Truth is Darkness
A really short story that explores the boundary between trauma and enlightenment, set in the world of my ongoing fantasy project
Embers brushed across her cheeks. Ash, still hot, some still glowing. A fresh run of tears carved through the soot on her cheeks. When this many buildings go up in flames, whether from the smoke or the loss, everyone cries. Gara knew which side she’d rather be on.
“Mistress.” A pant from behind.
She didn’t turn. The village kept her attention. She had always been proud of her handiwork.
“We have ‘em.”
Gara smiled. Smiled at the flames, at the houses beneath them, at a job well done. At redemption, beckoning her with each crackle and scream. Perhaps this time, she’d find her answer.
They had been lined up, shackled neck to neck, chains only long enough to allow a shuffle when moving. Where she might have once seen people; fat magistrates, oily merchants, calloused carpenters, now she saw them for what they were.
“Believers!” She accused. Every sorry head snapped to her with a jangle of chains. “Your prayers have become curses.”
An old man, still proud and straight despite his bindings and stained bed clothes, growled. “We pray for our souls, witch, not for this life.”
Gara couldn’t help but smile as she ran a hand over the stubble of her hair. “Tell me, will screams help your souls?” She drew a long knife, the blade glimmering in the wild light thrown by the burning village.
The priest eyed it. “The punishments you deliver will be a test.” His voice grew, loud and confident. “A test, whether our faith will break before our bodies, whether…”
He gasped as the iron butt of the knife cracked his cheekbone.
Gara flipped the knife in her hand. “What kind of gods would let such horrible things happen to believers as pure as you?”
Nothing.
She put the point of the knife under his chin and lifted until his trembling eyes were looking into hers. “You spend your life worshipping, sacrificing, preaching. You won’t let that faith down, even with the prospect of your children on the rack, you watching from a cage?”
He gulped and a single bead of blood ran down Gara’s blade.
“So, what will your gods give you in return?”
Gara had heard all the answers. They always came a little differently, depending on the local falsehoods, but the priest gave the real answer as his eyes flickered, then faltered, then dropped.
Nothing.
“Exactly.”
The creak of leather announced a soldier with a bound man in tow.
“We found this one out in the woods. Larghast spotted his altar lights burning.”
Gara looked up to the night sky, stars hidden behind a screen of smoke. Larghast would be flying in wider circles, searching for more pinpricks of faith in the darkness of truth.
The man was thrown forwards. In the torchlight, his eyes glittered. Gara had always been able to read eyes, a talent. That’s why she’d been chosen. As a girl, she’d been chosen to swallow the lies of holy men and scriptures, told that her talents were not her own. They were gifts from gods that she could neither hear nor see nor touch. As a woman, wiser, she had been chosen to do this work. Work as real as the screams of believers.
Now, a woman, she could see that this man was sure in his faith, unlike the priest who sobbed behind her. This man was the one she was looking for.
* * *
The keep they occupied was small, a single stone tower surrounded by a clutter of wooden buildings like fungus growing from a tree. The dungeons were equally small, a single cell tucked in between storerooms. But she only needed one.
“Where are the others?” He asked.
Gara finished her wine and put down the wooden goblet. It was simple, a typical altarpiece from a small temple in Avend. She traced the marks she had made in the years since, gouges eroding the symbols of the faith that had once bound her. She had broken free.
“Shuffling their way here at the spear points of my men.”
“So why was I bundled over your horse and bounced here at a gallop?”
“I have questions.”
Gara unrolled the leather case beside her goblet. Knifes, shears, hooks, graters. The old tools of her new trade.
The man’s mouth pressed into a tight line. No one liked pain, no matter how insulating their belief. “Shoot.”
Gara smiled. “What’s your name?”
“Not the question I was expecting. Harlon.” He had a creased face, like a favourite poem, the paper unfolded and read and refolded until the lines were as much a part of the joy as the words. She scowled.
“Well Harlon, I don’t want to know about your faith, what you light those altar candles for. I don’t want to know what other villages around here have shouldered the yoke of religion again.”
