A Warrior's Revenge (9 page)

“Why, what can she do?” Kana asked
inquisitively.

“A better question is what can’t she do?” He
responded gravely.

The long black cloak with its hood conformed
to her body under the pressure of the cold icy wind that threatened
to steal her warmth from her, just as the sight of the destruction
around her had already crushed her heart. Ellanara walked alone
through the rubble of the past, her past. It seemed like it had
just been yesterday, when all of this had existed, but it
wasn’t.

She was truly alone. Gone were all her
friends and loved ones. Those who knew and understood her best and
would never have looked at her, as these people did and yet she
would save them, as that was what her purpose here was for.
Ellanara walked down through the remnants of Thunder Ridge into the
valley to step through the snow strewn pathways of the village.

She stopped in the village’s square, not
because one could see it was such, but because she knew the
village’s layout by heart. She gazed upon the pile of rubble that
was perhaps the saddest of all, the Chapel. There would be no one
to rebuild it this time as in times past. She dropped to her knees
uttering a cry of loss for not just the Chapel, but everything she
had held dear in her life and that was now gone for forever.

“God I can’t do this alone! I can’t! I don’t
even know where I’m going! God please help me, because this is all
too much for me!”

She fell forward onto her face in the snow
crying brokenly, now that she was out of the view of others and
free to express in full emotion the sorrow that she felt
overwhelmed by.

Complete peace overwhelmed her at once and
she lay quiet and listened.

“
I have not forgotten the righteousness
of your father’s before you nor have I left you to be alone in
despair. I have provided a guide for you and he will direct you to
a new home that I have set apart for my faithful. He is alone, even
as you are separated from those around you. You will be bonded to
him and together you will be one. Your two great houses will be one
and your peoples shall become one. Trust Me in that I know what is
best for you and that you are priceless in My sight.”

The voice of her Creator stopped and she
whispered into the snow, “I will do even as You command me Lord,
but how shall I know such a man?”

“
You will know him by his ways. He is
faithful to me, even as your father was and as you are now. He is
the greatest warrior that has walked any of the lands of My
creation in over a thousand years, which is how long I’ve kept him
a warrior out of the bounds of time. It has been as if but a day to
Me, but for a man alone the time has caused him to grow weary of
life itself. You will change all that as you give him a reason to
live and to hope for the limited years of a mortal life once again.
Now listen carefully Ellanara. Get the rings that your brother has
kept for you and the sword of your father. Give the sword to your
father’s heir, Loric, which I’ve raised up to help you and to
continue on your father’s legacy. Take the stone from before you as
a remembrance of all that I have said lest you doubt in your mind
and stray from the path that I’ve set you on.”

The snow melted before her eyes to reveal a
flat stone laying on top of the old cobblestones of the old village
square. On the stone was inscribed a passage from the Bible. It was
Psalm 23 written by King David in another place at a different
time, but with an eternity of meaning. The stone at one point
must’ve been located in the meditation garden of the Chapel, as
part of the wall or one of the many boulders that had been
inscribed with the words of God. Ellanara’s fingers closed about it
tightly and she got to her feet.

The stone seemed to warm in her hand and
once again she heard the voice of the Author of her creation speak,
“Build a new Chapel in the new land that I shall give you and
teach your children and the people My ways and it will go well with
you and your descendents will be blessed for generations to come,
if they remain faithful to Me and walk in My paths. There is not
any obstacle to great that I will not overcome for you, nor any way
that is too hard, for by Me all things are made possible.”

Tears steadily dripped down Ellanara’s face,
as she felt humbled beyond all words could express in the midst of
God’s presence upon her in her gravest hour of need. Her lips
quivered with the passion she felt, “By Your Grace and loving mercy
I will accomplish all that You have set me to do and more. My Lord
God I worship and adore Thee and I will keep no other gods before
me. For there is one God, and You are He the great I AM. Into Your
hands oh Holy Father I entrust my life, my dreams, and my hopes for
the future. May it go well with me for I have chosen to serve the
Lord all of my days and through whatever trials may befall me. Thy
will be done in my life, even as my life is poured out before Thee.
Shape me into a vessel that will bring You honor, even as my father
did before me!”

All communication seemed to cease and
Ellanara feeling far more positive than before because of her
encounter with God, turned away from the ruins of the Chapel and
made her way up through the ruins of Thunder Ridge not really
seeing the devastation around her, but rather the future that was
opening up before her and her people.

In the not so distant future in the old
galaxy of worlds, from which the Vallians once fled from.

Rain dropped from the broken ceiling to
splatter on the hard stones of the floor sending little droplets of
water scattered across the dusty plain of someone’s forgotten home.
It had begun to rain, but then I had known it would ever since I’d
seen the sky this morning out the broken section of the wall I
stared out of continually. How long had I been sitting here….three
days? No, today would be the seventh day.

Seven days gone adrift, while I had just sat
here and watched time go by. Surely there was some good I could
have done in that amount of time other than to just sit here and do
nothing? But of course there was something I could have done that I
hadn’t. One more opportunity that had slipped me by, which only
added to the guilt of the many other missed opportunities I had
experienced in my existence of boundless limbo. Time without end,
with too many sad moments to count much less relive.

I was feeling sorry for myself again, which
was also wrong to do, but it was hard not to. I wanted to die, but
God had been silent to my pleas other than for the constant,
“Patience and Trust.”
Over and over I heard that phrase and
it seemed to still be the lesson that I could never learn. No
matter how long I waited I was always impatient for my wait to be
over, no matter how long I seemed to live I couldn’t trust God to
end it soon enough.

My situation was pathetic. I was
pathetic!

