The Ring of Fire – Chapter 31

*Scene 01* – 00:00 (Azragoth Under Attack)

We saw the fire….and so did everyone else in the valley below and surrounding villages.

The account I have of it was pieced together and reconstructed here to the best I could gather from eye-witnesses and the principal parties involved.  Mattox had ridden back into the tunnels upon leaving us and was joined by his attendant soldiers that had guarded our flank, from a distance, as we made our way out of the city.  Four other Azragothians, two from the east and two from just to the west of us, both hidden from our view during our departure, joined them after following us about a league by different hidden paths down the switchback trails until we had reached the dry riverbed.  By Mid-World and Surface World measure, a league was about the distance a healthy person could walk in an hour’s time (approximately 1.4 miles).  They all were mounted on horseback and rode into the tunnels and sealed up the grotto entrance, by pivoting a cleverly balance stone slab and sifting dirt down grooves cut in the top so that its base appeared undisturbed by the movement.  A mere shallow backing to the small cave, rather than the great stone entrance to a series of complex tunnel systems.  They seize the flickering firebrands from sconces in the cavern wall and rode downward, carrying their lights aloft and before them, picking up their pace when the cavern floor began to even out enough for the horses to feel secure in their footing.

Mattox addressed those following and riding astride him, “The others should be clear of the enemy beasts soon if we timed it right.  But we must hurry if we’re to share in a part of this.”  And with those words he rode forth, pushing the cavern’s darkness ahead within the light of his fiery torch.

At no time was Mattox ever really left unattended.  A guard was always present within shouting distance to relay an order to another within earshot so that The Eagle’s commands always had a swift reach to the larger company needed to carry them out.  His attendants had a gift for blending in and making themselves seem part of the background citizenry going about their daily lives.  Where none were expected, these agents of his often resolved into the shadows and recesses, every watchful for their leader’s command or signal, scanning the perimeter for anything that looked out of place or may pose a mortal threat to their general.

A great strategist and good with maps and military terrain advantages, Mattox and his men had studied the environs of the hills and forests surrounding Azragoth.  Much of their time was spent outside of the city rather than within it, though Mattox was always aware of the progress being made by Nem and his craftsmen, and met with him regularly and often when he was not on a military campaign, providing strategic suggestions for the rebuilding effort when needed.  Nem valued the keen understanding of The Eagle and often consulted him when there were plans to be drawn up for the remaining vulnerable sectors of the city.  The point was that Mattox and all of the leadership of Azragoth and its people had been planning for a siege attack for many years, and they stood in readiness.  Mattox did not have to be present, observing and directing from the battlement walls, for the people of Azragoth to know what they were expected to do.  They had drilled in emergency procedures and had discussed scenarios if there were to be a break in the chain of command.  They could regroup and fight on as coordinated units, or fight as independent battle groups, as needed.  Each of the bastion towers housed soldiers on duty, ready to defend the walls from the heights at a moment’s notice.  The black death resided in the wall of the city’s outer curtain and beneath the killing zone, short courtyards choked with vines and twenty years of weeds and rot, burned-out domiciles and collapsed buildings and broken rubble was strewn about from the destruction of those times before.  Charred arrows and half-chewed, mold-blackened children’s toys lay beneath the weeds in the old dead sectors of the city, sinister symbols of its historical tragedy.  Stray herds of goats haunted the breaks and defiled the once hallowed family homes that now moldered with decay and neglect, char and ruin.

Yet some other things moved about under the overgrowth in the dead sectors as well.  The bleating of the goats and the braying of the wild donkeys had not only been signifying their presence but, of late, also signified their distress.  Many of these now lay dead under the canopy, their carcasses were torn apart and pulled under the blankets of vines to be further savaged.  Skulls and twisted haunches, and partially gnawed legs, all matted with dried decaying flesh crawling with worms and maggots disintegrated silently under the leafy canopy.  The awful smells blending in with the moss-rot odors of the kudzu and mushrooms growing through the pavements of the dead sectors.

Malevolent eyes of ancient creatures newly arrived in the old town of Azragoth had watched the comings and goings of the hidden inner city.  They had seen the silhouettes of the people standing on the terraced balconies beyond the blackened wall, looking down into the places of the old town, unaware that they were being observed from beneath the bushes and vine mats.  They had witnessed how a party of newcomers, a party they held in extremely heated hatred, had been led into the inner city by the secret town’s guards.  They had suspected these were not received with a welcome by the hidden citizenry, but there had been no sense of furtherance of danger.  No punishment for their crime.

