dozen of my unit. We hit them hard in response, made the bastards regret picking that fight. But I missed most of that. I was trapped in the burning wreckage. They ended up cutting me free.”
“And you feel guilty about that?” Jerry asked.
“Guilty? I don’t think…”
“Well you weren’t there when your friends needed you.” There was an uneasy stillness that suddenly filled the room.
“Hey man, it wasn’t like that.”
“Really? Sounds like that’s exactly what it was. Sounds like you sat there in your own piss whilst better men did the fighting for you.”
“Hey Jerry…” one of the other group members tried to interject, but his words were cut off by the withering glare Jerry cast him.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Paul almost begged. His hands were shaking, the skin pale from the palpitations the unexpected confrontation had brought on.
“What’s wrong with me? I’m sick of your bullshit. You need to own your failure.”
“I didn’t fail,” Paul insisted. There were supportive voices to back him up. Jerry had lost the room, nobody understanding why their group leader was suddenly being so vicious.
“It’s the same with all of you,” Jerry pointed out, looking each individual in the eye. “You come here with your sob stories and your tales of woe, instead of growing a pair and making something of your lives.”
“Fuck you, Jerry,” the oldest member of the group said.
“Truth hurts, does it?”
“I’m not sitting here to listen to this,” Paul insisted, standing up ready to storm off. The Sig Sauer P320-M18 that Jerry seemed to pull out of his ass quickly changed that plan.
“Sit down, Paul. I won’t tell you twice.” Paul did, his anxiety reaching new heights.
“This isn’t you, Jerry,” someone pointed out.
“You don’t know how right you are,” Jerry said. It was only then that Paul noticed their group leader wasn’t in his usual position. Jerry’s chair was set back from the circle, instead of being part of it. Nobody was going to get the jump on him.
“Why are you doing this?” Paul begged.
“Ah, the thousand-dollar question. Why do any of us do anything?”
“Are we supposed to frigging answer that?” one of the group said defiantly. Jerry shot that man in the forehead in response.
“Jesus,” Paul exclaimed. As the dead body slumped to the floor, Jerry pulled himself up onto his fake legs. Nobody saw the black specks that briefly floated across his eyes. The children of New York were fortunate that this demon was interested only in the body count he could create rather than selecting individual targets.
“We are going to play a little game. I’ve got sixteen bullets left in this baby. If you play your cards right, some of you might get to live through the night.” Nobody was willing to argue with him.
“What kind of game?” Paul demanded.
“Well it’s quite simple. I want to see who has the greatest will to live. You’ve all been through the wringer, and some of you are ready to just curl up and die. I want you to prove me wrong.”
“How?”
“By fighting, of course. There are eight of you, so it should be easy for you to pair up. Just know, only two of you will survive this night.” Jerry was lying, of course. Despite being surprised by how ferociously some of them fought, he didn’t let any of them walk out that night. When the police finally arrived, Jerry went down gun blazing, taking one of the officers with him.
Just another bit of chaos and violence added to the world. Jerry hadn’t even been possessed. Instead he’d finally been driven mad by the world around him. There seemed to be a lot of that, recently.
28.
London, UK
“Tell me Father, will the world ever end?”
Those had been the last words she had said to her teacher. In the final year of Lilith’s training, Father had fallen sick. At first, he had defied it, the pain he experienced mingling with the other aches that plagued him. But as the days and weeks passed, the pain became a world unto its own, standing out as an agony that no amount of prayer or self-denial could ignore.
When he found he could no longer hide the discomfort he was in, Father had reluctantly asked the Order to send him a doctor. Lilith had known something was wrong perhaps before Father had himself.
“Cancer. Pancreatic. Untreatable. You will be dead within months.”
Father had accepted the words given to him by the doctor who seemed to possess the bedside manner of a Waffen SS death camp guard.
“I can give you something for the pain,” the doctor had added.
“Why?” Father had asked. “God feels I am worthy of this punishment, who am I to defy his judgement?”
