behindcloseddoors | CLOSED ♔ and who shall i blame for this sweet and heavy trouble

[Well.

That explains a lot.

Des sits up with a groan and then gags midway through it. He takes a shuddering breath though his mouth to stave off the stench, but only comes up choking again.

He shakes it off, forcing himself to his feet so he can get a better look across the battlefield. (spot 20 total)]

Okay? Now what.

[ a noise startles him. the thin, panting figure of a wolf draws near to him, bearing down on him with its lowered head. he can see its narrow uplifted eyes as it pushes its snout arrogantly at him. he can smell its hot, rank breath. ]

[you know he's heard of being left for the wolves but this is ridiculous. He tries to shoo it away.

Yes. That's a great plan.]

Nice doggie. Go on. Get.

[ des hears a deep growl emerge from it, and then its teeth graze his neck. (atk 9) ]

Jesus! [LYING BACK DOWN NOW.] Okay. Fine. Have it your way.

[Think like a Stark???] So are you my power animal or what?

[ he chomps at him again since he's gonna lie there like a good dead body (atk 21, dmg 6). which des is surrounded by.

the sky overhead is the daytime sky of earth, full of white clouds, but other than the slavering wolf trying to eat him, he also gets to hear the storm of insects - gnats and flies rising and swirling here and there over the bodies - and see big humpish ugly vultures tiptoeing over the feast.

from far away is the sound of human weeping. ]

[Well, no one ever said Des was smart. So when the wolf CHOMPS HIM, he yells and punches it in the nose. (atk 23, dmg 3). This way not be the smartest thing to do right now, but he has no weapons and the wolf seems to think he's dinner.

And he really doesn't want to deal with the vultures. HE WILL DEAL WITH THE WEEPING WHEN THE WOLF GOES AWAY.]

Edited 2014-02-10 05:16 (UTC)

[ the wolf yelps and goes tumbling and scuttling away from him. 8|

the clouds roll by so that they release the sun in all its power, and down comes the warmth on his face and hands, and the warmth only makes him conscious of how tired he is and how all his body wants is to rest now k thanks ]

[And so Des, Mighty Wolf Puncher, lies there for a second, staring at the circling vultures and wondering if he's just been abandoned. Azrael and Lucifer are off having a lunch break and he's just going to stay here and get set upon by wild animals.

That whole punching a wolf thing did not help any. He blinks in the sunlight for a few seconds, but that's exhausting and maybe if he closes his eyes for a bit, he'll feel better...

Yeah. Good plan. Just gonna lie here in the middle of this gross field of dead bodies and take a nap.]

[ when des' eyes open, he sees a shining cobalt sky, and the newly dead greeting the older dead, embracing and exclaiming. out of the corner of his eye, he sees the dizzyingly high walls of Heaven, and Heaven's gates - he's outside them, in the Garden. this time he can see the angels, less solid than all the rest, chorus after chorus, moving through the skies, unbound and dipping down at will into the little crowds of mortals crossing the bridge. shifting between visibility and invisibility, the angels move, watch, drift upward to fade into the inexhaustible blue of the sky.

the sounds of Heaven are faint and achingly seductive as they come from beyond the walls. all songs sing the same refrain: "Come in, come here, come inside, be with us. Chaos is no more. This is Heaven."

but he is far from that, in a little valley, amid wildflowers, tiny white and yellow wildflowers, on the grass bank of the stream which all souls cross to get to Heaven, only here it seems no more than any magnificent rushing stream. or rather, it sings a song that says - after smoke and war and soot and blood, after stench and pain - All streams are as magnificent as this stream.

water sings in multiple voices as it slides over rocks and down through tiny gullies and rushes abruptly over rises in the earth so that it may again tumble in a mingling of fugue and canon. while the grass bends its head to watch.

