#so a god came and sanctified her work to get her over the finish line

[seasonsofeverlark]

Menorah Lights, Blessing of Life

Author: @alliswell21

Prompt: I would LOVE to see some Everlark Hanukkah fluff there’s way to little out there right now. [submitted by anonymous]

Rating: T - for non-explicit: adult situations, childbirth description, and breastfeeding. 

Canon typical violence. Vague reference to a war zone/conflict. 

This work contains religious and cultural imagery and traditions. There’s also some use of the Yiddish language, as well as some Hebrew. There will be a glossary and more in-depth commentary at the end of the fic, when this piece gets cross posted to AO3 in a few days. Peeta makes a quick reference to 1 Samuel 1:27 towards the end part of the fic.

Author’s Note: Thank you, Anon, for this prompt. I have to be honest, and disclose I’ve never witnessed a Hanukkah celebration personally, and most of the events depicted in this story concerning the festival is a product of hours of research. I apologize for any inaccuracies or if I’ve inadvertently misrepresented any cultural or religious aspect of the holiday.

Extensive thanks to @rosefyrefyre​, who was kind enough to beta read, spell check my Hebrew, direct me to some great sites to aid my research, and serve as the best resource for Judaism accuracy I could’ve asked for! Rose, I always learn something from my interactions with you. I’m grateful for your willingness to share your knowledge. 

***Hannah: Hebrew origin. Means: ‘grace’/‘favor’; attributed meaning: ‘He (God) has favoured me with a child’.***

Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating the holiday! 

————-

The house is reverently quiet, despite being crammed to the gills with all our family and friends.

  Peeta checks his watch nervously for the fifth time in ten minutes. He’s so rigid, I know his leg will bother him so much tonight, he’ll take hours to fall asleep. 

  I smile at him, making a mental note to warm some lavender infused oils to massage the stump of his leg. It’s the least I can do for my husband. 

  Peeta lost his lower leg protecting me from shrapnel during an attack while deployed to the Middle East some 16 years ago. I was rendered deaf in my left ear on the same attack…we are a perfect match, my husband and I; he has to wear a prosthetic leg to get around, I have to wear a hearing aid, and that doesn’t even begin to cover the burn marks and other scars we sustained in the service. 

  “I think we should…” he says quietly, motioning to the small table we placed by the window earlier. 

  I turn to my cousin, Johanna, and nod. 

  Jo winks at Peeta and shuts the lights off, while I pull back the curtains from the windows and tie them up, revealing a waning sunset over the rooftops of our neighborhood. 

  Peeta stands a pace behind me, transfixed by the slim line of flaming orange in the horizon being swallowed by deep purples and indigos of the falling night. It’s Peeta’s favorite color. 

  “Almost time, Katniss!” he whispers, giddy, placing a match box on the table at the foot of the menorah. 

  There’s a soft buzz behind us, which means everybody  is shuffling closer to the window. Outside, the world is busy with cars driving by, splashing the dirty slosh of melted snow accumulated on the ground from days ago; a dog barks somewhere in the distance, and a couple of people hustle home; but the thing that really catches my eyes, is that in a few houses down the street, candlelights start to flicker to life on windows and front porches, announcing the start of Hanukkah. 

  “Should—should we do it?” Peeta asks leaning closer to the window pane, clearly seeing the other houses already lighting their candles. 

  “There’s still a sliver of sun. They just can’t see it because they’re facing our way, against it.” I mutter back. 

  This is Peeta’s first Hanukkah as a host, so he’s a little eager. In fact, my beautiful husband was beside himself when everything fell into place for us to host tonight’s celebration. If he could’ve gotten his way, we’d have everyone over to light the menorah the whole eight days of the festival. But, we are expecting the arrival of our very own little miracle any day now, so hosting the first day was a very generous compromise with our family. 

  The thought warms me inside, and I caress my protruding stomach absentmindedly, staring at the darkening sky. 

  The sun finally sinks. “Now!” I grin at my other half. 

  Peeta grins back, handing me the candles. Two of them, to be precise; long and blue. If my Tatte —my father— were here, he would’ve insisted we used olive oil and wicks instead, but it’s only Peeta’s first Hanukkah leading, and he’s so nervous about the whole thing already…candles are perfectly acceptable. 

  First, I place the shamash— “Shamash means helper candle, Katniss,” Tatte would explain— in the middle peg of our menorah, so it sits higher than the rest. Then, I place the one other candle in the rightmost holder, to signify today is the first night of the Festival of Lights. 

  Peeta passes me the matches, and I light the shamash. I smile at him, encouragingly, and mouth the words: “Your turn,” 

  He takes a deep breath, wiggling his fingers at his sides, and then starts reciting the first blessing: “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha-olam, Asher kid-shanu bi-mitzvo-tav vi-tzee-vanu, Li-had-leek ner shel Chanukah.” 

  His Hebrew isn’t perfect, but he recites the whole prayer exactly as we practiced. 

  My mother, who’s standing with Peeta’s family, translates quietly, to not disrupt too much, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Chanukah light.”

  Peeta waits a moment, and then recites the second prayer: “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha-olam, Shi-asa nee-seem la-avo-teinu, Ba-ya-meem ha-haim baz-man ha-zeh.” 

  Again, my mother translates, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who performed miracles for our forefathers in those days, at this time.”

  Peeta’s blue eyes shine joyfully in the dim of night. 

  “Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu melech ha-olam, Sheh-he-che-yanu vi-kee-yimanu vi-hee-gee-yanu laz-man ha-zeh.” 

  He finishes the third blessing, which we only say on the first night, with utmost reverence, and holds my gaze for only a second. 

  My mother translates this prayer as well, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.” She explains this one we only say once, during the first day, but the first two, we recite every night. 

  I take the shamash from its holder and tip the flame into the wick of today’s candle, so it starts the mitzvah of the night. After the light has been kindled, we —the ones in attendance who speak Hebrew— sing Ha-nerot Halalu together. 

  When we finish, my sister, Primrose, starts singing Maoz Tzur, and Peeta turns puppy-dog eyes on me, because he loves my singing.

  I chuckle ruefully before opening my mouth and letting the lyrics spill like second nature. The rest of the attendees join in singing, and suddenly everyone is participating in some way. When the song ends, another one starts, and the atmosphere grows animated and joyful the longer it goes. As it should! 

  Peeta’s brothers came with their families, so he goes to them to chat. My mother has been sitting with them, explaining the proceedings, since it’s the first time they’ve joined us for Hanukkah. 

  The candlelight flickers from the menorah, the only light in the room, just as we finish another song, and then Uncle Haymitch staggers into the middle of the floor, shoving his hands into his pockets. The children peer up with interest, because most of them have known Haymitch long enough to guess what’s to come.

  Haymitch moves his arms just a fraction, and all the kids slip out of their seats like an exhale, and then, the paunchy, ol’ grump is throwing small, shiny, gold disks up towards the ceiling, crowing: “Gelt! Gelt! Gelt for everyone!” 

  “I think he believes he’s some kinda middle-aged, Jewish Oprah!” Blight, Johanna’s husband, cackles somewhere behind me, as the children descend like locusts on the chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil scattered all over the room. 

  Peeta encourages his younger nephews to get in on the fun. 

  Between all three of our siblings, Peeta and I have seven nephews— two of them are teenagers— and one niece. 

  The adults shake their heads and smile from the sidelines, watching the children in merriment.

  When all the gelt has been collected from the floor, Peeta asks the children if they would rather: eat, play dreidel, or hear a story. Since the oldest child in attendance is 8½, the kids settle on a story pretty quick. 

  I sink into the cushions of our plushest chair to watch my husband corral the little ones onto the rug for their story; one of my hands rests lazily on my heavily pregnant belly, while I hold a half eaten sugar cookie in the other one.

  “So…who can tell me what we’re celebrating for the next eight days?” Peeta starts.

  There’s a soft chorus of kiddy voices calling “Hanukkah!”

  “That is right!” Peeta agrees, his eyes are wide, excited, merry, “and Hanukkah is a very important party, because it reminds us of the Miracle of Lights and the victory of the Sons of Israel over the mean ol’ gentiles—“

  “Mamme says gentiles aren’t ‘all’ bad!” cries out Bekka, Johanna and Blight’s little girl, who looks like a carbon copy of her mother, except with long, wavy hair. 

  “Um…you’re right, I should’ve said ‘Greek invaders’ instead of gentiles…my bad—”

  “Uncle Peeta…” one of our nephews— on Peeta’s side— blinks owlishly at him, “What’s a gentile?” 

  “Non-Jewish people,” says Asher, one of Prim’s twins. 

  “Oh…like Muggles are non-magic folk?” asks another of the Mellark boys. 

  “I guess so,” answers the other twin, Aspen.

  “I don’t think we are Jewish,” comments one of Peeta’s nephews, turning inquisitive blue eyes to my husband and then to his own parents, “Are we?”

  “No, buddy, you aren’t a Jew—“

  “Uncle Haymitch says gentiles are helpless,” interrupts Aspen, shaking his head sadly, “He says the goyish thing gentiles do is putting mayo in their pastrami sammiches! So, if neither of you don’t put mayo in your pastrami, then you’re alright. You’re mishpachah, Bran!”

  “Um…what does that mean?” asks Bran.

  “We’re your mishpachah, right, Mamme?” inquires Asher.

  “It means ‘family’,” explains Prim, making the Mellark boys look relieved, and even proud. 

  “Are you a gentile too, Uncle Peeta?” asks Asher, “Uncle Haymitch says you used to be his favorite Shabbos Goy of all times before you married Auntie Katniss.”

  I almost choke on my cookie. 

  Peeta wheezes out a tiny chuckle, but is interrupted by my enraged sister.

  “Boys!” Prim rushes from her chair, her daughter half asleep in her lap; she dumps the toddler into her husband’s arms to stand in front of the twins with her hands on her hips. “That is not nice! What have I said about repeating all the mishegas Uncle Haymitch says?”

  “Not to…” the twins mumble contritely. 

  “Oy! I’m sitting right here, Sunshine!” Haymitch calls out. “Plus, kinder wisdom,” he pronounces it the Yiddish way, like the start of kindergarten, “it’s still wisdom!” 

  The twins are 7, but they can be a menace and clever to boot.

  Haymitch continues, “Everybody knows the Boy used to be pretty helpful back in the day. I was almost sad when Sweetheart finally snatched him up, despite it being the smartest thing she’s ever done,”

  “Haymitch…” I ground a low warning. 

  It’s a well known fact I kept digging my heels in against Peeta’s subtle advances for years, despite having feelings for him myself; I’m grateful my beautiful husband persevered though, because looking at him now, I can confidently say that our marriage, our family, would’ve happened anyway, despite my deep seated fears, the physical and mental toll being in a war zone took on us both, and all the heartbreak in between… 

  Unlike my mother, Peeta did not convert to Judaism in order to marry me. He did that on his own, way before I agreed to make our odd relationship official. I tried to persuade him from converting though— he does love Christmas and bacon— but again, he was committed to our faith with an iron will only the grave can quell. 

  “Eh!” Haymitch waves me off, “Nobody can win with you girls. Not even kvelling about one of your husbands!” 

  I sink deeper into my chair, sufficiently mollified. The old man can gush all about Peeta all he wants, as long as he doesn’t comment on me.

  But Haymitch has a big mouth; he used to give me a hard time for my apparent ‘prickly personality’, often telling me I was so surly, I was practically gornisht helfn—beyond help—and once, he even said, I was as charming as a slug. I retorted he was probably looking at a mirror, and that was the end of that.

  When Peeta started hinting at wanting more out of the casual arrangement we’ve had since the Army, and to my chagrin, two more suitors sprung out of nowhere, Haymitch had the gall to tell me that before Peeta, I was as romantic as dirt. Peeta gave him an earful for that one, though. It was glorious seeing Haymitch properly chastised by his favorite Shabbos Goy.

  I giggle at the memory. 

  I finally relented a couple of years ago, letting my fears go. Haymitch was the first to congratulate me when I announced I was dating Peeta, like a normal couple. My uncle fixed me with a stare that said he expected me to really try, because this boy was a true catch, or as he called him then, “a mensch if he ever saw one.” 

  I happen to agree. 

  I sigh, massaging my ribs where the baby is digging its tuchis in. 

  Haymitch gets away with a great deal of things on the simple account that he was the only person who actually accepted, and welcomed our mother into our family, when she married our father. Everyone else called her an opinionated shiksa behind my parents’ backs, probably thanks to my Bubbe…dear old Grandma really disliked the idea of my father marrying a gentile girl, despite being clear as day how much they loved each other. 

  My sister glares at Haymitch too, then turns to her sons, “It’s the first day of Chanukah, nu?” The boys nod in affirmative, “Then be good, so Uncle Peeta can finish the story—“

  “But, Mamme…we know the story!” 

  Prim gives them The Look and shuts them up right away. “Bannock, Graham, and Bran don’t know the story. They’re our guests, and we are called to be hospitable to everyone, right?” 

  I stare at Prim with mild amusement. She’s such a MOM! 

  “Yes, Mamme.” 

  I wonder if I’ll be able to master ‘the stare’ as well as my baby sister has? 

  Prim told me once, that everything she knows about mothering, she learned from the years in which I took care of her, after our father died, and our mother fell into a debilitating depression that almost killed us all from starvation and hebetude. 

  I have mixed feelings about that assessment, first, because: At first I was just trying to keep our situation hidden from others, so I made sure Prim and I were clean and presentable for school, that all homework was made on time, that we studied our Torah lessons, and that we attended Hebrew school without missing a class. I made sure Prim ate at least once a day, even if that meant I went without.

  There were things I couldn’t provide for my sister, simply because I didn’t know how, and when the pantry was empty, I started secretly raiding the trash containers behind the stores in our neighborhood.

  I was 11 then. 

  That’s when the first and only interaction with Peeta— or as I knew him then: the baker’s son— occurred before the Army. 

  Peeta had been watching me steadily lose weight and figured something wasn’t right. Then he saw how I dove out of his folks’ bakery’s garbage container and emerged empty handed, because trash had already been collected. 

  Instead of sneering, bullying me or calling the police, Peeta gave me two, fresh loaves of bread— the chiefest of foods in our culture— and thanks to his generosity, I figured out how to keep Prim, mother and myself fed when money was tight, hunting squirrels and little birds, long enough for my mother to find the strength to get the help she needed to get better.

  Secondly, in my adult life, I’ve learned to appreciate our mother’s position. She had a really hard time with life in general. Her family turned their back on her when she converted to Judaism, yet people in our community mistrusted her because of my grandma’s own prejudice, the fact that my mother was a nurse and every now and then her hospital wouldn’t (or couldn’t) honor her religious freedom to observe the Shabbat didn’t help her case. People started trusting her after they saw her care for the sick in the community, often paying from her own pocket for their treatments. 

  Peeta never struggled fitting in with my family. Then again, he’s so sweet and friendly with anyone, always so happy and ready to lend a hand…why everyone in our community loves him, and welcomed him with open arms as one of us. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to picture my loving, sweet husband as a seasoned Army veteran, who’s seen his share of destruction and death…then again, maybe it is because he’s seen humanity at its worst that he makes the extra effort to stay a pacifist and he chooses to show The Lord’s love unto others. 

  “Sorry, Peeta, please continue with the story. You’re doing a lovely job!” says my sister.

  I chance a glance at my husband, and see the mirth in his bright, blue eyes. 

  “Thank you Prim,” he says, turning back to the boys, with wonder in his voice. “But, I was thinking, and this might be the best idea I ever had! What if we let the boys tell the story of Hanukkah tonight, since it’s true, they know it better than I do? They are incredibly smart young men!” 

  “Avadeh!” exclaims Haymitch from his spot. 

  The twins wiggle with excitement, and both of them turn eager, hazel eyes to their mother, seeking approval.

  Prim takes a deep breath and nods. 

  Both boys turn their bronze haired heads back to Peeta, enthusiastically. 

  “Alright, go on then, tells us what happened!” Peeta encourages. 

  Asher starts, “The brave heroes, called the Maccabees, kicked out the Greek gentiles that wanted to make the people of Israel pray to their gentile gods! Then the priests came to ‘re-medicate’ the Holy Temple—“

  “Rededicate!” Thom, Prim’s husband, corrects from the back of the room, but the boys are on a roll now.

  “‘Redadecate’ the Holy Temple, by lighting the menorah. So, they looked all over the place, but found only one jar of ‘puridified’ oil—“

  “Purified!” 

  “Yes, what Tatte said! They only found enough of the good oil, to light the menorah for one day!”

  Asher pauses for effect, while all the adults react to the suspense accordingly, gasping and murmuring. 

  Aspen continues the narration after a second. 

  “At first, the priests thought: oh no! We don’t want to light the menorah for only one day, it needs to burn all the time to clean all the filth the Greeks left behind, so we can praise Adonai again!”

  Hushed voices comment their approval. 

  The other twin picks up the story. “But they decided, that even one day, was better than none at all, so they used that little bit of oil, and fired up the lamp, and the lights burned for eight times straight!”

  “Eight days…” corrects Thom.

  “Eight days straight!”

  “It was a miracle!”

  Everyone claps, excitedly. 

  “The priests had time to…” Asher cranes his neck, seeking his father in the crowded living room, and then smiles, enunciating his word with precision, “‘purify’ more olive oil, to add to the menorah from then on!”

  “That’s why we celebrate Hanukkah every year! To remember how our people defended their freedom,”

  “And won back the Holy Temple,”

  “And The Lord accepted their effort with a miracle of lights!” 

  The whole room erupts in cheers and song. Everybody hugs each other in celebration. 

  After a moment, our auntie Effie calls out, “Oh what wonderful storytelling, Tattelles!” She rushes over to the twins and smacks loud, wet kisses, on both of the boys’ cheeks, leaving red lipstick all over their wincing faces. 

  The twins wipe their cheeks with the backs of their hands, and Prim just sighs, hugging her sons to her chest. “Well done, Asher. Well done, Aspen.”

  Peeta pats them both on the head, and ever the attentive host, directs everyone to help themselves to the many treats he made. 

  “Is everything fried?” asks one of Peeta’s sisters-in-law.

  “For the most part,” I hear my mother say, fondly. “To commemorate the miracle of the oil, traditionally, Hanukkah food is fried.” She explains, patiently. “Everything is delicious, and Peeta and Katniss made quite the spread.” 

  My mother busies herself, setting up a stack of napkins on the table where we placed all the food; she then serves latkes to the Mellarks.

  Haymitch grabs her hand and pulls her to sit by me. “Come rest, sit with your daughter, enjoy the lights. I’ll shmooze the bakers now, nu!” 

  My mother comes to sit next to me. She smiles tiredly, “How are you feeling, zeeskeit?” 

  I grin, she’s using the same term of endearment Tatte used to call us. It means ‘sweetheart’.

  “I’m alright. Just a little tired. My back is killing me and I think I have gas, ‘cause my belly keeps rumbling and tensing up.” 

  My mother arches a dark blonde eyebrow, “Maybe the baby is on the way?” 

  “I suppose that could be a possibility,” I shrug. I’m 6 days shy of my due date, but the doctor says I’m healthy, and he expects no complications, whatsoever, plus first time mothers can be early. 

  Thom brings out a dreidel to play with the children. 

  My toddler niece rubs her eyes grumpily— she’s got gray eyes, like my father did. Like mine. Mother and Prim are blonde and blue eyed, but I favored my father in appearance…I wonder who my child will like? I hope it’s a little of both Peeta and I— the girl clings to her father’s arm, watching her brothers and cousins spin the top, suspiciously. Once she realizes gelt is involved in the game, she perks up a little, and tries to spin the dreidel to mixed results. 

  Everyone sits around the children, eating latkes dipped in applesauce or sour cream; Peeta decided not to serve any meat tonight, so we could eat dairy products. Effie is dipping hers in salsa…what an odd woman! 

  Johanna is eating an entire block of cheese, noshing on it like a mouse. 

  Peeta brings me and my mother sufganiyot; he smiles sheepishly. “These were a hit.” He says, “they’ve already disappeared from the tray.”

  I stare at him with wide eyes. “Why does that surprise you, babe? Your cooking is amazing!” 

  Peeta rubs the back of his head, bashful. “Eh, it would be embarrassing if the baker couldn’t handle jelly filled donuts, nu?” he whispers, kneeling in front of my chair. 

  “Nonsense,” I say equally quietly, “you are the most talented person I know.” I kiss him on the forehead, after pushing back the ashy waves of hair falling into his eyes. 

  I hope our child has wavy hair like Peeta does! Mine is boring…not so much the dark as ink color, but the way it’s so thick and straight, the only way to keep it up is in braid.

  Peeta gazes at me with so much love, my heart skips a beat. 

  “Have I told you recently, just how grateful I am to have you as my wife, lover and partner in life?” He reaches up to caress my face, and suddenly the hubbub of the party fades, leaving us in a bubble of our own. 

  “I’m grateful too!” I say, curling my sugar coated fingers around his, cupping my cheek. 

  It’s a veritable miracle that Peeta and I are here today, married and with a child on the way. 

  We grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools, and frequented the same places; yet, despite crossing each other’s paths often, and outside the lone time with the bread when we were eleven, we never truly interacted with each other until we found ourselves deployed to the same base overseas.

  Peeta enlisted in the Army fresh out of high school. I enlisted much later, when it became glaringly obvious that if I was going to pursue any higher education, it would have to be paid for by the military, since every penny Mother and I made, went straight into Prim’s Med school fund. 

  Prim took a couple of breaks from school while building her family, but she’s a pediatrician now, beloved by her patients and their parents. 

  Thom is in the field as well, as a Physical Therapist. He was Peeta’s PT for a while; that’s how him and my sister met. They married years before we did. 

  Call it chance or providence, Peeta and I had no idea we were in the same camp, until our names got chosen for some grunt duty I can no longer remember. We recognized one another instantly, and became very close friends while in the service. Close enough to share cots and knock boots when the itch was too unbearable to ignore. We discovered we had more in common than just our hometown, and then…the worst day of our lives happened, cementing our dependence on the other, like only tragedy can. 

