alight with fire, and yet it felt cast into darkness at the same time, like I was watching the world burn from some faraway place.
Coralene’s grip on me eased and I looked down on her. Tears flowed from her eyes, eyes that seemed tinged with red, as if her tears were mixed with blood. I realized why a moment later when I looked at our surroundings. The images imparted by her gift were now a reality. I could not gather my thoughts on what to do quickly enough. An explosion ripped the deck apart beneath our feet throwing us in opposite directions. The dull sensation of the concussion made it feel as though time were standing perfectly still. I was airborne for what seemed like years, even the feeling of my body hitting the deck of the craft was numbed by the sensation that could only have been the result of Coralene’s hold on me.
I scrambled to get to the nearest weapons depot to help guard the craft. I knew it was all for naught, everyone was going to die regardless of my actions, fate decreed it. Apparently fate did have a hold on our lives after all.
“Coralene!” I screamed, hoping she could hear me over the blasts erupting around us. She descended beside me almost immediately, her feet barely touching the deck beneath her.
“Now do you believe?” she asked, but I was too involved with defending the craft to answer.
I pulled the trigger and watched as the Daliqian bombers exploded in the air from each projectile I sent their way.
“Do you believe?” she asked yet again.
I turned my burning eyes toward her and could see a fierce intent in her eyes—I could tell she needed to hear that I believed her. I looked away like a coward and maintained my position, each pull of the trigger jarring my body as the recoil moved through me until Coralene placed her hands on my cheeks and turned me to face her.
“Do you believe?” she asked.
My eyes watered as the heat of the flames scorched the air that surrounded me. The only beauty in all of the chaos that surrounded us was the woman that I was looking at. Her eyes bore into me and tore at my heart in a way that I had never experienced before.
“Yes, I believe,” I gasped and realized that I choked down sobs as I spoke. “I believe.”
She wrapped me into her arms one last time as I felt the quake of destruction boil over us. I could not feel the pain as much as I felt the motion of falling. There was no fear, only expectancy. Life was over, and I had lost everything.
“May.”
I heard her voice and felt her hands over my body. Everything felt like it was on fire and my eyes burned as I opened them. It wasn’t from the flames, but from the violet canopy under which we lay beneath the heavens.
“It’s all right, I’m here,” she said as I blinked and flinched, trying to figure out what had happened.
“What happened? I thought we were dead,” I said sharply.
“We would have been, had you not chosen to believe,” she replied, her hand rested on my chest. The violet hue lit up her face and I could see a bit of the landscape through the transparent parts of the canopy that she had created.
“What is this?”
“This is the power of belief. This is what has saved us. Our love and our faith.”
“How could this be? We should surely be dead.”
“We should, but we are not. Fate has given us a second chance to right the wrongs of this world.”
“How can we do this?” I asked. The concept of righting a world so full of hate seemed impossibly daunting.
“By teaching acceptance, by rewarding peace. That is our fate.”
“Surely you are mistaken,” I said. “This world does not crave peace.”
“Make no mistake about it, May. We have a bigger purpose here than destroying the world. Otherwise I would not have been sent to find you.”
“What do you mean you were sent to find me?”
Coralene sat up and the canopy warped to allow her new position to maintain cover. She looked up at the sky before speaking. “I am not a Hybrium, I am a messenger of the heavens.” She looked down at me with tears in her eyes. “I was sent to protect you in hopes that you would spread the word of peace across the land or else this entire world will die.”
Her story sounded too fantastic, too unreal. No one was ever chosen by the heavens. No one ever even spoke of the myths of heaven that had once circulated our world thousands of years ago. “Are you talking about the God of Heaven?”
“Yes.”
“No one speaks of those myths anymore. Most of our history has been destroyed and condemned as lies.”
“He is aware, but that bears little on the truth.”
“Can you prove to me that this God really exists?” I asked.
“I thought I already had. You would not be breathing now if it were not for His existence.”
