The Chronicles of Sin: The City of Magic
© Domenic Marbaniang, 2013
ISBN: 9781549551635
A Mysterious Encounter
T
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he dim lights
flickered on the street as I turned in the key and got inside my house. It was
dark. So, I reached my hand to turn on the lights when I heard a strangely
sweet but cynical voice,
My heart stopped
for a moment and chilly sweat drops broke onto my forehead. I felt numb and
powerless. I shuddered, wanting to open the door and flee but was motionless.
Then into the pale moonlight creeping through the window walked the tall
silhouette of a woman dressed in a dark robe and a hood pulled over. By her
waist hung the appearance of a sheathed sword.
“Sit down!” she
ordered. I slumped into the chair.
“Who are you?” I
mumbled to ask.
She walked out of
the silhouette and came closer to me. She had the venomous fragrance of a
thousand roses from the vale of death.
“Would you really
know me? Yet, I am not unknown to any human and my praise echoes in the
corridors of the darkest regions. Light and wisdom are dalliances of leisure. I
reign in the deepest realities of mortal hearts. And, deep beneath the outward
mask of their talks of reason, boils the volcanic furnace of my invincible
treason. I am the invincible one, the all sovereign, the orchestrator of all
vice, the mother of Death! By me are wars raged, cities ravaged, and histories
erased. By me is order and confusion, darkness and light. For me are cities
built, economies constructed, markets invented, and commodities made. My voice
do all mortals obey; princes and paupers, sinners and saints, preachers and
hearers, the wise and the fool: they make no difference to me – all have bled
under my blade. My kingdom is the largest and my servants as numerous as the
stars of the sky. Would there be anyone who would heap up words and statements
to despise my strength, I would meet him in a place that he considers safest
and there watch him turn pale, numb, powerless, and fall before my face. I
invalidate their reason and falsify their beliefs by turning their bestial
passions over them. My name is dreaded in the monasteries and shunned in the
universities. Yet, none can escape my power; my venomous arrows lay plunged
like barbed hooks in their hearts. They know me by different names in different
lands. Some call me good and some call me bad, some call me natural and others
call me infernal [she laughed sinisterly here]; a few think I am a kind of
disease that must be cured…”
She touched the
hilt of her blade, pulled it a little and pushed it back – my heart thumped.
“I am Sin.” She
said.
At this moment my
mind felt like a black hole; it almost felt that it would explode from the
pressure of confusion and tedious emptiness that increased with every word I
heard.
“Sin?” I muttered.
She unsheathed her
sword and it dazzled in the moonlight. She raised it towards me, I cringed; she
said:
“Shouldn’t you see
the world of the neither-not,
Where ideas live
and where battles are fought?
To a world unseen;
to the world of thought;
To the world where
now rests your lot
To remain with me
and be conveyed across
These fringes of
time to Death’s Dark House!”
And, she turned her
sword and there seemed to be worms of light rushing over the blade in such
velocity that within the twinkling of an eye there were sparks, a blaze, a
crackling explosion and I found myself standing on an endless bridge over an
endless ocean. There was no sun or moon or star above, but the sky was filled
with a pale reddish light resembling a dusky evening all over. The only
difference was that this evening seemed to be endless. There were people of all
sorts walking over the broad bridge, and there were dim lamp posts, sign posts,
every here and there. Many people were reading the posts as they walked; some
looked confident, but most appeared confused. For a moment, I was caught away
in watching the people and the things around, but then my eyes fell on two
young men fighting with each other with switchblades in hand and I remembered
the lady and the vision, but couldn’t understand what was happening. I thought
to myself, “This must be a dream” and so pinched myself to wake me up, but I
was still there on that endless bridge, seemingly all lost.
The two young men had
now reached at a handbreadth of me as they yelled and struck at each other. One
of them was about to tip over me, but I held out my hands to hold him and
cried, “Stop! Stop! Stop it! Why do you fight?”
He pushed me away
and I staggered to fall, but then I felt that some hands had come behind me and
restored my balance. I turned around and saw a heavy-built man who appeared to
be a police officer. He didn’t look at me but rushed towards the young men, who
on seeing him began to run away. He chased them for a few yards and then
stopped and returned. I said, “You should have caught them; for, they’ll get
away and find another place to fight and kill each other!”
“If one of them
really needed to be defended, he would have submitted to me,” he replied. “If both
of them really want to kill each other, then let them kill each other and die;
for, we can’t keep them perpetually in jail anyway.”
“But shouldn’t you
stop them from such evil, seeing that they are bent on killing themselves?”
“What difference is
it to you and me, if they are up for a duel and have agreed to kill each other?
They are a law unto themselves,” he replied.
“But, then if you
allow this, then by the same token you ought also to allow it if everyone
decided to kill each other; then, wouldn’t that be the greatest
self-destruction of people, society, and humanity?”
He stared at me
with a vexed glance and then said, “I think, stranger, that you’re wasting both
your time and mine. You seem to have come here to tour this country and so seem
to be having plenty of time; but I have none. Sorry, I have to go.” And so
saying, he proceeded to go away in the direction from which he had come,
opposite to that in which the two young men had gone; but then turning around
while walking backwards away, he quipped, “If everyone in the world decided to
kill each other, no law or law enforcement would be able to prevent them from
doing so.” So he said and then turned around and walked away into the twilight.
I watched him
disappear and was very much perplexed by what he had said. I didn’t feel it
right that the two young men were left to the fate that their passions had
triggered in their souls. Yet, I also knew that every man couldn’t have a
policeman after him to stop him from an evil that he felt he had reasons to do,
or at least, couldn’t avoid doing. “Don’t such ‘reasons’ solidify into rules
and, when accepted on a major scale, become laws of society; so that what was
once considered noble is today considered to be oppression?” I began to walk in
the direction in which the two boys had fled, not knowing where to go. There
were a greater number of people walking in that direction and it seemed safer
to me to be with the crowd. I walked for a little while in this manner, but the
more I walked, the longer the bridge seemed to grow, and I began to feel
anxious and tired. I thought to stop and rest for a moment, and so went to the
rail of the bridge and leaned on it with my arms, looking out at the vast
expanse of the ocean.
“Are you lost?” a
voice asked, and I turned around.
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