  While on a mission, our unit got attacked. Our Commander, a burly man named Boggs, called for extraction while we ran for cover from a volley of bullets raining on us. In the confusion, Boggs stepped on a landmine that blew off both his feet. 

  I rushed to him, pulling him back to safety. I didn’t think of the shrapnel flying everywhere, but Peeta— who had located me a second earlier— did. He made it to me somehow, and shielded my body with his own, earning a mangled leg full of lead for his troubles. 

  Boggs was beyond medical help; the poor man bled to death in my arms in the transport back to base. Peeta was badly hurt, losing blood quicker than anyone in the transport could stomach. I tried to help him as best I could, wishing I had my mother’s touch or Prim’s cleverness; I placed a tourniquet on Peeta’s thigh. It saved his life, but cost him his leg. 

  It wasn’t until we arrived back in camp, and the adrenaline and terror left my body, that I was able to feel my own wounds. I had second degree burns in several places of my body; the fire and heat miraculously spared my face. Then, I noticed the ringing in my left ear wouldn’t go away, and when it did, no other sounds came in. 

  I was honorably discharged for my damaged ear, but I requested to stay close to my buddy, Peeta Mellark, until he was stable enough to go back home. When questioned about this, I simply replied, “We protect each other. Is what we do.” 

  Peeta was discharged too shortly after. We got shipped back home to America together, which is how we’ve been ever since.

  Peeta and I survived against the odds.

  It took us months and lots of counseling to be able to sleep through the night without waking up screaming. 

  It took him years to convince me it was okay to let my guard down around my heart. I was always so scared I’d lose him to some unseen danger, and like my mother, fall into such a deep depression I could harm any potential children we had together, because in my heart of hearts I knew Peeta was it for me.  

  It took us five, ten, fifteen years to be where we are at, and that in itself is a miracle I’m grateful for. 

  “Peeta, darling, the candles are almost out,” says Effie, who apparently is eager to turn the lights back on. 

  “Alright, let’s see…” I stand up to check just how consumed those candles really are, and as soon as I do, my incompetent bladder releases all the pee I have in my body, and then some. “Feh!”

  My mother gasps and pushes Peeta back, who was still kneeling close by. “Katniss, your water just broke!” 

  “What?! Already? Whatdowedo?!” Peeta is frantic, practically jogging in place, hands hovering uselessly around my belly. 

  Effie screeches in a very uncharacteristic fashion. “Oh! What a big, big, big day this is, darlings! Katniss, doll, you might get to hold your very own bundle of joy in your arms on the first day of Hanukkah! What a blessing!” 

  “Well, first things first,” says my mother, going into nurse mode. “Everyone, calm down! This child is not about to drop just yet. Second, Katniss needs to get out of these clothes and into clean ones. Then we need to get you packed and ready to go to the hospital. Peeta, dear, you need to call the doctor, and let them know your wife’s water broke, and you’re heading to the hospital soon.”

  “Okay! Yeah…on it!” says Peeta chewing nervously on his lower lip. 

  He reluctantly steps aside to make the call. By then, my sister is moving people around to get me through the room.

  Delly, Peeta’s sister-in-law, comes from who-knows-where with an armful of towels to mop up the floor. 

  “Thank you,” I offer embarrassedly.

  Delly waves me off, “Oh no, honey, don’t you worry about it. I know how these things go. You have more important stuff to think of right now. We will clean this place up, and probably call on grandma and grandpa Mellark, to let them know.” 

  I give her a hug, because she’s the nicest person I know, and barely hold back an ugly sob. 

  Peeta comes back from calling the doctor just as my mother is helping me into a pair of baggy sweatpants. Prim’s going through my bag triple checking what I packed, despite my protests that both Peeta and I have been checking on it every day for the last week. 

  “Everything is ready, Katniss. The doctor is on the way to the hospital. There’s a triage nurse already waiting for you, our paperwork is being processed as we speak, so all we have to do is sign it when we arrive, and Effie and Haymitch are taking over hosting duties from us.”

  “Oh great!” I sigh, “you can say goodbye to all the wine in the house if those two are in charge,”

  “Is that sarcasm I detect? That means the contractions aren’t even painful yet…” says Prim dryly. Then she and my mother giggle. 

  I glare at them, rubbing the back of my hips, my bones back there kind of burn. 

  Peeta seems confused and wisely keeps his mouth shut. He grabs the hospital bag I packed for me and the baby, a week ago, and shoulders a backpack for himself, he packed almost a month ago. 

  My mother rides with us to the hospital, and since everyone knows her and my sister there, I get extra pampered by the nursing staff. 

  My obstetrician, Dr. Aurelius, checks on me as soon as I’m put in the hospital gown; he’s a little concerned about my blood pressure, so the nurses keep an even closer eye on me. At 32 I’m not at any greater risk of things going wrong than any other mother-to-be, but this is my first child, so I endure their over prodding gratefully. 

  Labor itself goes quickly, only a couple of hours from the water breaking to the crowning. Peeta holds my hand through it all; he tends to me lovingly, feeding me ice chips, blotting sweat from my face and neck, whispering sweet nothings and encouragement into my ear, and when he’s not talking to me or the medical staff, he prays. 

  After surviving a war zone, second degree burns and a few broken bones, I think that giving birth is perhaps the least painful experience of all. Not in the literal sense of course— giving birth physically hurts like a mother!— but in the psychological-emotional sense. I’m going through this trial for love, with the expectation of meeting someone amazing in the end.

  But when it’s time to push, a fear older than time itself chokes me up. “I can’t do this! Let the baby stay in my belly…I can keep the child safe here, please!” 

  “Sweetheart, look at me,” says Peeta cupping my face in his hands, “You are the bravest, most selfless person I know. I’m not denying how scary this is, bringing an innocent into the world, but you’re not alone…we have each other, and we will face this fear like we’ve faced any other fear, and we’ll beat it into dust!” 

  “Together?” My voice wavers.

  “Together!” he vows. 

  “Katniss…the baby’s crowning,” says Dr. Aurelius, “This is it! On your next contraction, I need you to push real hard, alright?”

  I nod, exhausted; Peeta squeezes my hand in his, and I squeeze right back. 

  “Here it comes!” I bear down with all my might and growl all the breath out of my lungs, and suddenly, the best sound in the world fills the delivery room: the meowling of my newborn reaches my ears. 

  “It’s a girl!” calls the doctor from between the stirrups holding my legs up.

  The man holds the screeching child up, so we can see her, and my whole world shrinks to her tiny shape. 

  Peeta is crying. 

  I’m crying too! 

  My mother is somewhere in the background singing something I can’t quite catch, and everyone around is bustling to get my brand new baby girl cleaned up and measured. Then finally she’s placed on my chest, and my husband and I can’t stop staring and caressing her. 

  “Shalom, sheifale,” I sigh in contentment, kissing my baby’s forehead.

  “Welcome, little one!” Peeta murmurs. Our daughter wraps her whole hand around her father’s index finger and holds fast to it. 

  Again, it feels like we are in this hermetic bubble, where only Peeta, myself, and now our newborn, exist. Meanwhile the doctor and nurses are still working on me, but that doesn’t matter. My family is finally whole, and that too is a miracle full of light!

  “Mazel Tov, my dears!” says my mother, smiling at Peeta and me. “I’ll go tell the people in the waiting room the good news…do you have a name picked out already?” she asks tentatively, her face lit with happiness and relief. 

  “Hannah!” says Peeta right away. “For I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted my plea.” Peeta’s eyes widen, then he looks down at me sheepishly, “unless, you have something else in mind?” 

  “No!” I laugh, “Hannah is perfect!” I hold the babe higher on my bosom, and tilt her head towards my mother, “Hannah, say hello to Bubbie Lily, she’s my Mamme, and I am yours!”

  My mother giggles, “Happy birthday, Hannah Mellark, and happy Hanukkah, zeeskeit.” My mother leans closer, and gives Hannah’s head a peck. “Next time I see you, there will be others with me…your mishpachah, who are eager to meet you, sheifale!”

  “We’re almost done here, and you can see some of your family. But be mindful of visiting hours!” says Dr. Aurelius, pushing back from the instrument table. 

  We all say our thanks to the staff, and my mother goes to talk to our family in the waiting room. Peeta’s led to the nursery, to give Hannah her first bath. Once the baby is dressed and swaddled into a hospital blanket, Peeta snaps a couple of pictures of her with his smart phone and sends it to everyone one we know. The caption reads: “Hannah Mellark, because G-d favored us with a child!” 

  The nurse helping Peeta, takes two of those thin hats they give all the newborns, and fashions it into a single hat with a big bow on the front. Our daughter’s head will be warm and stylish.

  Back in the room, Hannah latches onto my breast easily enough, and to our surprise opens her eyes, to show deep blue peepers, like her father’s! 

  “Look, Daddy, she’s got your eyes!“ I exclaim. 

  “Can she call me Tatte?” Peeta asks quietly, as if asking permission.

  I nod, “Hannah, your Tatte gives the best hugs in the world!” 

  The visitors file in. My mother-in-law falls in love with Hannah, her first and only granddaughter. Peeta’s father tears up a little bit, and hugs his son, kissing his temple. I’ve never seen the Mellarks so happy and moved. A baby would do that, I guess. 

  After our siblings come to visit, Effie and Haymitch make a quick appearance. Haymitch holds Hannah the longest; he sings her a song in Hebrew, then says a blessing over her. 

  Effie pulls Peeta aside, “What we discussed…” she says demurely, smiling softly, and hands him a bag. 

  Since she already gave us practically half of Buy Buy Baby at our shower, I have no idea what else she could’ve gotten, but my husband’s entire demeanor lights up like fireworks when he peeks in the bag. He hugs Effie and thanks her profusely. 

  I fall asleep after a while.

  When I wake up again, the room’s mostly dark, except for a soft, flickering light. 

  Hannah is not in her bassinet, so I sit up with a start, only to find the most wonderful scene in front of me: Peeta’s holding the babe by the window looking down the road. The blinds are open, and on the sill sits a child size menorah. The shamash is lit, but the day one candle is not. 

  “Peeta?” I call softly.

  My husband turns, smiling, “You’re awake! We didn’t want to disturb you. You had a hard, busy day, but…” he shrugs, “It’s Hannah’s first Hanukkah, and I figured you wouldn’t wanna miss it,” 

  No, I wouldn’t. 

  I get up, gingerly, and shuffle towards my family. 

  I cock my head and study the candelabra, which looks suspiciously like the kind business owners put in their offices along their Christmas trees and other wintry decor to show how inclusive they are. This one is smaller than regular menorahs, made of plastic, with a cord sticking from the side which is plugged into the wall besides the window. The flickering light I thought at first to be a real flame, is just a small bulb with a candlelight effect. 

  “Where did you get an electric menorah?” I ask skeptically.

  “Effie,” my husband blushes. “She said it was okay, as long as we lit a kosher menorah, which we did at home,” he says a little defensively, with a lot of pleading generously sprinkled in between. 

  My father would’ve frowned at the decidedly un-kosher menorah. 

  Reading my expression, my sneaky husband harrumps, “This is a hospital, Katniss. I don’t think they’ll be thrilled to find there’s an open flame in a room housing a newborn, no matter what holiday you’re celebrating.”

  I sigh. He’s right. Safety protocols should be observed, and we did light a traditional menorah already; plus, this one is practically a toy for the baby…technically a Hanukkah gift. 

  I relax my stance. I wasn’t aware that my shoulders were so tense during that exchange. 

  “Fine,” I acquiesce, “show me how does the thing work?”

  Peeta grins, looking at ease holding our daughter in one arm like a pro. No wonder he’s always our nephews’ and niece’s favorite uncle. 

  He pulls a couple of bulbs from his pants pocket, and holds them on his palm for me to peruse. “All you do is screw these in the small sockets, just like placing the candles in a regular menorah. Then, you press this button, and it lights up!” He points at a small button at the base of the toy. 

  I nod, accepting his explanation. 

  Hannah wiggles a bit in her father’s arm, then makes an aggravated noise. Peeta adjusts the child against his chest, and looks at me, expectantly. 

  “Hannah’s waiting, and she’s probably getting hungry. I should know, I’m her Tatte!” 

  I snort a reluctant laugh. The man can drive me crazy, in an endearing sort of way. How can I deny my family anything?!

  We say the blessings together, then Peeta whispers all the ceremonial rules on lighting the candles to our baby.

  Hannah has her fist wrapped around his finger again, so he picks up the pretend shamash with the same hand, and touches the tip of the bulb into the opening, so— according to him— Hannah is lighting the day one candle herself…symbolically. 

  He screws the bulbs in their right places, and switches the candlelight on. 

  I must admit, it’s not as tacky as I feared it would be. I make a mental note to let Peeta know I’m glad he thought of this, later…probably tomorrow. 

  We sing quietly, not to disturb anyone else on our floor. After the ceremony of the candles is done, we hold onto each other, watching the flickering lights, while Peeta narrates the story of the Maccabees to Hannah. 

  Everything is quiet after that; Hannah fusses once, so I take her into my arms, and sing a lullaby. 

  Peeta has been staring at me all night like I hung the moon in the sky. He gazes at our daughter like she’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen, and I’m sure my eyes reflect the same feelings as his.

  “I wish I could freeze this moment, right now, and live in it forever.” 

  I smile up at him, who in turn is gazing at our daughter and me with adoration; my heart fills to bursting!

  “I do too!” I stand on tiptoes, and kiss his cheek. “Happy Hanukkah, Peeta. Happy Hanukkah, Hannah.”

  “Same to you too, sweetheart, and thank you Lord, for blessing our family with the miracle of life.”

[twitchesandstitches]

Birth of a New City

(Commission for @alt-hammer of an AU we’ve worked on together, of a fantasy-themed Homestuck AU where the main characters are the descendants of noble families following a long and perpetual conflict. This comm concerns the establishing of a city by the Megidos as Kankri journeys to be with his lady-love Damara, prior to her accidentally getting ahold of an artifact that stuffs her with ghosts that make her super pregnant and her boobs absolutely massive!)

------

Into the furthest lands of the north, at the limits of the lands the trolls called home, there came a line of caravans bringing people. There wasn’t exactly a road for them to follow; they had to settle for a slightly deeper trail flattened beneath them, rolling onwards by the first arrivals, who had engineered a special tool to the rears of their own caravans, digging out the ground behind them so that in their wake, they left a trail to follow for the second wave of caravans.

These caravans were massive freight carriers, and designed for the environmental peculiarities of their destination. It was always cold in the north, and they had taken considerations for the weather. Up here, it was usually some variety of wet, and at best it made for a gloomy atmosphere. In the spring, it rained. In the summer, it rained more. Autumn and winter would come, and then it would snow. Now, it was snowing, despite it being summer, but unpredictable weather was unfortunately a consequence of heavy magical activity, and this land was drenched in it.

Snow spilled off the scalloped, upwards curved of the caravan’s tops, leaving little piles by the side of their road as they traveled onwards. And inside, the people who had come (mostly from the lakeside lands of the newborn Vantas dynasty, Inside, they were lined with thick blankets and massive furs donated from the hunting guilds of the Leijons to the eastern lands, so they were quite warm even as the threatening chill of this place made people very nervous.

It was a basic rule of exploring new lands; you got the hell where you were going before winter happened. That it should be snowing, even in summer, was making the experienced caravaneers edgy. Fortunately, they were simply following the steps that had been laid before them, bringing badly needed supplies to finish the job.

And at the front, in a caravan the same as any other, there was an opening to look out through. And peeking out of it was a troll. He was short for a troll, nearly human-sized (though not as much as his younger brother), swaddled in the pale greys that had once hidden their blood from prying eyes. Thick furs, pale white and spotted in random patterns, adorned most of his visible body beneath it: furs for the cold, and a cloak for the wind. It was how they would likely remain dressed here, for the foreseeable future.

And he had enough time to reflect. He thought that he looked very much like his father, wearing old grey robes and swaddled in the furs harvested by Leijon claws. It troubled him.

His name was Kankri Vantas. And as it turned out, he was not exactly small. He was not as large as an ordinary troll, who tended to be among the biggest of the known thinking species. He was… compressed, as if someone had taken a troll and squeezed him up, but maintained the usual proportions into a package that seemed to emanate a frenetic energy bottled up with great difficulty. His horns were short and nubby like the closed claws of the great crab guardians that protected the lakes of his homeland, and to trolls, this combined with his body shape to suggest someone who spent a lot of time in libraries. Really old libraries. Something of the dusty, academic dryness seemed to have settled in him.

Now he marked his spot on his book, put it down, and looked out onto the road. He gazed upon a landscape that would be someone’s home soon enough.

From here, as they crested a high hill crowned by a last outcropping of forests, Kankri could see the north spread out beyond them. Frosty mires bubbled faintly, kept warm by the mysterious organic processes of a bygone era still operating on automatic to make a somewhat unconventional hot spring, and there were about four or so of them visible from here. They made a warm mist, rising into the snowfall to make the snow melt just enough to fall as a strange rain into the snow.

As a consequence of that, they had been trudging through a kind of slush for the last few nights. Their caravan was designed for this sort of thing, and the weather had been anticipated even if things this far north were totally unknown to trollkind. Even humans, who had their reasons to try to live anywhere that didn’t instantly kill them, had avoided this landscape.

It was a place of death, old superstitions said. There were such places known to scholars of magical lore; Kankri had read their works well in preparation for his apparent task to observe the world and determine a way to repair the damage made by their forebears. He knew that any strong emotion or action could leave a mark in the world, influencing the flow of magic by shifting its aspect.

If a place saw a happy family, for many generations, that place would become kinder and happier; just look at the Hoard Keep of the Pyropes, that ancient fortress in the mountains. Their predecessors had always been brutal and vicious, but dragons were loyal to one another, and they cherished duty to their own above anything else. Serene feelings of safety and joy lived in the stone, and had a tendency to leak out everywhere else.

Kankri thought of the wars that had torn the land apart. Ages and ages of almost ceaseless conflict, and his fangs bared at the thought of such… stupid wastefulness. He amended the thought to ‘careless’ wastefulness. People dying, human and troll and other beings, over and over, and for what? The same ridiculous rhetoric; some purplebloods declaring themselves superior or declaring bloody war in the name of their capricious, serpentine gods. Or humans fighting back and becoming consumed with pride, hatred; declaring that this war of total destruction was justified by atrocities almost as bad as what they were going to do…

Blood had soaked the ground more thoroughly than the rain up here could possibly try to do. Troll, human, or something else: it didn’t matter. Blood was life energy, blood represented ties to other beings both positive and malicious, and blood shaped the world, as it shaped the bonds between others. Blood in every color of the troll rainbow and human red drenched the world, with its hate and sorrow and loss, and now, the land was scarred.

He wondered if this territory was one of those places. It didn’t feel like it had seen so much death and horror that it had become some sort of inverse holy place, sanctified to the worst in sapient life. He’d been to those places, and he didn’t like thinking about the things he’d seen even when he shut his eyes, his magical senses treacherously open to the horrors replaying themselves in the astral realms forever and ever.

Here, it just rained. The air was thick with magic, and it tasted of something… distinctive. It didn’t feel bad. It did not have any associations with the true cruelties that made their work so very difficult elsewhere, and it didn’t make him remember horrible memories that weren’t his own. (Being in tune with magic, and the living memories that shaped it, could really suck sometimes.)

It felt like death. That was the bit that Kankri was having some trouble figuring out, and apparently so were his companions.

“Figures Ara and her family decided to settle out there.” The voice had a curious buzzing quality, as if a multitude of voices were backing up the speaker’s words. Kankri turned aside and acknowledged the speaker.

“I hope you are not impugning the Megido family, Sollux,” Kankri said, rather stiffly.

The speaker snorted, hanging off a supporting rafter like some kind of morose spider; his limbs were long and gangly, and his claws were surprisingly suited to hanging onto things, given that they had apparently been carefully filed down to serve as pseudo-pens. Given that he did a lot of time inscribing things, that made some sense. The rest of his body was on the lean side, perhaps the powerful magic coursing in his body running him so hot that any excess mass just burned away into the aether.

This other troll replied, “The Megidos have never been pugned a day in their lives and you goddamn know it.”

The speaker was Sollux Captor, scion of an ancient house of mages who had endured the long ages in their hives to the west, and Kankri had read that the power of the goldbloods ran particularly vibrant in his family. He didn’t doubt it; Sollux had a nervous energy like his body was stuffed with lightning, constantly itching to find an avenue loose, and even his horns (two pairs of them; not uncommon in golds, but their length and size certainly was) radiated a faint glow.

Troll horns acted as a… release, as Kankri understood it. There were some machines that needed to continually vent off heat or magical energies to prevent breaking down or structural problems, and trolls were much the same. They generated magical energy in ways that humans or the other magical beings did not, and it fueled many of the instinctive abilities that came to them; the psionic powers of the hot-blooded lines, the immense physical power of the cooler-blooded, and the many variants thereof. Horns, Kankri supposed, bled off some of that excess energy.

Without him realizing it, Kankri self-consciously put a hand to his own stubby horns. He scratched at a velvety peel his last trip to the manicurist hadn't gotten. A faint crackle of magic moved, and though he honestly wasn't sure if the old power moved in him, he felt the presence of something familiar.

He looked out towards the trail again. His expression grew solemn. "We are almost there."

"Make it sound more ominous," Sollux grumbled. "You sound like a spooky assistant to a creepy necromancer dragging up victims to the master."

Kankri sniffed. “Pardon me, then. We are absolutely not any such thing.”

“It’s a joke, Kanker-sore.”

Kankri ignored the… insult? Nickname? Who even knew, with Sollux; he was notoriously abrasive, even by the standards of a species that regarded biting and clawing down to the bone as polite discourse. He simply continued speaking (which was just what Kankri always did, if you believed the people who disliked him personally). “We are spooky assistants who perform ethical tasks for our cinnamon-blood masterminds.”

