Disunity, Chapter 1: The Chickenshit River

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished. It ran backwards because it was total chicken shit.

A coward till the end, where we weren’t… well, I guess we were cowards, but only cowards for… well, a very long time actually.

But the river never wised up. Even at the end; it was trying to run away.

But we the people had finally taken our lives into our own blistered hands… And stood up as one!

Before the day of reckoning, the stones, the dust, the waters, and the people believed the queen’s power was absolute!

There was always an air of unrest, even the hope of upheaval.

Of course there was!

We were all tethered in absolute poverty.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was her greed for our children.

The royal guard might show up at any persons home, kick the door in at the dead of night…. And scoop a child into their arms.

Nothing could be said to dissuade the guard.

Grieving parents begged.

They cried.

They offered what small, what pathetic, treasures they might have squirreled away.

They offered their own bodies.

But no bribe was ever successful.

Kids were taken to the castle, against the pitiful sobs of their parents.

Nobody knew exactly what fate awaited a taken child. Best case scenario, they were conscripted into the military or other service to the cursed throne.

Perhaps they were indoctrinated and sent to battle, to spread the queens dominion?

All we really knew was these thefts were final. Any child taken by the queen’s guard would never, ever be seen again.

So there were protests. There were marches.

There were rallies led and populated by fathers and mothers who no longer had anything left to lose.

But the protests weren’t squashed. Their leaders weren’t brutalized by her guard, or put to death by the royal torturers.

Perhaps, that would have been a mercy.

They were allowed to carry on, unimpeded, to publicly shoulder the full weight of their loss .

Perhaps they were left to fly the flags of their anguish as a spectacle of deterrent to the rest of us.

Their marches were a cold, seething reminder to those of us who still had our own at home: so far it hadn’t been us.

We feared that if we joined the protests our own children would be targeted the next time the guards came knocking down doors.

So the protests, they never gained real momentum because these mourners were in the minority of people who truly had nothing to lose. Nobody else wanted to risk adding their voice to the outcry.

Too many of us fell into that pitifully weak camp of fear: caring only as far as we could think, never as far as we could speak or act.

And the few, the broken, the protestors found no support— no unity— and they finally gave up.

They saw how little difference they truly made.

They had great reasons to protest— for what reason could be more justified than the righteous anger tha follows the loss of a child.

But it didn’t matter how justified they were, how authentic their complaints…. They still achieved nothing.

They were sandwiched between their honest and excellent rage and the reality of their powerlessness….

They remained a small collective of livid individuals, with a high turnover rate. They’d fall to jadedness and even despair, many would drink themselves to death, or otherwise chase the grave.

For any escape would be better than such a crushingly bleak reality: their children had been taken to the queen and then never seen again, and the queen would never pay for whatever crimes she had hidden in her castle.

There was no justice.

Until one night the guards came knocking on the wrong door.

They could have knocked on anyone’s door, after all.

Everyone else in this city was a soft target, so to speak.

But they chose a household that had just suffered the death of their oldest child— the poor boy had fallen to a blood infection, after an injury sustained in the fields.

So the parents were already wrought with grief and they clung extra tight to their surviving child— swearing to each other they’d not let any more tragedy befall their family.

Well the guard showed up at their house, but the parents didn’t beg. They didn’t bribe.

They didn’t plead.

They kept their heads down.

Then those grief-ridden parents sprung their desperate, flailing trap.

They used whatever they could hold as weapons to surprise the first of the guard, then they pried proper swords from the dead and loosed their parental fury.

The guard faltered, for a moment. But they were better armored, and better trained. They pressed into the house, butchered the man and woman while their little child screamed and screamed.

Of course, at this point the guard hoisted the child and began to retreat to the castle, but they found themselves ambushed yet again.

It wasn’t anything planned, it wasn’t even consciously decided upon in the moment.

But some of our broken neighbors; those who had felt their own babes stripped from their arms and who had gone through the motions of bruised, powerless protest were roused from their wasting depression.

They were roused by the sounds of ringing steel and of a shrieking child.

The agony of parents we were used to hearing, but the agony of an orphaned child? His screams, his pain, seemed to answer the unanswerable question: “what had the queen done with our babies?”

They, the powerless parents heard their own children’s pain in that little boy’s voice. They rose from their stupor, cast aside their fatigue and charged the remaining guard.

Households rose up all around them.

It was a blood bath.

The guard were overwhelmed by superior numbers and our deadlier rage.

We rescued the child and he became a living banner, for the resistance.

The spectacle of these parents and their sad protest went from deterrent to cataclysm, as they marched through the streets with the blood spattered babe on their shoulders.

And there was a contagious joy, a sense of power.

Then a shriek tore through the night, and the queen swooped down— though none knew her by sight, we all knew her at first sight: her crown of horns and the seething darkness in her eyes. She bore the indignant look of a glutton, spurned by the food on her table.

She landed in the midst of our celebratory procession and fledgling rebellion.

She ripped the child out of the arms of his rescuers. She wrapped her leathery wings about the boy and his wail was the utmost misery to our ears.

Anyone who tried to stop her, she murdered in cold, lethal efficiency. Our strikes did her no damage, and she responded to our ineffectual attacks by hooking out innards and scattering them to the ground with her talons.

Tens of men and women who’d been close enough to try and help, lay bleeding and dying around her but the blood that horrified us most, was the blood on her lips.

By then the boy had fallen limp and silent, but she still clung to him; as a greedy child clings to a candy.

She smiled and told us to think long and hard about whether we’d prefer future meal calls carried out by her or her guard.

