Aza Smith
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“…the arbiter of life, and gifted me a revelation in return. A wish made, and a star answered that wish. Life itself descended…”
-Salvation Dissertation, Chapter I, Verse 35
The Bishop Chata left Cielo for the Starlit Capital for help and brought back an entourage. He couldn’t look the villagers in the eye as they looked to him with relief of his return. The guilt was torture, but he had to persist. It was his mission from the Hierophant himself.
Mad Helga howled at the holymen parading through the streets to the town cathedral. Marching were high priests, altar boys in-training, and masked marchers of the Hierophant’s Militia. They all came to deliver something precious.
Carried into Cielo on its own palanquin, seated in the elevated throne fit for a saint, was a box. In the box was a star. It had fallen to Earth in a valley to the East. The Hierophant believed it to be a gift, for their God was itself a star.
Chata began with the healer’s psalm: “Thy Wish be heard, thy heart be light, thyselves blessed.”
“May life descend, persist, and thrive,” answered back the townspeople, all of whom knew it by heart.
Chata quoted from the Salvation Dissertation to his people, who gathered at the steps of the cathedral. He spoke of God’s gift of life, and in drought-stricken fields such as theirs, it was hard to remember that life triumphed regardless in times like these.
The holy men and women strapped on masks designed to look ceremonial, but they were for their own protection. One of the militia guards gave Bishop Chata his mask. Chata refused.
“Bare witness and praise the Stars, for life will prosper!”
The speech was more for Chata’s sake than the parishioners, who wept and cheered at their Bishop’s declaration of hope.
A pair of clerics each brought keys out from their coats and unlocked the chest. Two militia men, one-hand each, reached over from behind the chest and opened it. Sparkles of bright, white drifted out from the box like dandelion seeds, wafting in the wind.
The villagers marveled at such beauty.
The widowed Amelia reached out as a speck of stardust fell, so it landed on her open palm. Her fingers twitched and convulsed. The bones and joints creaked before contorting in directions they weren’t designed to.. Amelia screamed, the baby Andre in her other arm startled into sobbing fits when her free arm jerked back hard enough to snap her shoulder blade in two.
Dole the Butcher’s skin tore in several places. It crawled off his body, dragging his organs with the shredded remains of his clothes behind like a blubbery, mollusk-like creature. Rather than collapse, the man’s skeleton,, went down on all fours, hissed, and skittered away, before crawling up the walls of a nearby house. The boneless mollusk then leapt, opening itself like a blanket, and engulfed Dole’s wife Roberta, melting the poor woman with digestive enzymes.
Eren, whom the Bishop had seen doing odd-jobs for food, put his hands over his mouth before vomiting, and a rope of digestive organs spilled out like spaghetti in his hands. The organs lashed out, grabbing his sister Bethany by her braids. The girl screamed as her brother’s mouth stretched, attempting to swallow the girl whole like a snake.Then the siblings embraced , and became a single, horrible thing with a torso where their heads met.
It was not just the people who metamorphosed into new life in the chaos. A termite-ridden cart creaked as the wheels popped and contorted into fins which it used to drag itself down the street like a sea turtle in the sand. Wood and tiles from rooftops flew away in a flock. A puddle of water on the road bubbled before leaping out and clinging to the face of the baker Daniel, his face half-melted mid-transformation, as the jellyfish-creature consumed his bodily fluids. Smashed bottles of stout grew into dark, reflective orchids in a barrel, taking root as bark grew over the barrel’s wood.
“This is life,” said Chata, aghast at the horrors beyond his church. “This is God’s gift? Life? Life such as this? What a terrible thing.”
The Bishop’s heart ached before it started to palpitate. His ribs cracked, and Chata fell backward, a red lump forcing its way out of his mouth. The fleshy thing that tore itself free was his heart, covered in blinking eyes as it slinked free of his body, dragged itself by the fleshy venous tubes like an octopus. Chata’s eyes rolled into his skull as his body continued to change and transmogrify, a miracle of transformation birthing new life from the shell of his dying body.
Their full-bodied uniforms and masks protected the holy soldiers and missionaries from the metamorphosis of their miracle. The militiamen fended off villagers mid-transformation with their ceremonial spears while the altar boys locked the box and hoisted it back onto the palanquin.
The heads of tavern regulars Louise, Grock, and Krat sprouted wings and dislodged from their bled-out bodies, before feeding from the bottle-flowers with needles protruding from their tongues. The heads then swarmed one of the militiamen, one breaching his suit at the neck while he swatted them ineffectually with his spear As the creature fed on his blood, the stardust still in the air seeped inside the breach, and when his dying breaths came, they were from lungs no longer his own.
The Hierophant’s forces deemed the militiaman’s death unfortunate but necessary. They started back on the road they came in on, continuing to protect the palanquin at all costs from the growing pains of Cielo’s rebirth.
Their holy mission was not over. They had more villages, more towns, across heaps and valleys, both grand and humble.
Life must persist.
It was surely God’s blessing.
An occultist by trade and anthologist by pleasure, Aza Smith has had both humor and horror fiction published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Phantoms, The Molotov Cocktail, Jokes Literary Review, Last Girls Club: The Witch’s Cosmo, Curious Curls Publishing, Nat 1 Publishing, WATG Press, Wicked Shadow Press, and SM Sykes Books. His greatest ambition is to level up his charisma stat to Level-100 so that he can have a threesome with the Saint and the Demon Lord. Attempting to do that while under-leveled has, historically, been a bad idea.
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