Those last words to him from Lilith’s lips had been said on his death bed. By then his flesh was emaciated, the muscle stripped from him, his face a constant grimace. Every breath was a torture and yet Father refused to complain. He also refused to give up, clinging on to what was left of life. There were saints who had suffered more than this. It was enough to know his time on this planet was finally at an end.
“Yes,” Father had said finally, the words laboured. “There will come a time when the world will end. We do what we do to try and hold back that day, but when it comes it will be because the Lord commands it.” A cough had ripped through him then, blood exploding onto the once pristine sheets that covered his frail and broken body. “Everything happens because of his design. Everything.”
Lilith remembered those words. Deep in her meditation, she found herself once again wondering what that design was. There were things about it that didn’t make sense, and until recently, she had not let her mind wander there. Despite the completeness of her training, she was struggling with the inconsistencies that kept cropping up.
Her Order proclaimed to be the protector of mankind, the guardian at the gate, and yet they failed to pay heed to the evidence set before them. She was a mere foot soldier on the ground. If she could see how the enemy was coordinating, why couldn’t her superiors? Lilith had tried to set these doubts aside, knowing them for the heresy they were, but she couldn’t help herself. Her training had taught her to trust her intuition.
She had to stay faithful to her Order, and yet her inner voice was screaming at her that the Order was failing in its duty. But if Father’s teaching was to be believed, that failing was part of some otherworldly plan. Did that mean her doubts were, too?
Was she in control of the thoughts that were rampaging through her mind? She suddenly felt like a pawn, a disposable piece being used for somebody else’s ultimate benefit. Opening her eyes, Lilith cursed under her breath. She knew who she had to talk to. Picking up the phone, she dialled the number that was burned into her memory.
“The library is about to close,” were the first words she heard.
“But I have an overdue book,” Lilith said, the code technically unnecessary because the man she was speaking with knew her voice.
“Oh, and what mighty tome have you kept from us?” There was humour in the voice, the man on the other end enjoying the chance at conversation. Lilith knew he rarely got to speak to people these days, having retired from the Inquisitor teaching. He sounded every bit as old as his ninety years on this planet.
“The Pilgrim’s Progress.” That completed the code. There was no chance that this conversation was being intercepted by outside ears, the phone using the same secure network as before.
“Are you riddled with temptation then, Lilith?” She knew he was having fun at her expense, and she couldn’t admonish him for it. The man she still knew only as The Librarian had watched her grow from a child into a woman. Much of what she knew about the world had come from his lips.
“I am riddled with doubt,” she said honestly. You didn’t lie to those for whom you had the utmost respect.
“Doubt is a dangerous path for an Inquisitor. It leads to a dark path too many of your kind have wandered onto.”
“My doubt is about my Order,” Lilith added.
“Ouch,” the Librarian replied, humour still in his words. He had been a welcome relief from the harshness of the priests and Father’s reign. Although humour was not something to be embraced, it was something Inquisitors needed to understand if they were to blend into a world that often used humour to cover the horrors that existed there. “It happens to most of you, eventually.”
“Really?” Lilith was shocked by this. She had thought herself alone with such doubts.
“You think your training ended when you left the camp? I thought we taught you better than that.” There was no humour now, just genuine disappointment. She didn’t seek his forgiveness, because she knew she could never offend this man.
“I’ve seen things in the field that contradict my training.” Lilith hesitated. If she couldn’t trust the Librarian, then the concept of trust was a lie. But should she tell him these things?
“It has been that way for centuries. Why don’t you tell me what is troubling you?”
“The demons. It seems that they are working together.”
“And I take it your superiors disagree with you?”
“Yes,” Lilith agreed. “They think I am imagining things.”
“What is your job, Lilith?” the Librarian asked. Lilith was in for another lesson.
“To serve mankind and protect him from the forces of darkness.”
“And can you do that alone?”
“No, that would be suicide.” To go out into the world without the resources of the Order would be foolhardy.
“So, you need the Order behind you?”
“Yes, always.”