des lies against the trunk of a tree, what the peach tree might be if she bloomed forever, both blossoms and fruit, so that she is never bare of either, and her limbs hang down not in submission but with this richness, this fragrance, this offering. above, amid fluttering petals, the supply of which seems inexhaustible and never alarming, he sees the fleeting movement of tiny birds. and beyond that, angels, and angels, and angels, as if they are made of air, the light luminous glittering spirits so faint as to vanish at times in one brilliant breath of the sky.

the cool sweet air surrounds him, slowly removing, layer by layer, the soot and filth that cling to his coat and shirt. his shoes, however, are broken and tattered and barely held together anymore.

petals fall in his hair, a shower of them, pink and white.

to the left, in a copse of olive trees, lucifer and azrael stand in their human looking forms. lucifer is collected, his face grim and set, and azrael's eyes are sympathetic, a small, sad smile on her face. their images begin to grow and spread, and they sprout huge black wings. ]

The argument is simple. Do you have any trouble understanding it now?

[ their black wings come in close, hugging their bodies, lower tips curve forward, near their feet, so that they do not scrape the ground. they walk towards him. ]

If you'd like, you may ask any Angel you choose to corroborate the truth of things. But as we said, neither side is prone to directly lying.

[Des lets his head loll against the trunk of the tree, thinking about it.] What are they gonna tell me? Suffering breeds character and purity. [A scoff.] I think I'm living proof that it just pisses a person off. I didn't need you to tell me that.

[He stares at his ruined boots and sighs drearily and begins to kick them off before he trips over them or they fall apart while he's walking.]

I get it. We're looking to end the need for suffering. I can get behind that.

I'm glad you understand. You see, what He actually did was this. He said over and over to me, "Lucifer, everything in the universe is used... made use of... you understand?" And He came down, and suffered, died, and rose from the Dead to consecrate human suffering, to enshrine it as a means to an ends; the end was illumination, superiority of the soul. Character and purity.

But that myth of the suffering and Dying God - whether we speak of Tammuz of Sumer or Dionysus of Greece, or any other deity the world over, whose death and dismemberment preceded Creation - this was a Human idea! An idea conceived by Humans who could not imagine a Creation from nothing, one which did not involve a sacrifice, a price. The Dying God who gives birth to Man was a young idea in the minds of those too primitive to conceive of anything absolute and perfect. So He grafted himself - God Incarnate - upon human myths that try to explain things as if they had meaning, when perhaps they don't.

Where was His sacrifice in making the world? He is not Osiris, chopped into pieces! What did He, Almighty God, give up to make the material universe? I do not remember seeing anything taken from Him. That it came out of Him, this is true, but I do not remember Him being lessened, or decimated, or maimed, or decreased by the act of Physical Creation. He was, after the Creation of the planets and the stars, the same God! If anything He was increased, or seemed to be in the eyes of His angels, as they sang of new and varying aspects of His Creation. His very nature as Creator grew and expanded in our perceptions, as evolution took His path.

But when He came as God Incarnate, He imitated myths that men had made to try to sanctify all suffering, to try to say that history is not horror, but has meaning. He plunged down into man-made religion and brought His Divine Grace to those images, and He sanctified suffering by His death, whereas it had not been Sanctified in His Creation, you understand?

It was a bloodless Creation and without sacrifice. But He does believe suffering is sacrosanct or can be. Nothing is wasted. All things are used. But my position is that He took the awful flaw in His cosmos - human pain, misery, the capacity to suffer unspeakable justice - and He found a place for it, using the worst superstitious beliefs of Men.

And now when people die, where they lived in places of peace and prosperity, where they were exposed to such privilege, they find the tunnel and the Light and Loved Ones. They rise without hate or resentment, directly into Heaven. And so do some who have no belief in Him whatsoever or His teachings. Because they too are Illuminated. And this gratifies Him and expands His Heaven, and Heaven is ever enhanced and enriched by these new souls from all quarters of the world.

