From Night On: Magdalene

Chapters 25-26

Chapter 25:

Sacrifice

The question posed by the mysterious figure, whom Thomas identified as Daena, went right over the heads of most of the men. She wasn't asking to get an answer. She was saying, in the form of a riddle, that she already knew the answer. While many of the others searched their minds for ways to describe what they had experienced, Thomas and Mathew watched her, waiting for her to continue.

"He is infiltrating every religion that is poised to make a grand entrance in the history of humans," she warned them. "He's woven his own image into their beliefs, distorted the tales, whispered commandments, and slowly manipulated the humans into giving up worship of all gods, except for him. Now, I ask you, again: who is the One True God?"

Thomas rubbed the back of his neck in confusion. He knew exactly who she spoke of and couldn't argue with the warning of a goddess of truth, so, he wondered, could she be mistaken? The Yehudhi were once a people who believed in many gods, but the experience of every man who followed Meira's instructions was something beyond what he knew to be associated with Zeus. During their travels, they had not worshiped images, nor spoken a name. They hadn't discussed scriptures or commandments and the only message they had ever received was more of a feeling that, when any attempted to translate that feeling into spoken words, expressed, "I am here," in a very loving and inclusive embrace. If this was, indeed, the work of Zeus, he had to know. He didn't care about paintings or stories. Those were so common to him that they might have been massed produced and sold as trinkets with no real value other than as memorabilia. He wanted to know how Zeus was reaching them all through the veil.

"How is this possible?" he asked Daena, nearly breaking his controlled reverence of her. "We've felt His presence long away from this tear in the veil. How is Zeus reaching beyond? Surely, a human body wouldn't allow him such a presence."

He had never seen Daena bewildered by new information until that moment. For the first time in all of his memories, her eyes moved. A confusion caught her and broke her infinite stare as she desperately tried to correlate what he was asking to what she knew. What she said was true: Zeus had been infiltrating and manipulating the religions of man to superimpose his own self as the head figures of each tradition, including the Yehudhi's, but what Thomas was saying was also the truth and something beyond Zeus' capability.

"What you speak of is not within Zeus' powers," she answered in a cautious curiosity as she stepped closer to him. "Who is it you're feeling? What are you feeling?" The fact that she did not know of what Thomas spoke of or what the others experienced troubled her more with every moment that did not carry the end to that ignorance. Even for the gods of truth, truth was always something to be discovered and not simply known. It was something to be built upon in the mind and shared, which meant that there were still secrets, although few and far between, that even they did not know of. "Show me," she demanded. "How do you call upon this One True God?" Thomas was about to step forward and instruct her as Meira had instructed them so many times, but he faltered. His confidence was suddenly washed away and he then feared disappointing Daena, known to the Greeks as Tyche and the Romans as Fortuna.

"It might be best to," Mathew interrupted to save his friend, "let Meiri guide the prayer. Not once, under her guidance, have we failed to feel His presence."

Daena's head turned directly toward Meira's location as ivory wings grew from her shoulder-blades. In a burst of wind, she was gone, the wings more of an ornament of her ability to travel, but, still, leaving behind a single feather. As quickly as she left the one group, she arrived at the presence of Meira and Quaden while he was still toying with the sand-mixed remains of Nyx. "Guide me through your prayer," she demanded immediately, startling the two as Quaden spat into the sands out of surprise.