Betwixt Light and Dark: My War and the Battalions I Face

*Read by the song-
The Final Countdown by Europe








The desert valley lay peaceful beneath a cloud-swept sky. To the east and west, the canyon walls loomed steep and high, their smooth slopes too sheer for any but the most fearless horse master to descend. To the south, the waves of the blue-green sea tossed themselves high; crashing into the cliffs that barred their way. To the north, far off in the distance, a travelling warrior could glimpse great mountains if his gaze were piercing, unclouded, and keen. Few warriors had such a gaze, for though many roamed in these areas of the wild, alone or with his or her war band, there had never yet a rumor spread of a battler with the name of Warrior- seer. Days when such souls had dwelt in this land were long past.

Tales were told of the deeds the Warrior- seers had done in those ages. There were many of the old men who held the younger generations captive with their stories of estranged lovers brought together again after years apart. Travelling warrior scholars regaled their spell-bound listeners with tales of entire mountain ranges brought into being with a single word spoken, of oceans and rivers that ceased to flow simply to allow a seer to pass, of days that lasted longer than their allotted two dozen hours, days when the sun stood still. Days when the battles fought therein found the fighters on both sides lying on their faces, too exhausted and faint from the blood they had lost, because of a day when the daylight never waned. Days when entire villages were laid low by fierce storms of a fury that had never been seen before. Days when every law that dictated the ways of Lady Nature was disobeyed.

Though the Warrior- seers were no longer to be found, the times were such that they were in the forefront of the minds of all people. War bands roamed freely across the land. Those who dared to settle in one place and build a village did so with the fragile hope that a war band would not come across they and their kinsfolk; the only hope free people had of surviving such encounters was their acceptance into the band and their own fighting savvy; if they could defeat the war band’s fiercest warrior in one on one combat, they and their kinsfolk were made part of the band. They were required to abandon their village, their traditions, their trades, and their dreams, to fight for the war band against every other, with their every breath. The idea of family, of brother and sister, mother and daughter, father and son, of cousins and uncles and aunts and other kinsfolk, was severed the moment a soul entered their band. From that moment on, a soul, whether male or female, was given to the unrestrained bloodshed of his or her enemy. The old and feeble did not survive long once they were made one of the band. If they were fortunate, they passed into the void within a week, the toils and struggles of the band overcoming their minimal strength. Their bodies were left unburied, their remains left victim to Lady Nature and the beasts that roamed the land.

The young were drawn immediately into conflict, those who were already part of the band teaching them the art of war from the moment of entry. Regardless of age, children were given the harsh tools of battle. The thick leather clothing, the armored helms, breastplates, leg and arm shields, were thrust before their impressionable young eyes. Metals of all kinds composed the armor they chose from. Steel, aluminum, tin, bronze, copper, silver, gold, nickel, titanium. The weapons arrayed before them likewise were of every metal imaginable; swords both curved or straight, spears short or long, maces with metal-spiked balls swung on chains or with heavy heads set on a solid shaft. The children were taught in the most practical and realistic setting available: in mortal combat with each other. The gentle toys and games enjoyed in the villages they left behind were replaced by the weapons and battles their war band gave to them in the stead of what they had known before. Though free people still lived in numerous areas and had many places of retreat and resort, each of them could feel the proverbial walls of eternal war closing in upon them.

Many of the free people, to survive in a world that was becoming more and more defined by war, bloodshed, bondage, and death, formed travelling villages; free people learned by the harsh realities of nomad life how to defend themselves against the war bands. Every member of the families and kinships that made up their people were bound together by necessity, by the ties of common blood, by the love between each other, by their hatred of the bloodthirsty animals that the members of the war bands became, and most importantly by the kidnapping of their precious children. Fear of the war bands, which in the beginning of their formation had caused people of the free world to flee, to hide, and to pray to their gods for deliverance, was changed almost overnight once free people headed out onto the trail they would make by the pounding of their own feet. Those feet, already working together in the villages at their back, were made one by the rigors of the wild land they embraced.

When a free people met a war band upon the trail, the most bitter, bloody, and decimating conflict took place. Free fighters freely bled, giving no quarter to the members of the war band. Those of the band, equal to the free fighters in battle and more powerful in their darkness and weaponry, sought to destroy them; dividing their numbers by their own, pitting their dark children against the home- bred, sun- taught youth of the free fighters, the war bands inevitably prevailed in such conflicts. They did not, however, succeed in their purpose of integrating the surviving free fighters into their band, for no free fighter ever survived. A free fighter would never surrender; every last one fought to his or her death. Because of this choice of the free fighters, the war band was destroyed at its heart. No dark warrior could remain with others of his or her kind after being pierced by the light that dwelt in a free fighter’s indomitable heart.

Free people everywhere knew in their souls that they were standing on the cusp of the most terrible battle that they and their kin and every free fighter everywhere would face.

The battle for the preservation of their right to choose whether or not they would take another breath.

. . . . . . . . . .


It has been two centuries and one half since the time that I walked among the sons and daughters of Man. I have seen births and deaths innumerable. I have seen the hearts of mothers break, and the strength of fathers fail. I have seen sons thrust out as innocent thieves from the place they called home, to seek humble shelter among those few they knew out in the cold world. I have seen daughters unwittingly abused because of the lack of understanding their abusers had of who they were: precious daughters of the God above their cursed heads. My own Brothers have fled this land, for they have lost their hope that this wretched world can yet be saved from the chains that bind it fast; chains whose ending lies in the hand of him who is the enemy of all of God’s children. Those who yet serve the light in this area of the earth are vastly outnumbered by our enemy’s
adopted children, children who once belonged to our dwindling ranks. Children whose darkening souls are being taught by our enemy to hate the light that gave them birth.

