Waiting Silence: Part 3

Soapygold
Waiting Silence
Part Two: A Windborne Refugee

Jonathan woke from a feverish sleep filled with demons and knights, innocence and corruption, light and dark, and always, just out of sight, Amitiel, the black-winged, scarred angel of truth.  Amitiel himself was writing on a very long scroll of parchment paper with a delicate quill pen and muttering strange syllables to himself.  He turned from his work when Jonathan stirred.  
"Is sleep really so elusive to you?" he inquired, raising his eyebrows.
"I couldn't rest without knowing the rest of your story.  It's so close after all these years… I almost can't believe I'm really here, talking with someone who was there—and an angel, no less!  How long did I sleep, anyway?"
"Just under two hours."
"Two hours?!  It felt more like weeks!"
"Very well; I see that rest is not an issue for the moment; that said, I think it is time to continue the telling of my history.  Before I begin there is something you must know: The soul provides only two things to the body.  It provides a power source, so that the body can move and think, and it provides a moral compass so that the body's judgment will not stray toward sin as often as it would if it were left to pure logic.  Now let us begin."

As I was saying when we left off, I was forced to leave my body to die and fly to the Gates of Ascension.  But when I arrived there, the Gates were closed to my passage; in my reckless attempt to pass I was scorched so badly that the scars still remain on my face and body.  I rebounded from Heaven and smashed back into the earth so hard that the tower shook and I heard the sound of an impact behind me.  I paid no attention to the sound, assuming that y own impact had knocked something down, and instead I thought over my conundrum: I seemed to be banned from Heaven.  I had never really sinned during my mortal life—I had certainly committed minor taboos, but the largest sin I had ever even been involved in was that of using Dark power, and I had used that for the purposes of righteousness.  No, I couldn't have been unworthy through sin; there must be some other reason.  I heard more impacts behind me, and a sort of guttural sound, like that of a deaf man attempting to speak.  I turned and saw the only possible explanation for my failure to pass the Gates.  My mortal body stood before me, staring at its own soul.

Somehow, my mortal body had survived my leaving, as if it had another source of power.  I looked closely at it and realized that it wasn't quite the same as when I had inhabited it.  It had a strange nimbus, an aura that seemed to absorb light that should have been reflected, almost as if it were standing in its own shadow.  Then, just as I realized the truth, time stopped.  The aura that surrounded it split from its body, leaving it standing on its own, and the three of us stood in a triangle on the ground next to the tower.  I examined the shadowy aura of my body and saw that it looked like a twisted, broken form of myself, made from shadow and darkness.  When it spoke, flames danced across its tongue and teeth and slid behind its eyes.  It was the fully developed form of the Demonic Taint that had lived in my arm all those years, growing and maturing as my mortal self did until it could summon the power to break free of its shackles and claim the body that had nurtured it.  It was the source that provided power to my body, keeping it alive and preventing my entrance to Heaven.
"Why?" asked the body.  "Why is this happening?  Why am I still alive even after my soul has departed, and what is this creature of darkness that stands before me now?"
"It is a demon from the Darkness itself, come from some pit of Hell to destroy us all!  Destroy it!" I yelled.
"You pathetic mortal," sneered the darkness, its voice harsh and grating.  "You don't know what real power is.  You have only tasted the barest drop of the powers I can show you."
"Destroy it!" I interrupted, trying to drown out its promises and trickery with my voice, "It deserves death!  It's trying to trick you!"
It continued talking, its voice easily carrying above mine, even as I attempted to stop it.  "I can give you a second life.  Immortality!  Don't you want to live for eternity, never hungry, never tired, never aging, and even at the end of the world, never facing judgment for your crimes?  Don't you want to rise above all these devout ignoramuses who call themselves your betters and rule them for once?  You know you deserve it, after all you've been through.  You could do it with my help."
"No!"  I shouted as I flung myself at it, buffeting it with my wings and trying to destroy it with my holy powers.
It merely chuckled as it wrestled against me, even as it began to fade, "Don't you see, you old fool?  I've already won."  I gasped as I felt a terrible, cold pain in the center of my back.  My physical body withdrew its sword from my spiritual body and I collapsed as it merged with the darkness, starting time again, and walked away, leaving me to recover on my own.

