Sacrifice

It took eleven days to build the thing. Hours upon hours of hauling. First lumber, then kindling to the top of the barren mount. Trucks would arrive at the end of the dirt path. Lily put fifty dollar bills in strangers’ pockets while we trudged the wood to the sacred place. Some of the newcomers stared with confusion as we threw heavy logs to the top of the overflowing bundle. Before long, we built the pulley system, elevating the logs up and placing them on the top of the massive structure. It was like a giant’s game of Jenga with only one purpose.

In the eves, we slept in tents and took guard shifts to make sure the nightbeasts didn’t tear the thing down. Trundling oafs that they were, they had an uncanny sense of when something didn’t belong. As the thing grew taller, more wolvers and barbears would show up, snarling and lumberous as the wood on the mount. We chased them away with flares and theremin music.

On the moon of the second week, the project was complete. A stirring weightlessness hovered over the high plateau as we felt the culmination of our efforts begin to take new focus. A number of lumberjacks who had helped us gather the pine and oak and bamboo and willow came to see the great spectacle as it took shape before us. We knew it would be so, as we tempted them with libations and revelry for an experience unlike any they had experienced before.

They made acceptable witnesses.

We gathered our rats and let them scurry into the tower. The dark, humid place made a new home for the creatures, expanding their world beyond the cages they had grown to know. The five of us gathered, Lily, Rex, Stacia, Murray, and myself, at the five points of the grand star.

We called each other’s names as we stripped down to the bareness of our being, leaving the clothes to the earth. With stardust hovering and a crew of spectators, we threw the matches.

It did not blaze at first but crackled inside itself as the kindling broke and spit. Tendrils of grey smoke spun into the sky. The smell like camp, youth, and other things we were here to forget.

Then the squealing. A handful of rats scurried out of holes into the night they once knew well, but many remained trapped as the structure collapsed around them. The more the flames grew, the fewer opportunities to escape. A twisting, merciless fire that grew and grew under the large wooden pyre.

The bamboo burned first, a driving force that shot to the outer world of the bonfire. Then the willow and pine smoldered and caught alight. Redwood was the last, catching and clutching the flames to itself, containing the blaze in a funnel of heat that could melt iron. The sweat paraded down my face and legs as I heard the others begin to chant.

Stacia swayed across from me, lit brightly by the flames. She muttered the old spells and demanded herself into a trance. Standing behind her, the witnesses cowered behind their hands, attempting to watch what was to unfold. I closed my eyes and listened to the crackling wood and whispering spells of my coven.

I heard the patter of bare feet on soft dirt on my right, and I knew it had begun. Murray ran into the blaze. A gut-clenching, vile scream of agony broke the whooshing roar of the flames. The smell of sweet pork filled the air around me, and I peeked to see the lumberjacks retching and running. One of them rushed toward where I knew Lily to be, on the other side of the fire, but he soon returned to sight on his backside, dragging himself away from the witch’s fate. I could feel Lily was gone. She didn’t make a sound.

Rex and Stacia found each other’s hands, giving strength to their goal. Rex let out a holler to the gods and rushed the bonfire, blazing higher than the history books thought possible. Stacia followed suit, and soon their battlecry turned to bitter screams, like lobsters in a boiling pot. I could feel them go, as well.

To cleanse and be free of the earthly plane. To forgive the sins of the mother and the father. I seek myself the world above. The world below. The world beyond.

I readied myself for a curtain call, knowing my familiars had given themselves to the power of it. They believed the world had left them behind, had moved on without them. A power had lit their own flames, and they heard the call of a dark they knew well. Months of chanting and playing dress up led to this dance. To find the world beyond ourselves. To forgive the mother and the father. And the demons in the dark. We seek light.

Some people are so easily seduced.

I heard a whimper next to my feet; the lone lumberjack who tried to save Lily would try to save me too.

“Why?” he panted through the exhaustion of the heat, “Why are you doing this?”

The amusement was overwhelming. For the first time in months, I laughed.

“You mean, why are they doing this?”

He looked at me with bewitched puzzlement.

“Don’t kill yourself,” he finally grasped.

“I don’t intend to.”

I turned and walked away from the terminal, festering pile of myth and faded prosperity. I walked beyond the shadows it cast over the barren plateau, beyond the sound of crackling logs, beyond the smell of burning flesh, beyond the world I had shown Rex and Stacia and Lily and Murray.

They knew the dark well, and yet I was born in it. I had shown them a life beyond the miracles of sunrise and sunset. I had made them believe there was truth on the other side of the veil. Yet still, they couldn’t contrive how hopeless the whole of their lives would be.

Belief is a strange and funny thing. Few can truly give themselves over to what we call the truth without question. Without compromise.

That’s the power of belief.

The power to control belief lives only with the gods.

And so, I become god.