The Balance of Wings

by Epiphany sola Gratia

A year after the Blight, Alistair is king and struggling with his responsibilities and his personal losses. While undertaking a diplomatic mission into the Cauldron valley, things do not go as planned. He meets a woman who helps change his perspective.

89. Interlude 29: Vision of Consummation

Interlude 29: Vision of Consummation

From the Journal of Ser Helyas Manning

Knight Commander of the Maferian Templars

She is both temptation and salvation. We cannot exist in harmony and yet I would die without her. I would perish without that which feeds me. She makes me weak with want and yet she tempers me like steel. She enflames my senses with rage and passion, yet the flames drive me forward to my holier desires. She is polluted in her baseness but pure in my aspiration.

I must resist the corruption she represents and yet I relish the small pleasures of looking on her. In my mind my hands have wandered her lushness. In my fleeting fancies I have tasted her nectar. In my mind's eye I possess her, body and soul. She is both promise and profanity.

In my visions I become the roaring inferno that consumes the birch trees, curling back their pale skin with the licking of scorching tongues. It is the oneness of conflagration and object of consumption. One is destroyed feeding the will of the other, providing blazing illumination and searing warmth.

I know what I must do and will not falter, yet I know that with her absence there will be ash and emptiness. It is only when the soil has been cleared of the weeds that the good crops will grow. If it were not a sacrifice, would the Maker even accept it?

I am resolved.

The world must burn so that it can be purified and remade, prepared for the footsteps of the Maker. He will make his new seat and build a new Golden City among his faithful. From the ash all mankind will be re-born without the taint.