The Damned – Part 3

Given what all happened, I’m not even remotely surprised by that.

So, based on several suggestions, I will begin pursuing a Kickstarter release for Temple in the Stars.  I legitimately have no clue how I will be doing that, as I’ve never used Kickstarter either as a backer nor as a creator.  So I guess this will be one more thing that I have to learn in order to be an author.  That list is getting rather enormous, but I want this, so it can get as large as it likes.  I will learn everything if I must.

As far as The Damned is concerned, I like the story in concept a lot more than the execution is panning out.  I had different things to say, but the various situations of the last week have kind of taken the wind out of the sails for what I had planned.  I’ll take today and see if there is still something there for me to work with.  

My captured eye flashed, swirling in a restless pattern of observation.  What I saw, however, was a streamlined form of the world.  Imagine a heads-up display of your first-person shooter of choice.  Now see that out of one eye, along with demon spirits too weak to manifest physically and demons attempting to hide their corporeal form.  Out of the other eye, see normally.

Head hurt yet?  Well, there’s a reason they call us The Damned.  Eventually, even the best of us finds the constant stimulus and agonizing medication too much to handle, and we go a bit crackers.  Sometimes violently so.  As I always did when I rejoined the world at large, I fingered my flip-folio.  It was filled with children, with single men and women, and with families.  Each was one I had saved.  Each was alive because of my actions, each given a new chance to pursue redemption and salvation because I did what I do.  

You see, demons had given us knowledge of our souls, and their eternal nature.  We suddenly knew, without any doubts, that we were immortal beings having a transitory mortal experience.  Death lost it’s sting, suffering was brought into better focus, and the clean streets and lack of poor or destitute members of society the hallmark of mankind united.

Screaming on the heels of that revelation and change were the downside of a leaderless Hell:  Beelzebub.  Once thought as another name for The Morningstar, instead humanity learned that he was the fourth brightest star in heaven, bested only by his boss and The Son himself.  His hatred of humanity was, if anything, even worse than Lucifer’s had been.  Lucifer hated humanity because he was asked to love us more than God.  Beelzebub hated humanity because we cost him eternal paradise as a pillar of heaven.  He took things rather personally, whereas Lucifer just saw us as pawns on the board where he and God played an eternal game of chess.  

Upon the death and entombing of Lucifer, Beelzebub had taken his followers (every bit as horrible as himself), and hidden in the background as the bulk of a liberated Hell rushed towards Earth to save as many as they could.  Only years later did the ringleaders of the rebellion learn of Beelzebub’s survival.  Hell had been abandoned, and Beelzebub had needed no invitation to secure his borders.  Defectors and human-lovers had been executed without exception, and as Lucifer had rigged the system so that those souls that transgressed became His, the universe had gone on with the idea of the damned going to hell.  

Hell had always been bad.  Now, things were worse.  Much worse.  Torture was a pale descriptor of the horrors which warped those who arrived to his cause.  With every new soul sent to his demesne, his followers gained strength either with twisted rituals which consumed the soul in question, or with a new follower should they chose to join him and spare themselves oblivion.   

Beelzebub was not content with his new conquest however.  He loathed each human life as an abomination in the universe, determined to eradicate us all under a tide of blood and suffering.

Enter me and my kind.  The Damned.  Those who choose to fight against the forces of Hell using the only weapons which work.  Fire a gun at a demon spirit, if it chooses to let you see it, and all you have is a laughing demon handed a defenseless target.  However, if you can see them, and have the hand of a demon grafted onto your own…

Demons could kill demons.  The Damned could fight back in ways mortal authorities could not.  And all it cost us was our sanity.  In the end, when our time was done, it would also cost us our souls.  You can’t graft bits of demon onto you and expect heaven to welcome you with open arms.  So we chose this path, this ronin existence with madness and torture followed by oblivion at the end of it.  No one pushes us, no one forces us, but all of us know that we could do nothing else.  They may call us Damned, but we know what we really are.

Chosen.