“May I therefore suggest that bashing your head up against the bureaucratic brick wall is not the way to go.” He sounded stern, something that had rarely occurred in his lectures. It was the Librarian who had taught them to laugh, but who had also instructed them in the dangers of laughter. Whereas the priests would beat them for showing pleasure in humour, the Librarian would patiently explain why laughter was seeded onto the world by Satan himself.
“But how am I to persuade them otherwise?” She could see a glimmer of what was coming, but she wanted to hear it from his own lips.
“You know how,” the Librarian stated. “I taught you the ways of persuasion myself. The willow bends in the wind and adapts to the forces against it. What do you think would happen if it were to stand defiantly against the mighty breath of God?”
“The tree would fall.”
“Do you want to fall, Lilith?”
“No, Librarian. I want to help my Order.” She was well aware that her doubt was her own failing. If there was one thing her training had taught her that applied to this situation, it was that to find a failing, one first had to look within.
“Then do your damned job.” Lilith could almost see the twinkle that was likely in her mentor’s eye. He had a way of hitting home with the truth.
“This is God’s way of finding the best of us. The trials of life are merely a selection process for the bliss of the afterlife. Only the noblest and the best of us can ever be allowed entry.”
“Why did God make us this way, though?”
“I do not know for sure,” The Librarian answered. Unlike other factions in the Catholic Church, those who served the Order of Tyron were not arrogant enough to think they knew every answer. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. “Remember that I am just a man. Despite my professed learning, I am flawed and no more important than a speck of dust. I would be a fool to proclaim I understood the will of God. All I can tell you is what I believe and understand from the righteous verses he had blessed us with over the centuries. Are such limitations acceptable to you all?” Everyone in the windowless classroom nodded. “Very well, let us learn about the first of the fallen. The book of Enoch gives us some glimpse into why the angels fell. Head of the defilers was Lucifer, sometimes called Samyaza, the leader of the renegades who became consumed with lust for the mortal women they gazed down upon from their heavenly loft. Do you see the dangers of lust, children?”
“Yes, Librarian,” they answered together.
“If it can corrupt those that were deemed to be pure, imagine the dangers it means for such weak flesh as ours.” The Librarian had a little chuckle at that, perhaps remembering a time from his past, thought Lilith. “But I am getting side-tracked. Perhaps I am being subtly influenced so as not to reveal to you the truth.”
“You are too noble,” one of the children insisted, not understanding that The Librarian was merely teasing.
“I am as naive and vulnerable as anyone,” The Librarian informed them. Perhaps I am able to withstand the ultimate temptations, but I will never know for I have not been subjected to them. Unlike Inquisitors who must have hearts of iron, I am merely a man who reads too many books.” He saw that the message he was trying to impart into them had broken through the cracks of their own innocence. As the years progressed, he would tell them more about the frailties of those they would be charged with protecting. “So, back to the fallen. Although Shemyaza was the initial leader of the fallen, it was the angel Azazel who wreaked the most havoc. In Enoch 10:12 we are told that all the earth has been corrupted by the effect of the teachings of Azazel. It is Azazel that taught the world the pleasures of sin.”
Sin, the one thing Inquisitors were taught to avoid above all things.
“What happened to the fallen?” Lilith asked.
“They now serve Satan. Many people consider Satan a being of immense power, but that is not my understanding.”
“Is Satan one of the fallen?” Lucien asked.
“In the more popular biblical texts, yes, but many of those were written out of ignorance. To me, Satan is an idea, just as evil is a concept created by the minds of man. When Eve took a bite from the apple, it was not on the urging of Satan, that is a false translation, deliberately left in by the earlier corruption that was prevalent in the church. Satan could be a creation of human consciousness. There is no way for us to know for sure, but if you ask me, Satan was created by God to give him a worthy adversary. Satan’s presence is within us all, and it manifests as the overlord of the place we call Hell. The Fallen Ones and the demons serve him. With God’s blessing, of course.”
