What's before and what is after?
"Father," the child whispered, "why are we following them?" His eyes were searching. His arms were thin as branches, he was young and has a young mind yet his feet were heavy enough to flatten the crumpled, to crush what had already fallen.
The father tightened his grip around the child's wrist. "Because their path bleeds into truth."
"Truth?" He searched his father's face once again and found only a defeated expression.
"The oldest lie disguised as truth," the father said. His voice was hollow. "The kind that survives...or perhaps it was really the truth, and the one we used to live with was really the lie." The child did not answer. He couldn't understand it yet-the heaviness in his father's words.
Their footsteps dragged through the earth. Sweat struck the ground like warning shots. They stopped often, careful to be unnoticeable, breath failing before courage did.
"Where does it hide?" the child asked.
"In minds that refuses mercy." His father simply answered. They crouched behind the bushes. Close enough to see. Close enough to be marked.
There, where trees hissed with every movement. Fire stood naked against the cold, offering warmth with the promise of death.
"I wanted to feel something."
The voice split the dark. They turned. Her eyes were vacant-emptiness stretched so wide it swallowed fear.
"I wanted to feel something," she said again.
"Kill me."
"Pain," the guardian proclaimed, "is the purest proof of living, the greatest feeling one could ever feel."
Lie, the chained woman thought, it is not pain, it is enlightenment. But she kept it in. She is tired, tired of knowing, tired of helping. She cannot save them, she has given up.
Armories and swords clicked as the warriors lined the aisle, unmoving, but listening attentively.
"Thy those who have sworned, your hearts evolved wrapped around your words. The forbidden and the truth will once come to surface. Thou shall not see, shall not hear, one who have sinned shall be punished."
Steel sang as the Guardian yelled, "kill her."
"Her?" Behind the bushes, the child lifted a trembling hand toward the woman chained to the stone-skin bruised, spirit already broken.
"Yes," the father breathed. "It is always her."
The blade fell.
Her head followed.
For a heartbeat, fear bloomed in the child's eyes-then hardened.
Something ancient lit behind them.
Not terror.
Not grief.
But understanding that the truth has now been hidden, buried without trace.
YOU ARE READING
Anatopism
Fantasy--Anatopism is something placed in the wrong location. A geographical or spatial error. A mistake of putting a person or an object in a place where it doesn't belong-- A setting in Lemuria, with two souls, one is a Healer, the other an Alchemist, ro...