There was a long pause as the caravans rattled across the land. Gradually, something new came into view upon the horizon; an irregularity, breaking apart from the distant view of mountains and ancient forests that dotted the land like the tombstones of randomized cemeteries. This new sight looked… made, though ancient all the same. It was too far for them to make it out clearly, but there was no doubt that the trail they followed was winding through the landscape directly to it.

Sollux recovered his faculties and said, partly disbelieving and partly in grudging admiration, “Did you just make a joke?”

“The important point,” Kankri said, with as much grave pomp and gravitas as he could manage, which was quite a lot, “Is that no matter who you tell, no one will ever believe you.”

“You total bastard,” Sollux said softly, the admiration a lot less grudging now. “Didn’t think you had a talent for… trolling.”

“Father may have passed on a few things.” Kankri shifted awkwardly. He didn’t actually talk much about his father. Their relationship was good, all things considered, but it was a terrible thing to live in the shadow of the Signless Sufferer, the paradox troll; a mutant with the powers of the color-line he originated from, a messiah of peace who had started the most bloody war in modern history, a kind man who had done terrible things to end coldblood supremacism, who had set the humans free by tearing his own people down.

Kankri was a pacifist. His father was not. There was more to their fundamental disagreements and conflicts than that, but the fact of it was that Kankri looked and acted so much like him, that it was like looking in a mirror at times. It bothered him, even as he readied himself to take his father’s position, should it prove necessary in future times, and when Kankri was bothered by something, the low-grade hostility radiated off him like heat from a rock someone left in a desert at high noon.

Sollux could take a hint. He could take a lot of hints, all of them couched in varying degrees of passive-aggressive sniping that served pretty much the same function as a friendly duel; swords were crossed, without any real intent to do injury. Kankri, on the other hand, was very honest. He said what he meant, when he understood how to say it properly, and where Sollux was from, this was something very hard to understand.

To the west of these lands, a relative stone’s throw if you didn’t account for the mountainous terrain, were the lands of the Captor Orders. The bitter cold of these death lands evened out towards the coast, growing… if not warmer, at least more hospitable, and in the past, many trolls and humans and other things had taken up residence there for the ample hunting, lumber; the massive animals living in the sea could feed many people for a long time, wood was useful for building homes and fueling the artistic interests of those inclined, and the magical bees native to the area proved amenable to being bred for being living engines to refine magic and calculate complex spell patterns or problems.

The ages had come and gone. The Captors had come early, and they had stayed ever since. They’d built their wizard’s towers and college-fortresses high, and left the other lands to their own devices; never conquering, not waging war, but ignoring it entirely. When coldblood supremacism had waged war across the land, the Captors stayed out of it; when slavers came searching for goldbloods to put to the yoke,the Captors usually sent them back to their employers as little more than a pile of ash.

Sometimes people came to learn, and the Captors taught them, and those people went home with power and influence. ‘Come to the lands of the Captors’, they said, ‘they will teach you the secret lore’.

The Captors did not recover or keep ancient lore; they made their own discoveries, over the ages. They made new things; new wonders, new understanding of the hidden rules of magic. This made them possibly unique on the continent, where the creations and knowledge of bygone civilizations were the foundation of entire regimes. Their lore was their own, and this same indifference to the past also applied to politics; they were barely aware of the influence and power they gathered, with magic so essential towards modern society, and the orders of mages the Captors had gathered all showing fealty to their teachers and colleges above all else.

As they came closer to their destination, Sollux reflected that his father would go down in history for sheer controversy; convincing the heads of the mystical orders and all the leaders of the colleges to engage in continental politics, and aiding the Pyropes in the war, wasn’t just a risky move. It was completely contrary to their established tradition of neutrality. Sollux supposed he’d either go down in history as an unconventional hero… or a heretic who kicked their traditions in the nook. One of those two. Hell, people were already calling him that, not that his dad seemed to care.

The moment of good humor had already passed. The caravan wagons moved upon the trail, and as it advanced them closer to what appeared to be a vast and ancient city (with many tents pitched around the front, and the distant impressions of what might have been scaffolding, cradling the old walls), Sollux and Kankri both reflected, in their own fashions, that they didn’t actually know each other.

Kankri glanced at Sollux. Sollux did the same in turn. They looked awkwardly away. The thought that they didn’t really have anything in common stuck with them, hanging there like a persistent thorn that hadn’t quite pierced the skin; it didn’t hurt, but it stuck there, so needling that the mind couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

It was, Kankri supposed, the sort of thing to be expected when building a better world than the one their parents had known. Dealing with people you normally would not. Making compromises, and so on.

‘This is weird,’ Sollux thought. ‘I’m friends with his brother. He’s friends with mine… I think. Are they lovers? Rivals? Got a mutual pining thing going on with Latula from when they were kids? No idea what happened there before she got hitched and he moved on. How the hell is it that we’ve never even really talked before today?’

Both of them tried to focus on the road. And it dawned on them that the only thing they really had in common was their mutual connection to the women of the Megido family.

The women they were… in all honesty, probably going to marry, in defiance of cultural norms but for different reasons. The only trolls who would actually like this cold land, soaked in death and forgotten memory.

That made them both feel better, funny enough. Thinking about the Megidos, that is.

Love, even for the terminally proper and persistently grouchy respectively, had a way of lightening moods. This lay on their minds, the tension beginning to evaporate as they drew closer.

Especially for Kankri. He visibly relaxed; not stiffening or trying to look impressive, but the tension that normally forced him into the uncomfortable posturing that he thought a lowblood mutant, raised to his position, had to look like, all drained away from him.

He felt her. Kankri had powers of his own, perhaps linked to his own magical studies, and there was a presence nearby, now, as they drew closer to their destination.

----------

Their destination was, in fact, a city. It was rather more than that, based on the ancient documents, translated journal entries, and map fragments they had pieced together from archives and collections from all over the kingdoms. It was a city of the dead, from an era before internment of the dead had become an alien notion for trollkind.

Jack Noir, a carapacian who had served as Karkat’s guardian for the complicated and dangerous years of their childhood, had suggested it held a major necropolis. Odd, Kankri considered, that the stab-happy bureaucrat should know a thing like that, but everyone knew weird things.

And of course, that said ‘Megido interests’ all over.

The walls were very tall, rising very high into the sky, and beyond the first one they saw was another set, even higher than that. The city was built on a steep incline, so the walls outlined the shape of the city beyond it. As they rode closer, Kankri could see pathways and high windows in regular intervals, and while the form was unfamiliar, the basic principles were similar to geomantic construction techniques common in the old troll empire, many ages ago.

The walls had not otherwise fared well through the ages. There were large gaps missing towards the tops, perhaps sheared off by siege weaponry; there were fewer signs of that near the bottom, which explained how they had remained stable enough to survive the ages. Nevertheless, there was still damage everywhere else. Ancient murals, enormously complex and surely the subject of much worthwhile study, were tragically heavily damaged; burned, half-melted, and worse. Perhaps the result of some ancient conflict that had seen this place becoming uninhabited to begin with.

Kankri approached them, as their group waited to be properly received. He was hardly an expert in the visual arts of a bygone era, but he did spend a lot of time reading. He was an expert in few fields, but reasonably knowledgeable in many of them. A deep fascination with history (or at least that which was recorded, and that which was worked out later, and he viewed both with polite suspicion) gave him a useful toolbox for this sort of thing.

Now he studied what could be seen of the murals, on this side of the outer wall. It was difficult to make any firm guesses on what they were meant to convey; the artistic style was consistent with the era prior to the collapse of the last known pan-continental troll civilization. Perhaps due to local preferences and cultures particular to this part of the continent (for the old empire was cosmopolitan, if only for trollkind), that style had shifted into something unique. It was chiseled into the stone, if the material was stone, but the style was something different.

Kankri ran a hand against the material, just to see what it was. His short claws, cut and dulled to minimize any possibility of injury to another, ran against something improbably smooth and cool. Even exposed to the elements for untold generations, left without any kind of maintenance in these winds and piercing snows, beneath deluge and mud, it was largely untouched.

It did not feel much like stone. It was cool; not as cold as one would assume, given the weather. Somehow, it was warming itself, and pulsed gently beneath his hands. It felt… wholesome, but it felt like something that made him nervous.

Magic has a resonance, in many different forms, from both the nature of it, the impact it had made, and from events going on around it. A sword might taste of craftsmanship and deliberation, but it was also soaked deep in the violence that defined a sword. And this, distantly, felt like endings.

Kankri kept his hand there, letting his magical senses journey far, and it felt colder still. There was an echo of many things ending, with a patient and steady pace, their memory marching backwards to him.

The murals beneath his claws, clear etching of a time so long removed that it had no real bearing on his sense of ancestry or country, were abstract. Squarish figures, all right angles and stylized depictions of that seemed to be trying to convey the very essence of a troll; each figure showed both horns but a face in profile, all limbs displayed at geometric angles. He didn’t know why, but it seemed relevant.

Other figures arrived, and they had no faces, and they had no horns. The firner was setting; the latter was horrifying. He rubbed his own horns, wincing at the idea of losing them. To many trolls, they were symbolic of identity, and most artistic work used them as such. Had the people of this land done something as cruel as removing the horns of criminals?!

He frowned, studying the mural longer. He supposed that if the faceless, shorn of horns, were supposed to be viewed negatively, they would look more gruesome. But they were chiseled the same as the others, but identified by their lack of horns and faces. And, as he followed the path of the mural onwards, he realized that the mural seemed focused around their progression.

First, they approached a city; it looked much like what he had seen in the distance, so perhaps it was this city, seen from afar in days when it had been in better condition. And then, they were laying down, in lines. This was a lot more complexly drawn, he had to admit, and it took him sometime to suggest that was what was meant.

He had to keep going, on and on, around one vast opening in the walls big enough for a group to have passed through, until he came to a particularly large mural. It was massive, nearly twice as tall as he was, and so wide that it could have formed a wall in some looter’s museum, if someone had simply torn it from the walls and stolen it. It displayed the faceless, the hornless, lying in many rows, lovingly chiseled in intricate detail.

The damage of ancient days lay strongly here; scorch marks had melted the stone in key areas, so it was hard to tell what it was supposed to show. He thought it showed many of the hornless laying down, and an unusual effect in the air above them, the stone apparently chipped away in very gradual sections and then glazed with some process he did not know, so that it shone in a way quite unlike the rest of the mural. The surface there shimmered, like the pulsing of particularly powerful magic.

Behind him, he heard footfalls against snow. Tarps were laid heavily over the walls in an attempt to keep it out, but they were not as efficient as whatever roofing had once crossed the sloping rise of the walls. He turned around, and standing behind him were several hooded figures, their cloaks of fine fur and bearing the marks of their homelands. The nearest of them drew near; behind them, one of the two taller figures behind them, exceedingly voluptuous even in form-obscuring cloak, tried to march ahead of them but were frantically waved off by one of the two in the front.

“No, no!” said one of the two at the front, and this speaker was taller than the other one. Both of them wore the gold-colored robes of the Captor Orders (though a bit frayed, now), and they had the distinctive multiplied horns of goldbloods. One of them, the speaker, crackled with even more raw magical energy than normal. “We gotta do this by the book! The book!”

A much taller woman, whom the goldblood spoke to, stamped a foot and crossed arms across what must have been a spectacular bustline, to press so outrageously against a fur cloak as thick as that. The horns extending out from her hood curled like a ram’s, smaller spikes rising along the curve, signifying her as one of the Megido family of necromancers. “I don’t see why!” She said archly. “We all know each other. We can be formal and boring when we actually have a settlement going!”

This speaker wore a cloak trimmed in dark red; the colors of a cinnamonblood. The eyes beneath the hood glowed a faint dark red; what had been called rust, by the purplebloods a few generations ago. Her cloak was buckled by a distinctive symbol, of a ram’s head with its horns locking the cloak together (and under some serious pressure, given the speaker’s apparent curves trying their best to force the cloak apart), a symbol marked on tombs all across the continent, on necropolises and places where the magic of death was studied, away from the sun in accordance to the magical principles surrounding such powers.

The necromancers of the Time Ram were infamous. None of them had as much authority, or as much magical power, as the Megido family.

Kankri stirred, paying more attention now, and less attention to a brief argument between the two. He looked about, for someone in particular. They liked to move together…

“Miss, we gotta have you introduced properly!” pleaded the cloaked goldblood.

“I mean, we don’t have to,” said his companion. She was shorter than him, and a lot wider. In some very select, specific places at least, in a fashion similar to the Megido who apparently didn’t want a formal introduction. Her cloak had a definite look, even with the thick fur making up most of it, of fabric stressed by the pushing of breasts nearly two and a half feet around, pushing out so much that her cloak hung off them in a big canopy downwards. Her buttocks were just as massive, so big she’d require at least two chairs per cheek to sit down normally, with a simply draping effect behind her. It was like she had a miniature tent around her body. “I mean, she’s the boss here. Right? So if she says no, that means we can’t do it.”

“But we have to!” he retorted, with an air of aghast horror. It was probably what you’d get with someone who had spent most of his short life idolizing the nobility and was outraged on principle that they didn’t want to be super fancy all the time.

“We really don’t,” said the other Megido, slightly taller than what had to be her sister. She had an attitude of stoicism that contrasted with the manic energy of the other, and she had the distinctive body shape; not exactly chubby, but certainly thickset, belly prominent, and breasts so big they had the same draping effect on her clothing as the short goldblood. Perhaps it was that she was tall, but her assets looked even more outrageously massive; each breast was over three feet across, their lower slopes dipping nearly to their waist, and slung nearly four feet out.

Her backside had a similar dramatic effect; perhaps as thick across as two of her standing back to back, taking up a sizable amount of her thighs and pushing out against the confines of her cloak.

Now, Kankri focused on her.

He knew her voice; heavily accented with the distinctive accent of someone who struggled with Purpleglot (the common language in most of the continent, for several hundred years now), thick with world-weary cynicism, ready to shift into a more hostile persona if required. Kankri began to approach, as the argument continued.

“We are NOT getting out the trumpets, or red carpet, or purple carpets!” The first Megido, whom Kankri determined was probably Aradia, said firmly. She had the same, hyper-curvaceous build as her sister, but since she was moving around so much, her sheer heft felt much more prominent. People tended to stand back from her, as if instinctively afraid she might ram them with her curves if they weren’t careful. “We don’t even have any of those!”

The first speaker gasped in horror. Kankri realized that this had to be one of the people that had come from Sollux’s land. He hadn’t familiarized himself with all of them, and so he’d overlooked the matter entirely. After a moment of thought, he recalled a brief encounter on the way up here, with a pair of wanderers on Sollux’s land that Sollux had taken a liking to on a whim, and had gotten to come along with them.

Kuprem; a powerful goldblood mage, though totally untutored, and his friend Folykl, the shortstacked goldblood whose tremendous figure was partially genetic but mostly the consequence of her unusual power to siphon away magical energies and absorb it into her own body (and store it as bigger curves). Kankri had noticed them get uncomfortably excited over being in the presence of genuine nobility, or at least Kuprum did, but he tended to put people into little folders marked ‘NOT OF INTEREST’ until they did something to get his attention, and he’d completely forgotten about them.

Even so, they were of very little interest now that he’d spotted the girl he had come across half a continent for.

Kankri strode onwards, towards the Megidos. “At least let me scream like a trumpet!” Kuprum begged, almost on his knees, teary-eyed.

“Okay, uh, wow!” Aradia said, giggling with a strange enthusiasm. “That sounds kind of fun. I don’t want any formality here, but maybe we could do a screaming contest!”

Folykl groaned, bowing her head. Four crooked horns, bending out forwards, jutted from her cloak like the jaws of some fierce beast, and thick hair spilled out onto her front. Her eyes, though, were the dead black of the outermost void, a reflection of her singular power; the air felt strange around her, energy slowly draining into her, feeding her own abilities or perhaps nourishing her. If one looked close, they would see her cloak slowly straining, filling out as her breasts very visibly grew at a slow, steady rate. Magic ebbed into her, and took physical form as a curvier form. “Please, don’t. Tired of screaming already!”

Kuprum, conversely, was a lot taller, so much so that Kankri had seen her riding on him like a scowling backpack. He was a pretty athletic guy, or so Kankri would assume; he was currently carrying a massive load of construction equipment on his back without any strain, despite the fact that when Sollux had picked him out, he and Folykl had apparently been living out in the wild, abandoned by any caretakers, half-starved and oblivious to current events. His horns, double-rowed and hooked upwards, were startlingly similar to the Captor horn style. Perhaps, Kankri had mused before, this was why Sollux had taken an interest besides the potent magical abilities the caravans had spotted at a distance. He might have been a scion of a lost branch of the Captors.

Now, though, Kankri didn’t have much interest in him, and he was an impediment. He walked past him, pushing him aside. Or he tried to. His hand pushed against Kuprum with some force, but his load made him far too heavy. Kankri just rebounded and plopped onto some stony stairs. “Ow.”

“Hey, don’t go pushing in line!” Kuprum said. “I’m supposed to announce them and stuff first!”

“Hey, none of that!” Aradia said firmly, putting her hands on her exceptionally bountiful hips, her arms making crooked shapes inside her cloak. If Folykl looked curvaceous, Aradia made her look slim; the front and back of her robes both stuck out a startling amount, given the slackness of the material, and it was a testament to just how ample she really was. She radiated a sort of maniacal, happy wildness, like a clock freewheeling it’s hands all over the place so hard the gears might bust loose at any second, and even turning about to face him, Aradia did it with so much energy that she did not step, but sprang from one foot to the other, flailing around so that she didn’t unbalance herself. There was a lot of bouncing. Kuprum averted his gaze and wailed that he did not deserve to witness the wiggle of the nobility. Folykl just went ‘ooh wow that’s a lot’.

The face peering at Kankri was smiling extremely widely, lips thick and dark red, and her hood framed that face in such a way that her expression was disconcertingly concentrated. Kankri felt the urge to shuffle back awkwardly, just having her look at him. She was… intense, to put it mildly. “Hello, Aradia,” he said meekly.

“Kankri!” Aradia came forward, and with a twist of her hand, generated a swell of force that pushed the snow back, in a great burst of magic that felt like a faint wind moving by, and could have smashed him to a pulp if she was so inclined. The power she held radiated from her, and Folykl hopped up and down excitedly, drinking down the magic that came her way. Aradia regarded this with deep interest, grinning and showing all her broad, heavy fangs. But she returned to Kankri again, as the other Megido started to impatiently stride forwards. “Where have you guys been!? Oh, Dam’s been waiting on knives and daggers for you!”

(Which was like ‘pins and needles, but adjusted for the subject’s decidedly morbid interests.)

“Have not,” said the other Megido, taller than Aradia. She was possibly not quite as overwhelmingly voluptuous as Aradia, but perhaps her cloak was just too big to really emphasize her figure; it draped over her like an ominous cloak of the sort that the really dedicated necromancers liked to wear.

“Have so.”

“Did not,” Damara Megido said, with an unspoken air of ‘keep this up and zombies will use your head as a kickball’. The scowling face under the hood tilted up slightly, with an expression that suggested that a smile would be in completely unfamiliar territory there. Dark red eyes, obscured very slightly by a few stray hairs falling from an obsessively prim hairstyle, flickered from the obstruction to Kankri.

For a moment, the stern expression softened. Thick lips, several shades notably darker than Kankri’s own mutant blood, shifted like breaking stone into something that would have been a smile if she hadn’t suddenly remembered she had a reputation to uphold.

Kankri sat up. Damara stepped forward. She stood nearly a head taller than her sister, her shoulders around roughly the same level as Aradia’s distinctive curling horns, just like a ram’s. Damara’s were much the same, but polished to a shine, and capped with bone and rings curling around it, all etched with symbols Kankri assumed were magical. Damara walked with a wide, swinging strut, her hips so massive that it was the easiest way for her enormous thighs to move. And yes, her thighs were huge, easily as wide across as Kankri’s body, and her cloak swayed magnificently as she advanced towards him. Soon, a bustline advanced over his personal horizon, so that he couldn’t see her face. It was a shame; anything obscuring Damara’s face was, in his opinion, a travesty.

(He’d told her that, once. Her face had gone very burgundy and she had to cover her face in a pillow and she’d wailed a little bit. It took about five minutes of his frantic apologizing for upsetting her before someone had to come along and tactfully inform him that she was blushing.)

Now, Damara gestured, as if to summon him to come to her side, and Kankri felt a gentle and very firm grip around his entire body. The air shimmered with a faint darkness, and that same power pulsed around Damara, her native powers calling upon the death energies in the region and focusing through her. Up Kankri went, lifted into the air by the telekinetic spell, and then he was gently let down. The pressure of Damara’s mind did not abate until he was firmly standing on his own two feet again.

It was no easy feet to pick up a full grown troll, nor to apply the strength required to do so evenly across his entire body, and certainly not to pick him up and then down at a respectable speed, and definitely not to do all that as casually as someone picking up a letter.

Kolykl was practically drooling. “Oh, wow, she is really strong… your magical energies are delicious.”

Damara tilted her head. “Thank you. I suppose? Never heard that before.”

Folykl only grinned ghoulishly. Kuprum gasped, in horror, and rushed over to her. “Please!” He cried. “Do not smite my beloved for her impudence, my lady!”

“I… wasn’t?” She said, looking bemused. “And we don’t use that term of address here.”

Kuprum looked vaguely disappointed that he wasn’t going to have to genuflect himself into the dirt for the sake of Folykl. He tried again. “Your highness?”

“No. No monarchy here.”

Once again, he tried, “Your most doomy slaughter-monster?”

“Like that. But no. Try again.”

He slumped over, his extremely vague archive of noble address exhausted. “What do I call you!?”

Damara shrugged, an interesting motion that affixed Kankri’s attention. He moved by her side, which was a natural place for him to be in most circumstances. “Whatever you like.”

Kuprem scowled. “That is a terrible precedent for royalty!”

“We’re not royal.”

“We’re the nobility of necromancers!” Aradia said cheerfully. “There’s a difference! We do spooky stuff! That our ancestors did not necessarily do.”

Folkyl raised a hand. “Um. Miss spooky lady? What DO necromancers do?”