“I’m sure the others from my village will cough that up soon enough.”
Gara nodded. “You said, ‘my village’, yet you lived as an outsider, a hovel in the woods.”
“Such is my lot.” He shrugged. A gentle gesture.
“Your lot?”
“A believer, yes, but in my own way. I do not think Jeren did the gods justice.”
“Jeren, the priest.”
Harlon nodded and stretched his fingers out. They were starting to go red, the rope connecting his hands to a ring in the wall tight. “All placation and pomp. Transactional. Do this and get that. All about the next life, the rewards. But nothing about living beside the gods in this life, the feeling of being with them each moment.”
Gara scoffed. “A half-life then, neither empty of religion, nor accepted into the fold of your beliefs.”
Harlon shrugged again, smiling this time. “It has been a full life.”
Gara studied him. A part of learning how to read eyes is that you learned to keep yours unreadable. Her empty gaze had been as effective as all the tools on the table beside her. A gaze so empty that men would try to fill it with anything they could. A gaze so empty it swallowed lies without blinking, waiting for a mouthful of the truth.
Harlon returned her stare, and Gara blinked.
“But your life has not been full.” He said, “Busy, yes, but there is something hollow, deep beneath it all.”
Gara hissed in his face. How she had crossed the room so quickly, or how a knife had appeared in her fist, she didn’t know. He didn’t flinch, even with the blade so close his eyelashes would brush it.
“And I just touched that emptiness, didn’t I?”
“Anyone free of religion is empty.” A string of Gara’s spit splattered across Harlon’s nose and hung there, swaying as she yelled. “Truth is darkness, a void to be filled.”
Harlon’s voice was quieter now, almost a whisper. Gentle and warm. “Your emptiness made you ask questions though, didn’t it? I think it made you become what you are, High Inquisitor.”
Gara felt his bound hands struggle to wrap around hers. His fingers were cold and she let him. The knife clattered on the flagstones between them.
He watched her. “You have a story, don’t you?”
He was the one she was looking for.
“I was being trained to be a priestess, a Seer, when I was taken. For days I held out. I would not forsake my gods; I would not say where the others hid. No food, no sleep, no blankets against the winter nights.” She looked down at the roll of tools behind here. “Then they got them out.”
Harlon sighed and a sob caught in the back of Gara’s throat.
“I told them everything, then began making things up, but they didn’t stop.” Her teeth were gritted now, trying to keep her past where she had buried it, like white stones over a tomb’s door. “Days into it, as I hung from the gambrel, the strangest feeling came over me.” Her jaw relaxed; lips parted. “It was as if I was no longer there. I could see myself looking down at those men as they laughed, continuing their work. I felt no pain, no anger, no regret. All there was was…” She shuddered, but the didn’t have the word. In all these years it had never come to her.
“Love.” Harlon said.
Gara swallowed, then coughed. A tear pooled at the corner of her eye and ran, finally free. “Love.” She croaked. “Love. It shone through everything, like the sun through a pane of Gathan glass. I could see myself glowing with it, the black walls of the prison were like jewels, and the men, laughing as they chose the next tool to try on me, were as my brothers, beautiful and loved despite their faults. No, closer. They were a part of me. All of us a part of something else.”
She rubbed her eyes. Harlon was watching her, a sad smile on his face.
“How do you explain it?” Gara asked, ashamed of how broken her voice sounded.
“It’s what Jeren preached but could not find. It’s what all religions hope to teach but get hopelessly lost along the way.”
“And you found it?”
“A moment now and then. Enough to lead a full life.”
Gara leapt forwards, fists clenched as if she could catch it, hold it in and never let go, “Show me how to find it again! Teach me!”
His smile was sad now, truly sad. “It cannot be taught. The further you chase it, the faster it runs. The more you know, the more there is to get in the way.”
Gara wiped her tears with the scarred heel of her palm. He was not the one. She picked her knife up and looked at his bound hands. Harlon had, however, taken her further than anyone before. She would make this quick.
