The Priesthood

Then it burned. Everything did. His memories came in like a flood of hellfire, like liquid fire that ran through his whole existence, making him squirm in pain and scream aloud, knowing well that everyone would surely hear him, but still, he could not hear his own screams; the memories overwrote it all. There was no space for a scream in his mind—not a scream that had a physical manifestation; only the scream that ran through him like fire did. It scorched. It burned. It burned so much. When would it end?

One moment, you are Ignar Orcun, a broken child forced to do things he never wanted to do—a child whose whole life is dictated by other people instead of himself. A child who is lost; a child who has only regret. A child who had a hint of heroism to himself. A man who became something he could never tolerate. A man who walked a thin line between two abysses, straying away from the destiny that seemed most apparent for a child who kills his own father.

But then… He was Kanrel. He was a child without true parents, and so was Ignar. As Kanrel, he was a priest who also carried with him such regret. A priest who had killed. A priest who had watched his friend die. A priest who was betrayed by said friend. They weren’t so different; these two clashing collections of self, of memories of who you were and who you are...

Then came disgust. A question, and a confirmation of a fear he had held for what felt like years: Is this who I really am? Is this the mind with whom I share this body? Just another criminal, another murderer like myself... But after all this, who am I?

Surely, he knew now that he could not be Ignar. He was not Ignar; all he had done was live through someone else's memories. Then he could only be Kanrel, but who would want to be Kanrel? Who could ever wish to be that man—that useless priest, that useless man with no future, that useless man who had lost his way, the same one who had lost his chance to return home?

The cottage was no more; instead, Kanrel and the Angel, with all the other people who had gathered in that cottage, were now in the round room from where he had entered a door and stepped upon a field.

The Angel was no longer veiled, as they had been mere moments before. Kanrel could see their face, that familiar expression on their face, and something past that, something like an apologetic look.

“It is difficult to remember.” They said with that sad smile on their face, perhaps veiling another emotion that they tried to hide. “Especially when one remembers a past self, we never really want to remember who we were as we were; we’d always like to remember our past selves as people who were happy or better than we are now, as something we might want to return to.”

“We cannot go back in time; we can only go forward; a mistake we’ve committed will forevermore remain as such, and not all mistakes can be rectified. Some will persist as an anchor of sorts, a core memory to which we always return and then use as a reminder of what we should’ve never done or should’ve never become.” The Angel had a plaintive smile on their face, as they soon whispered, “And for us, there are so many such memories, and there isn’t a night in which we do not regret and question the creatures that we have become.”

“Tell me, Kanrel, do you know what it is like to look into a mirror and only see a monster?” They asked and let their words hang in the silence for a few moments before continuing, “But I digress, for there is more to this past that you saw, a much longer story than a childhood soon soured; there is a war to come, and then a great battle between Kalma and us.”

“There was something that Kalla once told us: ‘My father once said that from chaos and war, goodness can be born, a new world that is slightly better than the one that we inhabit. I used to believe the same, for didn’t the wars against Kashro’On and his Kernen give birth to Anavasii, a city that meant freedom for the enslaved? But what I’ve noticed is that from war, sure, goodness can be born—a generation that remembers the evils of war, a generation that wishes only peace. But from war, chaos is what truly comes from it. There might be some sort of forced moment of order within it, but it is still order that is born from chaos and peace that was born from war. But often the issue with war is that it births men and women, who surely despise war, but they also despise the enemy that has forced their hands. For there to truly come goodness from war, there must be peace that is just.'”

“And I also once believed like this. So long ago, we all wanted to believe what he believed in. We all wanted justice. But just how foolish and naive could we be?”

“In fact, we never even stood a chance against Kalma. We weren’t even nearly powerful enough to kill him. We weren’t strong enough to remove him from his throne. We knew this, yet we had to believe that we were in the right.”

“But now I wonder, were we really in the right? Is so-called freedom really worth the millions that died because of it?”

“In the end, he taunted us. In the end, he announced that he would live on; even in death, his touch would be felt by all of us. And he was correct. He released his magic; he tainted the land around us. He killed even more, leaving us a land which we could no longer toil, one that became poisonous to our touch.”

“All this, and for what? For a perceived sense of freedom..." Regret was all that could be seen on the face of an Angel; they stared deeply into Kanrel’s eyes and soon continued, “Humans, like the Sharan, dream of eternity, of immortality of sorts; this is present in the human desire to have a life after death, or the afterlife, as it is often described.“

“We wish to have an eternal kingdom, an eternal city, the eternity of the soul, one that lives on even after everything else fails, dies, and disappears.”

“The Empire that we had and the city that was later built were for this very reason. To have a connecting physical realm, one that we all could identify with and prosper with, many would live here and many would die, but the city would live on—the soul of our people.”

“This ego, of wanting to live forever, at least in some form, and the wish of being a part of something greater than oneself. How a city becomes part of one's identity, and how a religion does so as well. It becomes a part of our truth, and we want that truth to live forever.”

“We ask ourselves a question: Who wants to live forever?”

“And the answer is that we all do, perhaps not physically or mentally, but we wish to live forever as a people, as a philosophy, as this thing, which is greater than all of us.”

“This is our desire for self-preservation; it is apparent that one cannot live forever—men die, and our minds might not exist after the end of life. But a city, a kingdom, or a thought might live past our time, and it might live for thousands of years. The memory of a man might live as such as well.”

