Against the Empire: The Dominion and Michian (15 page)

There was no way to keep track of time in the strange, dim cavern that Alec travelled. The journey was wearying but Alec was in no way willing to reduce his pace. At great length, he noted that the end of the staircase was finally visible, where a floor was present along with a door.

The door knob was chilly, colder than the surrounding air in the cave, and Alec paused. He turned the knob and pressed the door open. As it swung open, the room beyond appeared pitch black, and Alec stepped in with a cautious tread. As he entered the room, the door swung closed behind him, closing with a snap of finality, and then a brilliant flash of light blinded him, not just causing him to shut his eyes, but feeling like a physical wave that pushed against his body.

Alec pressed the palms of his hands against his eyelids and rubbed vigorously. As he opened his eyes he could only dimly see his surroundings at first, although his eyes were gathering more and more illumination as they adjusted. He felt incredible joy overtake him! His healer energies were restored!

He could feel the power once again a part of every fiber of his body. He hadn’t known it the first time the cave had suffused him with powers, and had taken it for granted thereafter as he learned what he had been given. But now, after losing the power, he knew what was restored.

Falling to his knees, he began to pray and cry, “
Celebritas! Laudatio! Gratia eripui!
”

“Thank you, John Mark,” he added minutes later, as he opened his eyes and looked up.

At the far end of the chamber was a rough hewn opening carved out of the stony wall, and set within the enclosure was a long bier. Alec rose and walked over to it. There was a wooden lid on top of a casket atop the bier, and Alec cautiously reached a hand out to the lid, fearful of this gloomy relic so inexplicably located in a place devoted to healing. The lid was not fixed in place, he discovered.

Carefully, Alec raised the lid and peered in, where a shrouded figure was entombed. Scared, frightened, and curious, Alec pulled back the layers of cloth until he gasped at the sight of a brutally beaten man’s face.

“You are not
perdignus
,” a voice echoed sternly in his mind.

Alec used his healing vision to look at the man. There were injuries and piercings in a range of places, and severe traumatic internal injuries. The man though was not truly dead; there was an energy unlike anything Alec had ever seen before, and that energy emanated from every cell of the body. The energy was like that of the Spiritual ingenairii, but far greater – stronger, cleaner, and from a different source altogether. The man’s heart was not beating, but his body was not deceased. It was a very strange, frighteningly strange set of circumstances.

“There is no role for you here, Alec. You must go,” the voice said.

Alec looked around. There was no one visible. The voice was not John Mark’s familiar one.

“Let me try to heal him,” Alec called back. “I can do something. With my powers back, and my knowledge of how to use them, I can help this man. I know I can,” he answered as he turned back to the body and gently placed his left hand on the injured hands. “I’m the best healer in the world. I can do this.”

“Alec, disobedience carries consequences. Stop this,
prognatus
,” the voice said. But Alec in his disobedient pride, overwhelmed with hubris because he had regained his energies, unleashed his powers to begin healing the strangely injured man before him.

Chapter 16 – The Pain of Perdition

Alec began to scream, as he poured forth his powers into the inanimate man, and he felt them being violently pulled out of him. He felt himself being pulled somehow down into the man, following his energies into an all-consuming void. There was pain, intense pain, where he was going. Vivid images, cruel faces, painful ignorance – all imposed themselves violently upon him as he fell. Alec couldn’t control what was happening to him as his powers became a chain that pulled him into some strange portal.

As he felt himself losing all control of himself, his physical body seemed to dissolve away and he was only a spiritual being. Horribly, the spirituality around him was the worst forms of humanity’s distorted will.

He remembered his childhood in the orphanage, and living after the orphanage in the tannery, where he had been so lonely. He’d had no friends, other than the rare opportunity to see some of the other kids who lived out on the streets of Frame. At the tannery he’d been shunned, an outcast left with the worst jobs, a resident of the bottom of the lowest rung of society. He’d not thought of anyone who could be a friend, a refuge to escape the loneliness. He hadn’t thought about Jesus as a friend. He’d only wallowed in his self-pity, right up to the moment when Aristotle had come and liberated him.

And in that time in the tannery, he’d grown insolent towards the others who worked there, jealous of their better lives, better jobs, better conditions. His soul’s compassion had withdrawn within a tight shell as despair and lack of faith had begun to harden him. He’d been bitter.

His mind tumbled again, and he remembered the despair he had felt when he had seen Leah dead, because he didn’t have the power to heal her. It flipped again and he suddenly comprehended how selfish he had been in abandoning all other priorities to come back here to the cave to heal himself ahead of promoting the interests of the Dominion. Another twist, and he recognized the avarice he had felt often times as he thought about all the money he made from his water sales partnership with Natha.