But Hell - Hell so far exceeds the size of Heaven as to be laughable. Where on this planet has He ruled where there has not been self-sacrifice, injustice, persecution, torment, war! Every day my confused and embittered pupils are increased in number. There are times of such privation and horror that few souls ascend to Him in peace at all.

And He does not care. He says that suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls! He looks from His lofty height upon a massacre, and He sees magnificence. He sees men and women never loving so much as when they lose their loved ones, never loving so much as when they sacrifice for others for some abstract notion of Him, never loving so much as when the conquering army comes down to lay waste the hearth, divide the flock, and catch up the bodies of infants on their spears.

His justification? It's in Nature. It's what He created. And if battered and embittered souls must fall into my hands first and suffer my tutelage in Hell, so much the greater will they become!

But. As I said, I am winning. But I have to win on His terms. Hell is a place of suffering. But let's go over it carefully, so you know what to expect. Look at it; what He did:

When He threw open the gates of Sheol, when He went down into the gloom of Sheol, like the god Tammuz into the Sumerian hell, the souls flocked to Him and saw His redemption and saw the wounds in His Hands and Feet, and that He should die for them gave a focus to their confusion, and of course they flooded with Him to the Gates of Heaven - for everything they had suffered seemed suddenly to have a meaning.

But did it have a meaning? Can you give a sacred meaning to the cycle of Nature simply by immersing your Divine Self in it? Is that enough?

What about the souls who shrink in bitterness, who never flower as the heels of warriors walk over them, what about the souls warped and twisted by unspeakable injuries, who go into eternity cursing, what about a whole modern world which is personally angry with God, angry enough to curse Jesus Christ and God Himself as Luther did, as you have done, as so many of these days do.

People in your modern world have never stopped believing in Him, even with the rise of so many pagan deities of the Shadow World. It's that they hate Him; they resent Him; they are furious with Him. They feel... they feel... [ he searches for the word ]

Edited 2014-02-10 21:36 (UTC)

[Flatly, but with an anger burning in his brown eyes.] Betrayed? [he drops his ruined boot on the ground.]

[ his lip quirks up in a humorless smirk ] Superior to Him. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand why.

I can't show them His wounds in Hell. That isn't going to win them over, these victims, these grieving, furious sufferers of pain beyond His imagining. I can just tell them that it was the Dominican Fathers in His Name who burnt their bodies alive, thinking them witches. Or that when their families and clans and villages were annihilated by Spanish soldiers, it was all alright because His bleeding Hands and Feet were on the banner which the men carried to the New World. You think that would get somebody out of Hell, finding out that He let it happen? And lets other souls ascend without suffering one drop of pain?

If I were to begin their education with that image - Christ has Died for You - how long do you think the Hellish education of a soul would take?

Long enough for some jackass who eats that tripe up to cross a damned river. [he shrugs.] You're only winning 'til you're losing. So what can you really do?

Tell them their best chance lies in surpassing God? By being above His shit? I could get behind that.

I have put my throne above His throne - as the poets and the redactors of Scripture say it - because I know that for souls to attain Heaven, suffering was never necessary, that full understanding and receptivity to God never required a fast, a scourging, a crucifixion, a death. I know that the human soul transcended Nature, and needed no more than an eye for beauty to do this! Job was Job before he suffered! Just as after! What did the suffering teach Job that he didn't know before?

I don't begin by telling that for Him, the human eye expresses the perfection of creation when it looks with horror upon a maimed body, just as it expresses the perfection of Creation when it looks in peace upon a garden.

What do you think Hell is? You must have a surmise by now.

You're gonna show me anyway. [he has now accepted he's not getting out of that.] Why ruin the surprise?

I'd like to know what you expect.

What do you think the souls of Hell should undergo to be fully qualified for Heaven?

To be honest, Lucifer, I think being qualified for Heaven is a crock of shit. You don't see Shadowkind picking and choosing which afterlife they end up in depending on how much they did or didn't love their gods. I can't say I know a whole lot about that, but I know that's not something people go around talking about.

