Salvation

“And not to pull your halo down around your neck and tug you off your cloud, but I’m more than just a little curious how you’re planning to go about making your amends to the dead.” –A Perfect Circle “The Noose”

They said the old gods died long ago. Grown weary of human games, they abandoned us and sought new worshippers in other worlds, crossing into adjacent timelines, causing chaos in their quest. It seemed so long ago, but the effects lingered like thin layers of undisturbed ash after a furious blaze, choking anyone who dared to step into it. They must have died, otherwise--- the word always fainted on everyone's lips. To say the word, otherwise, was to admit you still had hope and faith. She had neither. 

The new gods had come out of the sky! That's the way all Gathered children began the tale, all but one child, and the elders. Ask any elder and they'd tell you a different tale of these blasphemous beings with their majestic countenance, silver tongues, invading eyes, and tarnished promises. No. These new gods came out of the darkness, out of our sorrows and doubts. One would swear they were created solely out of the tears of mothers who cried out their losses to the moon. These new gods came with open faces and outstretched hands. They promised prosperity and, in return, a single sacrifice. A mere trifle of a child, named Una.

As a young girl, Una challenged all norms to the point where they thought to change her name to Dissonance. Instead, they called her other things: Una the Restless, the Disruptor, the Non-Believer. Although she was only seven at the time of the new gods, she had earned many names in different Gathered circles, but the new gods lovingly called her Una the Blind. They claimed that they were charged with opening her eyes and making her see. The Gathered had no second thoughts in sacrificing troublesome Una to the gods, and in the trade gained sunlight, food, shelter, and peace. Una went willingly, not for her people, but to satiate her simple curiosity. Yet as with all trades, there was still a higher price to be paid, and the Gathered paid it. For every gift from the gods that stood rejected by Una, a fruit-bearing tree would wither, bringing with it civil war and famine. Every sharp-tongued word from Una's lips earned the Gathered a storm that devastated the land and killed their already depleted numbers mercilessly. Every time Una uttered words of disbelief, a Gathered child would fall down dead, but she knew nothing of it. The gods kept her hidden from it all, one would say blissfully unaware, but with Una there was never a moment’s bliss. As the years trickled by, Una grew into a beautiful and equally stubborn woman, still blind to the suffering of her world, and their blame was infused in a new name. Una, the Damned. 

"What is beyond the cliff?" That was Una's question for the day.

The gods, always reliable in their vagueness, answered. "Nothing and everything. You have merely to look."

"I am looking and I see nothing!" She never did have patience for their games. Standing on the edge, bare toes curling downward into the darkness, Una swayed. She had been there before and felt, as keenly as her own thoughts, their anxieties and parent-like worries, but also the hum of something more.

"You see nothing because you look with the wrong eyes." Another vague answer, but not one she hadn’t heard before.

“You keep saying that, but whose eyes should I see with? Tell me! Yours? Or maybe yours?” She pointed at each of them in turn, but fell quiet on the face of the strongest of them. They could all feel her frustration. She glanced once again into the darkness, but it remained the same as it had ever been.

“Mother says one day you will understand. Mother says one day you will see.” Una spun around and charged towards the gods she never feared.

“Mother is a liar who has never shown herself to me. Why should I believe? I am not this thing you think I am. I am no one’s salvation!” Unexpectedly a name came to the forefront of her mind. She knew it was a thought, but from where? Looking once more over her shoulder to the cliff, she muttered in question, “Una the Damned?” and in the name—a silence and void.

A deeply rooted sadness overtook her. Tears threatened to blind her as one by one the Gathered raised their prayers to nothing but a collective consciousness housed in a mortal vessel. She could feel the tension of the gods intensifying, and quickly captured the thought that she was not meant to find out this way. The gods panicked as she turned to them again in her fury, but one of the gods stepped boldly forward. He swiftly took her face in his hand, lifting her clear off the ground. Her heart stuck in her throat in an instant for he had always been the kindest to her, the most patient and forgiving of her impish desires, the strongest; but there was something different in his eyes now. Pain, and sorrow, and guilt.

Her mind was now flooded with images from the god himself. The others were powerless to disconnect her from it. Suddenly the grandiose gods were small and weak things. She forced her way into it all, violently, and they fell to their knees before her in agony, all but the one who steadily held her face to his. He cringed, and although she remained suspended, he seemed to seek the support in her just to stand. Together they made the other gods feel what the Gathered felt all those years. They knew the hunger of her people as the fruits rotted off of the trees before their eyes. She placed the gods in the midst of their own torrents, rain choking them with every breath, debris combined with ferocious winds tore through their flesh. She ripped through the memories of the rows of dead children, all branded with her name, and suddenly they were all her children. For the first time, she felt Mother, and saw that etched in Mother’s face were the lines of hatred.

Something inside of her knew what had to be done. She knew how to fix it all and that these false gods had never known, exactly, how they could stop her. The gods, still writhing in pain, did not have time to recover and react as the strongest of them stepped slowly towards the edge, Una’s feet placed well over the void behind her.

Deeply and slowly he spoke, and drowning in his timbre she heard nothing else. “You are Mother. You are Salvation, and so much more than this body will ever allow you to be.”

He sighed and edged forward, his one-handed grasp fell away as his other hands bore their way into the flesh of her arms.

Through her eyes she spoke to him. “You had to keep me here, didn’t you? That’s how you kept control of them.”

His eyes grew somber.

"Otherwise..." She whispered.

He embraced her tightly around her waist and together they hurled themselves from the precipice. Una’s eyes opened and she saw, for the first time, everything.