Chapter 11

As I was led up the stairs, I thought over all I knew of the customs of these people. I shook my head in wonder over their lunacy. I thought of my own mother and tried to picture her offering me and my brother up as sacrifices and I just couldn’t. My parents had something in them that had set them apart from these people and they had been hated for it. With the Creator’s help, I’d become just like my parents, that is, if I survived long enough.

The Creator must surely hate the activities of these people! All I could wonder was why He hadn’t already torched the place! For their sins, these people were certainly deserving of destruction, even as I had been. I had turned to a different path, but I doubted that these people would ever do that, as they loved the twisted lives that they led and had no desire to change.

“The city remains because I have those yet within it that are faithful to Me,” came the whisper into my consciousness. It answered my question and sent a ripple of awareness through me that my Creator had not forsaken me, but was even now here with me in this ordeal. It comforted me to know that I didn’t have to face what lay beyond the doors ahead alone and I felt strength flow through me at that awareness. With renewed confidence I lifted my head to face the future head-on.

Completing our journey up the wide steps we made our way through the open doors of the temple. Fires blazed brightly in the temple, keeping the cool evening air at bay. Vibrantly colored silks and crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings and the massive pillars of the temple halls, while vibrant tapestries adorned the walls. The scenes portrayed around me were set off by the richness of their surroundings. Some sights and sounds disgusted me, while others threatened to enslave me with the tempting pleasure they offered.

Trying to control a body I suddenly hated, because of its betrayal of me, I turned my head forward and concentrated on two pillars at the end of the long hall across which we were traversing. The women here were very attractive, and the sight of their barely clothed or completely bare bodies, as was the case for some, threatened to overwhelm my senses. The seductive welcome in their eyes and the sensual grace with which they moved was as provocative as the sight of them. The activities of the men around me, however, acted as a slap in the face, keeping my perspective of the wrongness of this place alive in my consciousness.

I was filled with disgust as I saw what they were doing in various places in the hall around me. Their activities reminded me of the vileness that had only been too common in the dungeons of the arena, when men had forgotten their created purpose and settled for something less and unnatural. Boys being used in the place of women was horrible and yet the room was filled with such debauchery and worse. Even the women were inordinately focused on giving each other pleasure, which made no sense to me.

Was this display of hedonistic wantonness supposed to be the example of what the world should be more like? If it was, I wanted no part of such a world where everything that had been created so perfectly had now been reversed into the shameful self degradation of an individual’s created glory and purpose.

It was as if, in the height of the immoral decadence which was on display all around me, the beauty and rightness of one man and one woman enjoying each other had been twisted into a thousand disgusting lesser forms of affectation. Why would a man hunger for something other than the beauty of a woman, and why would a woman settle for the affection of another woman, when only a man could ultimately fulfill and complete her deepest needs?

I thought of my mother and father and the way they had been with each other. My mother had been a beautiful woman too, but she would have looked completely out of place in this hall. Not for any lack of beauty on her part, but simply because she wasn’t the kind of person to share herself with anybody else other than my father. Often, as a boy, I had covertly observed instances where she would simply look deeply at my father or say something softly to him; which usually resulted in their unexplained absence, often lasting hours, a short while later.

Witnessing how they had been with each other had both relaxed me and made me want the same in a relationship one day. My mother hadn’t had to dress as these women did or display half the open eroticism that they displayed to completely overwhelm my father. I had never once seen him regard another woman other than my mother. What they’d had was special in a way that wouldn’t and couldn’t be understood in this place of such moral reversal and discontentment with what was naturally ordained.

The beauty of these women only went skin deep and knowing that helped me to disregard any earlier desires I’d had for them. The women that had drawn seductively toward me seemed to sense the change in my demeanor and, like candles extinguished, their looks of open invitation disappeared and were replaced with disinterested looks of hostility as they moved away to partake in pleasures elsewhere.

Feeling the weight of the spirit of the place lift off me with my denial, I noticed something about the place that I hadn’t seen before. In the bare open areas of exposed wall between the rich tapestries, shadows danced.

The shadows numbered many more than the people moving in front of the light, given off by the many fires throughout the great hall. There were thousands of them! A sudden chill swept through me as I heard the sound of terrible laughter ring throughout the hall, drowning out all else. It almost paralyzed me mid step, so frightened was I at the sound of the laughter.

“Peace Jasper, you can hear them, but they can’t touch you as I have sealed you for My purposes as long as you remain faithful to My will.”

I felt peace settle over me as I felt the words pour into my innermost being, even as the sound of laughter grew louder and more hateful in pitch all around me.

Curiously, I looked around the place. The laughter was deafening, but no one here seemed to be hearing any of it. Not even the guards, who prodded me along, gave any indication that they were hearing what I heard. Were they all so unaware of the foul spirits they were keeping company with?

There was no peace in this place, other than the peace I felt within my own soul in the steady words of encouragement spoken into me by my Creator. What must hell be like when all those lost and led astray, by their own desires of self-gratification, became aware of where their paths of pleasure had taken them and whose will they had been so busy accomplishing while alive? What must the full weight of the emptiness of their lives and actions feel like, when it became clear to them what they had missed out on for all of eternity?

It was scary to know how close I had come to making the same mistake myself. It was even scarier to think of falling back into my errant ways and rejecting the ways of the Creator, whom I was just now learning to serve. I said a silent prayer for the futures of all those around me. I prayed that they would wake up to the reality that I was even now beginning to see as plain as day. Who knew? Perhaps it had been someone’s prayer for me that had steered me back onto the right path in life.

At last, we came to a pair of double doors at the end of one of the long halls. One of my guards stepped forward and knocked on the door.

“Enter,” came the muted reply from within. The guards swung the double doors open and I entered the room, which was shrouded in darkness. A single candle, on an end table near a shuttered window, cast its glow feebly out into the room.

“Leave us!” came a sharply spoken command from a darkened corner of the room.

The guards shifted hesitantly as they glanced at each other uncertainly, “Go now!”

The guards hastily exited the room, closing the heavy doors behind them as they left. Many a man who had defied a temple priestess, or even just displeased one, had found himself dead or wishing that he was dead. My own family had once fallen prey to such a vindictive action by a priestess.

I stared into the darkened corner of the room where the voice had come from, hoping to discern who or what resided there.

As if in answer to my probing gaze, a voice softer and more feminine than it had sounded before replied, “You have your father’s way about you, that is of a certainty.”