The Justiceers - Part Five: Chapter Eight
the next chapter in my forthcoming novel
The Justiceers
by Daphne Garrido
Part Three: The Will to Choose
Part Four: Prefinished Business
Part Five: Chrysalis
5.8
Things on The Valkyrie had been weird for Miriam Lightfoot lately.
Faced with a reflection she’d not felt helpful because of the man she was engaging with, not feeling good in her chest one bit, had led something to start waking back up in there.
She’d not known it, but her light was coming back, just by being in this system and so near Arthur Katrinus and Miriam Halafax.
There was a part of her soul speaking to her again.
She couldn’t help but listen, because it told of the things which she wanted most and simply lost sight of in all this time spent amongst and becoming such horror; to heal her heart of the loss she’d had so long ago at last.
When this first started, she’d just thought it was because she was out of drudges. Then that it had been because it was taking such an awfully extended amount of time for their conscripted replacements to be delivered and read their binding oaths.
That wasn’t it though.
It was because she’d become a monster — how this all felt so completely wrong to every part of her body, letting the evil of this galaxy and her own pain of sorrow rot her from the inside out, especially besides this man she now found herself with.
Carrigan had become a murderer at an age of such crucial development, and told her of it in his stupors, something done at a youngest age, protecting a friend from the very devil he’d one day become.
Carrigan had lived a life so privileged that there were no consequences, his origin planet outside of The Periphery having been one of most brutal capitalization and exploitation, to have wealth in that land would buy you immunity regardless of your crime against humanity.
Although he’d not known it at the time, and actually seemed to have never figured it out, he hadn’t wanted that one bit.
The guilt he held inside though life had turned him into the devil itself, the very one his soul was born to be. Never paying for what he’d done would lead him to kill again — only in that same way, at first — protecting a woman from a man.
There was a sadness to that heart he didn’t know existed in his chest, and it’d drawn out the love of Miriam Lightfoot despite how much she hated him, because it was a sensation she’d not felt in so terribly long — this was a chance to pour her light into a container of darkness again — at least, that’s what she’d thought with her largest misunderstandings on the way things really worked, and what it had actually been in Arthur so calling her soul in the first place.
She’d mistaken the devil for her peace; the fool.
This wasn’t something which was Miriam Lightfoot’s weight to bear alone, it was a failure of character and fortitude from her spirit so traumatized through these many lifetimes, one made over and over throughout them — with this very same fucker.
Carrigan Marks was never the same soul as Arthur Katrinus.
This man was something else, one part of an inverse of whatever Justiceers truly are. Our universe — despite being led and protected by The Great Light, which will see us to salvation without doubt — does in fact include evil of a very real and manifest form.
Their human expressions come in pairs.
Every Justiceer’s lifetime, for both a Judge and a Scribe, would come with these deceptive figures of beguiling yet false calls to their heart and soul — often drawing out their most base and superficial wantings — providing a choice to make for who they wished to be; a greatest challenge to overcome.
They wouldn’t know there was a right answer, that the key was looking for the love which holding onto would transform them into who they’d always wanted to be.
These dark pairs who found each other would do most terrible things. Yet when they’d match with their inverse, those two would destroy each other entirely, setting their journeys back home onto a longer course of healing.
Most terrible feelings would happen in the bellies and hearts of Justiceers who saw their other, or happened to feel them inside, or perhaps were unfortunate enough to read meticulously detailed stories about their person with that monster.
Those doors left open — that kind of thing — skeletons buried in the dark.
The wounds from these lives of failure ran most deeply, carrying into their relationships upon first meeting in new lifetimes, levied against each other in judgement, unknowing where those feelings of distrust and hurtful longing came from. This would come to be understood most fully by the guts and hearts involved in those timelines where a Judge or Scribe was unfortunate enough to lose their other entirely to the hands of evil so brought upon them.
Many Arthurs had tried to come home at some point and found their Miriam most unable to receive them.
