Dusk in Kalevia: Chapter 7

For a time it was only screaming and smoke and the hail of bullets from the hillside, until the barrage slackened into the claps of scattered gunshots. Damien could hear moans and weeping down in the gulch, death murmurs of the wounded. With a growing sense of desolation, he spurred his spooked horse forward into the aftermath.

Teepee walls hung in shreds, revealing their lifeless inhabitants. A woman curled on the ground, her buckskin soaked in blood, clutching the still-warm body of her newborn beneath her. A group of young men, tangled together as they fell, limp hands stretching out desperately for their rifles. Children were sprawled and torn on the snow, the finality of their deaths inscribed in red on white.

He saw a flash of color and movement to his right. Survivors dashed like jackrabbits for the open plains, long black braids whipping out behind them in their flight, shedding terror in their wake. He rolled on the waves of their emotion, galloping after those flickers of light. As he rode, he felt a hundred feet tall, shadow wings unfurling across the entire sky, stronger than any human could possibly imagine.

Until the last one ran by.

She passed like the sun in the heavens. Infinite warmth and infinite sadness streaked by his horse out toward open ground, strands of light bursting out to those who ran before her.

Damien reared back his horse and stared, frozen in her brightness. . He felt a jolt shoot up his spine.

This was it–he had foundhis adversary. It would be over soon.

“Go on, get after ‘em!” Captain Varnum shouted as he galloped by.

Damien dug his spurs into his horse’s side, and they leapt into motion so fast the wind tore tears from the corners of his eyes. He saw the blurry shapes of the runners grow before him as the cavalry drove them across the open expanse. The chase spanned a few mad seconds, and then it was over before it had barely begun, the soldiers on their horses circling a huddled group of Indians.

As Damien looked down at them, he realized with a sick turn of his stomach that their captives were children; most couldn’t have been more than twelve. They stared back up at him with eyes defiant and terrified, silently accusing their attackers and hiding the fear that roiled up inside each of them. They were afraid of the murderers who surrounded them, afraid of the rifle barrels pointed at their hearts, afraid of the dissolution of their entire world. They were afraid of him.

Now, more than ever, he hated humans. They were all rotten, always coming up with things like this to abuse each other–and he a custom-made instrument of torment. A government that wanted to break a people, beat them down until there was nothing left but timid and compliant husks, and he was pulled down, down, down into the snow and the emptiness and the cruel waste of an endless cycle. No escape for Solas the Shadow–nothing to do but finish what they had brought him here for.

As he rode around the children, he began to drink, stripping them of the last of their pitiful hope. Bitter as hemlock, sweet as song, it filled his hungry soul.

He didn’t remember the bright woman entering the circle, but suddenly there she was, arms spread in a gesture of protection and herding the smallest behind her. He noticed how the fringes of buckskin swayed on her outstretched arms, her chest unguarded against the threat. The soldiers cursed at her and made threatening gestures with their guns, but she ignored them; when she looked up, it was though she only saw Damien.

Her face was young and so impossibly alive. Chin up, back straight, she spoke softly in a language he didn’t understand, and opened her mind to him, just for a moment.

So, my Shadow, you’ve finally come for me.

The touch of the Angel of Light on his psyche set him aflame, a blaze that sucked him in and threatened to crumble him into submission.

Zophiel? That’s you in there, isn’t it? Damien jumped at the connection too eagerly and the voice cooled, erecting a barrier and withdrawing, leaving only a faint whisper.

I will not beg for my life. I simply ask you: Let me live.

Stop. We are nearing the end, you and I. This has to happen.

Shoot me and the dream of a people dies.

With that, she opened the floodgates.

He could see everything. He saw the Prophet Wovoka teaching the dance, saw the dancers chanting and circling as the drumbeats shook them with the hope of a future. He saw their dreams of the land swept clean: endless green under blue skies, buffalo herds running in dark clouds, hooves thunder in the earth. He was there as this woman danced in her Ghost Shirt, believing that with a hope so strong, something must change. They had all felt it together and seen it in her voice and steps–a bulletproof hope that could banish the white invaders and bring back what had been lost.