“But why?” Lilith demanded. Her young mind couldn’t understand why the Lord would be so cruel.
“Because of us. The Lord gave humanity the chance to be free of suffering, but mankind rejected that. We chose to forge our own path rather than being loyal servants of God. Sometimes I think that might have pissed him off.”
“I do not understand, Librarian,” one of the children said. There were several nods of agreement that this was beyond their understanding. The Librarian smiled.
“I know, but you will. By the time you are done with my tedious lessons, you will have a deep knowledge of why mankind faces such an enemy. Just know it is an enemy from within, a force of our own doing. The fallen may serve it, and the demons may be spawned from it, but Satan is more than a single entity. It is a collection of everything that makes humanity impure. But Satan is real and is your ultimate enemy. Pray you never have to face him.”
27.
New York City, USA
“It’s difficult. I don’t sleep well, and when I do, I’m woken by the terrors.” Paul Jackson resisted the temptation to hide his mouth behind his hands. The nine faces in the sharing circle were here for him, and he didn’t have to try and hide away from them.
“We’ve all been there,” Jerry said. Jerry was larger than life, with a belly to match. They all knew Jerry’s story. He’d lost both legs in Fallujah, and had formed this veteran’s group to help those who’d been through the shit. “You taking your medication and staying off the booze?”
“I try to, Jerry,” Paul admitted. “But it’s hard, you know? Some days it feels like the whole world is collapsing in on me.” Paul had fallen into alcoholism and a dependence on pain medication. Those two monkeys rode his back relentlessly, although recently he’d found he could get the better of them. These meeting helped with that. It was good that there were people he could talk to, who could understand the way it was so easy to feel abandoned.
“Then you call me,” Jerry insisted. “You all know that, right?”
There were nods from around the sharing circle. There were no new faces today, which was disappointing to Jerry. He had wanted as many people present as possible for when he shared his news.
“We should never have been sent over there in the first place,” one of the others stated.
“Whilst that might be true,” Jerry pointed out, “pointing fingers isn’t going to get any of us anywhere. We have to take responsibility for where we are at if we are going to pull ourselves out of this.”
“They could still help us more,” Paul pointed out.
“Yes, they could, but then you would be even more dependent on the government. And I can tell none of you really want that. We have to learn to look after ourselves.” Jerry had a way of getting that message across, although tonight he seemed irritable to Paul, as if Jerry was eager to get this meeting over with. That was strange because their organiser was always the last one to leave.
“I think I’m ready, Jerry,” Paul suddenly said. This was the third meeting he’d been to, and as yet he hadn’t shared what had happened to him. They all got around to that sooner or later.
“I think you are, too,” Jerry said.
“Ironically, I came out of it pretty much unscathed, or at least I thought I did. We were on patrol outside Tikrit a few years back. Seemed like just another ordinary day. One second the Humvee is part of a four-vehicle convoy, the next it is on its side and I’m covered in other people’s blood.”
“IED?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah. They ambushed us, killed half a dozen of my unit. We hit them hard in response, made the bastards regret picking that fight. But I missed most of that. I was trapped in the burning wreckage. They ended up cutting me free.”
“And you feel guilty about that?” Jerry asked.
“Guilty? I don’t think…”
“Well you weren’t there when your friends needed you.” There was an uneasy stillness that suddenly filled the room.
“Hey man, it wasn’t like that.”
“Really? Sounds like that’s exactly what it was. Sounds like you sat there in your own piss whilst better men did the fighting for you.”
“Hey Jerry…” one of the other group members tried to interject, but his words were cut off by the withering glare Jerry cast him.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Paul almost begged. His hands were shaking, the skin pale from the palpitations the unexpected confrontation had brought on.
“What’s wrong with me? I’m sick of your bullshit. You need to own your failure.”
“I didn’t fail,” Paul insisted. There were supportive voices to back him up. Jerry had lost the room, nobody understanding why their group leader was suddenly being so vicious.
“It’s the same with all of you,” Jerry pointed out, looking each individual in the eye. “You come here with your sob stories and your tales of woe, instead of growing a pair and making something of your lives.”