Sensing that Damara and Kankri probably would have liked a moment alone, Aradia seized the moment, and swooped ahead, telekinetically picking up both of the goldbloods. “I’m SO glad you asked! Let’s go find Sollux and we can tell you ALL the little details about the spooky, icky things necromancers do! First warning, it involves ghosts! And dead things! Sometimes ghosts IN dead things! Or ghosts in BREAD things!”

“I’m sorry, what?” Kuprum said as Aradia bounced away, taking the goldbloods with her.

“Pastry minions are a thing!” Aradia said cheerfully. “Flatbread constructs straight from the Pyrope lands!” She continued on, turning a corner and going out the walls, into the complex of tents that was marginally warmer and certainly where Sollux would be orchestrating his fellow mages to working on the walls and making long term habitation a bit more sustainable.

Damara and Kankri watched her go.

They looked at each other, and they did what many young lovers, who were still somewhat unaccustomed to such powerful feelings and keenly aware that their respective training to continue their own family’s work into the future did not cover this particular topic, were wont to do:

They froze up and looked at the ground awkwardly.

Tension sang out between them. Not a harsh tension. Not something uncomfortable; it was the tension of a string plucked and about to sing, or of a wheel rolling steadily down a hillside. They saw the inevitable conclusion, had been building up to it for some time, and these were the first hesitant steps towards something… real, and lasting.

It scared them. Kankri dealt with fear by pretending it wasn’t a problem, and Damara dealt with it by snarling at it, but for both of them, the usual way they handled fear was not an option.

So, Damara tried not to look directly at him, or his handsome face, or the vibrant, unique scarlet of his eyes. No, instead she studied the same walls she had, pretending they held an unbearable fascination for her. Her gaze now slid across them as Kankri’s presence grew more accustomed to being with her again, and then it moved upwards. Towards the tarp-laced borders between the walls, and the remnants of the glass-like material that had once bordered the inner and outer walls. Snow fell from the gaps between them, and she stared at that spot there for a while, as if distracted by something. A shy glance her way from Kankri caught her eyes staring upwards.

“Is there something up there?” He asked, mostly to fill the silence.

And then, he regretted asking it. Because there might have actually been something there.

Kankri saw only empty space.

Damara did not.

She stared there for a while, her head tilted very slightly beneath her cloak. She began to speak, and perhaps it was going to be a comforting lie, and then she thought better of it. Instead, she said, “Are you certain you want that answered?”

He saw the look on her face and shuddered. “Perhaps not.” he muttered, giving the area above them a brief look. He could sense many things, but there were things that he could not sense.

The dead were not his domain. But it was Damara’s.

She patted his hand. “Come here,” she said, holding her own hand out, palm up, offering it. Kankri calmly took her hand, and their fingers laced warmly together. She began to walk, and Kankri came with her.

They began to walk aimlessly. Damara didn’t have a destination in mind, and her feet carried her to a completely random direction, and Kankri allowed her to carry him with her. Her hand was warm, no, it was hot, a pulsing heat nearly as warm as his own blood, and he half-thought that it was a wonder that her heat did not make the snow drifting on down instantly become steam upon her cloak.

There was a wind, curling down from the sky overhead, and it rustled her cloak. For a moment, both their furs smacked together. They adjusted their stance on pure automatic, awkwardly shuffling together so that their cloaks laid over one another, and their arms lay flat against the other. Their hands met near their hips, and swayed gently as they walked.

And as they walked, Kankri could feel the massive sway of Damara’s… endowments, wobbling up and down as she pressed onwards, moving against her cloak. That made a distinctive noise, and he couldn’t help but feel his heart beat faster at the awareness of her. Damara, in all her amplitude, here and now.

Goodness. It had been months since he’d held her hand like this, for the first time.

He swallowed, thinking of a few scattered moments in his homelands before the Megidos had journeyed north, to found their own homeland up here; a reward from the ruling council of the nobles of the unified kingdoms, and personally administered by his father and Redglare herself.

It had all been so sudden. They hadn’t even announced their intentions to court, to their families.

Kankri swallowed again. He tried to think of something besides the heart-wrenching goodbyes for even a few weeks, and his dread that the Megido’s journey to end their diaspora and reclaim what had been their old homelands would end with nothing. Just dead silence, and them vanishing forever into the north, lost and gone as so many others who had journeyed there.

But then, the Megidos walked with the dead. Perhaps the whispers and advice of those long gone had given them some help.

He blinked back tears. Damara stopped in front of the wall, the same one he had studied earlier, and moved slightly. A hand came up to his face, and gently wiped away the hot wetness on his cheek. “Is something wrong?” She asked, quietly.

“No,” Kankri said, wiping his face with his cloak. The cold stung his face, but it seemed less so with her there. And also, that it was warmer here than it ought to have been. Uncomfortable, yes, but as if in a warm home with the door open during winter. “I was… worried. All this time. For you and Aradia and those that came with you.”

She regarded him with the stoic detachment he was used to from her, and then her face softened. “You didn’t have to worry,” she said, calmly. “We knew what we were getting into.”

“I know. But I worry anyway.”

“I suppose someone must.” Damara shrugged. Now she turned to the wall. “I see you were looking at this earlier too?”

He rolled his thumb against her hand in an unthinking, instinctive way. “Yes.” something she said struck him. “‘Too’? You were studying this as well?”

“Yes.” With her free hand, she gestured at the murals, and she began to speak at length; not in Purpleglot, but in the language of her own people, and though Kankri was not the most fluent in it, he was versed enough to follow what she said. And he was pleased to see that his own assumptions were on broadly the right track, though Damara went into further detail then him, which was only fitting. The study of the cultures of the past, and the things they left behind, was something of an abiding interest for her.

(Damara did not tell Kankri of the whispers in the wind. Of words spoken in ancient tongues so old and its speakers so abruptly torn away from their earthly vessels that there were few connections to modern language.)

“You see here?” Damara said, gesturing at the wall and the large hole there, with the few remaining fragments suggesting a large crowd of the hornless laying down, attended by other trolls. “I believe this suggests burial rites.”

“You think so?” Kankri said.

Damara glanced up, just for a moment, before she replied.

(She would not tell Kankri what was roiling about them. She didn’t want to keep looking at the roiling masses of limbs and blurred horns and yowling, serpentine forms totally unfamiliar to her, and she didn’t want to admit to Kankri they were there. Some secrets ought to remain quiet.

But she could relay what few things she understood from them.)

“Yes,” Damara said, politely declining to remark that it was the best she had gleaned from the… entities around her.

She didn’t see a sky, or even a ceiling. They clustered too thickly to see such a thing.

She indicated, instead, the mural once more. “I believe the people of this town used geomantic magic. Architecture that shapes local magic, rearranges the flow of it for a specific purpose, yes?” Kankri nodded slowly. “And things that happen in a place can shape that magic, too. I think this wall is a big part of that magic, and the carvings aren’t decoration.”

“Oh?”

“I think they were… encoding? Runes that direct it? They’re part of the magical working.”

“Ah!” Kankri brightened. “So the depictions here are not merely artistic effects! And much of this damage looks like the wall was being targeted, despite there being no signs of there having been a gateway; this place was not meant to be defended, I would think. So whatever happened to make this city fall started with this wall?”

“Perhaps to disrupt whatever magic the city was producing. Though I don’t think it is a city, as such. I believe it was a place where dead were laid to rest, interred, and cared for as they neared the ends of their lives. A necropolis, yes.”

“What makes you say that?”

Damara did not look upwards at what she supposed had to be a mass of ghosts, so many of them and in such intensity that they were a silent cloud. “Observation.”

She gestured at the wall. “In the era this mural appears to have been made in, horns and faces often had a very specific meaning. Horns equated to identity, in the sense of being people, in the artwork of the time.”

Kankri’s face grew dark. “I have heard troubling things about the way humans and other such beings were treated. It was very akin to the way lowbloods and mutants were treated until the Pyropes attacked.”

Damara waved off the knowledge of injustice as though it were rain falling down on them; important, yes, but not strictly relevant to her point. “Yes, I know, but hornlessness in artwork was often used to indicate death.” She pointed at one part of the mural. “Look at these figures. They have horns and distinctive faces. Look at them continue onwards, until they lie down.” There, at a point where the mural’s unnatural shininess was on full display, and even pulsed faintly, new shapes appeared: wispy figures rose from the things who were now hornless and faceless, but the figures rising from them had those same horns and faces.

“I think this symbolizes those dying, and their souls departing, or perhaps stamping their identity onto magic to create death spirits,” Damara said. Again, she definitely made an effort to not look at the very obvious evidence of this, presently wheeling overhead.

Those spirits, from what she, Aradia and the other necromancers that had come with them had worked out, had been here for a very, very long time. So long that they had no real means to communicate with them. The best they could do was listen to their frantic whispers, begging to be understood, and try to find something that was just close enough to a language family still spoken in the modern day. They had learned a few things, but so terribly little.

“The horns, and the faces,” Kankri said. “If those symbolize identity, then these might mean the identity moving onwards? That DOES sound like the way another culture might have viewed death. Are you certain enough to call it a theory?”

“Yes; I suppose it will be disputed, but if anyone has alternatives, I will be happy to tell them they are objectively fools and are obviously wrong.”

Now she pointed at the center of the mural; overlooking it all, as if a beneficent giver of goods, there was something coiled far overhead. She wanted to say that it was a serpent, with a head very superficially similar to a skull. The shimmering quality of the mural, which she supposed was meant to convey magical energy, did not extend around it, and perhaps that meant that it was not strictly related to the workings of the mural.

The serpent, though, was important. She just didn’t know why it was given a position right at the top.

“I am still trying to work out what that implies there,” she said.

Kankri pointed to something above it. “And what of that?”

Damara gave it a long look. It looked something like a large gemstone, suspending like a crown above the serpent. The mural had been shaped around it, so that something like bright rays were descending from it, pointing right at what she had theorized to be spirits, who were rising towards it.

“It looks like a beacon,” Kankri said thoughtfully. “I don’t know what it could actually mean, though that is what it looks like to me. Have you any ideas?”

“Actually, I have thought the same.” Damara stared up at it, and she glanced back at a stairway leading further into the city, for some reason.

Her hand squeezed him tighter. Any obvious indication of emotion from Damara was extremely startling, and so Kankri glanced up, looking alarmed. He turned to her, and her expression was strange; a grimace of sorts, caught between delight and… some kind of worry.

“Are you… hungry or tired?” She asked. “We could go find one of the makeshift homes and rest for a while…?”

The question surprised him; she didn’t seem certain, and Damara always felt so adamantly, indignantly certain about everything, even the things she knew she was objectively wrong about. Kankri felt unsettled, as though the ground beneath him was about to give way, with the distinctive panic that implied. “Is something wrong? You don’t sound like yourself!”

Damara shook her head, stray lengths of hair flashing over her eyes. “Listen! Some time ago, I found… something. In a chamber, not far from here. Blocked off by rubble, and I think it’s very important, but…” She tensed. “You came at an opportune time. I’d hoped that you would be the first to study it with me. And there’s no one else I trust to be responsible with it.”

She took both his hands, propriety (never exactly a priority with Damara to begin with) forgotten in favor of the wonders of study and exploration. “Please, let me show you!”

Kankri took her hands, but he felt he had to make at least one reasonable objection. “You haven’t shown Aradia?”

Damara’s expression flickered, and she hesitated before she spoke. “I would not say anything about my sister, but she is… perhaps not the most cautious when it comes to research and investigation. And believe me, this requires delicacy.”

“And Aradia likes to do digging by throwing big rocks at things.” Kankri grimaced. “I see your point.” Then, he smiled. “And I’d much rather examine the wonders of bygone ages as soon as possible. I am with you, Damara!”

She smiled again and, tugging on one of his hands, walked them both up the stairway. Kankri observed that not only was it abnormally wide, but in the middle of it was a ramp, smooth and worn.

They traveled further into the city, past several additional walls also covered in murals (alas, most apparently too damaged to read legibly at this point) and this reinforced the theory that the walls were not meant as defense, but as part of a larger magical working. There were large gateways in them, without doors or a sign that there had ever been doorways. These were here to dictate the flow of power throughout the land, not bar entry, and Kankri (again, quite able to sense the flow of magical power around him) felt a heavy pressure as he moved through them.

It was not unpleasant. But it did taste of death, and old death at that. The weight of centuries was heavy here, and it was certainly unsettling.

The moment passed as they advanced further into the city, moving upwards: the stairway sloped upwards, and he thought for a moment that it felt like they were climbing into an old volcano caldera: they had walked up the outside of it, the considerable distance of the walls from one another outlining first the base of it and than a midpoint to it, and now they were approaching the top. And beyond, would be the inner part of the caldera.

He mentioned this theory to Damara, who nodded approvingly. “It’s not a caldera or a volcano of any kind,” she said, and went on to name a number of geographic curiosities that would be particular to such a place, and were not present here in any form. “The people who dwelled here were originally diggers, I think. They simply dug down into a hill and kept going as they needed more space.”

“A traditional thing for our people to do,” Kankri noted. “Though not so common in recent ages.”

Damara’s expression went strange, then. “I don’t think the people who built this city were trolls.”

Kankri frowned. “Really? Why not?”

Damara thought of old ghosts, their winged shapes so totally unlike any troll… or human. “Some of the things I’ve seen are inconsistent with the builders being trolls.” And he accepted that, at least.

By then, they reached the top of the staircase; it did not open out into another wall. As Damara had surmised, the walls were not fortifications, and further ones wouldn’t serve the purposes of the original city-builders. They stepped upwards onto a broad flatness, of quarried stone cut into shape, leading directly into the broad ramp at the very center of the stairs. It continued onwards, forming a ring around the entire lip of the hillside (broken and smashed in a few places, but reasonably intact), looking inwards towards the city itself below them.

Damara and Kankri admired it for a moment, their gaze following down the trail; below the stars and ramp going down, and there the sight of the stairs was lost, as buildings rose up in a complex weave below them. All the horizon in front of them was the city itself, all the way to the distant other sides of the ring far from them. Winding towers rose up beyond them, triangular points sticking up far, and even from here it was plain that the construction was much more varied than the stony construction elsewhere seen here. Wooden structures, treated to endure the climate, still endured, though in terrible disrepair, and as they began to descend, Kankri saw that there was further variety; stone, metal-shod walls, even the remnants of what must have been the quasi-organic substances some trolls literally grew into being, though the bodies of those homes had long since decayed so that only their skeletons remained.

Undead walked here; zombies carefully treated to hold off decay, skeletons held together with leather straps and metal bolts, and they were wandering mechanically from one building to another, patching up gaps in the buildings or towing bedding here and there. The Megidos, and those who shared their teachings, were well known for their use of undead servants, and Kankri supposed these had been brought with them.

It was a long way to go, past the bulk of zombie minions. The stairs descended downwards, and from here Kankri saw the inward curve of the city. Yes; he saw well-organized districts, incredibly complex and adhering to principles of architecture that seemed very alien to him, tilting slightly down as their foundations followed the curve of the hillside.

He and Damara followed them, and as they did, his view of it became clearer. He also saw that, where there had been totally destroyed buildings or empty spaces, Damara’s group had begun to build new buildings, doing their best to match the geomancy of the area and not disrupt it. They were far from complete, ragged foundations covered with high-mounted fabrics to shield themselves from the wind, but they were sufficient as temporary shelter, and at least this was not destructive and harmful to the old city.

As they passed a few other people, tending to their work or simply minding their own business, Kankri saw the very base of the city. He couldn’t make it out very clearly; it was quite distant from them, and it would be a long time to walk there on foot. He suspected the original inhabitants had not; he could see the long, narrow pathways of what could have been ancient trains, rigged to slide down by the pull of gravity and pulled up by powerful counterweights, to convey passengers straight to the center.

He made out some vaguely triangular shapes, or perhaps pyramids. Old homes and what might have been businesses, all the buildings strangely crooked and tending towards curving shapes quite unusual to his eyes, the product of architectural sensibilities totally foriegn to him, bore so much damage they were hollowed out husks. Whatever had damaged the city had made a beeline to the center of the city from here. “Are we headed there?” He asked.

“Yes,” Damara said solemnly. “To the center of the city; the necropolis proper. The thing I found is there.”

He tried not to look terribly enthusiastic about going to an ancient ritual graveyard. “It is a bit of a walk,” he said vaguely.

She squeezed his hand. “I can carry us both there.”

He tried not to flush at the notion of being lifted aloft by her. “Oh, if you must.”

“I must, indeed.” Her fingers wrapped firmly on his palm, blunt claws tapped on his wrist, and then she suddenly swung him up, catching him in a carry with her other arm, his legs fitting snugly into the crook of her elbow and forearm, sliding him against her monstrously huge breasts so suddenly that he let out a cry that was meant to be a protest but just came out as a mortified squeak, compounded by the rush of heat of being pressed so firmly against her incredibly heated body, and the cold suddenly seemed very distant.

Damara floated upwards, carrying Kanki with her. She flew high, over the highest of the buildings around them, so that the city stretched away beneath them. Kankri’s nerve gave out and he clutched into Damara’s front, face buried in hot softness. The sheer inappropriateness of it didn’t matter as much as his stomach dropping out into a pit and his head swimming at so much distance beneath them, and he thought with a sudden certainty that he absolutely could not look down. Not at all.

His stomach felt that it was plummeting again as they descended downwards. Damara judged them in the right spot, and their cloaks flapping together, she came down right in the center.

Eventually, they dropped down. For Kankri, it was an interminable time, suspended between Damara’s astonishingly big bustline (and the temptation to snuggle; oh, that was a cruel thing indeed), her strong arms, and nothing between falling hundreds of feet except more Damara.

There was a sound as Damara’s feet touched down, eventually. She remained holding him in a bridal carry, though, a faint smirk on her lips.

“Please let me go,” Kankri said, still clinging to her.

She let him down, and he honestly expected her to say something just a little sardonic. She didn’t need to; she radiated smugness at seeing him so vulnerable.

Kankri needed a long moment to recover, and when he did, he was again overwhelmed; not by fear of falling far and fast, but wonder. He had thought he had seen pyramids from afar, and so there were.

High and angled surfaces rose far, pocked and burned with the injuries of ancient years, but they still gleamed, in the same way as the walls outside did. Power coursed through them: weakened, faint, but it was magical power all the same, an ancient circuit of magical energy still moving. It took him a moment to realize that they were indeed pyramids after all, and he stood in the center of a podium between them. Four of them, a narrow crossroads between them just wide enough for perhaps four average-sized trolls to walk, side by side, rolling their mysterious burdens along.

“I’ll thank you for being less needlessly terrifying in the future,” Kankri said. “But what are these wonders? Burial grounds?”

“No, those would be below us,” Damara said. “These are not pyramids in the sense of being sites for beings that are buried. That is, we did find beings interred within them, but the pyramids were not built for them. There were many rooms, filled with tools; scalpels, old funerary kits, containers that were probably filled with fluids used to speed decomposition of bodies after burial, alters for religious rites… I think these pyramids were most likely used to prepare bodies for burial, and a lot of them at once.”

“So perhaps a site where many people were interred? Or a city built specifically for that purpose?” Kankri halted, and he realized that Damara was avoiding talking about something. “You said ‘beings’. Not trolls?”

“No,” Damara said, and despite her fascination, she still sounded troubled. “They were… strange. I don’t know what they were. No one had ever seen anything like them before.”

Kankri frowned. “Can you describe them for me?”

“They were skeletons; still preserved, so I suspect that was important somehow. Not trolls, or humans. Humanoid from the waist up, much larger than trolls. Skulls.. I would say they resemble a snake’s, but with broader jaws, larger eyes. Wings, I think, extending from the back. And below the waist, they don’t seem to have legs, but a large flexible trunk. Like a snake’s body, some of my people thought.”

Kankri racked his mind, and found nothing that sounded familiar. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“Nor has anyone else.”

Kankri stared up at the pyramid. “I would like to study them later, if that is permitted,” he said. Damara glanced at the roiling storm of ghosts, always a present sight even this far down. They were thicker around here, as if something around the pyramids made them stronger, gave them greater substance than they would have otherwise. And four strange ghosts, so totally unlike anything she’d ever seen, were studying him with interest.

They gave a sense of, if not exactly approval, at least a lack of antagonism. “I think that would be acceptable,” she said carefully.

Kankr peerd outwards into the darkness; it was quite dim down here, as Damara’s people were unwilling to keep it too brightly lit. “Do we go down there?” He asked, pointing at a stairwell. He sounded uncomfortable.

“No,” she said, and he visibly brightened. “That leads downwards into the necropolis proper, I think; we found many catacombs down there.”

“How far down do they go?”

Damara recalled a staircase that had just… kept going, on and on, its design suited for both bipeds and someone that might slither, and in her mind the image had formed of a spike’s outline, made by the staircase. “We sent people down there. They followed it for days. It just kept going.”

Kankri’s eyebrows rose. “Ah.”

“Suppose the people who built this necropolis just kept digging downwards and building more catacombs as they needed,” Damara said. “They just keep going on… like spider webs, or canals.” She moved to the very center of the area between the four pyramids. The ground was absolutely torn up by damage, very little of the original stonework still intact at all. She went to a large pile of rubble and made a gesture; the whole pile moved up and floated away, piled up to disguise a large hole right at the center. “What we’re going to look at is down there.”

Kankri felt something pulse up from there. “At the very center of the entire city?”

“Going up, and down,” Damara said, with something distressingly close to cheerful. She offered her hand to Kankri’s again. He took it, and they floated into the air, and down into the hole.

They descended down into a chamber that was not, relatively, all that big. It was not brightly lit, but it didn’t need to be; trolls had very good nocturnal vision, though not to the degree of being able to see in the dark like many humans believed, but there was sufficient light to see clearly enough. It was not long before they stepped down, and for some reason that seemed vaguely disappointing. He expected a longer fall; perhaps some kind of interminably long drop, as fit Damara’s description of how far down the necropolis went.