Solas…

Zophiel, I…

It happened too quickly for him to react. A child, fed by a momentary gasp of bravery, made a break for it–and a startled soldier fired.

The truce was shattered. The children screamed and rifles cracked, and all was chaos once more. The woman still held his gaze, daring him, forcing him to make his choice as innocents fell around her.

“Shoot! Shoot, dammit!” Varnum howled, and Damien became aware of his finger on the trigger, squeezing…

The bullet struck her in the chest, tearing a small red hole in her pale shirt. She was dead before she hit the ground.

 

In his tent back at camp, Damien curled up with a bottle of whiskey and drank it dry. Even after all those years, the night after the final battle hadn’t grown easier. He had taken all they had to give, and now he was as empty as the bottle that he clutched to his aching chest.

It was over. He had won.

His one source of comfort gone, he wandered out into the snow and stared up at the tiny sliver of moon in the endless sky. He was free now; he had felt his connection to this place go to pieces when he had shot the dream dead, and he knew that somewhere, Zophiel soared, far away from this frozen little ditch. He thought of the way she had fallen so softly and quietly forward, and he threw the bottle down into the creek with all his might.

When the men of the 7th Cavalry woke, they would retain only a vague memory of one First Sergeant Damien Blackwell–just an impression of a tall, dark man synonymous with the defeat of the Lakota Sioux. For all they knew, he was one of their precious few casualties, a hero in a pine box on the 4:15 to Omaha.

A wind was blowing in the east, calling him. He could already feel himself beginning to change. Far away across the sea, the peasants were growing restless, and a bright young University student in Samara was reading Das Kapital.

Solas the Shadow saddled his horse and rode out of camp alone, with no one to see him go but the ravens that circled the silent battlefield at dawn.

**

The pain was horrible. Toivo tore himself from the memory, the dam broken, his past lives surging back to bowl him over with the immensity of his loss.

“Wait,” Demyan murmured. “I…”

Toivo recoiled from the man on the bed. “No,” he croaked. “They all…”

Demyan’s jaw tightened. “For what it’s worth,” he rasped, “I’m…sorry.”

There was nothing Toivo could say. He looked at the body of Solas, the Angel of Shadow, killer of hope, and wondered how long it would be before the inevitable happened and they were forced to kill each other. Perhaps hope would win out, and he would be the one to walk away, changing himself in a journey as one conflict became another.

Without a word, Toivo walked out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

He dropped onto the unyielding sofa of the living room and stared at the ceiling, trying to come to terms with the return of his memories–withwhere it all fit behind his current, painful reality.

He’d fought this, hadn’t he? He’d stayed away from incarnation for as long as he could, fighting the pull back down to earth and the human hearts begging for hope while the world caught fire in his absence. He’d fled Dresden, Nanking, Nagasaki, refusing to return, keeping distant from horrors even as he witnessed them. For seventy years the thought that was Zophiel had stayed aloft, above the smoke and death, his memories of his earthly existence fading with time until it was only a dull ache warning him of the pain of taking physical form. He could no longer bear to be that close to them; the way they suffered, the way they died.

The wall clock in the kitchen ticked out the minutes as the day wound down into evening. Toivo lay motionless on the couch, trapped by a sense of overwhelming fatalism. He thought back to the words of the angelic Station Chief–an old woman by an open hearth–and of the endless suffering that must have plagued his kind and their opposites throughout the ages.

As long as there is war, the light and shadow will fight. As long as humans call us and shape us, hope for us and fear us, we will fulfill their dreams and their nightmares.

The cycle was inevitable–an eternal polarity, a struggle that would play out as long as humans were human. He ran a hand weakly up the hair that had fallen in his eyes.

How long could this détente last? He thought of the prostrate man in the other room, and the offered gun he’d left in the State Security Building, and once again wondered what the hell he was doing.

To be continued in Chapter 8.

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