Desa and Kalia

Prologue-2

Raphael stumbled, trying to regain his balance and looked up just in time to see a fist colliding with his face. His head rang like a struck gong. The next thing he knew, he was stretched out on his back, his body aching from feet to shoulders with a hot poker through his nose to boot. At least, that was how it felt.

“Timothy!” Bill wailed. “You can’t strike a pastor!”

Through blurred vision, he watched the burly man coming up behind his son, but Timothy spun around and swung the chain much harder than Raphael could have. It didn’t quite strike Bill, though it did make him wince and turn his face away.

“Is this what you like, huh?” Timothy yelled. “Is this what your god demands?”

The ground started rumbling not two seconds after he finished speaking, a quake so fierce it shook the spruce’s branches and made tools clatter to the floor inside the shed.

Raphael couldn’t hold back a peal of laughter. He sat up, blinking his tears away. “There’s your answer, boy!”

He would have laughed again, but the quake intensified, and the wind began to howl. Timothy and Bill both fell to the ground, though the boy was quick to get up on his knees. A window shattered somewhere nearby.

“Reverend! Reverend!” Nathan came barrelling out of the church, nearly tripping as the ground tried to throw him like a bucking horse. He managed a few more steps before he was forced to give up. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know!”

As quickly as it had started, the quake went silent, though the wind was still blowing. Raphael heard cries in the distance – frightened voices begging for comfort. They would find their way here soon enough. Men always turned to the Almighty when their fear was great. And promptly abandoned Him once the danger had passed.

* * *

Another quake battered the church, causing the windows to rattle and dust to fall from the wooden beams that stretched across the ceiling. Every pew in the nave was full. People whimpered and shut their eyes against whatever horrors they imagined. Perhaps they expected the roof to collapse.

Standing behind the pulpit with his hands gripping the lectern, Raphael grimaced as he was nearly thrown to the floor. “We remain pure and humble!” he cried out when the shaking stopped. “Our sins are forgiven, and we accept the judgment of the Almighty!”

He heard children crying while their mothers hastily tried to quiet them. Some of those women directed glares at Raphael, silently imploring him not to scare the little ones. He would not relent. Children deserved to know the truth; coddling them with lies was perhaps the worst sin of all. Even now, he heard Melanie Brightman assuring her son that the Almighty was loving and kind, that He would not inflict these quakes upon the world.

The fetid stench of lies wafted from her filthy mouth. Lies meant to shield her boy from the truth, to wrap him in a comforting delusion. The Almighty was many things: loving and kind, yes, but most of all, he was just. He would take his vengeance upon a world that had spurned him.

“This is the end, my children!” Raphael shouted. “The end of all things! The end of this wretched world! Accept the Almighty into your hearts and be welcomed into his home. Do not delay! For without his grace, the Abyss awaits you!”

His speech was punctuated by another quake, this one more violent than the last. “Accept the Almighty!” Raphael yelled over the rumbling. “And be cleansed!”

One of those wooden beams broke free of the walls, falling hard onto Colin Basworth and crushing him beneath its weight. “Behold the fate of sinners!” Raphael bellowed, pointing at the dead man. The wrath of the Almighty was glorious to behold!

His words fell upon deaf ears.

With the church tearing itself apart, a flood of people charged through the arch-shaped door and sought the open sky. Fools! Better to remain here and accept their fates. Those who showed loyalty to the Almighty would be rewarded; those who clung to this fleeting life would receive only the final death.

Raphael would not flee; he welcomed the chance to-

Another beam fell to the floor behind him, shattering the statue of Peter the Pious. Perhaps it would be best to go with the others. He couldn’t preach to them from in here.

Tired and sore, Raphael descended the steps from the pulpit and shambled through the wide aisle between the pews. He had to grab each wooden bench as he passed. It was the only way to avoid falling on his face.

The wooden doors stood open. He could see people kneeling in the yard outside the church: mothers comforting their children, men with their heads bowed in prayer. Maybe they had taken his words to heart. He hurried out of the church when the rumbling stopped, seizing the opportunity offered by this temporary lull. The destruction would resume soon enough; he was sure of that.

As he stumbled into the cold afternoon, Raphael gasped.

The clouds had departed, leaving a deep, blue sky, but that was not what had shaken him to his core. A swirling vortex had formed in the heavens. He could think of no other word for it.

The light seemed to bend around whatever it was, creating a whirlpool that made him dizzy. At this distance, it was small enough that Raphael could blot it out with his hand, but even so, he could not escape the feeling that the whole world was being pulled into that gaping maw. The Almighty’s Wrath was magnificent indeed.

Another quake forced him to his knees.