I myself am one of them. The darkness in my soul is deeper than that of any other man; the abuse I have received at others’ hands and dealt back again is harsher and more heartless than the abuse suffered by daughters of God upon this earth. The light that I have known is brighter than the noonday sun; I can no longer gaze upon it and receive no harm as I once did. My eyes are no longer the pure oracles they once were. I have embraced the light and turned and walked away more times than an immortal mind such as my own can recall. I have been immersed in God’s light and buried beneath the enemy’s dark chains. I cannot die unless I so choose, and yet the endless stretches of time before my eyes, eyes that are both piercing, unclouded, and keen, hold no answers for me of what I should do. I cannot choose between light and dark, for both hold priceless treasures for me. Both make up a vital, irrevocable half of whom and what I am. I do not see evil in the darkness; I see the desire of God’s children to experience the wonders of this world in all their unshielded, unfiltered, natural, breathtaking, soul shaking, brutally honest splendor.

I see heaven’s light in my enemy’s darkness. I cannot choose between them, for they have become one and the same.

Here I sit, in the center of my wind swept valley, canyon walls before and behind. The sea is far away to my left; its waves I have sailed, its winds and storms I have survived, its ebbs and flows I have committed to my memory. I am caught at the center of them all.

Hills and vales, small mountains and great mountains and razor sharp peaks I see in the far distance to my right. No sweet singing birds fly overhead to ease my wandering heart’s song. No desert or mountain animals scurry around me among the tufts of grass and rocks and desert trees scattered throughout this place. No living creatures live within miles, though the climate and natural food available for them abounds. It does not look it to the naked eye, but to such eyes as mine, eyes touched by God’s own hand, I see the innumerable hosts of men who have died here, battles and wars of every kind and by every people. It is in this place that every soul comes to die, for it is not a battlefield for legions of trained soldiers, or hosts of the roaming horse people, nor yet for the hosts of light and dark whose paths will soon bring them here, to face each other as two fully fledged hosts, born and bred in exact opposition to each other. Their very nature compels them to seek each other’s total annihilation.

This is the battlefield where souls are saved from the darkness and embraced by the light, or where those souls are overcome by the darkness to become servants of our common enemy.

And so here I wait, standing upon the eve of the day when these powerful forces shall meet, upon the spot where I now stand, to bring the human race to an end. My task, which I have awaited two and a half centuries to complete, is impossible for any but the most impossible of Warrior- seers, impossible for their acceptance of all things in opposition, impossible for all seers save one.

Impossible for any save the Warrior- seer who dared to take both into his broken heart long ago in the hopes that such forces, brought together, would join to create a place where opposites would dwell in peace.

The Warrior- seer who, depending upon the People’s choice of life or death, war or peace, love or hate, will end this conflict forever. Either they will swear by their eternal souls to cease their warring, lay down the weapons of death they carry, accept the truth that their opponents have as much worth as they themselves do, and become one, or I will take my own weapon up again, and fulfill the heartbreakingly bittersweet fate it was destined for. It will break my already broken heart. It will never be mended again; shattered for eternity by the task required at its own cost.

My weapon shall be wielded against them, and by my own immortal hand will I end this eternal conflict.

I will slaughter them all. And in destroying forces whose essence I am, I will slaughter myself.

My own heart. My own life. My own immortal soul sacrificed to bring to pass the world’s ending.

On the morrow it will be done.


. . . . . . . . . . .



The patriarch laid his hands, one by one, upon each father’s shoulders. The fathers, gathered all round him, turned from him as soon as they felt his touch, to return to their kinships.

Every kinship stood in readiness for the fathers to return and give the word that it was time. Every family was gathered, mothers, sons and daughters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins and adopted members and in- laws, waiting upon the word to move out.

The news had traveled among the kinships, slowly at first but with increasing speed, that their enemies were gathering into one great horde of bloodthirsty savages, that they intended to fall upon them as one and wipe them from the face of the earth. Runners had been sent throughout the land from kinship to kinship, bidding all who desired to retain their rights and privileges, and to keep their families intact, to gather together in the great valley that lay at the roughly central point between the war bands’ territory and their own. The kinships who owned horses and other saddle worthy beasts were already gathering at the valley’s western edge. The rest of the kinships would be travelling all that day, and some through the night, to join their friends and fellow sufferers in one last bitter, bloody, life stealing battle against their common enemy. They would exercise their power, the power that had been handed down from their father Adam, untold ages of time long gone past. By the power that bound them together, inside and outside of time, they would stand against their enemies, outnumbered by more than one thousand to one, and fight. Their chances of surviving the conflict hinged upon one slim thread. The same thread that held the very earth they would stand upon in one piece. The same thread by which their fathers had stopped the waters from flowing. The same thread that had returned the breath to the dead man’s lungs, and removed mountains out of their place, and carried villages whole into the whirlwinds to return no more. The thread upon which the world and everything that lives in it and on it hangs.

The single, slender, simple thread of faith.