Editing The Tragedy of Thing-tan (section)

== End 2 ==

The Paladin catches up to me twenty years after our last encounter. He finds me because I let him find me. Ever since I devoured my cousin, I had gotten better at being my victims. I would choose carefully, devouring a new life once every few years, eating the biomass, but not the souls, of criminals to sustain myself in the interim. I would choose my new lives from those who needed me; the destitute, the hopeless, the lonely. I chose them because they needed to be loved in the way that only I can love. I chose them because they needed saving. Once they became a part of me, I would live their lives for many years, setting their affairs in order, building them a legacy, and then, when the new voice inside of me felt satisfied, I would move on.

Over the decades my family grew, and The Paladin, he never stopped hunting me. But he didn’t find me; I had become so good at hiding that tracking me down became impossible. 

And then, one day, I didn’t need to hide anymore. One day, my newest sister came to me. She was a scholar of the arcane and divine both, a faithful of Pelor, like myself, and a mind brilliant enough to find the truth about me when nobody else in the world could.

But she came to me broken; she had lost her daughter to my cousin. The girl had been among the first devoured in that awful incident so many years ago, and her life had been a hollow shell ever since. She blamed herself; she and her daughter, they hadn’t even been from that city. She was there for a conference at the arcane college and she had left her child alone to play while she was buried in her research. By the time she heard what was happening, the battle had already been hours over, my cousin long since devoured, her child embraced into my growing sisterhood. Like the Paladin, she’d spent the decades since then tracking me down. Unlike him, it was not to destroy me, but to be consumed by me; to join her lost child after so many years of loneliness.

I’m wearing her skin and sitting patiently in my temple as the Paladin enters. His armor is ragged and his hair is grey. His muscles have grown lean and wirey and his eyes have a hollow, haunted look about them. He no longer wears his holy symbol. His sword is drawn.

“I found you,” he snarls, “Devourer, abomination, I finally found you.”

“You did,” I say gently. “And what has brought you here?”

“You know why I’m here!” he barks, taking a heavy step towards me. “You may have fooled the others, but not me! I know what you really are!” 

“I could snap your brittle old bones in half with a flick of my wrist,” I tell him matter-of-factly. He tenses and I smile. “I won’t, but you know I could. If you are here to kill me, I will not resist…I don’t hurt good men…but before you strike I insist that you sit across from me and tell me why you are still so intent on it after all of these years.”

He snarls, but obeys. He sits across from me, just out of arm’s reach, clutching his sword to his lap. Behind me is a mural bearing an exaggerated depiction of my image…a gentle, motherly figure in a white shawl with hundreds of arms and a dozen gentle faces. He glowers at the icon in contempt. “That’s why,” he says.
“That old thing? Well, it’s a bit grandiose, but in my defense I didn’t paint it,” I say.

“Don’t mock me!” he yells. “You know what I mean!”

“You mean my church,” I say quietly.

“Your CHURCH,” he spits the word. “Your CULT, you mean. My superiors may recognize your ludicrous title of ‘All-Mother’, they may call this blasphemous charnel house a legitimate offshoot of the Church, but I know better! You’ve done nothing but dupe people into being your meals. Herding desperate folk into your gaping maw!”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I remind him, “It was hers,” I gesture to the body of the woman who gave me the idea to found this church, the woman I am now wearing. “And I do not advertise. Nor do I coerce. People come to me of their own free well. The broken. The lonely. I give them solace. I give them a way to lend their lives to further a just cause.”

“And besides,” I gently add before he can speak, “The Church of Pelor…you are no longer affiliated with them, are you?” 

He chokes back a curse but shakes his head.

“Tell me what happened,” I say gently, “And then you may strike.”

“Are you trying to give me Confession!?”

“I wouldn’t presume,” I say. “I only want to understand the man who has been such a crucial part of my life. I only want to know what drives you to hate me so much.”

“…I was sure that you had devoured that little girl,” he manages, his words a broken whimper.

“I was so certain that you were wearing her skin as your disguise. I couldn’t…I couldn’t risk you escaping a third time!”

“But I wasn’t ‘wearing her’ was I?”

“No,” he says.

“She was innocent, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“And you killed her,” I say reaching out to touch him. He recoils.

“I thought it was you. It was supposed to be you!”

“I’m sorry,” I say. It hurts to see such a noble man reduced to this. I once hated him. I once would have relished seeing him broken and desperate as I once was. But that was the old me. That was the person I have not been for decades. “I’m sorry you fell. I’m sorry the church did what they did. If I had known I would have come forward to defend you.” 

He’s silent for a long time, gripping his sword tightly. I’m not sure if he intends to strike or not, but if he does I won’t stop him. Perhaps that will give him some comfort.

“I know you would have,” he says finally, letting the sword fall. “I was so sure that you were a monster…”

“I was,” I say. “But people can change. They just need the chance to learn. They just need someone who loves them enough to teach them.”

He says nothing.

“What did you really come here for?” I ask.

“It’s been five years since I killed that poor girl,” he says. “Five years, and nobody has given me shelter or succor. Five years and my brothers still spit on me. Five years and I am still beyond forgiveness.”

“It must have been lonely,” I say. This time he lets me touch his cheek. Each line etched into his face shows the weight of time and loneliness. I am beyond both of those things.

And I know why he has come to me now. “Is this what you really want, old friend?” I ask tenderly.

“Yes,” he whispers. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

I wrap my arms around him and embrace him into my family. His memories wash over me with such force that I am almost knocked flat. Decades of pain, isolation, obsession, guilt. Loneliness of such totality that it almost blackens the bright core of virtue at the heart of this man. Almost. As my brothers and sisters welcome him into the fold with open arms, I feel the loneliness dissolve, leaving only his faith, which burns throughout my being with the heat of the morning sun. I feel myself grow stronger than I had ever imagined possible. Together, he and I can do anything. Together we will accomplish miracles.

Together, we are both finally free.