Negative feelings filtered through him as he felt like he was falling into and through the body in the cave, moving downward into a different dimension where he was without any physical presence. Only his soul existed as it dropped, and he felt all the mean and self-serving cracks and crannies of his soul being exposed. There he felt again the lust he felt for Bethany, seemingly increased because she was beyond his reach, satisfied within her relationship with Tritos now. No wonder Cassie had turned away from him after seeing his soul, he thought. It was stained and tattered into an abysmal, ugly mess.

And looming over all, he began to squirm even more under this scrutiny, as he saw how proud, overwhelmingly proud, he had been of his healing powers. Here he was now, because he believed he could cure anyone, with any injuries. This man whose body had turned into this trap of self-examination, showed him how self-centered he was in thinking about himself first and foremost, even when it seemed he was helping another person. He felt consumed by misery and self-loathing as he thought about all the times he had put himself first. There was nothing about him that seemed worthwhile, nothing that earned the right to have the privilege of great powers, let alone of life itself. His pride, his smug belief in his own self-sufficiency was his greatest sin, his greatest downfall.

At that point he blanched as realization hit him. The body he was trying to heal, the body that seemed dead and not dead, could only be the body of his Savior, resting in the tomb while he descended to Hell to bring freedom to all souls. Somehow, Alec had entered John Mark’s cave, but it was also the tomb where Jesus had been buried.

As that realization rose to the surface of his awareness, through the heavy layers of guilt and sin, Alec felt gratitude well up. Through the great leap of salvation of the Savior, he was allowed to be imperfect and still in communion with God. Even though he was filled with so much sin, God loved him still, unconditionally.

Was going down to Hell a matter of a person constantly reliving and realizing all their faults, he wondered? Was that what Jesus had taken on, accepting all the pain and doubt and regret and loneliness that every soul must feel when it realized how flawed it was? It must have been an inhumane burden, and Alec gave his profoundest thanks for that holy sacrifice.

There was another spiritual twist, and he began to weep tears of gratitude and sympathy, as he found himself physically within his own body again, slumped down on the floor next to the holy casket. A flood of warmth, of love and joy came over him as he lay there, comprehending the greatest concept of holy love that a human was able to carry, and he fell into peaceful slumbers.

Chapter 17 – John Mark’s Mission

“Alec, wake up,” a voice said as Alec lay on the stone floor of the lowest level of the Cave of John Mark.

He raised his head and looked around the dim chamber. The lid was still off the sarcophagus, and a small brown man sat lotus fashion on the floor near the door. Alec stood, and gently replaced the lid on the casket with reverence, after looking down at the battered face one more time before he pulled the linens back to cover it. Perhaps he imagined it, but even amidst the bruises and contusions, he imagined he saw serenity in the features.

Alec noticed that his left hand was marked with vivid scars on both the back and the palm. John Mark watched him. “That hand has touched the divine. It will never be the same,” he said. “Here, in the Cave, it is only a visual mark, but out there in the world, it will provide a different type of reminder.”

Alec thought for long seconds about the implications of that simple statement.

“You can’t begin to imagine what Hell is really like,” John Mark said, his tone indicating a change in topic. “You’ve had a little taste of pain, and maybe dipped the nail of one toe into the best end of the pool. But what our Savior has taken on, for all of us, for all time, is beyond any human’s comprehension.”

Alec thought about his self-loathing and self-disgust, and all the moments he had thought only about his own desires above others.

“No human has ever experienced anything like what you just exposed yourself to,” John Mark said. “If you hadn’t had such a hubristic sense of pride in your healing abilities, you wouldn’t have experienced that either.”

“What’s that mean?” Alec asked.

“Arrogance, ambition, pride, self-satisfaction. A failure to understand just how limited we are, and how little we ever achieve compared to our potential,” John Mark explained with a smile. “Don’t ever think that you’re at the top. Don’t ever think you can’t be better. Don’t ever think that you can’t do better. Don’t give up on trying to improve yourself.”

Alec had a startlingly clear recollection of countless hours spent sitting with Aristotle, riding on the front of a long gone carnival wagon, listening to the exact same message.

“I will work to make myself better,” he humbly said.

“Nobody has ever come to this cave twice either, Alec,” John Mark told him. “Not that I need to say anything else to let you know that you are marked for a special fate, but you are special.

“And never, not once, has a pilgrim from our world come to this chamber in the cave,” he told Alec in a more solemn tone.

“How can I be in Christ’s tomb?” Alec asked. “He was sacrificed in that other world.”

“He was sacrificed for all who are created in God’s image,” John Mark said. “We all -- his world, our world, other worlds as well -- have access to his sacrifice and grace and salvation. So in that regard, you have access to Christ, and this is a profoundly personal and real manifestation of that. I doubt that anyone else has ever handled their exposure to salvation as you have.

“Now, I have a special set of duties for you to carry out before you return to your obligations. There are things you need to learn, and messages you need to learn, that require some very unusual steps,” John Mark explained.

“I am going to send you on some journeys,” the prophet began to explain. “There are things you must hear and learn, and perhaps do.”

“What do I need to learn?” Alec asked with interest.