To The Reader

Harbinger

I was born just after dusk on the steps of a church. My mother's identity is unknown to the villagers who birthed me - she appeared banging on the door of the church screaming for help. They claimed that she labored for three days before I emerged. She was dead a moment before I was finally released from her charge. The woman who had coaxed me from within insisted that the mother be buried straight away with all the funeral rites given. Poor, poor, woman, she often said when she recalled the events to me throughout my childhood. She looked so young. Of her appearance they called her pretty when they told me about her, but they might have just been being kind. Every child wishes for their mothers to be beautiful. Since she was alone, they do not know who the man who sired me could have been. She carried no pendents, no letters, nothing. She didn't even give them a name to call me before she passed. 

The name that they gave me is irrelevant; I made my own name much later and at the time it meant so much more. But now I am banished from memory and my own name struck from all records of history. 

To be raised amongst the church-goers as I was led me to holy scholarship at a tender age. I worshipped the pages in the Holy Bible. Every word was a drop of honey to me, every calligraphic letter written by the monks the most beautiful of all Creation. I memorized Genesis at the age of five and recited its lessons to my play-mates. My greatest wish was to be God's next prophet, to be bestowed with Holy power and weed out the wrong-doers and non-believers with fire and plagues upon their lands. The priest and the nun who headed the church saw my complete devotion and took me on as their apprentice. My foster mother said she was proud of me for being such a good Christian, but there was relief hiding in the depths of her eyes. She was afraid of me, though she was a God-fearing woman who attended all of the Masses. 

The first thing they taught me was how to pray properly. If my back wasn't straight enough, my head not humbled quite right, a switch was lashed upon my wrists. I was their door to the village youth, who they taught me were submitting to the Devil rather than bowing down to the Lord. They taught me how to carefully weave holy thought and prayer into casual conversation, how to make the most carefree of young people become wracked with guilt for missing a Mass because they were taken ill or for looking at the opposite sex. I was their perfect spy and they loved me for it.

My desire for divine prophecy grew with my age. I discovered other essays, other Holy papers left out of the Bible and devoured them. I read the Hebrew Torah, the Islam Qur'an, the Prose Edda, Poetic Edda, the Tripitaka, every book on beliefs and divinity I could find. My guardians dismissed them as heresy but I knew better. If the Lord did not wish for the books to be written, He would have had them destroyed along with their writers. You cannot fake divinity for the Devil cannot put his mind into yours and make you write against the Lord.