He looked around into a chamber that was, surprisingly, reasonably well lit. Illumination radiated from… lines of a sort, set into the walls, though they were so badly damaged that he initially thought they were dots and circles. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw the walls, rising up to meet the floor above them in a gradually widening circle, and those walls were in ruins.

Scorch marks did not dot the walls, but engulfed it. The marks of devastation, a terrible impact blow and hints of some massive blast had rendered the walls all but unrecognizable. Perhaps something had smashed the entire chamber open, flooding it with the destructive output of some ancient weapon, or a dragon had descended down here.

There had been murals on the walls. Tragically, there was very little left of them. Some part of him cursed the moment he recognized the damage; it was hard to tell that there even was decoration on the walls, with so much of it having been smashing away, or lying in pieces on the floor. So densely covered was the floor, that there was hardly a space to stand upon. He felt a great sense of loss, and tragedy; what had been here? What ancient secrets had been ruined, in some ancient conflict?

The lines he had seen were clearly magical in nature, still powered by some ambient force just barely present. He thought perhaps they were magical conduction lines; a geomantic pattern of conducting energies from one place to another, or from a power source. They were still operational, if perhaps not to fuel whatever spell they had once managed, but enough to give them light.

They connected to a podium, in the center of the chamber. The very heart of it; perhaps the heart of the entire city. Once, it must have been a grand thing; a marvel of magical engineering, every inch honed to precise mathematical precision, and here and there he saw the fragments of curving shapes that once would have cradled the podium like the petals of a large flower. The conduits connected to it in a spiraling shape, like a spirograph, flickering steadily even in front of his eyes.

However, his gaze was ultimately drawn not to the podium, intriguing as it was, beautiful as it might have been. Rather, pulled in much the same manner as iron was tugged by a magnet, his attention came to something laying behind the rubble, near the podium. From the rubble and its position, it might have been once set atop that podium before being knocked away.

It was a crystal; a little taller than he was, nearly three times wider than it was tall. It shimmered a dull red, brighter shades periodically flashing as the magical forces it embodied moved within. It didn’t appear shaped; large bulbous swellings defined its shape into something that looked surprisingly like a humanoid figure sitting down in a calm position, but these were so smooth and rounded that Kankri rather suspected that it had been grown, not carved into shape.

It was not just a crystal, though.

It radiated age, even more than the city above and below them. It felt old, and Kankri felt a sudden and terrible awareness of how many generations of trolls could have lived and died before this object. And it radiated power, so fiercely that it was nearly a physical pressure weighing against him.

He’d felt power like this; in the halls of the mighty, in the presence of weapons whose mere existence threatened the world, in places where artifacts had been shaped into entire structures. He’d felt it shaped into forms radiating such magical might that their substances alone were transmuted into something otherworldly, their very touch dangerous to many.

Kankri’s breath caught in his throat. His senses, so tuned to the magical and the invisible ties of emotion and feeling, blazed at the sight of this, and the immense power dormant within it. It did not blaze with power, as such. Blaze implied activity, and this felt quiet, passive; asleep.

But to look directly at it with magical senses alone might have wounded him. It shone like a quiet star, with so much power that he was honestly shaken. How had it stayed here without anyone even noticing? How could anyone not feel it; how had he not felt it as they approached?

“I know the feeling,” Damara said, reading his mood, sympathetically. “It’s a bit.. Intense, isn’t it?”

Kankri breathed in. “Damara. Is that what I think it is?”

She stared at it for a long time, her expression distant, and then she swallowed loudly. She played well at being calm, but Kankri read the excitement, and the fear, in her voice when she spoke. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know exactly what it might be but…” he hesitated to say it. It sounded foolish. “It’s old. And powerful. It’s something like… I don’t know if I want to really say this.”

“Then you thought the same thing as me, I suppose.”

“It’s like the castle of the Pyropes. Or the ships of the Amporas. This is something from the old era, isn’t it? That’s an artifact of power; one of those relics that entire kingdoms fought and died over.”

Damara looked nervous, even as she nodded. “Now the city’s layout makes even more sense, doesn’t it? An entire city, built around this artifact, conveying its power.”

“Power to do… what, exactly?” Kankri bent low. He felt extremely nervous in its presence, but also excited. This wasn’t just something for the history books, this would define the Megido sorcerers! They’d found an artifact, an actual artifact of the ancient world!

“I’m not sure.” Damara leaned down, not quite daring to touch it. “It reminds me of the magical power batteries people make by condensing magic into something that can be stored and tapped, but this is far stronger than any of that.” She reflected, once more, upon the vast storm of ghosts lurking around here. Still here, even after so long, with nothing tying them to the world. And perhaps, sustained by something. “It could be naturally occuring, but I think it’s more likely that this artifact once powered this city.”

“Perhaps this was made after eons of this city’s spells discharging excess into something?”

“Or it predates even the city, and they designed those spells after harnessing its power,” Damara countered. “To be honest, I was hoping you might have some insight.”

Kankri crouched down as well. Being in the presence of so much power made him feel intensely uncomfortable, and he would have liked nothing better than to be away from it, but the excitement of the moment was more potent by far. He winced in the fast of so much spiritual power pulsing from it, and he recalled something. “Do you remember the mural?”

“Yes! The crystal it showed; do you think it is the same thing?”

“Well, it would be a strange coincidence, yes?”

Damara, impulsively, clasped his hand. He clasped back, smiling widely, his eyes shining with wonder.

Without thinking, Kankri’s iron self control slackened. It was her influence on him; just as he made Damara feel gentler, let her guard down for once, she made him calm, and so the magical power he possessed, with its ties to emotion and feeling, came loose.

Normally, it wouldn’t have meant much. Perhaps people sensing his feelings and thoughts, or spells materializing to suit his feelings.

But this was not a normal situation.

(For so long, the spirits had called, and cried out for form again. And it could not answer.

The city lay dead and forgotten, and it could not fuel it.

It’s people were gone. The last priest of death and endings had died long ago, the sacred rites lost and with them, the knowledge to maintain it.

It’s power pulsed out, the need of the restless dead and enduring memories pulling at it. The two lives around it pulled it to greater function, and here, HERE was an ideal priestess.

From the other came a pulse of magic, colored in love and affection, and it was a gateway. A road, to giving the spirits peace once more.

It flowed to its new container.)

The crystal pulsed, so brightly that both Kankri and Damara had to shield their eyes, and power radiated from it so furiously at the magical conduits around them ignited in actintic brilliance.

Kankri shouted aloud, and power jumped to him, and his mind ached beneath the strain as unimaginable forces coursed through him, and into Damara, using himself as a living conduit. It only lasted a moment, but it burned so furiously he nearly passed out on the spot. He heard her shout, and he forced himself to stay conscious. He took hold of himself and demanded, No! Stay awake!’

“What?” Damara said, voice steady even with a faint waver.

The light faded, just enough for Kankri to see. “What is it!?” KAnkri yelled. “What’s it doing?”

“I, I don’t know…” Damara’s voice was faint, uncertain. “Yes? Hello?”

“Damara! Who are you talking to!?”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and it was too long; power coursed out, twisting and churning around them, and it felt so alive, and moving with the moment, time itself flowing into its depths and somehow melded with it. It was terrible to behold, it was awful. And this was meant in the old definitions of those words; it was full of awe. It was terrifying, but also somehow a good thing.

And she felt a question directed towards her.

Somehow, she understood what it actually meant.

The weight of ages, of countless generations piling up long before her ancestors had ever walked the continent, loomed before her. She felt as though she were paddling before a tidal wave ready to crash down on her, and the wave had noticed her. And asked something.

She felt sorrow, all the countless and soul-rending sorrows of thousands of souls, trapped in torment for so terribly long. The need to alleviate their pain, to give them form and to find a way to move on, and regain what had been lost, and here, the last remnant of the city that had once tended to their needs lay before her.

“Yes,” she said softly to it.

The crystal flashed, even more brightly than before… and then, it faded. And then it was Damara who glowed with radiant light.

-----

And above, the churning mass of spirits paused.

And then, they slowly descended downwards to the very center of the city, with something like wild relief.

-----

In the chamber below the city, power flashed out, like a fist blindly striking around.

Kankri tumbled as Damara shone so brightly she became impossible to look at directly, flashing a brighter red than his own blood, and so much magic made a physical force that knocked him away. He saw her begin to float upwards, suspended by the power that was funneling into her, merging with her and infusing her living body with its limitless energies.

“Damara!” he wailed. “Let me… hold on!” He tried to crawl, and the pressure shoved him face first against the ground. Even so, he kept crawling, claws against the dirt and pulling him onwards.

And he looked up as the ghosts appeared.

It was the first time he had seen them properly, and he realized what Damara had been coyly hinting at all that time; that this was a place of the unquiet dead, and it was from them she had learned so much of it. HE had little time to dwell on this, though, as the first of them descended upon her.

He stopped, horror halting him completely still, as Damara tilted her head upwards with enough presence of self that his fears faded a little. She flung her arms open wide, as if a mother greeting long lost children, and it was not entirely Damara there, for a moment; there was another presence meshed into her, staring out through her eyes. Not overriding her, but channeled through her.

The ghost, a troll so old that its features were almost totally nothing but faint memory, flew into Damara. And then it was gone, flashing red and sucked up into her. Her belly grew slightly larger, as if it had entered her womb in some strange inversion of sacred birth.

And then another ghost came down, shyly fluttering down. This one landed right across her heart, and vanished into her two. Another did the same, and another, and then another; and with each one, her belly began to swell more than before. Her cloak fluttered, and the robes she wore beneath them swelled outwards, as her body began to take on a more excessively curvaceous shape: magic flowed through her, and her body responded to it by converting it into size and attractive mass.

Four serpentine shapes descended downwards. Kankri stared in awe and a little bit of horror as they hovered downwards, a tornado of spiritual force pulling like a vacuum around Damara’s willing body. The four creatures looking nothing like anything he had ever seen; there were long trailing tails like the bodies of serpents, muscular and powerful forms even more massive than that of the most mighty troll, body-dwarfing bustlines equal to the most magically powerful of mages, and enshrouding Damara now were spectral wings, feathered and gently cradling her.

There were few other details. They were old. They were so old. So many countless ages must have scrubbed away their memories of themselves, perhaps their very identities, until nothing was left but this vague suggestion of what they had once looked like, and an overriding imperative. He felt it, as keenly as he felt any other emotion and mind, and though the minds he touched were so profoundly alien that it scared him, the desperation and hope from them felt familiar indeed.

One of them leaned forward. As far as he could tell, it was presumably a woman, and the only hint of color left was spiral-shaped eyes shining a lime green. The same color as his own blood would be, were he not a mutant. It stared into Damara’s face, making its own mysterious judgements, and then nodded it’s fearsome face once at her.

All four vanished, into her. Damara’s belly billowed out, writhing beneath the surface and flickering with magical force. Kankri stared at this, shocked and bewildered, and then he turned his face away in embarrassment as her top swelled out; her breasts expanded nearly as much as her belly, and even her backside seemed to swell outwards. She radiated an image of fertility, and it was a little mortifying to watch.

He looked back, compelled to do so. It felt wrong to look away. He felt, suddenly, that he was witnessing something sacred; holy.

Damara’s belly expanded outwards even more, the shimmering ghosts stabilizing, becoming part of her and growing docile within her. Her body sustained them, endowed them with serene energies that soothed the torment of their condition, and they fed her back, infusing her with magical energies that made her keep growing even bigger than she already was.

And, above them, the air changed, and the magic from Damara gave shaped to the storm of ghosts descending pleadingly towards her.

There were thousands of them. More. So many of them that he couldn’t possibly keep count, flying with such ferocity that they packed together, spectral forms blending into each other; Damara’s magic gave them greater substance, and he saw their faceless features resolve into more identifiable features, and he felt their minds suddenly bloom again, resolving into being after eons of unraveling and suffering. Complexity flowed from her, giving them not life… but perhaps a form of peace.

How many had died here? How many had been here, all this time, trapped and in such awful torment?

They were all here. All the ghosts of this place, drawn to Damara.

She opened her arms and embraced them, drawing them into herself as they filled her up, and he could not look directly at her as the necromancer’s light shone forth.

(Her power flowed into the ancient conduits, the veins running across the city; into ancient buildings of law and good order. Into the places where food had once been stored, the foundries where the sacred tools had been fashioned, and into the homes where it must be warm and comfortable; for those who lived there, and for those who came there to pass away.

This was largely a moot point, now. But the new residents, the people who had come with Damara, saw portions of the wall suddenly turn on, and the dark city was suddenly illuminated.

Machines turned on, and then off again as they were not needed, scaring the hell out of several humans who’d been investigating the area.

Glyphs, once serving as person-to-person communications, lit up, forming a physical shape; there was no one to speak through them now, so they simply turned off. And unfortunately, Aradia had been sitting there, mistaking it for a chair, and its activation had toppled her right off onto her face. Or onto Kuprum, who had wailed that he was not fit for nobility to boob-slam him. Folykl simply observed that he didn’t seem to be bothered when she did it to him, and realized that ‘bothered’ was not the feeling there.

The walls were damaged, broken. But there was still enough of them to maintain the most basic of the spells, and warmth swelled up, sizzling away the snow. Blessed heat pulsed through the city, filling its streets with a pleasant warmth. Those now looking to give this place life again felt a great sense of relief, before they felt bewildered; what was going on?

And those who used magic, or could at least perceive it, felt the massive surge of magic shooting straight up and drawing restless spirits to it, and they felt the old power of it, enough to make them alarmed. This was the power of ancient workings, lost to modern wonder-workers, and they dreaded to know what it might mean.)

And below the city, in the chamber that had once housed the heart of the city, the roar of such immense power slowly petered away, the weight of it fading so that Kankri was able to get up, and he heard a sound as something very heavy landed on the ground.

He looked up; all the ghosts were gone. He looked to his side, and there was the crystal artifact. It was still there, reasonably intact, though it had been severely drained. It’s surface was translucent, apparently hollowed out, the vast bulk of the power it carried now somewhere else. Or in someone else.

He looked up. His ability to sense magical energies almost quailed before the sheer quantity of it in front of him, nearly as much as the crystal had done before, and there was Damara.

Well. Certainly, it was Damara. A lot more of Damara than he’d imagined ever seeing.

Damara rocked back and forth on her feet, groaning faintly, with a faint hint of satisfaction. She was bigger, her cloak not destroyed but pushed back by the expanding force of her enlarged body, hanging back like a too-small cape. Her body was broader; her hips more than four and a half feet across, her arms wider across than before, and her thighs noticeably bigger than they had been, and that was saying quite a lot.

But her stomach had grown impossibly huge, even by the generous standards that magically-fueled expansion could change for a body. Damara leaned upon it; an enormous mass slung out in front of her, so big that it was longer across than she was tall, and rose up nearly as high as she was taller. Some part of him thought that it was even bigger still than he was, or at least looked that way; there was just so much mass, so much gray-red flesh swelling out. The sheer volume of it was a physical weight, drawing both magical focus towards it, and the eye.

She rocked forwards, standing on her tip-toes into her stomach. Two enormous swells, barely contained by a robe top that had generously grown to keep them within a minimum of modesty, wobbled on the steady shifting of her belly’s firm surface. It took Kankri a moment to realize those were her breasts, grown by the same process that had made her stomach so big. They were huge; as big as a massive chunk of her own body, at least five feet out and easily over ten feet across each, sprawling over the top and sides of her stomach in much the same way that Damara herself liked to lounge on couches.

For that matter, her stomach was increasingly beginning to resemble a couch, at least in terms of size.

Kankri began to draw close, so worried that he couldn’t stay back. Damara groaned, her eyes fluttered. There was a red glow there, which faded; whatever alien presence had spoken to her, or merged with her, faded away. The crystal on the ground pulsed more brightly, almost like a living thing.

She was changed, even so. Even apart from having breasts so massive Kankri could have slept comfortably on them, or a stomach as big as she was. He glanced nervously from the firm and distinctive shape that suggested pregnancy to him, and he almost jumped at the movement from within, of serpentine shapes and many horned shapes brushing against it, briefly.

Damara blinked again, and now she looked directly at him.

“Oh,” she said, voice soft and low. “That feels… nice.”

She gave him another look. Instincts more central to her character took hold. She smirked. “What’s with that look?”

Kankri became vaguely aware that he was blushing horrendously.

“I think you need to cover up,” he said, looking away and covering his eyes.

Damara looked at herself, and took stock of the situation. As in so many other things, she took refuge in audaciousness and teasing him:

“Perhaps you could spraw upon me, and warm me up that way?”

“Damara, we are in the north, romantic cuddling will not help and anyway I don’t think you’re appreciating the gravity of the situation!”

“Firstly, it’s… surprisingly warm, now. Secondly, don’t you mean… gravid-ity?”

“Puns don’t count as helping!

-------

Less than a week went by, after that momentous day.

This was not much time, from an objective view of things. It was little enough time for life to be established or for the memory of it to fade from the world. Certainly it wasn’t enough time for the trolls, humans and carapacians who had traveled across from their lands to do more than simply settle into the city, and make it a little more comfortable for them.

It definitely was not long enough for Damara to really adjust to her new body. Or for that matter, for everyone else to adjust to her.

“You’re looking more like your mother every day,” Sollux observed, sitting on a table they’d set up in a fairly large building close to the entrance of the city as a whole. From the outside, Damara had seen as they’d struggled to get her in there, it loomed over the neighborhood around it, topped by a fancy dome; an upper level had been converted into a bedroom for herself via the addition of many plush bag-seats that piled together to form a makeshift mattress suitable for her body.

Kankri had his own apartments in another improvised dwelling not far from there, but in practice he stayed at her place every night, pouring over plans with her: devising new schemes for infrastructure, working out the logistics of supply caravans due to be called for within a few months, working out nearby eras to start establishing crops (rice, for example, making use of the swampy region to make paddies), and on and on, until the nights grew long and they both grew weary, and they fell into each other’s arms.

Well. Rather, he fell between her breasts and on top of her stomach, the spirits within her writhing invisibly as he came down. Her arms weren’t quite enough to hold him for a proper embrace, but the rest of her body could manage it fine.

The doors of this building were exceptionally wide, and high; it threw off the sociological assumptions many of them had come with, given that it was far too wide to make sense for a normal troll sensibility, and perhaps suitable for industrial-grade carts to be rolled in. The ramped stairway and a smooth floor, suitable for slithering, suggested it had been made for an entirely different kind of body, far larger than a troll.

It also meant that Damara was able to get into this home without too much difficulty, which had been a major consideration in choosing it as her temporary residence until the city was restored enough to find more permanent lodgings. ‘Too much’ was not the same as saying ‘none at all’ though; Sollux had said this while glancing wryly at the doorway, which was presently a massive lump of belly flesh squeezing out around the doorframe, from the ceiling to about halfway up it, softness pushing out so thickly against the doorframe that it made a faint noise as she tried to force her way through.

“I promise you, Captor,” Damara said through gritted fangs, clicking them in a grimace with each word, “I will get in here and I will find a way to hit you!”

“Just don’t drop your big-ass belly on me,” he said, tonelessly. “That’s what’ll ruin my day.”

Damara’s belly inched slightly through  Roughly over a hundred pounds of solid cinnamonblood gut was pushing through and the dark grey tinting into genuine shades of dark red where she was exerting herself, or even pulsing with the thick essence of raw magic currently fused into her physical body.

Aradia was floating in the air, for reasons she had declined to volunteer to anyone. She was watching Damara’s progress with great interest, and a lot of envy. “How’s it feel having all those ghosts inside you like that?” She asked, grinning a little too wide to be entirely approachable.

Damara grunted. She pushed forward with one leg, shoving herself with telekinetic might, so much that she managed to get a few feet of stomach through the wall. She shivered as her stomach now touched the cool floor, but the outslung mass of her apparently pregnant belly had a lot more to go. “You’ve asked me this before, Aradia! Kankri, I need you to push hard - now!”

“As you ask!” Kankri shoved against her back, pushing with all his surprisingly considerable might. They moved together as a single unit, sliding her at a reasonably consistent, but insufferably just steady pace.

Aradia watched them slide in. “Oh, hey, your boobs made it in now.”

“I noticed!” Damara retorted. Now that her stomach was about halfway through, her massive mammary mounds wobbled at a slight incline, the rise of her firm belly pushing between them. Combined with her disinterest in supportive undergarments and her fondness for loose fabric, her breasts sloped gently downwards.

And that, in turn, combined with her stomach being very bouncy and rippling at the slightest touch. The ground slapped up from below her, the doorframe pinched so hard her stomach wobbled even more fiercely from the force redirected throughout the whole thing, and it rose into her breasts, and they were almost constantly wobbling and shifting.

And very sensitive, as it transpired. Damara was having a hard time pretending to be stoic and contain the erogenous pleasure of so much movement, so she channeled it into sounding angry all the time.

“Push, now!” Damara ordered.

Kankri did so, wearing a cloak low over his head to cover his face and his extremely intense blush. There was just so much… Damara now, and everywhere his unrefined hands fell, it just sank in. He was having to be very careful where his hands went; her butt was so massive now that just putting his arm on her waist could risk an inappropriate patting, if he wasn’t careful.

(Granted, she didn’t actually seem to care, but he thought he ought to. It was gentlemanly.)

“Somewhere besides the small of my back,” Damara said tensely. Kankri was pushing, but it wasn’t going with the rest of her attempts to keep moving, and now she was being pushed upwards onto her own gut, her boobs rising up and pinched by the door overhead, and now they hung directly above her as her powers misfired, and lifted them upwards. “Move with me!”

Kankri obliged by ramming into her with his shoulder, making alarming noises when his hip slid between her robed butt.

“Close enough,” Damara said, both of them sliding through the door.

Over the noise of something that sounded distinctly like enough sloshing to contain a couple troll-sized communal pools, Damara and Kankri’s struggles to get her through continued. There was a crude kitchen set up in the room beyond; a table that was probably meant for many people but in practice worked fine for Sollux, Aradia, Kankri, a couple attendants, and Damara in all her vast scope. At the other side of the room, there were several makeshift stoves, attended by the frenetic figure of Kuprum and the more reserved movement of Folykl.

