What Memory Remains

Chapter 8

It was time.    

Zenapharr stood silently over his mother’s grave, a small portioned area of the large garden used as a cemetery. Cicadas chirped and owls hooted. The night was still and calm, very contrary to his nerves. He clutched his sword so tight his knuckles were ghastly white. Fear…for the first time in a long time he felt it. Fear…of himself.

The once invincible Zenapharr was to end his own life, so Shakespearean and romantic, yet the most logical possible thing he could think to do. To keep from taking so many others’ lives he had to take his own in order to save his soul.

In that moment, all doubts he had of a spiritual realm began to crumble. He thought back on his life, his actions, his connections to others…and things started to come into focus. All that he truly wanted in life was gone…a family…a connection. Once that glass figure of himself was shattered, the shards of his humanity lay in ruin, never to be mended. Instead, they melted down into a sword…his destiny.

“Live by the sword…” He said to himself , looking at his prized katana. “Die by it.” He reminisced on these words spoken earlier to him by the chaplain of the facility. Shocked as he was, there had been a chapel there at the facility for many years which he never knew of. Equally surprising was how much he actually enjoyed talking about spirituality. Perhaps Sade stirred a curiosity in him, opening him up to the topic.

“People have two ways of looking at who they are,” the chaplain had said. “The first is who they are by birth, the other is by their actions. In reality, it’s both. No one’s identity and actions are fixed into stone, there are only predispositions. You are something, but when you take action you eventually BECOME that. You’ve killed for so long, it’s just seemed natural. Being exposed to a situation that’s unnatural even for killers, it really got you thinking for the first time. You’ve been asleep for a long time, Zenapharr. Now is the time for your awakening.”

“Awakening…I like that,” he’d replied thoughtfully.

“When you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Your actions become you, unless you change your actions. Do you understand? It’s never too late for grace.”

“I wish I could agree with you on the grace, Piotr, but I cannot.”

“What’s that?”

“Sorry…it means Father in elvish.”

“What do the elvish believe in these matters?”

“I don’t know much, being that I haven’t been raised in an elvish environment. They seem to believe in a spiritual connection with the Earth, as it connects to the Heavens in a sort of cycle.  When they die they are sent into the heavens as stars…nourishing and watching over the Earth as a guide to everyone else. Needless to say, they find the North deplorable. Mostly they live in seclusion in the forests, and mostly in the South. There is a treaty that protects many of them so as not to cause any dischord, but there is still hatred for us because of their relation to Seraphim…a bloodline I apparently possess.”

“Seraphim? Oh….” He had gotten uneasy at this point.

“What is it?”

“It’s just…I haven’t heard that word in a long, long time. Not in the sense that you’re referring to, anyway.”

“What do you mean? Do you know something of them?”

“Well, there are correlations between them and the Seraphim in the Holy Word, but their motivations are quite different. The word Seraphim literally means the ‘Burning Ones,’ or in Hebrew it means ‘serpent.’ They were the highest class of angels and caretakers of God’s throne. So, someone not knowing exactly what they were talking about, dubbed them the Seraphim that you know today as the origins of the elven race. They were most likely called that because of their angelic soft features, which you can see passed down to elves and henceforth called the Angels of Death. So there’s a great example of how the name of a heavenly order of angels is used to label a horrible, violent race that we fought a long time ago. Tsssk, tsssk.”