Come on, get up and do something, anything,
my soul urged me, but rationally I thought, do what? Having a
seemingly unlimited existence such as mine wasn’t the joyride that
I knew that many would think it was. The struggles of a mortal life
were enough to drag even the stoutest of souls into the grave and I
had been alive the span of many such mortal lives.

Life didn’t get any easier with more time on
one’s hand to do with as one pleased. If I started something
positive such as a friendship I was stuck watching that friend grow
old, while I stayed the same. That had been the way it had been
with my wife.

Never again!

It was true that I could enjoy the pleasures
of life such as the comfort willingly offered to me by so many
women over the years, if I had so chosen to, but I had not. Just
because the years of my life appeared endless was no excuse to live
any less moral than the ways of my father’s before me.

Fighting and striving to maintain a moral
existence and be seen as righteous in God’s eyes was hard enough to
do in a shortened lifespan, but the length of my struggle made me
want to go crazy. I had longed for the peace of deaths, but it was
kept from me.

Pain was not kept from me however. I had
watched my wife die an old woman childless and embittered toward
me. Those of my friends, who had survived the destruction of our
lands and people I had also watched grow old and die and their
children after them and so on and so on.

I avoided making friends any longer, just as
I avoided women. It was to tormenting to form a relationship of
either kind, as I already knew how it would end, with their death’s
years in the making, while I watched it all unfold.

Why had God cursed me so? I asked myself not
for the first time and as always I never received an answer other
than the constant mantra of,
“Patience and Trust.”

I had done nothing to merit this seemingly
eternal torture of mind and emotion. While I was tired of my long
life I did have a purpose. A purpose that I was grateful to have,
but one that made it little better to continue on alone of spirit
and body as I was.

I was the Guardian and sole protector of the
scattered remnants of my people. My people now numbered but a few
thousand, while I was alive they were free to continue living and
upholding the traditions of our people. Boy met girl, relationships
flared, unions were made, and some at least found happiness for a
while despite the shattered history of our condition.

While I was able to keep my people alive and
free I had long since given up hope of anything more than that. For
the past three hundred years or so my people had not been hunted by
the killers of our once proud nation, the Orlandian’s.

The Orlandians had stopped hunting my
people, when it had become clear to them that for every one of my
people they killed I would in retribution kill 100 to 1000 of
theirs. When the Orlandians had stopped hunting us I had stopped
hunting them, which had left me but with little worthwhile to do
other than what I was doing right now. Watching time go by, unable
to change the fate of my diminished people.

I knew the Orlandian’s would not keep the
tenuous cessation of hostilities between us for forever and knowing
so gave me a savage joy, because it meant that I could kill them
again, which was one joy I did not grow tired of. I knew
introspectively that it was not good to think so hatefully, but it
was just how it was. Maybe I was going crazy.

I surely must be, if I could value the
continued safety and peace of my people less than the joy I
received in killing my sworn enemy. A moment of shame for my
thoughts caused me to blink out of my silent trance. In my trance
like state I hadn’t really been seeing anything. Now with fresh
eyes I looked out through the broken section of wall overlooking an
even more broken and deserted city. It was the same view as ever
and it depressed me as it always did.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a
Sarpatton viper slithering toward me across the floor. It was
trying to escape the increasingly damp floor caused by the dripping
roof leaks above. My hand flashed out and I crushed the serpent’s
head between two of my fingers and with the flick of a wrist I
threw the contorting body of the viper out of the open section of
jagged wall in front of me. The snake’s body lay twisting on the
ground, as the torrential downpour beat the pavement hard outside,
even as I reflected on the uselessness of my actions.

The bite of a Sarpatton viper is enough to
kill a full-sized adult, but if it had bitten me it would have had
no effect whatsoever. I should know, as once lured by the
Orlandian’s into a trap, I had fallen into a pit full of them.

There had been no reason to kill the snake
other than that I didn’t like them and that I wished they were all
dead anyway, if I could only find a way to eliminate all the vipers
at once. The thought was a parallel consideration of my constant
struggle with the Orlandian’s.

It was a thought, dream really, that was
much easier said than able to be accomplished in any form of
reality. During a period that had lasted several hundred years I
had thought and planned of nothing else but accomplishing such a
goal. But the part of the equation that I could never factor out
was the risk to my people’s survival of such a revenge quest on my
part.

If I failed to eliminate the Orlandian’s in
one fell swoop they would out of sheer spite obliterate the
remaining traces of my people knowing that they were all that I
really still cared about.

If I could but remove my people from these
series of worlds and take them somewhere else where they could
start all over again, while I stayed behind to ensure the utter
destruction of the Orlandian’s I would have done it, but that
option was gone from me now as well.

The only place that my people would be safe
were the mysterious Haven Worlds of legend. But I had no ship to
take them there and none of the Orlandian ships could ever make the
journey, as the worlds were very far away.

Even if I did have such a ship I no longer
had the map keys needed to find the Haven World’s, because my
father the King had foolishly given them away, as he lay dying a
millennium ago. It was an old problem of what to do that I fought
over and over in my head and bitterly I admitted that I still did
not have an answer, but I refused to give up, because if I did my
people and our way of life would perish and the enemy would have
won.

I stared out into the hard rain searching
for an answer. I did something then that I hadn’t done in a long
time. I got onto my knees and bowed my head and was real for a
moment with my Creator, who I believed in, but was mad at.

“Lord, if there is a way, I pray that you
would let my people go free and find the Haven Worlds, with or
without my help. Please do not let our name perish forever from
those numbered under the heavens of Your creation. Forgive my anger
toward You, as it is Your right, as Master of all creation to do
with Your created works as You please. I ask…… I beg You of this
fervent wish of mine yet one more time! I fear for the future of my
people, if a way of escape is not made. Can a people live without
hope? Be merciful on us Lord for we have ever been your servants
from of old.”