To be specific, Kuprum was doing all the work. Folykl sat back, periodically running like a quadruped (her massive butt stuck in the air like the tail of a beat, wobbling so much that it was amazing it didn’t affect her movement) to steal some food when Kuprum wasn’t looking, and sometimes when he was, and otherwise she sat back to do whatever errands her superiors demanded of her. Or dared her to do, as Aradia had spent the week discovering to her delight.

“Eat that bug, I dare you!” Aradia said, growing briefly bored with the sight of Damara’s growth hampering her daily life.

“Okay,” Folykl said. She pounced, and there was the distinctive noise of a very large bustline smacking into the ground. A small bug was caught between her cleavage, that Folykl swiftly extracted and promptly gulped down.

Aradia clapped. “What did I ever do without you!?”

Folykl tilted her head. “Be super bored, I guess.”

Sollux made a face. “That’s disgusting. ...Do it again.”

Folykl went to chase more bugs, pausing to glance adoringly at Damara’s… bigness, slowly making its way through the doorway. There was a look in her black eyes, light playing against the pitch-dark coloration from corner to corner, that suggested she dearly wanted something like that to herself. Or to lay in those boobs. Or both.

In the meantime, Sollux went to Kuprum. “So, some good news, bud.”

Kuprum saluted with one hand, and continued flipping a monstrously huge collection of pancakes, each with its own pan, all at the same time. “You’ve made a motion to fuse me and Folykl into a horrible monster to serve as a minion?”

Sollux paused. “You want that?”

“No sir! It sounds existentially terrifying, sir!”

“No, we absolutely are not doing that. Why are you so excited about it?”

“I’m just happy to be of service, sir!”

“We have GOT to get you a backbone.”

“Understood! Where do you want me to have it installed?”

Sollux groaned. “I’ve got the paperwork finished, so you and your little buddy there,” he indicated Folykl, currently scratching her hair with her hindfoot, as Aradia mimicked her in mid-air. “Are now officially employed as Damara’s attendants, given her…” he sought for proper words. “Condition.” He showed the paperwork to Kuprum, who being barely literate, stared at the legal fine print and complex wording with polite terror. “...That’s a good thing. Means you get paid and crap. And given that service for a noble gets attention from the magical orders, that’s practical a shoo-in for being accepted into the Captor universities of your choice.”

Kuprum nodded gratefully. “Thank you, sir! So very much, sir! What’s a university?”

Sollux paused. “What’s your level of schooling, again?”

“Is that something you eat? Is it poisoned? Should i be a food taster?”

“No, no. Guess we should, uh, find some schooling for you before we set all that up, too.”

“That’s good! I think?”

Sollux cuffed him on the back of the head, in a friendly way. “It is, yeah.”

Kuprum shrieked in delight. “My head has felt the impact of a noble! I may never wash it again!”

Aradia shouted, from above, “Wash your head as soon as you can, mister! That’s just nasty!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Kuprum said loyally, though with obvious disappointment.

“And go help Damara and Kankri!”

Folykl and Kuprum both saluted. Or at least, Kuprum did. Folykl, being rather newer at the whole concept, just smacked herself in the face. But at least it was respectful. They hurried over to Damara’s emerging body, like cleaner birds flocking around a whale trying to beach itself. (And hopefully grow legs or something, because you didn’t want whales actually beaching themselves.)

“Hey, what’s that there!?” Damara said sharply as she felt a telekinetic power grip the sides of her stomach and the bottom.

“Ha ha, wow, this is really heavy!” Kuprum said cheerfully from the other side, his magical power manifesting as telekinesis, and Damara’s stomach began to float under his power, and inch through as he pulled.

“Who’s there!?”

Folykl began to climb up the front of Damara’s stomach. “Oh my shit this is so damn squishy I love it.” Beneath her, Damara’s newfound power gave shape and substance to the spirits housed within her, and several of them moved against her, so that her skin surged with horns and handprints at Folykl’s passing. “That looks DISGUSTING, your booby-ness. I dig it.”

“What’s climbing on me!?” Damara said, genuinely alarmed.

“Just push please, your booby-ness!” Kuprum shouted from the outside, readying for a massive pull.

“Fine, whatever!” Damara said. “And stop calling me that! Kankri, push! On the count of one… two…”

She counted to three, and she, and Kankri, pushed with their respective capacity for might.

Kankri was very strong now. Kuprum pulled her, and Folykl jumped up and down with so much enthusiasm that it squashed her belly up and down, the rippling motion making her stomach slide through easier.

But Damara’s power echoed out, as a wave of force that blasted clear to the skies above; in its wake, ghosts and spirits that had been drawn to the reawakened power of the city took on a physical form for an alarming few seconds, and then more alien shapes appeared above: her power called to thoughts and memories, to stray ideas, to even the basic resonance left in the old stone and that growing anew as people accumulated new memories and life in the city, and she was so strong that even this little exertion of power gave all that form, for a few miraculous moments.

The sky above twisted with eldritch forms, which faded.

The exertion also shoved Damara and Kankri into the house, right on top of Kuprum and Folykl, which did not fade.

After the shaking stopped, Damara groaned.  “Is anyone dead?” She said grumpily.

Kuprum and Folykl made noises beneath her, indicating they were okay.

“Fine. Good.” Damara leaned up, her stomach firmly propping her into the air by a good eight feet, at the very least. Her breasts flopped down, barely robed, nearly to the ground. This kind of dress might have been a very bad idea, given the weather, but the magical awakening of the city she had caused had also made the climate within the city significantly warmer, so she felt free to dress as she pleased.

She leaned up, squinting. It was far too early in the morning for all this, and she was sorely regretting ever leaving for a bit of managing the construction outside the city. “Kankri! Where are you!?”

“I promise you I did not mean to do this, I am not doing any inappropriate touching!” Kankri said desperately from behind her, and also atop her, his arms firmly plastered to his sides, but the rest of him sinking into her backside. His face was pressed firmly against the small of his back.

“Actually, that’s quite pleasant,” Damara replied, a sly tone in her words. “You may stay.”

“Damara, that’s indecent!”

Her breasts wiggled. Eventually, Folykl’s horns and then her face poked up between them, her compact body brimming with energies as she leeched off the ambient magical energies gushing off Damara. “Can I stay!?”

“...Sure. Why not.”

“You are gracious and crap, your booby-ness.”

“But not if you keep calling me that.”

Sollux watched the whole thing with a faint frown. “Will you move already!? You might have crushed your new attendant!”

Damara tilted her head. “My what now?”

Kuprum wiggled out, head eventually appearing from under her belly. “I have been crushed by the firm iron belly of authority!” He said, obscenely delighted. “It’s everything I ever wanted out of life! I LOVE this job!”

Damara blinked. “Oh.” She glanced back again. “Why do I need attendants?”

“You did just spend fifteen minutes wiggling your way through a door until they helped,” Aradia said delicately. “I’d say that’s why.”

“Ah.”

Damara rocked up, so Kuprum could extricate himself, and she allowed her new attendants to get down and push her belly, so she rocked back up to a standing position. And everywhere, she felt herself bouncing, and Kankri sliding (absolutely mortified, which was a plus) onto his own feet again.

She felt a keen sense of her own body, and how massive it was. The spirits within herself as well, feeding her power as she fed them back with a sort of mystical complexity that made them more active, more aware, thinking and feeling more. Perhaps soon, they would be able to move onto whatever awaited them, or for the ones that were just memories imprinted, to fade away or express a desire to be shaped into useful objects.

The idea of it, and feeling them inside her, making her so big (inconvenient as it might sometimes be) genuinely felt very good.

The power coursing through her, making her an equal to any country-killing weapon hoarded from the old days, though, was something she was actively trying not to think about.

But that would be a matter for another day.

[dragonrajafanfiction]

Dragon Dancer IV: The Creche

Mr. Gattuso carried me down the hall, whistling and far to bouncy in his step. I was supposed to by lying limp in his arms, completely overwhelmed to fainting by his prowess as a lover apparently. He had to cut me free of my restraints to take me to the monastery infirmary, so the story was supposed to go.

I tried not to think about it. It was simultaneously gross and hilarious.

What irritated me at the moment was that he was bouncing too much. My limp arm slid from my supine body and was bouncing in a way that pulled at my muscles and ligaments and made things more uncomfortable than they had to be. The gravity pool my blood down into my fingers and they were starting to tingle.

By the time I heard him address the nurse, it had gone numb. I stared at an invisible point behind my eyelids and tried to think silent unconscious thoughts.

“Ah... I see you’ve worked the nightshift,” came Pompeii Gattuso’s silky deep voice. “I’m in luck...”

I heard a breathy giggle and had to concentrate to keep from rolling my eyes. He laid me on the exam table.

“I’m not certain what happened. By the time we’d finished, she was out cold.”

“Well... “ A moment of silence. “She will probably wake up soon, perhaps she has an underlying medical condition that got triggered by things being a bit...”

“Well, I can explain further...”

“That’s not really...”

“Or demonstrate...”

There was a long pause. “...now?”

God, I could see why Caesar hated him.  Caesar was always this stalwart night ready to defend a lady in all manner of distress, but his father...

Before all of this he explained that the best disguise is to act the way you act all the time. Because if you’re behaving in a predictable way, even when you do something unusual, people will explain it away in their head as normal.

I concentrated on staying as still as I could while the sounds of lips locking filled the exam room.

“Wait... she might wake up...”

“There’s another room down the hall...”

The door shut. I sighed, puffing out my cheeks. Part of me wondered if I was going to actually was going to wait while he made another conquest.

But fortunately, he wasn’t gone long. Within a few minutes, he’d returned with the woman’s scrubs and labcoat. 

“Hurry up and change. The clock is ticking.” He tossed the clothes to me and I caught them. Then he drew the curtain. “You’re a good actor.”

I couldn’t tell him I had studied ballet because the curtain was drawn and I still couldn’t speak.

He gave an appreciative whistle. “Have you been scouted?”

I laughed scornfully. It came out like a hissy snicker.

“No?  But you’re obviously talented. I’ll have to change this.”

I stepped around the curtain, feeling oddly emotional at being reminded of my lost passion. I hadn’t thought about dancing in ages. I was too busy running for my life, fighting for my friends lives. Protecting my daughter. How could I think about dancing?

“Don’t bother.” I whispered.

“Don’t give up on your dreams, Miss Lu.”

“I said forget it!” I snapped.

After a moments silence, he said. “It’s a pretty good fit.” He looked me up and down. “Okay... After this, I’ll see about getting you back to your career. You can’t just be a dragonslayer...”

I saw a box of medical masks on the shelf and grabbed it, covering my face. I glared at him.

“Alright.” He led me out, shaking his head sadly.

I was stunned that he was still in a robe and hadn’t considered changing. He walked non-chalantly to an elevator and pressed the down button. The elevator dinged and we entered it.

“Where are we going?” I asked, removing the mask.

“There’s a special area for new high-purity Gattuso offspring. If they’re taking her as a bride of Caesar’s then she’ll have to be sanctified.”

“Sanctified?”

He didn’t look at me, gazing at his reflection. “You know how certain rituals and customs have their roots in the secrets of the dragon clan?”

“Yes.”

“There are a variety of holy rituals regarding newborns. Some of these are rooted in the early days of Hybrids. Here we strip away the human fables associated with these rituals to get to their true nature.”

He had armed himself with two pistols before we left, filling them both with anesthetic Frigg bullets and keeping a magazine of more lethal ammunition just in case. These pistols he drew, as the elevator doors opened. He stepped out and pointed them, one on his left and one on his right. He pulled their triggers once, instantly felling two guards who stood at the elevator entrance.

He jerked his head, indicating I should follow. I carefully stepped over the men and hurried after him.

we were in a dark basement area. The walls were stacked round rock and the floor was uneven stone. The electric lights were clearly a new addition. Carved dragons stuck out from the walls where they once held torches to light the way. The space ahead of us was oddly dark and the darkness shifted

Two glowing eyes blinked open. The dark shape took on a draconic form baring its teeth and letting out a frightening hiss of threat. Energy pulsed down its body in bright blue bioluminesence. It’s body filled the entire room. It had what appeared to be the stumps of broken wings on his back.

It’s tail lashed, banging against the wall.

They kept these monsters down here! I should not have been surprised, but I was.

Pompeii’s expression darkened and he handed me a pair of dark glasses he was keeping in his robe. “Put these on... to protect your eyes.”

I backed away, unable to use my speaking spirit to defend myself. I slipped on the dark glasses.

Pompeii Gattuso strode forward. I could only see his back, the length of his blonde hair, tied in a loose messy braid. Everythiing else as shrouded in dense gloom.

But I heard his voice, the draconic ringing loud and reverberating like a loud bell. The echoes of his voice in the underground took a life of their own in my ears. They took on an insane, fervent chant, like monks praying for a miracle.

As the hall filled with this unnatural sound, bright tendrils of light whipped from Pompeii’s body and began crawling up the walls. My hair stood on end and my ears filled with the crackle and buzz of electricity.

The monster charged him but only made it half the distance before it was stopped by a burst of electric light, like a explosion of a power grid. The monster let out a squeal and collapsed into convulsions.

I covered my nose against the smell of burning flesh. The arcing electricity was still cycling around Pompeii. Behind that beast, others were awakened and I could hear their claws scraping the stone floor. Their eyes bounced as they ran towards him.

The battle happened in flashes and silhouette. The strobe effect stunned and disoriented the beasts in the dark of the underground. They were helpless to defend  themselves.  Pompeii was bare handed and every time he threw a punch, the space between his fist and his target burst like a supernova sending a grotesque monster to the ground, stiff as a board. He grabbed another around the neck. It wheezed, breathless and twitching. When he let it go, it didn’t get up again. He was a living taser, killing his enemies in a single devastating electrocution. 

He didn’t wait for me, running down the corridor. I scrambled to catch up, careful not to step on or trip over the corpses of the beasts.

We came to a large ceremonial chamber. Ru’Yi’s blanket was there, clean and white on an altar, but she was not. The altar was surrounded by dead bodies. Each one had their throats cleanly cut, their bodies lay in crimson pools.

“What?!” Pompeii looked around, stunned. “Search the bodies! See if you can find a phone!”

He started rolling them over, patting them down.

My throat closed in terror. I remembered this scene. It was similar to what happened in the basement of Genji Heavy Industries! The murderer who killed countless Hydra elites in a matter of seconds now had a name, a face. 

Shinnosuke!

Pompeii found a phone and immediately dialed a number. He grabbed my hand and yanked me out of the chamber.

“What’s happening? Where’s Ru’Yi!”

He looked at me but he didn’t say anything. 

“Please tell me!”

He hissed. “Damn it Caesar! Pick up your phone!”

We hurried back to the elevator and stopped. The men that Pompeii had put the sleep were laying on the ground. Bleeding out.

“Shit!” Pompeii pressed the elevator but it was on the top floor. It would take minutes to come down. He looked at me in a panic. “He killed the priests... why would he kill them?! What happened?”

He started to search the phone for information while it rang endlessly on Caesar’s end of the line.

He stared at it. “They’re sending agents to Japan... and Tibet?”

“What?” I squeaked. “Tibet? No! Nonono! This isn’t possible! How did they find out Mingfei was there?”

“Mingfei’s alive?!”

“Yes! I just came here to find out their plans and get in touch with Caesar!”

“What else haven’t you told me?!”

The elevator opened and a beast, one of the servitors, leaped from the cab. Pompeii pushed me out of the way and the claws dug into him. The cellphone slammed to the ground, the screen shattering.

A voice like a bell, and then a loud crack! I had barely enough time to look away and saw stars, blinded.

I rubbed my eyes. The phone was still ringing on Caesar’s end, but he couldn’t hang up or dial again.

Bleeding from his chest, Pompeii shoved me inside. “I should have known you were hiding something from me.”

“I’m sorry... but I was afraid someone was going to listen! I did-” I shut my mouth at his glare.

But then he sighed, the phone still ringing at his ear. “It doesn’t matter.”

The elevator was moving entirely too slow. Every second that passed, Ru’Yi could be in danger or dead. The possibility made my knees collapse under me.

Pompeii steadied me with one arm. “Easy. I’m not going to turn around now. If Caesar has taught me anything, children need their mothers.”

[burgess698]

Am I Ordained To Marry?

One standard requesting people position to us during training is on the off chance that they are assigned to marry. Scarcely any weeks sooner, a sister progressed toward me to ask regarding if she was alloted to marry. I approached regarding for what legitimate explanation she suspected so a ton. She conveyed, her pastor set them up that it is written in Matthew 19:12 that few individuals were made to be eunuchs and in light of everything, only one out of each odd individual is depended on to marry. Moreover, in the end she was worried by virtue of the diagram of disappointments she had experienced in her affiliations. Right when I saw whether they were comparably arranged how to isolate between the two get-togethers she said that was the explanation she came to ask me. I said she should have gone to her priest to ask regardless she said she would not considering how they were more amped up for the measure of spirits they had won to Christ than their own arrangements Ordination certificate .

Her enthusiastic refusal to go to her pastor for counsel was a verifiable sign that she had encountered a few bits of disappointment. I don't have the foggiest thought the measure of people are in an equal condition today. All I know is that someone will be freed from this bondage today.

Before I region the middle issue, let me uncover to you that Christianity is a sensible relationship. The very God that says he that wins a soul is skilled in like manner says marriage should be respected by all, and the marriage bed kept unadulterated, for God will censure the reprobate and all the expressly off-base, (Hebrew 13:4 NIV). The appearing of holding down make adults in house of prayer from marriage since you would uphold not to lose them to various splendid places or redirect them from agreeably captivating in refuge movement is lopsided and vomited for the improvement you need. Marriage is an honor before God. It gives miracle to God. Anyone that prerequisites to marry should be asked before they begin to challenge themselves obviously under your establishment.

My course is that while mentioning that they continue winning spirits they should in like manner be guided on the right strategy to find the right kind of life colleague and the right technique to marry. Urge them to let their marriage become at any rate a to the social occasion rather than short. If no one anyway you could look after 1,000 spirits, let you and your assistant partake in relationship with search after 10,000 spirits.

Matthew 19:12 says: '' For there are some eunuchs, who were so considered from their mother's waist: and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs of men; and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the achievement of the space of paradise. He that can get it let him get it.''

The above favored framing clearly portrays the three classes of eunuchs. Our place of supplement here will be on those considered eunuchs from their mothers' stomach. The other two are those obliged into it and those that injury up being so by their choice.

Unequivocally when God made man in His image and similarity, He declared that he should go into the world and increase. That affirmation is for you and me. The rule maintained way to deal with oversee achieve this advancement is to marry really and keep the private bed heavenly. You needn't play with an extraordinary master to mumble into your ears that the open entryway has appeared at marry. The standards are there in the book of sanctified compositions. That isn't our fixation until extra warning at any rate.

Take model from Abraham, the father of conviction. He didn't need any longing to see whether his childhood Isaac, required a mate or not. All he required was head recognition drawn from the Word of God. God let him know during his consider that through him the earth will be populated with His new period of youngsters. He settled it in his mind to get a partner for Isaac to make that calling and reason happen precisely true to form. At the selected time, he sent his star, Eleazar to go to his individual to get a partner for Isaac. You know the rest of the story in Genesis section 24.

God engineered man with all the features expected to play out all that He anticipates that him should do on earth in addition a producer won't put his things in the business place without the inbuilt features to work. Signs of pubescence, sexual sentiments and strong interest towards the other sex are a few pointers that you are alloted to marry. Correctly when His due season is close, He begins to show His longings your spirit for ahead transmission to these sluggish sexual anticipated outcomes in you and suddenly you will mix to certain store toward that way. The brilliant book says, '' it is God who works in us both to will and to do of his excellent happiness'', Philippians 2:13. Marriage is one of the supportive things that give bliss to God. Unequivocally when you start feeling the inclination or capacity to get hitched just perceive God has begun this exceptional work in you. Anybody that has this affinity or need to marry is one of those God has alloted to marry. There's nothing more to it!

To change into an eunuch or to marry is your choice. God has given you the over the top decision to pick it. He won't pick or power any one on you. Witness Paul chose not to marry since he expected to use his life to serve God and not in light of the fact that God said he should not. His case should not change into a standard to prevent people from fulfilling God's inspiration for their lives. He even castigated anyone that can't suffer it to marry rather than burning-through in hurting. If you choose to continue with a presence of ideals or choose to marry as you have required, God is content with you. Set forth an endeavor not to allow past frustrations weaken you or make you start feeling that it is conceivable that you are among the picked eunuchs. You are allocated! If things are not working incredibly, find what you have not been progressing agreeably, keep changing and working on yourself so God can connect you with the right kind of mate.

In any case, it doesn't mean you should race into anyone since God has willed it so for you. There is period to find the right kind of life partner and there is the ideal open door for planning. My stake here is to disclose to you that these signs put you in the class God has decided to marry. You do have a spot with the get-together of those made eunuchs from their mother's stomach.

Watchmen should pay uncommon mind to these signs in their children and wards. Definitely when these signs begin to show up, it is an indication to watchmen to fire setting up their youths or wards for the going with an extraordinary time. Sadly, various guardians and gatekeepers around these adolescents don't routinely set them up on time, and from time to time they misdirect them through wrong information. We owe the pushing toward age this duty as watchmen. The people who miss the mark at this level of supporting reliably consider it contemplating the way that late lines take certifiable marvelous time.

Those made eunuchs from their mother's waist don't have and will never will in general get hitched considering the way that they don't have the features in them. I don't mean those debilitated by illness, contaminations and diseases like down conditions, torment or loss of improvement. These are sound and virile individuals who are threatening to the site of the other sexual course. They never have any kind finishes towards the other sex regardless, when they are both stripped in a secret room.

Whether or not we choose to marry, remain single or brought into the world debilitated, it doesn't make us rats or better before God. He recognizes we generally speaking also, at any rate it will fulfill Him to see us fulfill His longings for us. I have watched out for the issues before you. The onus is beginning at now on you to pick what you need. Teacher Paul chose not to marry since it was his choice. Evangelist Peter didn't separate from his venerated one considering God's work, yet God recalled that them all. Pick your case without assistance from some other person.

