[As told by one person who has settled in the town within the crossing to someone else who has recently decided to live there.]
A long time
ago the town was resettled. A cult had been drawn here by the
darkness. The darkness wasn't as strong back then, but then neither
was the light. The darkness of the town called out, just as it does
today, but even fewer could hear it than do these days. The darkness
in the souls of the cultists, though, that was enough to make a
connection.
So they came. They came and found an
abandoned town waiting for them to take possession. They repaired
the buildings, tilled the land, and began to live here as if it were
any other place. Hard to believe now, I know. For decades they
lived here. It had to be decades because the ritual they wanted to
preform required the death of innocents, and none of them were
innocent.
They raised new children, keeping the
truth of who and what they were hidden from those they planned to
use. Raised from birth in this place, in the crossing, those
children had within them the power to enact the townsfolk's ritual.
The ritual called for the death of
twenty-three innocents over seventeen months. Lunar months, if that
matters to you. For the first year of sacrifices they killed one
thirteen year old each month. Thirteen deaths; thirteen months.
Each child sacrificed in the month of their birth – though, again,
lunar months. You would think them each thirteen years and six
months old, each sacrificed six months from their birthday.
The final four sacrifices followed an
escalating pattern. One twenty-three year old was sacrificed in the
fourteenth month. Two nineteen year olds in the fifteenth month.
Three seventeen year olds in the sixteenth month. There were to be
four thirteen year olds in the seventeenth month.
The cult failed to account for a basic
thing. Even as their actions sank the crossing further into
darkness, a light began to glimmer. The ones they scarified were
pure. Not saints or angels, but people. Human beings that were
purposely kept separate from the taint of their parents and their
town. Even as the cult's rituals cemented the unthinking darkness
that defines this place, the ghosts of those that had died formed the
first willful force of light to dwell in the crossing.
That we know of, of course. The
crossing is older than sin itself, so they say, but the history we
can learn goes back only so far. What went on here before cult has been
lost like whispers in the wind. They came after a period of
prolonged silence, and proceeded to drown out whatever secrets might
have lingered with their own cacophony.
Regardless, if the cult had bothered
to pay attention, they'd have noticed the push-back beginning as they
carried out those last sacrifices. They didn't see it coming until
it was far too late, of course. The twenty-third sacrifice at the
close of the seventeenth month was when the ghosts finally had the
power to really accomplish something. Twenty-two lost souls, not
some divine beings but things like you or me, humans --confused,
angry, hurt, muddled, but none the less compassionate human beings--
prevented the final sacrifice of the final batch from going as
planned.
Twenty-two lost souls trying to save a
twenty-third before it became one of their number. They didn't,
quite, succeed, but neither did they fail.
The ritual utterly failed to bring the
cultists dread god through the crossing. It failed because the
twenty third soul was torn asunder. Neither freed nor used. The
others tried to save its life, they tried to save the soul itself,
they tried to make anything happen … anything but what was supposed
to happen.
They succeeded in most of what they
tried to do, everything but the main point. They saved the life of
the last sacrifice, but it mattered little because all that remained
was a soulless body. They prevented the soul from becoming trapped,
like them, within the crossing, but it didn't much matter at the time
because the soul was broken in the process. As the ritual held the
soul in place, they tried to wrench it free, and the soul simply
shattered.
Part of it lingered here, not because
it was trapped but because it had some innate understanding that here
was where it had the chance to become whole again. The two largest
parts were thrown miles away, where they eventually became newborn
twins. The other pieces were tiny by comparison to the first three.
Some found their way into animals, a squirrel here, a field-mouse
there. One became attached to a stick.
The twenty two lost souls remained in
the crossing. The cultist's god remained beyond this world, but it
wasn't pushed back to where it had been before the rituals commenced.
It was instead stuck being almost free.
And so darkness and light infused the
crossing for the next thirteen years. As for the state of the
crossing itself, it was as if someone had stuck their foot in the
door between worlds. It wasn't quite open, but it definitely wasn't
shut.
