Companionship - beyond flesh

Beyond Flesh Monologues: The Churchman

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

It seems my life these days is measured in pain: the pain of loss, the pain of solitude, the pain of an invalid, and now the pain of return.

She cuts and pulls bone. The room is dark, and I can not see what is being done to me. I think I spin around. There is a tickle on my neck like running liquid -- blood?

"Will you require your reproductive function?" She asks and before I can answer I feel a warm rush down my leg, a release of all that is trivial and the focus towards a purpose of mind. I spin again, this time inside my head.

I am being remade. Once a mere man of God, from this place I will walk as Uriel, a warrior in God's army.

"Weapons." I say. There will be battle, and I must be prepared to wound; to dig my spear into evil. Is that wrong? To lust for the death of another? To be the one to order the rebirth of Satan? For to be reborn, first you must die.

I hear a crack in my back and the strange sensation of air on my insides. It is raining blood now. I can hear its fall on the ground somewhere below. My mouth is stuffed full, with what I know not, and I gag. My body heaves forward and there are sharp pains in my head. They come and go, these pains, just as the tide, again and again, of the Eternal Return.

It is our obsession; not content to live a life, die and become dust in the end, we must look to the heavens for a new life. Hail the saviour of Man, the Son of God; he came to the Earth and died for our sins and was reborn. She came again, the daughter of God, to the red Mars and died again for our sins and was reborn. At her ascendance, she said that she there would be no third coming; that the next would be the first again, a child of the Eternal Return -- the remaking. She gave us Milton's Paradise and said to look to this lost testament so that we may see the signs and be ready. The book -- it feeds our obsession.

For one hundred and twenty years, I have embraced Milton's testament watching and waiting for the revelation of the return. And while they see the Devil in shadows here and there, it was to me he chose to appear -- as it was written.

But also, as given testimony, I am ashamed to admit that his visit was much earlier than I have led the others to believe. He has been there for a time, and it was me, standing between the Paradise of Fools and this Paradise who invited him in.

In my defense, he was heavily disguised, when he came to me an angel child, naked and pure just as I was hanging crucified, naked and ruined. I remember being in awe of his beauty and beguiled by his earnest admiration of my charge, the --. What was it that I was protecting? I can't remember, a pile of bones? Did he say, Sion? But, it matters not, I invited him in. I will not tell them for it brings to me weakness, when it is strength that I need. Even so, they can read it in the Book for themselves, they can relive my carelessness.

The pain in my head recedes, and my body feels heavy. My limbs pull down like gravity. There is churning in my stomach. I feel a thousand nightcrawlers balled and writhing.

'Crawlers', the word we used in The Brotherhood to describe those selfish souls seeking godhead. Every one of you failed godlings is inside me now, fueling my fire.

It is true that I have borrowed time in the face of longitudine dierum, the long life, but I do not seek immortality. I wish only to stand at the head and the tail of the serpent and take my place at the feast of the Return. I long to feed.

I turn in the air and touch the ground with my new legs, the feeling is foreign to me. There is a shooting of energy up and down my spine and the power in my shoulders is irrepressive.