The City of Blood

As always, it began with a fountain.

That is all I know of how I came to be. Like the Kikayon of the Book of Jonah, I appeared overnight. But I have endured for millenia's worth of nights.

And I am miserable.

In the years that followed the finding of the fountain from which I sprang forth, many of those who found it, those who walk above the earth, have sought to live forever.

At the same time, they shortened each other's lives. To begin with, they threw stones and hit each other with wooden clubs, but as the years passed and metamorphised into decades and centuries, they developed ever cleverer ways of ending each other's life.

And all in my name.

But it wasn't always like this. For the first three millenia of my existence things were generally peaceful: the people devised a way of drawing water from the fountain, and slowly a city grew up above it. From time to time the current strongman of the region would come up from the pyramids of Egypt or Mesopotamia's ziggurats to show their strength. Generally they left me, and my people, alone.

But then the one-god people arrived. They only sacked me in their first invasion of the land, but when they finally unified under a chieftain or king by the name of David (or Chanan? The people who currently dwell in me are always arguing about the past; tragically it is hard for me to remember individuals so long ago so that's one of the only places I cannot help them) they conquered me, and gave me the name, that although would go through several permutations through the ages, would stick to me like blood on a desperater murderer's shirt.

Jerusalem.

But now I was no longer to be a backwater city in a land normally used only as a buffer in the eternal contest between the pyramid and the ziggurat. I was, or would be by the time I was next burned, the Holy City.

First it was only the one-god people, but then from them sprang a new one-god people, except they came from all over the world, not just descended from specific set of ancestors. They were persecuted by the same empire I was under at the time ,the same that killed their Savior (though they would later blame it on the people they sprang from and persecute them; which is a bit odd, considering that according to their scripture the plan had always been for the Savior to die and return) but in a matter of three centuries they took that empire over.

The blood hasn't stopped since.

Now that I was Holy to them and the third one-god people that would spring up in the sands of Arabia, they each had to possess me. I had no voice yet. They had not yet shed enough blood. I had not crossed the 'influence threshold' as I call it.

But now the original one-god people rules again. But the third one is killing them slowly, with exploding conveyances and exploding boys. And they fight back; with flying death, with lead balls launched by flame.

And with the power locked inside all things.

CHAPTER I

My Holy Mountain

Like the trumpet calling the dead to rise on the day of Tchiat Hametim, the Nexus 4 screamed into the slowly-spreading dawn over the Old City in the early hours of October 1st, 2013.

Within a moment, its mission was complete.

Yaron Elimelech had intended to rise slowly but steadily out of bed. He never did. Especially not this time. Fumbling for the phone that was on the night table on his side of the double bed, he turned over until he fell.

It was a briliant opening for a less-than-luminous day.

Slowly Yaron rose from the linoleum, stretching his twenty-nine year old muscles. They creaked as they held his considerable weight. This bodes well for my next Miluim. he thought. When he was up, he looked around for clothes that would not be too shabby today.