Those thirteen years are why we don't
know what happened before the cultists moved here. Things were calm,
we know that much. They interrupted a time of subtlety and silence,
that's clear. But their influence during those thirteen years erased
whatever history there was.
They explored the instances and
shadows, they built up the town in all its variations, they did so
much to solidify the in-between that it's hard to imagine the
crossing going quiet again. Hard to imagine, but it's happened
before and I doubt those cultists were special enough to do something
for the very first time in history, so it must be possible that it
will happen again.
Still, try to find history from before
they arrived and you won't. It simply isn't possible to see beyond
the footprint they've left with any kind of clarity.
The reason they stayed was that they
had nearly succeeded, their awakening of the crossing from its period
of slumber and whispers was all the proof they needed of that. Also,
I think, they somehow sensed that their time would come again.
They may not have, precisely, realized
that the majority of the soul had been reincarnated, but somehow they
knew that if they waited opportunity would knock. They may not have
known that in thirteen years time their chance would come again, but they
had a feeling that it would come at some point. So they stayed, and
they waited, and they built, and their darkness grew.
Some people I've told the story to
have difficulty understanding why they'd all stay. It's harder for
me to imagine why they'd consider leaving. These are people who had
sold their souls. Not by signing some silly contract written in
blood, by doing unforgivable things without so much as a twinge of
guilt or a moment's desire for forgiveness.
They'd burnt away everything good
about themselves. The original project, it must be remembered,
lasted a quarter of a century. They resettled the town, refurbished
it, began to live here, and brought into this world the first
sacrificial decades before their ritual would end. Decades before
the ritual would start. Remember that the oldest was 23 at the time
of sacrifice.
I don't know how you can live with
someone that long and still be willing to kill them for the sake of
some ritual or some god, but I have an even harder time believing
that the kind of person who would do that, the kind of person who
would go that far, would simply up and walk away if things didn't go
precisely according to plan.
Once someone has gone that far, what
could they possibly go back to?
Anyway, by the time the thirteen years
were up, the cult had figured out what they needed to do. They
eventually realized that parts of the soul had been reincarnated.
They also gained some awareness that a large shard of it was already
here. They hunted down and sacrificed the animals that housed bits
of the soul in smaller rituals, ones that helped them call out to the
largest missing pieces: the twins.
How magic translates to logistics is
something I'll never understand, but the process worked, and soon the
two pieces of the shattered soul that had escaped this place were on
their way back here, in a car with their father.
The shard that remained here had spent
its time learning, organizing the twenty-two who had gone before, and
regaining what parts of itself it could manage. When the animals
were sacrificed it readily accepted the broken bits back into itself.
It didn't, and I find this impressive for a thirteen year
old--however dead it might be--seem concerned with freeing itself
from its broken afterlife. In fact, it tried to prevent the twins
from arriving, which would have prevented it from ever being whole
again.
It failed; the result was a car crash.
The father lost consciousness, the boy was injured, the girl could
have escaped but she wouldn't leave her twin brother. Cultists
abducted the twins, but by the force of the shard that had remained
here and the twenty-two lost souls that were helping it, the cultists
were tricked into thinking that the father was already dead and so
left him alive.
The shard led the others in trying to
prevent the ritual. With twenty-three points of light against them,
twenty-two of them full souls, and the crossing partially open, the
cultists found themselves unable to proceed.
It must be remembered, as I said, none
of the sacrificed were saints. They may have spent the thirteen
years gently guiding outsiders away from the crossing, they may have
been trying to prevent darkness from overrunning this world, but they
were still quite capable of being pissed off. They could still find
it in themselves to hold a grudge against the people who had
mercilessly killed them.
There are monsters in the crossing,
you've seen them. They don't just come out when people need to work
out their inner demons by fighting outer demons. Ring the dinner
bell and they'll be more than happy to come out in force.
It didn't take the cult long to go
from thinking that leaving the father alive had been a hideous
mistake to thinking that it was an incredible gain. They understood
that if the shard had kept them from killing him, the shard must see
some value in him, and so they attempted to trick him into working
against the shard, correctly guessing that the shard would not harm
him.
