I, the Lamb

Prologue

Fire, fire and blood. The marble streets were slick with gore as I stood numbly at the corner of the old and the new. It was near dark, all the streetlights coming on suddenly and lighting one by one down the street, igniting a path that had once brought so much hope and happiness. Now the path was dark, drowning in sorrow and death. Shadows crept up the walls like enemies as those flags, those cursed flags, rose up over my home, my home…

The flag stood over the book shop. The First School, the parlor shop, the eatery, all had ghastly crimson-topped stakes stuck straight through their hearts, bleeding the blood of my people.

A shallow grave. That is what this city is. The world crashes down on us and we sit, waiting, waiting for the soft caress of the earth as it chokes away our pain and our loss. We do not get the solid, final burial, but instead we see the sharp spikes of light reaching to us through the darkness, enough light to see our home crumbling atop us, yet leaving us alive, not yet relieved of this torture they have inflicted upon us all.

This is what has become of my province after this new wave swallowed us whole. While some were carried away, safe in the arms of this new-found passion, others, many others, were left with only salt and sand. We have never seen each other, or perhaps we have, but we know beyond doubt that the other exists; that there are more like us, the loyalists who will forever share my sorrow, the deep, suffocating sorrow that even now buries us all.

The men came for me, red bands tied around their arms marking them clearly. They speak to me but I hear none of their words. Their words are wind. No one cares about the wind. The wind does not touch those who are buried alive. These men must know what I am, for they take me along with them. I do not fear them, as they do not reach to harm me.

It was that girl, that girl with the fiery eyes, she had done this to my home. I see her ghost before my eyes, arrogant and self-assured. I remember her looking down upon me, reminding me of my inadequacy. I felt an angry force take over my body in that moment, pulling at my skin and burning my blood. I leapt forward like an animal, clawing, howling to those who could hear, begging that this grave be unearthed. I remember feeling the men grab me but still fighting, kicking out at my invisible enemies with wild shouts of fear and rage. They were following me, those creatures of the night who wanted to take my world to pieces, ripping through my soul like a bullet.

The men tried to carry me away from them, they tried to save me, but the creatures, they caught up. Black clouds filled my vision and I screamed and tried to fight the clouds away, clawing at my eyes, but now the clouds were in my nose, filling my body with their lightning.

One of those damned flags. That’s what was choking me. Some strange force had caused a flag to wrap itself around my neck, trying to choke out the last bit of my life, the single scarred piece of me that still remained. And I could feel the black smoke dissipating as I desperately tried to pull off that flag, that blood-soaked symbol of everything I had lost. Everything I had lost. I had lost everything. The creatures surrounded me in the dark, but the white light came back. My mind was not as dark as it had been, and the monsters were pushed to the recesses of my consciousness. The tiny pinpoints of light filtering in through the things that buried me were growing bigger, and my enlightenment left me at peace, demons vanquished and eyelids hanging heavily, until I slept.