That was debatable given my recollection of the truth.
“If I can’t see for myself then I can’t believe,” I said hesitantly.
“You already believed. You told me so.”
“I meant I believed in what you showed me, not in some higher power.”
“What I showed you was a higher power,” she stated, clearly hurt by my doubt.
What had changed? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt betrayed. I felt condemned to something that I was powerless to control and I needed, no craved that control.
“Are you going to prove this God’s existence or not?”
“If I show you then you will die, it is as simple as that.”
With every ounce of my will I wanted to cry out that she was toying with me, or it was toying with me. “Then let me die.”
“You don’t mean this.” She placed her hand on my shoulder. Her touch was cold at first but then it began to burn.
“I do,” I said as I grasped her wrist and pulled her hand away from me. I made eye contact with her one last time before the violet canopy dissolved, allowing the radiation and fire to fall onto my skin and scorch what was left of me. I strained to keep my eyes open, the pain welling up deep inside my damned soul. I knew that the end was coming, but I did not welcome it, instead it was regret that etched its name into my heart.
I should have believed, I should have had faith in what Coralene had to say, but I was faithless. I knew too much pain to want to know the truth. Ignorance was bliss, and far less painful.
My lungs burned as I breathed in the ashy ozone that had befallen this world. Predestination was not a choice. It was the cold truth that coursed over a world hell-bent on destruction, for there is no turning back—we would have all died whether I believed or not. It wasn’t a self-edifying truth that I finally realized the harsh reality of our peril. It was self-depraving acceptance. I was to die without knowing love, to end my time without knowing the essence of faith. I was to go about eternity as the ash beneath the feet of the victor.
My own shallow hell. My own shallow choice.
In those last moments of life, as I looked up at the shiftless form that was my Coralene, I noticed the imperfections scrawling across her skin. They began as small fractures that seeped a blinding light from the cuts that spread across her body. It reminded me of a marble form straining from the stress fractures that occurred over time. I was no longer breathing, but I could still see her fall to pieces like a paper doll caught in a flame. Her body fell away as my belief faded into the ash that now smothered my body.
An empty form of faithless woes, caught in the tumult of the end. Should I have believed, and basked in the shelter of a predetermined fate, or was I right to have shunned the concept all together? How do you come to terms with the end? How do you reconcile the vile, and the wretched, amongst a shadowed concept of its opposite, veiled by your peripheral vision, hidden in the deepest parts of your soul that cries out for what it does not have?
How do you live with the consequences of either?
“Time of death, 17:35,” Dr. Trive said to the nurse standing beside him.
I tried to blink my eyes but I could not. The triage room was filled with light that was mu
ch darker in contrast to the light above me. I looked up, then down, before I realized that I could see each perspective simultaneously. The nurse, Coralene, laid a gentle hand upon the forehead of what had been my body, torn to pieces by the Daliqian rebels, all for information that would have led to a peaceful resolution to the wars.
I felt a pain in what I had known to be my heart, yet it no longer existed. I no longer existed. My soul had been torn from my body and I had not yet passed over. According to the myths that surrounded death it was only a matter of time before my body breathed its last. I felt Coralene place tokens over my closed eyes, payment for the transfer to the other side. I felt it without having the sense of touch. I smelled the scene around me without having the sense of smell. I had no way of explaining it, but I just had a sense of being, of knowing.
Coralene pressed her beautiful lips upon my body’s own lips and kissed a final goodbye. She had been my nurse, but even more than that, she had been my wife. Now I was gone, the war had taken me away from her. She had told me at our wedding that she did not care about the fact that we were not of the same race that love was deeper than that. Love was a thing that dwelt and breathed deep in another’s soul. She had been my soul match.
The tears fell from her eyes, and her body gave a gentle quiver as the sobs welled deep inside of her. She placed delicate fingers along the ring that I had given her on our wedding day—it held much meaning to her. It was the only symbol of faith that I had ever shown her. A faith that I had not shared, but she