Waiting For You

The Prophet

When my father finally woke, he told me the story of our tragedy.

He was a famous man in a society that openly embraced a certain kind of power that this world now ignores.

A few years into his career, he won a role that catapulted him to fame. That fame finally gave him the confidence to reach out to a woman he'd admired from afar long before he was famous. They married quickly and had me. His fans didn't like it – in fact, they hated it. So did some of my mother's fans, one fan in particular.

The fringes of this society entertained some very strange, very dangerous beliefs. One of those fringes followed a self-styled prophet who claimed to be a world-walker: a refugee from a darker, tainted world, one steeped in corruption and a kind of hidden darkness his followers could not imagine.

This prophet claimed he'd ported to this other, better world with the help of a spirit called Illakar. Illakar had a cruel nature, but kept promises to the people who served him faithfully. And in return for such service, Illakar promised truly extraordinary rewards. The kind of rewards people gladly kill for.

This was a conveniently symbiotic relationship because Illakar required blood sacrifice. So devoted was this prophet that he'd sacrificed his own mother to cross the threshold into this superior reality.

The prophet had great hopes for this new world. In his original reality - his darker reality – he'd lost his wife and daughter. Despair became obsession, so he obsessively looked for ways to bring them back. He believed reality is an illusion; an entanglement of forces we cannot possibly understand, distilled and simplified to accommodate the limitations of our minds and bodies.

It is a long story with many chapters I will never know, but eventually the prophet found Illakar. Illakar promised that a human sacrifice would supply the power required to take the prophet into another reality – one where his wife and child still lived.

While Illakar keeps his promises, he is a cruel being who takes delight in causing pain. He did not tell the prophet the full truth: that his wife in the new world was not the wife he knew, was not in fact his wife at all. She had an entirely different life and husband – a husband who was the father of her young daughter.

Like all devoted prophets, this man felt betrayed not by his god, but by everything else. He begged Illakar for a way to make his wife and her daughter his again.

Illakar was not all-powerful. He could possibly destroy the world, but not transform it into a new one. But Illakar could make a different world – one where the prophet, and the woman who looked like his wife, and the daughter that was supposed to be his could all be together and content.

But it would take a truly vast expenditure of energy that a single worshipper could not fulfill.

That is why the prophet amassed his following. He was a smart man in many ways. He knew that his followers would need their own impetus to commit this terrible crime. So he found people who were deeply obsessed with my father. People who wanted their own world, one where they would live forever with my father.

This is ridiculous to me, but it was not ridiculous to the man who was obsessed with my mother, or to the people who wanted my father for themselves. In order to keep everyone in line, Illakar frequently demonstrated his strength, proving that – with the right amount of adulation and blood – he could accomplish what he promised.

Illakar had a final request for the prophet. Or rather, a final requirement. In order to break apart the universe and reform it according to the prophet's desires, Illakar needed a physical body. He promised it would be temporary, that it would be painless and only during the killing and world-forging.