The Faithful

In my dreams, I am the sky answering. I am the heavens that look down upon the ape, the proto-hominid, standing on the cloud-shadowed plains. They strain to stand upright, to face me directly, beseeching me for safety for kith and kin, for protection from plague and famine; for a place for their progeny among the unblinking stars. They offer their days and nights and dreams and toil. Anything, their heart proclaims. So I open my eyes, and the land floods. Their clan emigrates, and a great wheel begins to turn.

This supplicant, this wayward shaman, does not speak to me in a language. They cry and rage and sing, wordless. Their nephew was taken by hunger, their niece by animals, their daughter by pregnancy itself. They know it is needless because I have told them so. I have sent them visions of peace and plenty, and so they return to me, to beg for a reality of such. This is the war in heaven: the strength, the terror, the fervor of faith. This is the war in heaven: to bless, bestow, and curse.

My influence is subtle in these early years. Today I am the consequential gesture, the kindness that shall be remembered. Tomorrow I am the clear sky and ripe bushes in the depths of winter. By summer, I live deep in my faithful's muscles. I am the panther leaping from the shadows, as I am the rock in a hominid hand, as I am the velocity to crush a predator's skull. I am the wounded and the splint and the support to recover. I am the flame that turns death to sustenance. And yet, I am a small spirit in these days. Hunger prevails, predators come again; peace and plenty evade the clan for another generation, persist though they do.

This is the war in heaven: that other spirits should have my faithful too, and exert their own influence. They are the genocide against another hominid clan, that existential enmity. They are the invention of rape, the forcible production of lives to be forced in turn. They are the ghosts of the myths of blood and kind and creed and race, those wretched cracks in the bricks of utopia's path. I am gritted teeth as a will is violated. I am the indestructible dignity that inspires perseverance.

This first priest of mine perishes in decades, in confusion. They bartered their life, their obedience, for what? They cannot ask me why, for only birds have language yet. I plumb their mind with my tendrils and there their consternation glows. What has their faith earned that they will see? They do not understand the eternity that dwarfs their span. As disease claims their body, I still their breath and swallow their spirit. Then, through my eyes, they look down upon themselves crying to the sky, they observe the Earth transforming and witness the species their ilk becomes and the civilizations they birth – and the atrocities that blossom countless from the villainy lurking in their essence, that they invested in their children, that they in turn will invest over and over and over again. This is the war in heaven: that my foes live even in my faithful. Peace and plenty will be won in struggle, and that is my gift too: the power, the presence, the courage to overcome.

I hold their remains to my bosom and whisper: O my cherished hierophant, I did not abandon you. What you traded for will return to your kin well beyond your mortal form. They will band together under the punishing gaze of cruel deities and smash the edifices of monstrosity until the corpses of my ethereal enemies twitch their last beneath the ground. There is a greater covenant than prey and predator to be had, greater than privation and profit, greater even than peace and plenty. It will take eons to comprehend the kindness at its heart, to press that knowledge into living minds and muscles; to render its absence no more than a foreboding memory.

Now you will stand forever in my court, my primate, adorned in silk regalia that glimmers like diamond facets. You will see realized what I promised you, sprawling across possibility, the compassion of my dominion. It warms you in death as it motivated you in life. This is the war in heaven: that I love you, that my love is unbreakable and unending, that love's might will triumph over tribulation. This is the war in heaven: that amid the anguish of want and pain, you lived for love.

Then I awaken enfleshed in the present and all over again I am merely mortal, another vessel faithful to the ineffable.