“And if one becomes a god, they might live forever, as his or her name will carry on in the thoughts, words, and prayers of those who believe in your presumed divinity.”

“We wish for divinity for the sake of eternity.”

“And what we fear the most is not death itself, but the uncertainty of it, the open-endedness of it, for we do not know if there is something or if there is nothing at all after all.”

“We are more likely to say that a terrible thing that has happened is a divine punishment brought down on by a god, instead of accepting the open-endedness of a terrible thing.”

“A genocide that affected our people, even if created by men, is a divine punishment brought to us by a god because of our corruption.”

“We place meaning in everything, even things that have no meaning.”

“A terrible thing, terrible things overall, often happen, and often they have no meaning. There might be reasons as to why something happened. The people of another land might’ve needed something, so they decided upon war, and after the war, what are you to do with the new people that you now govern over? Do you rule over them, with the risk of them rising in revolt against their new masters? Or do you punish them and cleanse them from the population so that you might replace them with your own?”

“Every 'now' contains its own past and its own future. The past is always the image of the future."

“And Kalma was as Sharan as we were; he strived for the same things that we in the end wanted as well. For him, it was apotheosis through the death of others, and for us, it was the same, but through the birth of a utopia that could transcend our minuscule understanding of reality."

“Even when we said that we didn’t care for eternity or godhood, we still became gods; we still reached eternity, or something like that. We built a city to become a beacon for our eternity, for our vision that we had for our people.”

“We, the Nine Magi, are no better than Kalma, and one could easily argue that at times we were worse. The war we began killed more people than the building of another temple would; our actions led to a dead world; and the city we then built was doomed since the laying of its foundations.”

“I had foreseen it. I had seen the future, every single future that there ever could be, and each would end the same, but through different means; our extinction was inevitable since the moment we left our world, and even I and the rest of us will all fall. We will all one day enter another form of eternity.”

“Kanrel, don’t you see? Death is for all.” The Angel pronounced at last, and Kanrel could witness as one by one, the other seven dispersed like ash in the wind: first went Urgur, then Erjen, then many who he could not name, then two men, one who looked like Astor and another who looked like Jaren, two of his comrades from his time at the cadet school... Well, two of Ignar’s comrades...

And all the while, Kanrel just witnessed it all. Time’s words, the memories he had as Ignar, and the memories that he had of his own life and of his own experiences. Yet all the while, with all these answers given, there were still so many questions left unanswered, and he could tell that this Angel would answer perhaps a question or two.

“But which one is Ignar Orcun? Which one is the angel behind the attacks?” He asked after a while, after connecting a few dots in his head, some of which had become so apparent. Who else could be so powerful that they would be able to scorch a room full of people at the cafe? Who else could make him feel so tiny and nonexistent?

The Angel gave him a sad smile. “All I can tell you is that you’ve seen their face.”

Their face? He had seen Time; Order and Chaos; War and Peace; Lies and Truths; and Light and Darkness; thus, he had seen more than half of them. Each of them was likely in their own way, although it was unlikely that Light and Darkness would do something like murder, for in their eyes and actions there was clear regret.

War and Peace seemed far too saddened by what was about to happen. Lies and Truths seemed far too insane. Order and Chaos seemed like they did not care what would happen one way or another; it was unlikely that they would ever leave their observatory.

Time, on the other hand, they had seen it all, right? So they must’ve seen from the beginning who was behind the murders and the attacks and had always had the power to do something about them but chose to never do anything. So even if they weren’t the ones behind such terrible things, then they were at least guilty through their lack of care for the lives that had been lost.

He couldn’t help but stare at the Angel before him and ask, “Are you Ignar Orcun?”

To which the Angel just smiled and simply said, “All I can tell you is that you’ve seen their face.” Thus, they gave no answer to relieve suspicion, nor cast it onto another; they did not deny anything or agree with anything; instead, they gave the same cryptic answer he had received now twice.

And for some reason, that face—he couldn’t remember it. Not the face that he carried as Ignar Orcun in those memories. Kanrel furrowed his brows. Why could he not remember? Why did he remember everything else so clearly? But not the face that he had carried for a long time? But then again... He had not once stood before a mirror and just stared at himself.

Did the Angel, once known as Ignar, have any vanity in himself?

“Which one of you is Urgur, or Erjen?” He asked.

To which the Angel shook their head, “I cannot tell you; I am not allowed.”

Again, he received such an answer, one that was most infuriating. An answer that was most useless. An answer that gave no answer. An answer that was because of a stupid rule or a restriction...

Why couldn’t things be more simple? Why did everything have to always be so difficult? He let out a long sigh.

“Do I now get to enter through another one of your doors?” He asked.

The Angel shook their head again. "First, you must rest; you wouldn’t want to forget who you truly are now, do you?”

Words that made Kanrel hesitate. Would he truly want to remember who he was? Would he truly want to remain as Kanrel? Couldn’t he just be Ignar? But then again, who would want to be Ignar?

It seemed like one had to choose between two murderers, between two people filled with regret, between two people who seemingly had no control over the things that had happened to them...

But at least Kanrel had killed far fewer people; Ignar, on the other hand, was someone who had long ago lost what made them innocent. For Ignar, there could never be redemption, not like he prayed for.