“Make it stop!” Callie Baker howled. At seven years old, she still sounded like a toddler. Her face was red as she bawled her eyes out. “Make it stop! Make it stop!”

Raphael opened his mouth to say that it would not stop – the Almighty would have his day – but something cut him off.

The sky turned red.

People shrieked in terror, hiding their faces from the Almighty’s sight. Or trying to, anyway. They were so distraught, they didn’t even notice when the strange light shifted through a rainbow of colours: orange and yellow, green and blue, then purple and finally red again.

The earth offered a few more groans before quieting down, leaving only the sound of the rushing wind and crying children. But those sobs died off as people slowly realized that the worst of it had passed. Half of them were staring up at the sky in wide-eyed wonder. “What is it? Reverend?” Mary Burnham asked.

“I don’t know,” Raphael whispered.

* * *

Afternoon faded to evening, and that hole in the sky grew larger. Many became fearful again when they realized that it would soon swallow the entire world, but the bizarre rainbow-light never faltered. It just kept shifting through every colour from red to purple and back again.

Paul Tailor kept insisting that it was a gift from the Almighty, protection against the vortex. He was quick to point out that the quakes had stopped almost immediately after the rainbow-light appeared. Indeed, his sentiments had caught on with several others, prompting cheers and exclamations that they had witnessed a miracle.

“He saved us,” Paul whispered reverently. “The Almighty saved us.”

“No,” Sarah Wakeman chimed in. A tall and slender woman with a small nose and a long, brown ponytail, she stood next to Paul in little more than a red frock, seemingly unbothered by the cold. “Not the Almighty. Desa of Aladar. She’s the one who saved us.”

Paul was at least fifteen years her senior. Though soft-spoken even at the worst of times, he had a scrunched-up face that made him look as if he might start yelling at any moment. Add to that his growing paunch and his thinning hair, and it was no wonder that the children avoided him. Raphael couldn’t blame them. A man should have a wife by the time he reached his forties. Paul’s solitary nature often rubbed people the wrong way. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Who is this Desa of Aladar.”

“The traders down in Ofalla told me about her,” Sarah explained. “Do you remember nine years ago, when the Rainbow Wave passed through our village and healed our bodies?”

Raphael remembered it, though he had worked hard to forget. A tidal wave of colour-shifting light sweeping over the land, passing through buildings as if stone walls were nothing more than hot air. It came so quickly, he didn’t even have a chance to cry out in alarm, and when it departed, the dull cramp in his fingers went with it. His eyes were a little sharper too, though he would never admit that to anyone.

People had been certain it was a gift from the Almighty. The church had been filled to bursting in the weeks following the Rainbow Wave. But of course, piety was a fleeting thing. Many lost their faith again when subsequent miracles failed to appear.

“Desa created the Rainbow Wave,” Sarah went on. “She did it to protect our world from some kind of demon. I don’t fully understand the details, but I know the rainbow is her sign.” She gestured to the sky, where the shell of colourful light changed from orange to yellow to green. “She saved us again.”

“Desa of Aladar,” Paul murmured reverently. “I think I should like to meet this woman.”

“‘Turn your eyes away from false idols!’” Raphael snapped, quoting the Scripture of Samuel. A glance from him was enough to make Paul wilt and lower his eyes. “‘For the path of deceivers leads surely to the Abyss!’”

“You’re right,” Paul mumbled. “It must be the Almighty.”

Raphael wasn’t sure about that either.

Why would the Almighty bring about the End of Creation only to change his mind and spare his people at the last minute? None of it made any sense! He had been frightened in the church – who wouldn’t be throughout all that chaos – but even then, he had been certain. Certain that his place in paradise was assured.

Now, however…

He couldn’t escape a creeping dread, a little voice that whispered the most horrid ideas into his agitated mind. What if everything he believed was wrong? Raphael chose to ignore it. His faith was strong; he would not waver.

Soon, the vortex grew so large that he couldn’t see its edges. And still, the people watched, shouting praise for the Almighty. They should have been terrified! This was a day of reckoning. Wasn’t it?

The enormous hole crept ever closer until it seemed as if the whole world had been sucked into it. And then they were travelling through an endless tunnel to the Almighty alone knew where.

It lasted a minute or two at most before they emerged from the humongous passageway. The colour-shifting light cycled through a few more rainbows before fading away, leaving only the bright, blue sky of a clear afternoon.

Wait. Hadn’t it been evening only a few moments ago? The sun had somehow regressed in its trek across the sky, moving eastward instead of west. No one else seemed to notice that. Or perhaps they simply didn’t care.

regressed“Almighty be praised!” Paul said, falling on his knees with his hands clasped and a smile on his upturned face. “Bless the Almighty! His mercy is boundless!”