Holy blight (draft 2)

Purpose part 2

Lehana lays the injured woman down on the hood of an abandoned car. The alarms blare loudly, and the headlights begin to flash. She places her hand over the woman's injured leg and closes her eyes. A pale-yellow glow begins to expand from her palm before slowly making its way through the skin, encasing the bone in divine energy. The leg suddenly starts to straighten out, and the woman stares in awe as her wounds begin to close and her pain alleviates. As soon as she is able, she stands up and runs.

"Where did you learn to do that," I ask Lehana.

"I told you, this knowledge was passed down," she replies.

"I've met my share of armature witches, but none that repair broken bones with the ease of applying a bandage." I retort. "Who taught you to fix people".

She sighs and says, "They say the first ones came from the East. Some say Persia, but we think farther... they went by many names, the wise men, the kings; we knew them as, 'magi.'"

"Wise men?", I ask confused and slightly amused. "Like in the Bible."

"Yes.", she answers. "But that does not begin to scratch the surface of their legacy. They were the most powerful users of this power, to ever be bound to human form. They came centuries ago... a few weeks after a deadly sickness had taken its toll, and dozens had already died. With them, they brought an unearthly light... yellow and gleaming, it was unlike anything our people had ever seen. Its powerful rays blinded those who looked to it and shrouded the Magi as they passed through. As the ill lay confined to their beds, the glow poured into their , healing them almost instantly, and as the magi walked, the dirt beneath their feet grew dark and glossy wherever they stepped. The name of our village was, Awọn Atẹsẹ, do you know what it means?"

"The footprints," I reply.

"yes...", Lehana replies. "Their obsidian footprints left a trail through the village, a long-standing reminder of the miracle that they had performed. The Magi, like you, had traveled across the land for an eternity, but... unlike you, they brought life with them... instead of death. Where they went, flowers grew, the sick were healed, and the crops prospered... When you and I met, you described my use of divine magic as parlor tricks, but I don't know if even the power of you and the others of your kind, match that of the magi. You probably brought that sickness to our town without a second thought, waved your hand and condemned the innocent to suffer, but the magi... they fixed what you had done, Blessing us with their magic and teaching us to use it. They showed us spells and incantations, and taught us to summon the divinity that exuded from their every pore."

"Local myth. Nothing more.", I reply. "No mortal men were ever granted the power to reverse our judgment with the ease that you describe. Either the stories of these 'Magi' are gravely exaggerated or-- ."

"—Or they weren't mortal men at all.", she interjects with a shrug. "It seems the one you served kept as many secrets from you as he did from, the rest of us. Hundreds of thousands of years on earth and you're still trying to figure them all out as if the 'he works in mysterious ways' notion was lost on you."

"Calling him mysterious gives him too much credit. Careless is more like it. If these teachings had spread, if the world knew they could cure anything from the common cold to death itself, with something as simple as a few tongue-twisting incantations and some lines drawn in the dirt then-- "

"—then you'd be rendered less effective?" she chimes in. "Then eternity-long rampage of you and your brothers would be combated by the will of the people you slaughter? What a horrible outcome.", she says sarcastically.

She wipes the dust from her hands onto her and ties her hair in a pony-tail behind her head.

She talks about these men as though they'd created the very she breathes, the very water she drinks. "Where are they now?", I wonder. Where are they while the world burns? What did they say when Father of all creation, abandoned the earth—abandoned us? Where were they during the dark ages, or when the ice age ended. Where were they when we suffered... when our minds left us? Three-hundred thousand years we've worked, we've suffered. Where were they? Were they offered release? Did the lord in his infinite wisdom, see fit to return merely to grant them the freedom that he's denied us for so long. No... Even he's not so cruel, so thoughtless. Surely Lehana is mistaken.

"Folktales... exaggerations", I mutter to myself. Still, her words are too foolish to not be addressed.

I sigh preparing to deliver a speech I'm not sure I believe in anymore, "If you take away the horsemen, you people would have destroyed this world long ago." I explain. "Unchecked by us, your populations would grow, and you'd expand to take up every available space on the globe. You'd be like a roaming plague, packing yourselves like sardines in the Antarctic; stumbling over each other in the Sahara. Even without Famine's help, you'd exhaust what finite resources this world possessed, even without War's influence, you'd fight each other for what is left. Without me, you'd still make yourselves sick from the filth you already produce, and if God were ever to return, he'd see the mess he'd left behind and purge it with a divine smite more destructive than Death could ever conjure. Mankind didn't need healing magic or spontaneously growing flowers. It does not need divine spectacles that make people feel good and worship those who perform them. It needed balance. It needed us. The world might have fared better without our influence, but there's no denying that without it... you people could never have survived for as long as you have".

She stares back at me, silently, not contemplating the depth of my words, but formulating a response. She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, she is distracted by Death floating upwards into the black and smoky sky. He rises to about forty feet in the air before coming to a dead stop.

His body is still as he hovers over the land he'd decimated with his furious storm. He snaps his fingers and rain begins to fall. White steam floats high into the sky as the fires are slowly extinguished by the downpour he'd summoned and as the clouds of thick black smoke that once blanketed the city begin to fade, so does the misty ethereal essence of those killed in the assault. They hold each other, the ghosts of families and strangers alike, facing oblivion with woeful wales and cries of panic, but facing it together.

The ghosts are purged from the world of the living within a few moments, leaving only Hyde behind, his gaze transfixed on the sky. He turns his head slowly and looks at Death.

"I could free you as well," he says as the rain slows to a weak drizzle. "It must be painful to watch souls leave, while you remain... here"

"No I don't think I'm ready yet," he answers.

"It's been a couple of hundred years Hyde.", Death says. "When will you be ready".

There was in which it was uncommon to see lingering ghosts. In addition to focusing nature's wrath, Death is also a corridor of souls banishing them from this plane and sending them to the next. About 600 hundred years after God disappeared, Death began to grow increasingly disinterested in this element of his work, stating that he was content to let the mortals "Figure it out on their own." This is the first time in a long time that I've seen him "clean up" after a purge. Sometimes he cleanses them with the beams of a brilliant sunset, or the force of a stiff breeze, but... I always liked when he'd dispel them with rain. There's something about how the raindrops fall through the clouds of souls as they disperse, how their ethereal glow bounces off of the pools of water on the ground, forming puddles of shimmering cerulean light. It's the part of our job that the mortals never see, the part where one of us manages to take suffering, and make art.