Living's enough. People go full serial killer in God's name and I bet they still get a comfy seat inside the gates, so claiming there's some arbitrary badness level that means you're never getting in is just as bad as saying there's some suffering quota you have to hit and rise above beforehand. Look at those Iscariot fuckers, assuming any of them actually die-

If you think God lets in those who commit horrible atrocities just because they did so in His name, you misunderstand all I have said. Serving Him, or believing one does, is not the same as being Illuminated, as finding peace and forgiving Him. Some of those who thought they were serving Him all along find themselves most deeply entrenched in my Hell, feeling betrayed by the God they'd envisioned.

Do you think it's right, that those who are truly evil: those who commit unspeakable horrors - rapists, serial murderers, those who prey on children - should be afforded Heaven as they are when they die? Should they have to pay for it?

Yeah. [Bitterly, though he's glad of the distinction. He was starting to wonder. Also, to be fair, this has been a LONG-ASS STORY.] So basically you need better trials that aren't through pain and agony to prepare these souls. Something that encourages them to let go. Something that no pain and suffering was ever gonna fix, because they have it in them to let go all the time.

[He shrugs.] So do you punish the damned or not?

Punish is an interesting word choice on your behalf. Consider the distinction: God doesn't see the suffering he enacts on earth as punishment because it does not reflect in any way the individuals choices made by any human - it has nothing to do with what is deserved or not deserved.

What should a soul have to endure to be worthy of Heaven, if we start by believing that no one is beyond redemption? Is it enough to say 'I believe in God', 'Jesus, I believe in your Suffering'? Is it enough for them to say 'I'm sorry for all my sins because they offend thee, my God' or to say, 'I'm sorry because when I was on Earth, I really didn't believe in You and now I know it's true, and wham, bang, one look at this infernal place and I'm ready to believe! I wouldn't do anything the same way, and please let me into Heaven quick'?

Should creatures who have tortured and killed other creatures, people who have deliberately duplicated through their actions punishments as severe as disease or fire or earthquake or any natural disaster just go to Heaven? If they don't know, if they don't understand, if they haven't begun to comprehend what they've done. Would not Heaven, in no time, be Hell, if every cruel, vicious, selfish monster of Earth were to go there? If it were so easy, then the suffering of the world would be worse than intolerable. It would be damned near unforgivable.

What would be forgivable - from the point of view of a soul who died in pain and confusion? A soul who knew that God didn't care? When I spoke to you of Sheol, I spoke of selecting people who had forgiven God for an unjust world, not reformed monsters. But those were people who had been victims of God's injustice. What about the souls of the guilty? The transgressors, those who commit injustices?

So what? Leave them there until they do feel guilt? Until they realize what monsters they were and crack under the weight of their sins?

Or just leave them there to rot because torment never got an honest confession out of anyone. I don't know. I do know that if I didn't want these people alive, I sure as sunshine wouldn't want to share an afterlife with them.

Ah, but remember, we're working under the assumption that no one is beyond redemption. So what is redemption, then? What would you morally settle for... before rejecting me and my hell out of hand! Before fleeing from me. What sort of hell could you believe in and would you - if you were in my place - create? What lesson would they have to learn, knowing I do not justify or defend their actions, that I have never defended anyone who made anyone else suffer - but also knowing that they have their stories, that they are products of the machine of horror that God has placed on the earth, in that He has allowed them to make terrible choices with the free will they were granted?

I'm asking you this: Given all that you have seen - What do you think Hell should be! Go on. Make a statement. You already know it to be akin more to what earthly souls call purgatory.

Then hell should be earth. The only way anyone gets redemption is by not making the same mistakes that dragged them down. It ought to be every bad choice removed from God's worldview and played out until the answer's clear and they make the right choice . That would be my hell. I don't know about anyone else.

CLOSED ♔ and who shall i blame for this sweet and heavy trouble

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