a surrender - 60

(Continuing "a surrender", chapter seven, "freely have you received, freely give") 

I squat here in the rain, not moving, looking up into the angry sky. The rain comes down in fury, battering my face. Any sane man would be crouching under a rock ledge, even inside one of the caves where they bury the rich dead, to be out of this.

I am not a sane man.

I am Legion.

My demons are a legion, an army in my head, marching in step one-two one-two. Too many of them to count. One-two one-two one-two and then suddenly they scream, they shriek their battle-cry and charge, and I am trampled under their feet and I know nothing; those times are my rages, the times I’ve torn chunks out of any man that dared set foot among my tombs. Then I feel no pain. I take the rocks that lie on this hillside and run their sharp edges down my chest and bleed, and I feel no pain. Nothing at all. Just the trickling on my skin as warm as tears.

They thought at first they could bind me, they thought I was a joke, a raving screaming lunatic joke—and they found out how wrong they were. They tried to tame me, tie me like a goat to a post—I tore their ropes to shreds. They tried to chain me up and I pulled their chains in two, I chased them through the tombs whipping the broken chain around my head, big men screamed and ran from me.

No one can look me in the face and not be afraid.

No one can bind me.

I stand and shout it to the storm as the thunder booms around me: I am Legion! No one can bind me! And the rain runs down my scarred body and the wind whips my tangled hair around my face and the lightning rips the sky and the thunder cracks again—

And within the space of a breath the storm is gone.

I saw it happen, saw the clouds pull back, draw themselves in and up into blue sky. Sunlight shooting down as sudden as lightning. The waves on the lake flattening out into calm, like the raised hackles of a dog suddenly lying down again at the sound of his master’s voice—there is something out there.

Continued...