The good news is that they ended up
failing anyway.
They nearly completed their ritual,
but it served only to empower the shard, making it a whole soul once
again. They may have thought that didn't matter as there were
twenty-two other souls already aligned against them. They may simply
not have given it much thought.
Either way the twenty-two lost souls,
for all their effort and all that they had done to oppose the cult,
were bound by the ritual. It was why they had lacked the power to
protect the sacrifices before the twenty-third and why they had not
even been able to save the twenty third. The shard, on the other
hand, had never seen its ritual completed. It wasn't bound in action
or location. It had spent some thirteen years as a free entity
within the crossing--and not the crossing as you or I know it. The
incomplete ritual had neither succeeded nor failed, it had simply
been put on hold. There was a rift in those days.
I know that it probably seems like I'm
hammering this too hard, but trust me, this is important.
For thirteen years the crossing was
jammed, neither open nor closed, the moments of flux we see today
were expanded until flux was more common than a stable state. In
that environment the shard had grown, half its life as a human born
in the crossing, ignorant of matters beyond the physical, half its
life as a shard in the crossing in flux.
It had understanding we cannot hope to
comprehend and was limited, primarily, by the fact that it was just a
portion of a being. A shard of a soul rather than a whole one.
When the ritual resumed, in the
moments between when it became a whole soul and when it would have
been bound like the others, it rebelled. With the help of the father
of the twins the ritual was ended in failure. The twenty-two
lost souls were freed, the cult's god was pushed as far from this
world as it had been before the first sacrifice, the cult was swept
from this world into one of the echoes within the crossing, and after
thirteen years of flux, the crossing was able to stabilize.
The three bodies that had belonged to
the soul --the original sacrifice, the boy, and the girl-- were
incinerated. I honestly don't know why the cult had bothered to keep
the original body alive anyway. The soul had already been expelled
from it, it was nothing but a highly damaged empty vessel.
A new body was created, in the image
of the twins, which left the crossing with the father. Somehow,
damned if I know how, it was able to change official records to say
that there had only ever been one twin anyway. While records are
just ink on paper or code on computers, memory is something that
persists, thus we can know that the one who left was originally the two
who came.
I won't say that the father and child
lived happily ever after, no one lives a life that's quite that dull,
but my understanding is that they lived well and continue to do so.
Old age looks to be more likely to kill the father at this point than
old gods. The child did return here once, as an adult of the younger
variety, to tie up some loose ends.
The twenty-two souls are free to do
whatever it is that souls do, but sometimes they come here again.
You can feel them linger, and sometimes even see their light as they
help the wayward out of the darkness.
I hesitate to say the cult is gone.
I've thought that before and been wrong. They have certainly been
kept from the human plane. They exist in the shadows, echos,
reflections, semblances, parallels, counterparts, and effigies, if
they exist at all. They cannot reach outside of this town, and as
far as I know they've never been found unless someone went looking
for them first.
The crossing became as we know it:
home. No longer stuck open, transitions and reverberations became
momentary shifts, not states of being. The darkness was pretty well
cemented into it, but so was the possibility of redemption. The
darkness calls out to its own, some who are brought here by the
call wallow in it, but others shed it and leave here brighter than
they would have been without the journey.
Most people who come here can't wait
to get back out, but I wouldn't want to live outside the crossing.
Don't get me wrong, if I were outside I'd want to live, it's not like
I can't live without it or anything, but it would never be my
preference to live somewhere else. I shudder to think what it would
be like to be trapped in a single world. Everything … static.
Nothing but what your eyes see and your ears hear.
Most people who come don't understand
that any better than I understand them. I see why they want to leave
--their darkness drew them here and so darkness is what they find
here-- but I don't see why they want to be in a world that's what they call
normal. I'm guessing you can understand me on that, since you've decided
to stay.
I'm glad of that, I like the company.
-
Interesting! I enjoyed reading this and the explanation-of-inspiration post both.
ReplyDeleteThat's an unusually patient cult. Still, I imagine dragging in that many innocents from the outside world would have some technical challenges.
ReplyDelete