[dndartshare]

Harvest Ritual

The air of the Eluthane valley was warm and cold at the same time as summer waned. The daylight hours were still longer than the night, but today Hiereus and his people worked together to bring in their harvest before the hard autumn frosts.  

“Hey,” his friend Luso called as he came up behind Hiereus, “Why are you wearing a tail sock?” his friend asked.

“What? It was cold this morning,” Hiereus said defensively as he thrust his sickle into the barley.

“Right,” said Luso, sounding skeptical, “It’s always cold in Eluthane, but you are literally sweating while wearing winter clothing in the summer.”

“Hmm…” Hiereus grumbled at Luso’s chiding, “I like to stay warm?” he responded as if asking a question.

“Uh huh…”

Hiereus’s ears drooped and tail sank, but still he stopped to unclasp and remove his tail sock and tie it around his waist before returning to work. The cool air came as a relief though he wouldn’t admit it. Still he grinned deeply as Luso walked beside him.

“Done with the squash already?” Hiereus asked as he cut again at the grain. 

“Oh yeah,” Luso said, and Hiereus’ tail swished as his friend spoke. “We just finished hauling it into the temple; it’s almost time to prepare the Thuometha meal.” 

Hierues sighed, “By the Flame,” he said, as he looked at the extent of the barley fields remaining to be harvested. “Always the last to come in.”

“We do eat a lot of it.” Luso said with a chuckle, scratching behind his horns. 

“Still, now that you’re here at least I’ll have someone nice to work with,” Hiereus grinned.

“Uh... most people are nice Hiereus.” 

“Yeah, um right.” Hiereus' tail sank. He’d never had the will to tell Luso that he liked him. “I mean,” he said itching his ear, “it’s nice to work with a friend.”

Luso looked at his feet, “I’m not here to work the barley field.”

“What?” Hiereus wilted further as he realized his friend hadn’t brought a sickle.

“Sorry,” Luso said, “I just came to see what you were doing. I drew for meal prep after we brought the squash in.”

Heireus put on a smile as his heart sank, “We each work for the liberation of all,” he recited the mantra. 

“Right.” Luso chuckled, “As labors are shared, by the Flame we are blessed,” he recited in return. “Alright then I’d best be going”  

      “Right,” Hiereus said, “Um… I’ll be performing in the sacrifice tonight. Save me a seat for the meal?” he asked.

“Sure thing,” Luso smiled, “I’ve got to go, see ya.” 

Hiereus waved “May the light of the Flame guard your path,” he said as he watched Luso go.

***

When work on the barley field finally wrapped up, Hiereus’ arms and back were sore and thoroughly worked.  He stretched as he made his way up through the town green past the Temple and the step kiln to his family’s small home. 

Once inside he stripped out of his work clothes and washed from a pail of tepid water. He shivered from the coolness yet compared to working in the sun, even in Eluthane, he found it a relief.

He found his priestly garb on a hook near the stove, and as he reached for them his hand brushed the robes left by his sister. It had been just over a year since Moira left. They still received the occasional letter from her. The last one came from Edrez where she searched the temples of the world’s gods. 

The city was sometimes called the Hub of the World, being the home of a goddess, and a center of trade and learning.  Hiereus trembled thinking about it, he would feel lost in such a city and he worried about his sister out in the world. 

She had been gone so long, and yet part of him still expected to see her when he went out, or to greet him when he went to the temple.  

He sat for a moment after he finished dressing, and surveyed his family's belongings and took in its emptiness. Then standing, he rested his hand on his sister’s vestments. “May the light of the Flame guide you home,” he said before leaving.

Outside the smells of food wafted up from the green. The meal of the community sacrifice would start soon and he had his role to play. This festival was probably his favorite of the year. It wasn’t the most holy–that was Longest Night–but the communal meal, sharing in the culmination of his people’s labor for the year, they were always the part of the liturgical cycle he loved the most.

“Ah, I see the Flame has finally led you here,” said Mutha, the recently-elected chief priest.

“By the Flame, I’m sorry, the barley harvest, it ran late,” Hiereus apologized breathlessly.

“Aw, pay her no mind,” said Molu, Mutha’s wife, as she waved him into the Temple. “You’re here now, and it’s not like we’d start without you child.”

“I’m a priest too you know,” he protested with a grin already knowing their answer.

“We know, child,” Mutha said patting Hiereus on the back, “But we’ve been in the priesthood for over 62 cycles.”

“To us you’ll always be child,” Molu finished.

Hiereus chuckled, “I guess being called child is my fate,”

“You and most of the priesthood, my dear,” Mutha said.

“You should go meet your mother,” Molu said, “I think you’re the last one here. Let her know it’s time to start the ritual.”

Hiereus nodded and headed off toward the central Flame under the oculus. His mother had been the chief priest in the last cycle of seasons and tonight’s sacrifice would be her last act in that role as it was handed over to Mutha.      

His mother Phose smiled and then pulled her son into a hug when he approached. “Good, you’re ready. How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Um… fine?” Hiereus answered. 

“Glad to hear it,” she responded cheerfully in a way that let Hiereus know his answer hadn’t been satisfactory. “Do you feel practiced enough? You were given an important role tonight.”

“Yeah ma, I practiced. It will be good.” 

“Good, I’m glad you feel confident,” she pulled him into another hug, “I know you get nervous leading a ritual.” “Ma,” Hiereus sounded abashed, “I’ll do fine.”

“I know you will, sweety, I just want you to know you will.”

Hiereus felt his face flush, and he smiled, “Thanks ma, I really think I’ll be fine.”

“Good, we should get going. The people are waiting, and hungry,” Phose said to Hiereus and the priesthood gathered in the Temple.

He followed his mother with the others out to the town green. It was dusk and brazers had been lit, speckling the assembly of his people in the Flame’s light as daylight waned.  

They stopped before a pyre and Phose opened a pouch of ash and began marking a circle round them and the pyre, sanctifying the space for the ritual. When this was done each of the priests came to her and washed their hands as the ritual began.

It was now Hiereus’ turn to speak. Unfastening his lamp from his belt he watched the crowd that had gathered. His people numbered little more than what the rest of the world called a small town, but even still a few thousand people occupied the green in front of him.

He trembled a little removing the cap from the end of the horn lamp and adjusted its wick. These people all knew him and he knew them. Still it was an effort to keep breathing and nerves even. Then he smiled as he saw Luso in the front with a space saved beside him, and he felt ready.

“The light of the Flame brings liberation; its way is freedom through benevolence,” Hiereus recited as he lit the wick of his lamp. Its light turned crimson as the blessing was uttered, and he could feel its warmth reflected in his soul.

“The way of the Flame is given,” Phose picked up the next line, “and as we keep it our labors are blessed.”

The momentum of the ritual carried Hiereus now, and he turned to the pyre and stooped and lit its kindling with the others. At first smoke bellowed through the logs but soon gave way to the Flame’s deep red light as the fire spread.         

“For inasmuch as a person cannot meet all their needs alone, you shall share your labors so that you may all have your needs met. For in sharing your work you shall be free from any one becoming your master,” Hiereus recited once the Flame reached its full height. 

Mutha took the next line bringing a cup, and handing it to Hiereus as she spoke, “Let none perish from lack or inability.” 

Hiereus nodded in thanks as he accepted the cup, and he could smell the sweet grain wine, fermented in the mine below the Temple. 

Next his mother brought a loaf of barley bread. “Be generous with each other and let each who can, aid their fellow with vigor,” she said as she offered her son the loaf, and he exchanged his lamp. Not so much as part of the ritual, but to free his hands.

He held aloft the cup and loaf, and uttered the blessing the meal was named for. “Thuometha, tō panti, ek pantos,” or in the common tongue, “For ourselves we sacrifice, for all, from all.” 

“As we have kept the way, our labors have been blessed. We give thanks to the Flame; we give thanks to the land.” As he spoke, he poured some of wine onto the embers of the fire. 

After sipping from the cup himself, he offered it to his mother who drank and in turn offered it to Mutha. 

Hiereus then tore the loaf. “May we now all share the blessings of our labor, in the light of the Flame.” He placed a part of the loaf in the fire and watched for a moment as the red flames began to consume it. 

Then, as with the cup, he ate first before giving the loaf to Phose, and she partook then gave it to Mutha. The ritual not only marked harvest but also the past cycle of sessions and the formal passing of office between the two.

Upon its completion, half of the priesthood took baskets of bread and the other half wine skins to give to all assembled, and officially the harvest meal began.

After helping to distribute the loafs, he returned his basket to the Temple when his mother found him to return his lamp.

“You did really good tonight,” she said, handing him his lamp.

“Thank you,” he grinned, reflecting on the ritual. 

“I mean it,” she said, “I was really proud of you as you performed the sacrifice,” and she squeezed his hand.

“We were all proud of you,” Mutha had come up behind him, “We’ve seen you grow a lot since joining our number. I wanted to thank you for the role you played tonight, and not just because I took your mother’s job. Keeping Thuometha is important for our people.” “Thanks,” he responded, shyly scratching the stump of his horn. “It’s always been my favorite,” he added, before stooping to give the older woman a hug.

“Hiereus,” his mother said as he stood up,  “you didn’t happen to see where pa and Rai were sitting did you?”

 “I didn’t notice,” he admitted.

“We should go find them so we can eat.” “You go, I was going to sit with Luso.”

“Oh,” she looked surprised, then smiled, “I think I saw him up front. You have fun then.” 

“Thanks ma, I’ll see you back at home.” He waved as she went off into the crowd.

He turned back to the new chief priest. “Hey thanks again Mutha,” he said, “Your opinion means a lot to me.”

“You’re a fine young man Hiereus, I’m glad to have people like you in the priesthood,” she said patting his arm. “Now go find your friend, I’m sure he’s waiting. I ought to find Molu, knowing her, she’s probably already started eating.”

“Alright, I’m sure I’ll see you later. Enjoy your dinner.”

Mutha waved and went off as Hiereus went over to meet Luso. His friend smiled as he approached. “So what’s good?” Hiereus asked, sitting down.

“There's a spicy bread pudding I think you’ll like. It’s a bit too hot for me, but you liked those chilies the traders brought back last cycle.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that crop worked out even if they didn't turn red. I never know what to expect from new crops.” Hiereus said as he sat down and started serving himself. 

“Yeah, new seeds usually fail this far north, but these took well enough.”

“Mmmm,” Hiereus savored the spicy bread pudding, “You’re right, I do like it. Mmmm.” 

“I think I’ll stick with squash and potatoes myself,” Luso said flatly.

“Your loss,” Hiereus’ tail waved vigorously as he took another bite. “I thought you liked spicy food?”

“Hmm, not the chilies. Their heat does something weird to my tongue.”  

“Oh, sorry.” 

“I’m not sure what you’re sorry about,” Luso said, “I just don’t eat them.”

“Fine, I’ll just be sure to eat your share of them then.” Hiereus grinned thinking about it.

Luso laughed, “Whatever you say bud.”

The air became cold as the stars started to appear, and Hiereus shivered. For a moment he wished he had his tail sock on, then his mind drifted and he wondered what it was like where Moira was.  

“Hey, are you alright?” Luso shook his shoulder. 

“Hmm?” Hiereus muttered, returning to the present moment. 

“I was just saying that I was going to join the foresting team this autumn, and you didn’t seem to hear me.” “Sorry, I was wondering how Moira was,” Hiereus smiled apologetically.

“Oh, yeah.” Luso frowned, “Have you heard from her recently?” 

“Her last letter came with the returning caravan a few weeks ago,” Hiereus said. “She was in Edrez when she wrote it. She was going to try and find her way toward Ikurad soon.”

“Oh wow,” Luso responded, “she's gone a long way.”

“Yeah, I don’t think our trading caravans have seen as much of the world as she has. I’m not sure any Eluthanai has.”

Hiereus paused, staring up into the night sky. “Speaking of the caravans, did you like the cinnamon candy they brought back?”

“Oh yeah, it was good. Spicy, but not like the chilies. I finished mine a bit ago.” “Well I saved some; if you like you can have one.”

“Wow, thanks Hiereus,” Luso said, taking a candy and popping it in his mouth. “I love these things.” Hiereus chuckled, “Good, I’m glad.”

“You, know I could have traveled,” Luso said. “Or I thought I could. I wanted to join the caravans, but the world’s big. I’m not sure I’m up for it.”

“Me neither,” Hiereus said. “Still I always find myself wondering about the places Moira has been.” “Yeah. It’s weird having her gone. I think the whole town misses her. But to be honest I had a mind to court her before she left. I never had the nerve to ask though.” Hiereus’ heart sank as the meaning of Luso’s words set in, and his whole body drooped. 

“Hey, something wrong?”

 Of course Luso wasn’t like him; so few people were. He didn’t know why he imagined Luso would feel the same way he did. He realized he was trembling and tried to still himself. “It’s nothing,” he answered, realizing his eyes were getting hot with tears. 

“It’s not nothing,” Luso said, “I think about it all the time, that perhaps if I had been a little braver maybe Moira would have stayed and you and I would have been brothers,” Luso chuckled. 

Hiereus forced only the smallest semblance of a laugh in response, “I’m sorry” he said, “I just realized it's time to start cleaning up inside the Temple. I need to go.”

“Oh right,” Luso said, stunned by Hiereus’ sudden change in mood. “It seems a little early, but I’ll see you later then.”

He rushed into the Temple and as soon as he was out of sight started crying as he sank to the floor.  His unease compounded as he heard someone approach from outside.

“Hmm,” He heard the voice of an older woman behind him. “You liked him a lot didn’t you?” Mutha said, patting him on the back.

“What?” Hiereus said, wiping his eyes. 

“Tears like that only come from death or heartache, and no one’s died,” Mutha answered. “I don’t think I realized before tonight that you were like Molu and I. Should have seen it, the way you moon over your friend, but I didn’t give it any mind until you went off to sit with him tonight. Would that I had, I could have given some advice.”

“Advice?” Hiereus asked. 

“Oh,” Mutha said sitting down next to him, “Molu and I were lucky to find each other. It’s not our way to make such things taboo as other places do, but there are so few like us that we seldom talk about it.”

Hiereus frowned; the only man Hiereus had suspected to be like him died alone. He knew his chances in Eluthane. 

“You need to make yourself known,” Mutha said. “I suspect there are more of us than we think but because no one speaks of it, we feel alone.” “I...” Hiereus started, but Mutha cut him off.

“I know it’s an awkward thing to bring up, explaining that your romantic interests aren’t typical. Trust me, I know. But by the Flame Eluthane won’t hate you for it, and you’ll never know if others feel the same way unless you're visible.” Hiereus smiled, “I’ll try,” he said drying his eyes.

“At very least mention it to your mother. The other day she was asking if there were any young ladies you were interested in.” Hiereus sighed and looked up at the ceiling, “I guess I can start with that.”

“I’ll understand if you need some time to cry and miss cleanup, but you might want to hide in one of the ritual rooms. The others will be coming back to the temple soon.” “Thanks, Mutha. Thanks,” he said and he hugged the new chief priest.                

[thetheoreticaljehovist]

There is an overthrowing of the wicked ones and they are no more, but the very house of the righteous ones will keep standing. For there will prove to be no future for anyone bad; the very lamp of wicked people will be extinguished...   

“Watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. But there is nothing carefully concealed that will not be revealed, and secret that will not become known. Wherefore what things YOU say in the darkness will be heard in the light, and what YOU whisper in private rooms will be preached from the housetops. Moreover, I say to YOU, my friends, Do not fear those who kill the body and after this are not able to do anything more. But I will indicate to YOU whom to fear: Fear him who after killing has authority to throw into Ge·hen’na. Yes, I tell YOU, fear this One. Five sparrows sell for two coins of small value, do they not? Yet not one of them goes forgotten before God. But even the hairs of YOUR heads are all numbered. Have no fear; YOU are worth more than many sparrows.

“I say, then, to YOU, Everyone that confesses union with me before men, the Son of man will also confess union with him before the angels of God. But he that disowns me before men will be disowned before the angels of God. And everyone that says a word against the Son of man, it will be forgiven him; but he that blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven it. But when they bring YOU in before public assemblies and government officials and authorities, do not become anxious about how or what YOU will speak in defense or what YOU will say; for the holy spirit will teach YOU in that very hour the things YOU ought to say.”

Then a certain one of the crowd said to him: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” He said to him: “Man, who appointed me judge or apportioner over YOU persons?” Then he said to them: “Keep YOUR eyes open and guard against every sort of covetousness, because even when a person has an abundance his life does not result from the things he possesses.” With that he spoke an illustration to them, saying: “The land of a certain rich man produced well. Consequently he began reasoning within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, now that I have nowhere to gather my crops?’ So he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my storehouses and build bigger ones, and there I will gather all my grain and all my good things; and I will say to my soul: “Soul, you have many good things laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, enjoy yourself.”’ But God said to him, ‘Unreasonable one, this night they are demanding your soul from you. Who, then, is to have the things you stored up?’ So it goes with the man that lays up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God.”

Then he said to his disciples: “On this account I say to YOU, Quit being anxious about YOUR souls as to what YOU will eat or about YOUR bodies as to what YOU will wear. For the soul is worth more than food and the body than clothing. Mark well that the ravens neither sow seed nor reap, and they have neither barn nor storehouse, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more worth are YOU than birds? Who of YOU by being anxious can add a cubit to his life span? If, therefore, YOU cannot do the least thing, why be anxious about the remaining things? Mark well how the lilies grow; they neither toil nor spin; but I tell YOU, Not even Sol’o·mon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. If, now, God thus clothes the vegetation in the field that today exists and tomorrow is cast into an oven, how much rather will he clothe YOU, YOU with little faith! So quit seeking what YOU might eat and what YOU might drink, and quit being in anxious suspense; for all these are the things the nations of the world are eagerly pursuing, but YOUR Father knows YOU need these things. Nevertheless, seek continually his kingdom, and these things will be added to YOU.

“Have no fear, little flock, because YOUR Father has approved of giving YOU the kingdom. Sell the things belonging to YOU and give gifts of mercy. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, a never-failing treasure in the heavens, where a thief does not get near nor moth consumes. For where YOUR treasure is, there YOUR hearts will be also.

“Let YOUR loins be girded and YOUR lamps be burning, and YOU yourselves be like men waiting for their master when he returns from the marriage, so that at his arriving and knocking they may at once open to him. Happy are those slaves whom the master on arriving finds watching! Truly I say to YOU, He will gird himself and make them recline at the table and will come alongside and minister to them. And if he arrives in the second watch, even if in the third, and finds them thus, happy are they! But know this, that if the householder had known at what hour the thief would come, he would have kept watching and not have let his house be broken into. YOU also, keep ready, because at an hour that YOU do not think likely the Son of man is coming.”

Then Peter said: “Lord, are you saying this illustration to us or also to all?” And the Lord said: “Who really is the faithful steward, the discreet one, whom his master will appoint over his body of attendants to keep giving them their measure of food supplies at the proper time? Happy is that slave, if his master on arriving finds him doing so! I tell YOU truthfully, He will appoint him over all his belongings. But if ever that slave should say in his heart, ‘My master delays coming,’ and should start to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that slave will come on a day that he is not expecting [him] and in an hour that he does not know, and he will punish him with the greatest severity and assign him a part with the unfaithful ones. Then that slave that understood the will of his master but did not get ready or do in line with his will will be beaten with many strokes. But the one that did not understand and so did things deserving of strokes will be beaten with few. Indeed, everyone to whom much was given, much will be demanded of him; and the one whom people put in charge of much, they will demand more than usual of him.

“I came to start a fire on the earth, and what more is there for me to wish if it has already been lighted? Indeed, I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and how I am being distressed until it is finished! Do YOU imagine I came to give peace on the earth? No, indeed, I tell YOU, but rather division. For from now on there will be five in one house divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against [her] mother, mother-in-law against [her] daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against [her] mother-in-law.”

Then he went on to say also to the crowds: “When YOU see a cloud rising in western parts, at once YOU say, ‘A storm is coming,’ and it turns out so. And when YOU see that a south wind is blowing, YOU say, ‘There will be a heat wave,’ and it occurs. Hypocrites, YOU know how to examine the outward appearance of earth and sky, but how is it YOU do not know how to examine this particular time? Why do YOU not judge also for yourselves what is righteous? For example, when you are going with your adversary at law to a ruler, get to work, while on the way, to rid yourself of the dispute with him, that he may never hale you before the judge, and the judge deliver you to the court officer, and the court officer throw you into prison. I tell you, You will certainly not get out from there until you pay over the last small coin of very little value.

Take good care not to practice YOUR righteousness in front of men in order to be observed by them; otherwise YOU will have no reward with YOUR Father who is in the heavens. Hence when you go making gifts of mercy, do not blow a trumpet ahead of you, just as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be glorified by men. Truly I say to YOU, They are having their reward in full. But you, when making gifts of mercy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, that your gifts of mercy may be in secret; then your Father who is looking on in secret will repay you.

“Also, when YOU pray, YOU must not be as the hypocrites; because they like to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the broad ways to be visible to men. Truly I say to YOU, They are having their reward in full. You, however, when you pray, go into your private room and, after shutting your door, pray to your Father who is in secret; then your Father who looks on in secret will repay you. But when praying, do not say the same things over and over again, just as the people of the nations do, for they imagine they will get a hearing for their use of many words. So, do not make yourselves like them, for God YOUR Father knows what things YOU are needing before ever YOU ask him.

“YOU must pray, then, this way: “‘Our Father in the heavens, let your name be sanctified. Let your kingdom come. Let your will take place, as in heaven, also upon earth. Give us today our bread for this day; and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the wicked one.’

“For if YOU forgive men their trespasses, YOUR heavenly Father will also forgive YOU; whereas if YOU do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will YOUR Father forgive YOUR trespasses.

“When YOU are fasting, stop becoming sad-faced like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Truly I say to YOU, They are having their reward in full. But you, when fasting, grease your head and wash your face, that you may appear to be fasting, not to men, but to your Father who is in secrecy; then your Father who is looking on in secrecy will repay you.