“Fuck you, Jerry,” the oldest member of the group said.
“Truth hurts, does it?”
“I’m not sitting here to listen to this,” Paul insisted, standing up ready to storm off. The Sig Sauer P320-M18 that Jerry seemed to pull out of his ass quickly changed that plan.
“Sit down, Paul. I won’t tell you twice.” Paul did, his anxiety reaching new heights.
“This isn’t you, Jerry,” someone pointed out.
“You don’t know how right you are,” Jerry said. It was only then that Paul noticed their group leader wasn’t in his usual position. Jerry’s chair was set back from the circle, instead of being part of it. Nobody was going to get the jump on him.
“Why are you doing this?” Paul begged.
“Ah, the thousand-dollar question. Why do any of us do anything?”
“Are we supposed to frigging answer that?” one of the group said defiantly. Jerry shot that man in the forehead in response.
“Jesus,” Paul exclaimed. As the dead body slumped to the floor, Jerry pulled himself up onto his fake legs. Nobody saw the black specks that briefly floated across his eyes. The children of New York were fortunate that this demon was interested only in the body count he could create rather than selecting individual targets.
“We are going to play a little game. I’ve got sixteen bullets left in this baby. If you play your cards right, some of you might get to live through the night.” Nobody was willing to argue with him.
“What kind of game?” Paul demanded.
“Well it’s quite simple. I want to see who has the greatest will to live. You’ve all been through the wringer, and some of you are ready to just curl up and die. I want you to prove me wrong.”
“How?”
“By fighting, of course. There are eight of you, so it should be easy for you to pair up. Just know, only two of you will survive this night.” Jerry was lying, of course. Despite being surprised by how ferociously some of them fought, he didn’t let any of them walk out that night. When the police finally arrived, Jerry went down gun blazing, taking one of the officers with him.
Just another bit of chaos and violence added to the world. Jerry hadn’t even been possessed. Instead he’d finally been driven mad by the world around him. There seemed to be a lot of that, recently.
28.
London, UK
“Tell me Father, will the world ever end?”
Those had been the last words she had said to her teacher. In the final year of Lilith’s training, Father had fallen sick. At first, he had defied it, the pain he experienced mingling with the other aches that plagued him. But as the days and weeks passed, the pain became a world unto its own, standing out as an agony that no amount of prayer or self-denial could ignore.
When he found he could no longer hide the discomfort he was in, Father had reluctantly asked the Order to send him a doctor. Lilith had known something was wrong perhaps before Father had himself.
“Cancer. Pancreatic. Untreatable. You will be dead within months.”
Father had accepted the words given to him by the doctor who seemed to possess the bedside manner of a Waffen SS death camp guard.
“I can give you something for the pain,” the doctor had added.
“Why?” Father had asked. “God feels I am worthy of this punishment, who am I to defy his judgement?”
Those last words to him from Lilith’s lips had been said on his death bed. By then his flesh was emaciated, the muscle stripped from him, his face a constant grimace. Every breath was a torture and yet Father refused to complain. He also refused to give up, clinging on to what was left of life. There were saints who had suffered more than this. It was enough to know his time on this planet was finally at an end.
“Yes,” Father had said finally, the words laboured. “There will come a time when the world will end. We do what we do to try and hold back that day, but when it comes it will be because the Lord commands it.” A cough had ripped through him then, blood exploding onto the once pristine sheets that covered his frail and broken body. “Everything happens because of his design. Everything.”
Lilith remembered those words. Deep in her meditation, she found herself once again wondering what that design was. There were things about it that didn’t make sense, and until recently, she had not let her mind wander there. Despite the completeness of her training, she was struggling with the inconsistencies that kept cropping up.
Her Order proclaimed to be the protector of mankind, the guardian at the gate, and yet they failed to pay heed to the evidence set before them. She was a mere foot soldier on the ground. If she could see how the enemy was coordinating, why couldn’t her superiors? Lilith had tried to set these doubts aside, knowing them for the heresy they were, but she couldn’t help herself. Her training had taught her to trust her intuition.