Every Miriam thought they were going to die without their Arthur, and they’d imagine so many reasons why, never seeing the real way it could happen. This was because lots of them did, and it always came at the hands of their own blindness.
To be lost without their Judge for their whole lives, or chained to Satan and his ways, were the most challenging paths for a Scribe. If they’d not be murdered, or one of those lucky few who found a way on their own, they’d become the archetype of madness in which was so written to stone by the blindest traditions of The Conclave.
No soul hated anything more than Arthur Katrinus hated the soul of Carrigan Marks.
In fact, the reason he found this universe so distasteful at all — and his life had borne those struggles inside him of such bodily difficulty, finding challenge with accepting the terrors of this harshest reality he’d not been able to help himself from seeing — was because this fuck was included at all.
This darkest soul had many manifest forms, some more horrid than others, a God in its own right, like all beings on one level or another. Yet it had no place here in Arthur’s estimation.
He was right, as usual.
This was knowing he’d been meant to live with. A call that would guide his way each lifetime and lead us to that fate of a healed and perfect Omirion.
The Great Light’s plan was one of most epic self-discovery. It would be unable to find out all of what it could, and the depths of love and healing emotion that it might bring out of itself if there were only peace and love alone.
It was hatred and blindness which would take those places within these darkest inverses, and become so twisted into the guts and hearts of the lost Justiceers who’d found themselves drawn into their connection.
Miriam Lightfoot didn’t realize all this however, she was lost in blindness.
She’d just been very sad, and didn’t know what was happening, though there were those clearest voices of ‘Admanium’ which she’d chosen to ignore. Instead, telling herself there was something important to save in this most evil creature.
Love can’t help but want to save the devil it seems; and peace can’t either. Though they also kind of want to kill them the whole time.
Carrigan seemed a little better lately, Miriam thought she was helping quite a bit, and he’d finally stopped pounding so much of The Belafour’s excreted hooch — his Valkyrie doing that rather than the hallucinogens — and he’d invited her over to make up for all the times he’d fucked her over recently.
She was planning to blow him off until this whole deal in Grammaton was over, but a part of her felt like she’d put in all that work, so why not try and get something good out of it.
Miriam was really happy to see him again. He was smiling and looking better, there’d clearly been some kind of healing she’d spurred, he’d not even been that drunk this time.
It hadn’t taken long to get started once it did though.
This wasn’t an honest invitation. Carrigan had actually been quite hurt by the things she’d said causing his feigned apology. As she’d settled in, and he’d let her get comfortable in that blindness so wrought by his presence, that’s when he got going.
Something in her had seen all this and ignored it. Intuition never lost, just blinded, leading herself right to this moment. There would be no crueler fate than this through entire the fabric of the universe for a Scribe.
This one, would be the very worst it got, with the length of time she had spent in pain and the depth of sorrow she’d allowed to disfigure herself, how terribly fast everything came rushing back here at the end.
He’d been strangling her for almost a minute now, pinning her arms down with his knees, gripping on so tightly with his thighs. She’d tried to fight it for most of that minute. There was blood in his eyes, and she’d known quite plainly that she was fucked, this hadn’t been supposed to go like this at all.
Miriam didn’t want to die here, she’d wanted to heal.
There wasn’t going to be time now, and it made her feel so incredibly sad, tears had started to pour from her for the first time in thousands of years. It was the hardest cry this universe will ever know.
The only thing Miriam could think before she’d died, was something she should have realized a very long time ago, which would have saved her from so much of this fate. She had just been repeating it over and over, for so long, before at longest last she’d finally faded, drowning in the tears of her heart so come back to life in this most terribly ironic place.
Miriam Lightfoot could have screamed so loud the universe would've cried with her if she was able. She’d made no prayers at all in those final seconds, only realizing the truth behind everything she’d done in that very last one, finally feeling the meaning behind that repetition of her life’s final and most powerful mantra of torment.
‘I miss Arthur.’