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If, then, your eye is simple, your whole body will be bright; but if your eye is wicked, your whole body will be dark. If in reality the light that is in you is darkness, how great that darkness is!“

No one can slave for two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stick to the one and despise the other. YOU cannot slave for God and for Riches.

“Stop judging that YOU may not be judged; for with what judgment YOU are judging, YOU will be judged; and with the measure that YOU are measuring out, they will measure out to YOU. Why, then, do you look at the straw in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the rafter in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Allow me to extract the straw from your eye’; when, look! a rafter is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First extract the rafter from your own eye, and then you will see clearly how to extract the straw from your brother’s eye.

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, neither throw YOUR pearls before swine, that they may never trample them under their feet and turn around and rip YOU open. 

“Keep on asking, and it will be given YOU; keep on seeking, and YOU will find; keep on knocking, and it will be opened to YOU. For everyone asking receives, and everyone seeking finds, and to everyone knocking it will be opened. Indeed, who is the man among YOU whom his son asks for bread—he will not hand him a stone, will he? Or, perhaps, he will ask for a fish—he will not hand him a serpent, will he? Therefore, if YOU, although being wicked, know how to give good gifts to YOUR children, how much more so will YOUR Father who is in the heavens give good things to those asking him?

“All things, therefore, that YOU want men to do to YOU, YOU also must likewise do to them; this, in fact, is what the Law and the Prophets mean.

“Go in through the narrow gate; because broad and spacious is the road leading off into destruction, and many are the ones going in through it; whereas narrow is the gate and cramped the road leading off into life, and few are the ones finding it.

“Be on the watch for the false prophets that come to YOU in sheep’s covering, but inside they are ravenous wolves. By their fruits YOU will recognize them. Never do people gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, do they? Likewise every good tree produces fine fruit, but every rotten tree produces worthless fruit; a good tree cannot bear worthless fruit, neither can a rotten tree produce fine fruit. Every tree not producing fine fruit gets cut down and thrown into the fire. Really, then, by their fruits YOU will recognize those [men].

“Not everyone saying to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but the one doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens will. Many will say to me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and expel demons in your name, and perform many powerful works in your name?’ And yet then I will confess to them: I never knew YOU! Get away from me, YOU workers of lawlessness. 

“Therefore everyone that hears these sayings of mine and does them will be likened to a discreet man, who built his house upon the rock-mass. And the rain poured down and the floods came and the winds blew and lashed against that house, but it did not cave in, for it had been founded upon the rock-mass. Furthermore, everyone hearing these sayings of mine and not doing them will be likened to a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand. And the rain poured down and the floods came and the winds blew and struck against that house and it caved in, and its collapse was great.”

Now when Jesus finished these sayings, the effect was that the crowds were astounded at his way of teaching; for he was teaching them as a person having authority, and not as their scribes.

After he had come down from the mountain great crowds followed him. And, look! a leprous man came up and began doing obeisance to him, saying: “Lord, if you just want to, you can make me clean.” And so, stretching out [his] hand, he touched him, saying: “I want to. Be made clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed away. Then Jesus said to him: “See that you tell no one, but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses appointed, for the purpose of a witness to them.

When he entered into Ca·per’na·um, an army officer came to him, entreating him and saying: “Sir, my manservant is laid up in the house with paralysis, being terribly tormented.” He said to him: “When I get there I will cure him.” In reply the army officer said: “Sir, I am not a fit man for you to enter under my roof, but just say the word and my manservant will be healed. For I too am a man placed under authority, having soldiers under me, and I say to this one, ‘Be on your way!’ and he is on his way, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.” Hearing that, Jesus became amazed and said to those following him: “I tell YOU the truth, With no one in Israel have I found so great a faith. But I tell YOU that many from eastern parts and western parts will come and recline at the table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of the heavens; whereas the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the darkness outside. There is where [their] weeping and the gnashing of [their] teeth will be.” Then Jesus said to the army officer: “Go. Just as it has been your faith, so let it come to pass for you.” And the manservant was healed in that hour.

And Jesus, on coming into Peter’s house, saw his mother-in-law lying down and sick with fever. So he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she got up and began ministering to him. But after it became evening, people brought him many demon-possessed persons; and he expelled the spirits with a word, and he cured all who were faring badly; that there might be fulfilled what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying: “He himself took our sicknesses and carried our diseases.”

When Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave the command to shove off for the other side. And a certain scribe came up and said to him: “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you are about to go.” But Jesus said to him: “Foxes have dens and birds of heaven have roosts, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay down his head.” Then another of the disciples said to him: “Lord, permit me first to leave and bury my father.” Jesus said to him: “Keep following me, and let the dead bury their dead.”

And when he got aboard a boat, his disciples followed him. Now, look! a great agitation arose in the sea, so that the boat was being covered by the waves; he, however, was sleeping. And they came and woke him up, saying: “Lord, save us, we are about to perish!” But he said to them: “Why are YOU fainthearted, YOU with little faith?” Then, getting up, he rebuked the winds and the sea, and a great calm set in. So the men became amazed and said: “What sort of person is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

When he got to the other side, into the country of the Gad·a·renes, there met him two demon-possessed men coming out from among the memorial tombs, unusually fierce, so that nobody had the courage to pass by on that road. And, look! they screamed, saying: “What have we to do with you, Son of God? Did you come here to torment us before the appointed time?” But a long way off from them a herd of many swine was at pasture. So the demons began to entreat him, saying: “If you expel us, send us forth into the herd of swine.” Accordingly he said to them: “Go!” They came out and went off into the swine; and, look! the entire herd rushed over the precipice into the sea and died in the waters. But the herders fled and, going into the city, they reported everything, including the affair of the demon-possessed men. And, look! all the city turned out to meet Jesus; and after having seen him, they earnestly urged him to move out from their districts.” 

-Luke 12 & Matthew 6:1-18;22-24 & 7-8, NWT 

Hypocrites How Is It You Do Not Know How To Examine This Particular Time?

[nolimitsongrace]

June 21: Spiritual Adultery

piritual AdulteryJune 21, 2020

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. — James 4:4

Up to this point, we have covered Jesus’ teaching on the ministry of the Holy Spirit in John 14, 15, and 16, and we’ve learned how to develop a more intimate and personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. Now we’re going to shift our focus to another vital aspect of the Holy Spirit’s ministry found in the New Testament.

As you will see in the days to come, the Holy Spirit lives within us like a Divine Lover. When believers allow the things of the world to usurp the place that should belong only to Him, the Holy Spirit — like a violated spouse — feels hurt and grief. It’s therefore vital that we gain a deeper understanding of how sin affects the indwelling Holy Spirit so we can purpose to change any permissive attitude toward sin that may linger in our lives and to live holier and more consecrated before Him in love.

*[If you started reading this from your email, begin reading here.]

In James 4:4 and 5, James referred to the nature of the believer’s relationship with Christ and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s heart. He wrote, “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

Throughout the New Testament, believers are most often referred to as “brothers and sisters.” Yet here James referred to his readers as “adulterers” and “adulteresses.” Imagine if a great spiritual leader wrote to you and called you an adulterer or adulteress! This is especially strong language when you consider that James was writing to Jewish believers, who could have been stoned for committing adultery. In fact, James couldn’t have said anything more shocking or outrageous to his audience! However, this adultery he was referring to was not a physical act, but rather a spiritual adultery that they had committed by giving their hearts to things other than Jesus Christ.

The Greek word for “adultery” is moichalis, and it carries all kind of connotations. Unfaithfulness, impurity, and violating a commitment to marriage are just a few. This word paints the picture of a wounded spouse who feels rejected, betrayed, misled, and deceived because the sanctity of his or her marriage relationship was recklessly thrown away by the act of adultery. All of these ideas are embedded in the Greek word moichalis.

So what had these believers done to be addressed in such a way? James explained, “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye know not that friendship with the world is enmity with God…?”

To illustrate James’ point, let me share an example from my own life. In the early years of our marriage, Denise and I led a single-adult ministry in a large denominational church. During this time, we developed a program to help single adults who had recently gone through a divorce. As we listened to the concerns of these precious believers, we discovered that most of these people felt like they were outcasts from the Church. So we made it a point to open our hearts and emphasize “life after divorce” as a primary message of our ministry. Soon newly divorced people came to us from all over to receive ministry, love, acceptance, and healing. It was one of the most gratifying, yet troublesome, periods of ministry we had ever experienced.

It was gratifying to see people who had been so rejected and wounded being healed by the love of Jesus Christ. However, it was very troublesome to hear the pain many of these believers felt as a result of being betrayed by someone they loved and trusted. Day after day, we would sit and listen as each one shared his or her story. Out of approximately 100 cases, nearly all sounded similar — so similar, in fact, that eventually I could almost finish most of their stories for them.

Again and again, these emotionally bruised people lamented, “I just don’t understand how he could do that to me. After all these years of being faithful to him, raising our children together, and working to help him through school, I don’t understand how could hurt me like this.” Or, “How could she do this to me after I’ve given her so much? I gave her my love, my attention, all that I knew to do. How could she do this to me?”

These intense, painful emotions are exactly what Jesus felt toward the believers James addressed in James 4:4. After all that He had done for them, they had been unfaithful to their sacred relationship with Him as the Bride of Christ by embracing a sinful relationship with the world.

In tomorrow’s Sparkling Gem, I will explain in depth what the believers did to prompt James to refer to them as “adulteresses” so that you never have to cross that line yourself. But today, why don’t you take a moment to look inwardly and carefully examine your life. Do you see anything that would cause the Holy Spirit to feel violated by your actions? After all He has done for you — regenerating you, filling you, and sanctifying you — I know that you would never want to intentionally cause the Spirit of God pain and sorrow. So make sure that you are living in such a way that will always give Him pleasure, not grief!

MY PRAYER FOR TODAY

Holy Spirit, I repent and ask You to forgive me for all the times I’ve walked too close to the world and violated Your holy indwelling presence by allowing sinful actions and attitudes to persist in my life. I am truly sorry, and today I repent before You. I ask You to strengthen me with Your mighty power to walk with a higher discernment and with the spiritual awareness to know when I am doing something that is grievous to You. I want to honor Your presence and honor You by the way I treat You with my life.

I pray this in Jesus’ name!

MY CONFESSION FOR TODAY

I confess that I live a life that is pleasing to the Holy Spirit. When I do something that hints of displeasure to Him, I quickly recognize it and repent of it. I do not permit wrong attitudes and actions to rule me. Instead, I surrender to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and it produces the life and character of Christ in my own life. Day by day, I am becoming more sensitive and spiritually aware of the things that displease the Lord, and I am learning to walk a higher walk in Him.

I declare this by faith in Jesus’ name!

QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO CONSIDER

Are there any areas of your life that are out of sync with the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence? What are those areas? If you are aware of them, is there a reason you have tolerated them instead of repenting and getting your heart right with the Holy Spirit?

When the Holy Spirit is grieved because of our attitudes and actions, our own spirits are grieved as well. Have you felt grief and sorrow in your own heart when you did things that were displeasing to the Lord?

What are some of the areas in which you’ve made progress and no longer habitually repeat sins as you once did? If you’ve had victories, you need to remember them and thank God for them!

[numbersbythebook]

133, Methuselah ,Korah

written by Will Schumaker

I have been studying the number 19 lately.  When Jesus was announced as risen from the dead, the word “risen” had an in-text gematria of 133.

Jesus’ resurrection is the most important event in history of mankind.  He conquered death and all the promises were secured for us.

133 = 7x19.  19 seems to be about the end of a cycle of time.  7 seems to be about divine perfection and holiness.  Since the 19th Hebrew letter Quph is stands for holiness, there would seem in my mind something special about the number 133 or 7x19, since 7 and 19 have a relationship to each other.

In the 19 year cycle of the sun and moon there are 7 leap years.

The seventh day was made holy.

Genesis 2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

I looked at verse 133.

Genesis 5:27 And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

Methuselah comes from two roots meaning “man” and “send forth”. He is the man on a mission or missionary man.  Abarim Productions has a nice explanation on the name if you care.

When you look at the Genesis 5 geneology, you see Jared the descender, Enoch the trained, and Methuselah the missionary man.  Jesus, the word of God, descended from above and trained man to go on a mission.

Methuselah is the Church age therefore.  Clay has spoken of this.  969 = sum of triangle numbers  1 through 153.  969 = 19x 17 x 3.  There is the number 19 again.

When the Church age or man’s mission is done then comes the flood or wrath of God.

Methuselah numbers are constantly tied to John the Baptist ( I have a couple old posts on this). The gematria of verse 133 is 4746.  John’s message of repentance which is our message as a church has the same gematria of 4746.

Matthew 3:2 And saying, Repent ye: for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

The first verse that has a gematria of 133 in it is about the completion of creation.  Again 19 and completion.

Genesis 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

I looked at chapter 133 of the Bible.  It is about Korah’s rebellion.

Korah challenged Moses’ authority.  Korah said everyone is holy. (the number 19 again) Those and all that followed him were thrown alive into the pit.

Numbers 16:33 They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.

This verse is numerically significant because it has a gematria of 2879. 

Strong’s G2879 = Korah.  They match.

Korah is a Levite, so he is special or holy.  He was not a priest, because he was not of the line of Aaron.  But he was set apart for the work of the Tabernacle.  Later in first Chronicles we read about the sons of Korah were in charge as gatekeepers.

 1 Chronicles 9:19 And Shallum the son of Kore, the son of Ebiasaph, the son of Korah, and his brethren, of the house of his father, the Korahites, were over the work of the service, keepers of the gates of the tabernacle: and their fathers, being over the host of the LORD, were keepers of the entry.

So Korah was set apart, yet chose to rebel and was cast into the pit and perished from the congregation.

Symbolically to me Korah sounds like what Revelation calls the whore of Babylon.

Mystery Babylon is robed in purple and scarlet.  So was the Tabernacle.

Revelation 17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

Exodus 26:1 Moreover thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of cunning work shalt thou make them.

Mystery Babylon was arrayed in gold and precious stones.  This refers to kingship and royalty.

2 Samuel 12:30 And he took their king's crown from off his head, the weight whereof was a talent of gold with the precious stones: and it was set on David's head. And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great abundance.

New Jerusalem is also covered in gold and precious stones.

Revelation 21:18  And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass.          

Revelation 21:19 And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald;

Babylon is called a mystery just like the Church is a mystery.

Colossians 1:27 To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:

Thus you should be able to see the connection to Korah as a Levite and chosen of God who rebelled and chose not to walk in the faith with mystery Babylon who is a picture of all who throughout history have been called of God and chosen to not walk in the faith.

Korah has a gematria of 308.

Strong’s G4204 = harlot or whore has a gematria of 308.  They match.

This is Bible verse 4204.

Numbers 16:9 Seemeth it but a small thing unto you, that the God of Israel hath separated you from the congregation of Israel, to bring you near to himself to do the service of the tabernacle of the LORD, and to stand before the congregation to minister unto them?

This verse about Korah’s rebellion has a gematria of 4204.

Numbers 16:2 And they rose up before Moses, with certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown:

Strong’s G2879 Korah is used 1 time in the New Testament.

Jude 1:11 Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.

If you add 308 verses to Jude you get this verse about the whore, mystery Babylon, being judged by being burned with fire:

Revelation 17:16 And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

The daughter of the High Priest was to be burned if she was found to be a whore.  Israel is God’s children.

Leviticus 21:9 And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

This verse is in direct opposition to the verse that says the High Priest must marry a virgin.

Leviticus 21:13 And he shall take a wife in her virginity.

So in Revelation you have the 144,000, which are the Church, called virgins sealed on their foreheads and you have mystery Babylon, the whore written on their forehead.

Also the 250 followers of Korah were burned with fire.

Numbers 16:35 And there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.

Also of note is that Lev 21:9 is verse 609 of Leviticus.

Leviticus 21:9 And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

Esau has a gematria of 609 in the New Testament. I have wrote of him as a type of those marked by the Beast.  He was the first born who chose his fleshly desires over his birthright.  Esau and Korah are types of each other.  The first Korah in the Bible was born to Esau.

Genesis 36:5 And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these are the sons of Esau, which were born unto him in the land of Canaan.

Notice Strong’s G609 = ”cut off”.  Otherwise you will go into hell and into fire.  The High Priest’s daughter who was a whore was burned with fire.  Korah went into a pit, which also is translated as hell, and his 250 followers were burned with fire.

Mark 9:43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:

The only verse with a gematria of 609 in the Bible fits very nicely with who Korah and Esau typify:

Isaiah 1:22 Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: God says I have called you, I have revealed myself to you, I have died for you but you chose me not and have diluted yourselves of what you should be and can be and have chosen the world over Me.

[nolimitsongrace]

June 21: Spiritual Adultery

Spiritual AdulteryJune 21, 2019

Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. — James 4:4

Up to this point, we have covered Jesus’ teaching on the ministry of the Holy Spirit in John 14, 15, and 16, and we’ve learned how to develop a more intimate and personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. Now we’re going to shift our focus to another vital aspect of the Holy Spirit’s ministry found in the New Testament.

As you will see in the days to come, the Holy Spirit lives within us like a Divine Lover. When believers allow the things of the world to usurp the place that should belong only to Him, the Holy Spirit — like a violated spouse — feels hurt and grief. It’s therefore vital that we gain a deeper understanding of how sin affects the indwelling Holy Spirit so we can purpose to change any permissive attitude toward sin that may linger in our lives and to live holier and more consecrated before Him in love.

In James 4:4 and 5, James referred to the nature of the believer’s relationship with Christ and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit in the believer’s heart. He wrote, “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”

*[If you started reading this from your email, begin reading here.]

Throughout the New Testament, believers are most often referred to as “brothers and sisters.” Yet here James referred to his readers as “adulterers” and “adulteresses.” Imagine if a great spiritual leader wrote to you and called you an adulterer or adulteress! This is especially strong language when you consider that James was writing to Jewish believers, who could have been stoned for committing adultery. In fact, James couldn’t have said anything more shocking or outrageous to his audience! However, this adultery he was referring to was not a physical act, but rather a spiritual adultery that they had committed by giving their hearts to things other than Jesus Christ.

The Greek word for “adultery” is moichalis, and it carries all kind of connotations. Unfaithfulness, impurity, and violating a commitment to marriage are just a few. This word paints the picture of a wounded spouse who feels rejected, betrayed, misled, and deceived because the sanctity of his or her marriage relationship was recklessly thrown away by the act of adultery. All of these ideas are embedded in the Greek word moichalis.

So what had these believers done to be addressed in such a way? James explained, “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye know not that friendship with the world is enmity with God…?”

To illustrate James’ point, let me share an example from my own life. In the early years of our marriage, Denise and I led a single-adult ministry in a large denominational church. During this time, we developed a program to help single adults who had recently gone through a divorce. As we listened to the concerns of these precious believers, we discovered that most of these people felt like they were outcasts from the Church. So we made it a point to open our hearts and emphasize “life after divorce” as a primary message of our ministry. Soon newly divorced people came to us from all over to receive ministry, love, acceptance, and healing. It was one of the most gratifying, yet troublesome, periods of ministry we had ever experienced.

It was gratifying to see people who had been so rejected and wounded being healed by the love of Jesus Christ. However, it was very troublesome to hear the pain many of these believers felt as a result of being betrayed by someone they loved and trusted. Day after day, we would sit and listen as each one shared his or her story. Out of approximately 100 cases, nearly all sounded similar — so similar, in fact, that eventually I could almost finish most of their stories for them.

Again and again, these emotionally bruised people lamented, “I just don’t understand how he could do that to me. After all these years of being faithful to him, raising our children together, and working to help him through school, I don’t understand how could hurt me like this.” Or, “How could she do this to me after I’ve given her so much? I gave her my love, my attention, all that I knew to do. How could she do this to me?”

These intense, painful emotions are exactly what Jesus felt toward the believers James addressed in James 4:4. After all that He had done for them, they had been unfaithful to their sacred relationship with Him as the Bride of Christ by embracing a sinful relationship with the world.

In tomorrow’s Sparkling Gem, I will explain in depth what the believers did to prompt James to refer to them as “adulteresses” so that you never have to cross that line yourself. But today, why don’t you take a moment to look inwardly and carefully examine your life. Do you see anything that would cause the Holy Spirit to feel violated by your actions? After all He has done for you — regenerating you, filling you, and sanctifying you — I know that you would never want to intentionally cause the Spirit of God pain and sorrow. So make sure that you are living in such a way that will always give Him pleasure, not grief!

MY PRAYER FOR TODAY

Holy Spirit, I repent and ask You to forgive me for all the times I’ve walked too close to the world and violated Your holy indwelling presence by allowing sinful actions and attitudes to persist in my life. I am truly sorry, and today I repent before You. I ask You to strengthen me with Your mighty power to walk with a higher discernment and with the spiritual awareness to know when I am doing something that is grievous to You. I want to honor Your presence and honor You by the way I treat You with my life.

I pray this in Jesus’ name!

MY CONFESSION FOR TODAY

I confess that I live a life that is pleasing to the Holy Spirit. When I do something that hints of displeasure to Him, I quickly recognize it and repent of it. I do not permit wrong attitudes and actions to rule me. Instead, I surrender to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and it produces the life and character of Christ in my own life. Day by day, I am becoming more sensitive and spiritually aware of the things that displease the Lord, and I am learning to walk a higher walk in Him.

I declare this by faith in Jesus’ name!

QUESTIONS FOR YOU TO CONSIDER

Are there any areas of your life that are out of sync with the Holy Spirit’s indwelling presence? What are those areas? If you are aware of them, is there a reason you have tolerated them instead of repenting and getting your heart right with the Holy Spirit?

When the Holy Spirit is grieved because of our attitudes and actions, our own spirits are grieved as well. Have you felt grief and sorrow in your own heart when you did things that were displeasing to the Lord?

What are some of the areas in which you’ve made progress and no longer habitually repeat sins as you once did? If you’ve had victories, you need to remember them and thank God for them!