She had to stay faithful to her Order, and yet her inner voice was screaming at her that the Order was failing in its duty. But if Father’s teaching was to be believed, that failing was part of some otherworldly plan. Did that mean her doubts were, too?
Was she in control of the thoughts that were rampaging through her mind? She suddenly felt like a pawn, a disposable piece being used for somebody else’s ultimate benefit. Opening her eyes, Lilith cursed under her breath. She knew who she had to talk to. Picking up the phone, she dialled the number that was burned into her memory.
“The library is about to close,” were the first words she heard.
“But I have an overdue book,” Lilith said, the code technically unnecessary because the man she was speaking with knew her voice.
“Oh, and what mighty tome have you kept from us?” There was humour in the voice, the man on the other end enjoying the chance at conversation. Lilith knew he rarely got to speak to people these days, having retired from the Inquisitor teaching. He sounded every bit as old as his ninety years on this planet.
“The Pilgrim’s Progress.” That completed the code. There was no chance that this conversation was being intercepted by outside ears, the phone using the same secure network as before.
“Are you riddled with temptation then, Lilith?” She knew he was having fun at her expense, and she couldn’t admonish him for it. The man she still knew only as The Librarian had watched her grow from a child into a woman. Much of what she knew about the world had come from his lips.
“I am riddled with doubt,” she said honestly. You didn’t lie to those for whom you had the utmost respect.
“Doubt is a dangerous path for an Inquisitor. It leads to a dark path too many of your kind have wandered onto.”
“My doubt is about my Order,” Lilith added.
“Ouch,” the Librarian replied, humour still in his words. He had been a welcome relief from the harshness of the priests and Father’s reign. Although humour was not something to be embraced, it was something Inquisitors needed to understand if they were to blend into a world that often used humour to cover the horrors that existed there. “It happens to most of you, eventually.”
“Really?” Lilith was shocked by this. She had thought herself alone with such doubts.
“You think your training ended when you left the camp? I thought we taught you better than that.” There was no humour now, just genuine disappointment. She didn’t seek his forgiveness, because she knew she could never offend this man.
“I’ve seen things in the field that contradict my training.” Lilith hesitated. If she couldn’t trust the Librarian, then the concept of trust was a lie. But should she tell him these things?
“It has been that way for centuries. Why don’t you tell me what is troubling you?”
“The demons. It seems that they are working together.”
“And I take it your superiors disagree with you?”
“Yes,” Lilith agreed. “They think I am imagining things.”
“What is your job, Lilith?” the Librarian asked. Lilith was in for another lesson.
“To serve mankind and protect him from the forces of darkness.”
“And can you do that alone?”
“No, that would be suicide.” To go out into the world without the resources of the Order would be foolhardy.
“So, you need the Order behind you?”
“Yes, always.”
“May I therefore suggest that bashing your head up against the bureaucratic brick wall is not the way to go.” He sounded stern, something that had rarely occurred in his lectures. It was the Librarian who had taught them to laugh, but who had also instructed them in the dangers of laughter. Whereas the priests would beat them for showing pleasure in humour, the Librarian would patiently explain why laughter was seeded onto the world by Satan himself.
“But how am I to persuade them otherwise?” She could see a glimmer of what was coming, but she wanted to hear it from his own lips.
“You know how,” the Librarian stated. “I taught you the ways of persuasion myself. The willow bends in the wind and adapts to the forces against it. What do you think would happen if it were to stand defiantly against the mighty breath of God?”
“The tree would fall.”
“Do you want to fall, Lilith?”
“No, Librarian. I want to help my Order.” She was well aware that her doubt was her own failing. If there was one thing her training had taught her that applied to this situation, it was that to find a failing, one first had to look within.
“Then do your damned job.” Lilith could almost see the twinkle that was likely in her mentor’s eye. He had a way of hitting home with the truth.
