The Binding

Chapter Thirty-Two

I felt intense heat burn against my skin before I opened my eyes. There was stone all around me. Monolithic pillars of stone towered above where I stood. It was a giant building, and every foot of it was intricately carved. The walls and pillars were brightly colored like a kaleidoscope of reds, blues, yellows, and greens. The colors were a sharp contrast to the panoramic desert brown all around the building. The structure was astounding— and it was burning. A roof fitted with wooden beams was on fire, and I could see flames licking upwards from isolated places inside the building. And two colossal wooden doors at the entrance were engulfed in red and amber flames.

Gathered all around the steps were people. Some were crying. The rest stared in dumb horror as the fire burned and ate away anything that wasn't stone, leaving black trails of smoke and soot along the walls. Sria was standing a few feet away, her eyes riveted on a man prostrate in front of the steps. I noticed near him lay what looked like statues that had been broken and crumbled into hundreds of pieces.

Standing on the remains of a large statue to the right was Petro. He surveyed the blazing fire and the prostrate man with disinterest. He turned to Sria and watched her with no more interest than he had with the fire. Finally, Petro turned and walked away into the desert.

I pulled my hand away and opened my eyes slowly. "The people there named him Petbe. That was the last time I saw him until today," she said placidly. "I moved north to Egypt and took a boat to Parthia and then traveled east to China. I found Yisu not long after that."

"What happened to the man? The priest?"

"He committed suicide," she answered. "The temple was destroyed. He had offended the gods, and they turned their backs on him. It was required." A binding rolled over me that sent sharp electric tendrils along my arms and back.

"He destroyed the temple because of you?" I asked, not exactly surprised but nonetheless horrified. More than stone and mortar, I didn't need the vision to know how important a temple would have been to them.

She nodded. "Petbe is the god of revenge." She smirked sarcastically. "He must have kept the name."

Sria and Yisu eventually took me to a small house in San Francisco. They did their best to try to keep me occupied, but the endless traffic and noisy crowds became quickly tiresome. I longed for our quiet Mediterranean shore and searched endlessly for pure isolation... the one thing I think they wanted me most to avoid.

Sria was withdrawn most days. I think she was mourning Petro, in her own way. Maybe she was just as confused as I was. My feelings for Ezra were mixed up in my feelings for Petro. Evil megalomaniac murders. Maybe that's the cost of old age. There's always a price.

What I had was what all Avati have... time. Time to try to find answers to unanswerable questions. If evil doesn't exist but instead occurs only in degrees of selfishness and malicious behavior, then is that also true for good? I had always thought of myself as good. If that is true, then did that make Ezra evil or degrees of evil? No matter how much I saw or learned of Azrael, I couldn't think of Ezra as evil. So what of Petro? Was he any different? Of course not. Ezra would be the first to admit he had done far, far worse. If Ezra had met me in a tiny village thousands of years ago, would he have slaughtered me as he had everyone else?

Only one answer is possible.

Yes.

And still, I couldn't understand Petro. The way he loathed mortals and the world. I tried to see the world from his point of view, imagine how it was when he was young. But I couldn't see mortals as cannibals incapable of respect and love.