One young man, a stupid man but a brave one, tried to retrieve the body of the boy. He charged, and the queen didn’t even bother to kill him. She simply spat in his face. And he fell back stricken and horrified by the feeling of the child’s blood on his lips and in his mouth.

She laughed.

Then she ran and leapt and spread her black wings and took to the sky once more, retreating to the castle to finish her meal in peace, leaving us to contemplate the deadly consequences of resistance.

And the unlivable consequences of acceptance.

The queen left us bloodied and beaten but not cowed. We spread through the city, roused our neighbors. Told them the story. Showed them our dead, showed them the blood of the child on the face of one of our own.

She’d made the mistake of showing us exactly what terrible fate had befallen all our missing kids— in splattering one of us with the spat blood of the babe, she had splattered all of us with the spent blood of all our children she’d taken over the years.

As a people we began to stand. Not every man for himself, but every one for another.

We the grieving parents, and those who still had losses to fear, we were galvanized as one: a people who would not submit ever again.

We could no longer stomach the quiet, cowardly compliance of silence.

When the dawn came, we assembled.

The young man who’d been spat on, he was at the center of the rally.

And he hadn’t washed his face.

We saw the blood, we let ours boil.

We laid our hands on him and cried out for revenge and freedom.

We’d all prayed these wants and words before, but never as one people.

Whatever God had ignored us as individuals, It seemed to finally listen when we all cried out together from the depths of our anger, grief, and indeed, our hope— in unison.

We felt a power, some glimpse of divinity, well up in our arms and pulse in our feet and move through the body of our assembly.

Individually, we were peasants.

Nobodies.

Beaten, broken, and bruised.

Together we were the very tide of change and the hand of God.

And the bloodied man, he the focus of all our energy, all our spirit.

He glowed.

He glowed like the sun.

We marched on the castle, with the full force of decades pent up fury.

We as a crowd were possessed by the spirit of our vengeful God.

Each of us, but especially the bloodied man, the physical, berserking embodiment of our communal retribution.

The guard tried to resist, but they weren’t expecting us and they were no match for our intensity.

We rolled over them like an avalanche over a stand of brittle pines.

We’d hated them a long while, but now our hearts were set on fire with the bitterest anger.

Truly, I think many of us hated the guards more than we hated the queen and more even than we hated ourselves for our decades of inaction.

A monster, one is compelled to loath! but a human who serves a monster? A human who helps the monster prey on his or her own kind?

Loathing does not go far enough.

We took great pleasure in every guard’s pain.

Those who begged mercy, we sliced them open at the gut and let their wails of agony bleed out on the stone floors.

In some ways, we might have seemed more bloodthirsty than the queen herself. But ours was the righteous fight, driven by honest anger— that is to say, driven by justice!

The guard tried to rally, around what we’d later discover to be the queen’s lair.

We slaughtered them like animals, and tore away the doors to her inner sanctum.

It was icy cold despite the summer warmth outside, and darker than the most despairing dark you can ever imagine.

The darkness seemed to pulse with its own hate, it seemed to eat any torchlight we cast through the opening.

But the bloodied man, he strode into the dark, unafraid, and the glow coming from his corporeal self cast a light which the darkness could not overcome— a light from which the darkness could only retreat and fall away.

As the darkness fled we found heaps of bones, decades of them, all clean, dry, and brittle.

We stepped quietly, and located the queen resting on a bed of black onyx. She did not stir.

First we rescued the body of her most recent victim. We brought him out of her castle, and laid him on the stones beyond the portcullis. He would receive a proper burial, but not until we’d let the sunlight warm away that unholy chill that permeated the queen’s lair.

We returned to find the queen just as we had left her, in a slumber, as one dead.

The bloodied man, spoke to her: “open your eyes.”

She stirred, her eyelids fluttered, a terrible hiss broke the air; we thought that was coming from her lips.

But then we heard her real voice— a scream of agony and pleading impotence.

The bloodied man said, “open your eyes wider. Look at me.”

His glow intensified— even we humans had to shield our gaze— it hurt to look directly. Like staring directly into the sun.

But it hurt her worse.

As the hissing grew louder, we saw the steam pouring from her eyes, they blazed with their own darkness, but that darkness could not resist the light.

He boiled her down to scattered ash and vapors, simply by shining upon her.

Then he told us, “head back outside, and await my Word.”

We did as he commanded, gathered around the broken child, our first flag of rebellion.

We heard his voice echoing through the corridors: “you stones. You have given yourselves in sacrifice unto the dark, just as the people had before now. They unified and summoned me. They rebelled. Why not you. Where is your loyalty to the Father of all Creation?”

The stone work started to tremble, the towers shook themselves apart. They crumbled in on themselves in their clumsy rush to flee His admonitions.

Then He approached us and looked to the river. “And you, sister water. Why did you turn a blind eye to this darkness? You unify to flow, why did you not unify to overthrow and wash this land clean?”

The river recoiled then and fled upstream.

Like I said, the river is chicken shit, but so were we.

He turned to us, and we shielded our eyes. “You waited so long to cast aside your fears and your petty differences.”

I knelt and said, “how could we know we’d have you on our side?”

He laughed, and his light nearly burned us. “Me? I’m a nobody. I’m just one angry man, one of you, one of many. All I did today was show you how important it is that you remain united. This vessel of the dark was not the last of her kind. More will come. And they will eat you alive if you are divided. Be ready to carry eachother— there is no darkness that can overcome a unified light.”

And the divine light receded.

But our arms still felt strong, and so did our hearts.

The bloodied man, looked at us in a daze. “Did we win?”

And someone had to tell him, “only so far. But we’re not done yet.”