After months of waiting, healing, and plotting to rid the world of that dark creature that had seduced my physical body with its promises of power, I returned to the Paladin Order's Headquarters, where I heard some very disturbing news.  The king had died and in his place ruled a tyrant said to have almost unlimited powers and no compunctions about using them freely to destroy whole villages if they rebelled.  Some even whispered that he had no soul, but those who said that disappeared in the darkness of the night and were always found dead in the center of their town the next morning.  

In the three months I had remained on Earth without a physical body, my spiritual one developed solidity and became physical without a body to inhabit.  I wore a robe and claimed to be a hunchback in order to disguise my wings, and I asked the Sages of the Paladins to allow me to become their bell-ringer, since their last bell-ringer had retired recently and they had been taking it in turns to ring the bells whenever they needed to be rung.  While I was there, I learned the art of healing and I noticed that the number of Paladins in training had grown rapidly in the months I had been absent.  Then, one day, I heard that the Sages were planning an invasion of the king's Palace on the premise that he was clearly an unholy demon of Hell.  I found one training Paladin who seemed to be especially talented and began giving him special training in our free time, readying him for the task I intended for him: that of killing my old physical body.

When the Paladins were ready to attack the Palace, they graduated all of the trainees, increasing their army's size more than twofold, and brought all of their priests to heal them, and of course I made sure they brought me as well.  Near the entrance to the Palace, our army was beset by several of the blood-drinking demons called nosferati, which could change their shape into that of any of several mammals and even become a pool of blood.  Two senior paladins stayed behind to combat the nosferati while the rest moved on.  We then encountered zombies, dead bodies given power by a very powerful necromancer, but deprived of the ability to think.  A few Paladins and two Priests stopped to fight them, and the rest continued.  Thus, our army dwindled until by the time we reached the king in his Grand Hall there were only ten paladins including the boy I had taught and four healers including me.  Our paladins charged, but the king summoned two skeletal servants to attack us and threw a bolt of Dark Matter toward one of the paladins.  He attempted to block the bolt with his sword, but it pierced his sword, armor, and body, finally blasting a hole into the ground behind him as he dissolved and disappeared into nothingness.  My apprentice, for such he was, dodged one blast of Dark Matter, rolled under another, jumped and corkscrewed over the skeletal guards, and landed with his sword drawn in front of the king.  I spread my wings, tearing through the back of my robe, and darted forward as fast as sound, driving my body directly toward the king and praying for success.  I passed through the king's physical body, but on my way through I grabbed the dark being by the throat and dragged it out of the king, smashing it into the throne behind it.  Its blood stained my wings black, a stain that has never once left my body.  The king was powerful enough by then to supply his own power, but he was much weaker without the darkness within him.  I watched as he drew his sword and dueled my apprentice to the death, both men spinning and twirling, thrusting and parrying, slashing and sidestepping, until finally my apprentice knocked the helmet off of the king's head.  Inside the armor was a mere shadow of the man he had been, so pale and thin he could have been a skeleton if not for the blood that dripped from his mouth and the skin that stretched tautly across his face.  He froze in shock from the blow.  My apprentice took that time to thrust his sword through the king's skull, leaving it there as he turned and joined the other Paladins in their fight.  I watched as the king, my old physical body, took a single step backward, an expression of shock on his face, and crumbled to dust in his armor, and I watched as the dark being raged and thrashed, fading into nothingness.  The skeletal servants collapsed into heaps of bones on the floor, and the Paladins searched wildly for the cause until they saw me, standing near the throne with torn wings and a scarred face and torso.  They never even looked at my apprentice, assuming that such a new Paladin could never have destroyed the king.  I nodded a greeting to them and left the room by foot, limping slightly from the exertion of the fight I had endured.

The people of the nation of the Paladins assumed that no demon less than Satan himself could be so evil as to commit the atrocities that the king had, and decided that with Satan gone there was no reason to keep the Paladin Order intact.  The Sages disbanded the Order and eventually died, as it the way of the world, but I remained here, bound to life by my inherent immortality, but unable to transcend to Heaven because of the physical nature of my essence.  One Summer a great fire swept the world and destroyed all evidence of any Paladins or Necromancers save for a very few stone monuments, which were found in later generations and contributed along with word of mouth to create the legends of the modern world.

I became a hermit, unable to live in a quickly changing world with so little true devotion to pureness and the Light, and I have studied my own life since then.  I may have found a way to exit this world and enter the waiting silence.