One of these angry watchers was a short squatty creature called Grum-Blud…and he carried the evidence with him.  He glared with piggish eyes, as he absent-mindedly gnawed on the ripped haunch of a goat.  Fresh gouts of blood mixed with his own drool, spilled over his lips and matted his grizzled beard as he ate.  His dark, glowering face remembering the sight of the one responsible for the rolled up and tied, fire-blackened remains he had bound to the wild donkey, he had cornered and caught and broken its spirit to suit his transport needs.

The others had arrived at nightfall.  Word had reached The Pan.  And it had sent its agents to remove this incursion upon their lands.  There would not be another, like the one before it.  Surface Worlders must be kept out.  They were not welcome here.

The Xarmnians were being told.  Mowgrai, and Darloc had met with them at the Inn at Crowe.  The fat innkeeper and his wife and boy were nowhere to be found.  Nowhere they could be immediately captured and held to account for the killing of his brother.  But they would soon be rooted out.  No one escaped Xarmnian justice for long.  And with the help of the creatures supplied by The Pan, no one giving these interlopers shelter or aid would either.

Grum-blud dug at his chest, with his free hand, angered by the black stuff that he could not seem to get off of his clothing and the shaggy coarse hair on his forearms and beard.  He was not a particularly clean or fastidious creature, by any stretch of the imagination, but the black sticky stuff annoyed him and pulled at his hair whenever he moved his arms.  He wondered if later he should allow himself to be combed or worse yet, washed by the one who had birthed him.  Naw, he thought.  She kept trying to change him back.  He wanted nothing to do with her again.  She was not happy with the transformations that had given him so much power.  What did she know of this newness?  How could he have ever believed that he once felt compassion for her, pity for her,…love for her.  Bah!  Stupid thoughts!  He grunted to himself.  But his brother, now.  These fools would pay dearly for what had been done to Pogsly.  Dearly and painfully!

The Xarmnian Protectorate Guards had lost the party of Surface Worlder’s temporarily.  Fools!  But they soon discovered something else that was pursuing them.  Something large and unseen and dangerous.  A creature from the Between.  Things of the other that did not properly belong to either world.  The being had left a destructive wake.  A damage path, in its pursuit, that the Xarmnians soon picked up on, though cautious enough to follow at a distance, giving it a wide berth.  Their dogs had to be driven after it by force.  Beaten to follow commands.  Trained as they were as young welts, the dogs abandoned their loyalty in abject terror.  Well, Grum-Blud, thought to himself, no matter.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Though he angrily fisted his hands at the thought that that Enemy of his Enemy, might get to them first.

One would think scaling the inner walls of this old town might be easy enough.  And one would be wrong, in thinking so.  The black coating smelled and resisted all growth of any kind.  No vines protruded from the mortar lines, not even a mushroom cap or blanket of moistened moss could be seen anywhere along its surface.  Kudzu, a most hearty plant, curled away from it and any creeper vines extending to touch it was yellowed and dried and crumbled to powder between the fingers.  Without a ladder to lean against the top of the wall, there would be no way to get over it, except to get enmired in its black coating by attempting to scale it with hammered spikes.  Not an attempt one could hope to achieve with any degree of stealth or secrecy.  Black gaping murder holes lined the top, just two to three feet shy of the top.  No doubt the means by which the thick sticky substance had been poured down to thoroughly coat its outer face.  One might hope to snag the claw end of a rope and grappling hook within these gaps, but it would be quite a trick to do so and not a feat in which he was confident he could pull off even on the best of days.  A rock mound ramp might be attempted, but not under the watchful eyes of those manning the bastions and battlements.  No, The Pan’s creatures were more adept at this kind of assault.  That is why Shellberd had to be sent off to them.  Shellberd the Dope.  He slept too much!  Had to be motivated continually with a good kicking and a clout every now and then.  It had taken a few days, but Shellberd did come through.  The Half-Men were here now.  They had insisted on eating first, before any fighting, and he had given them their will.  They hunted through the great leafy nets, killing whatever they could catch and corner.  Insatiable for blood, but skilled in tracking and surprise, they were mostly able to catch their prey without causing too much noise.  He had insisted that the city within not be alerted too soon, but they only half-listened.  Not being accustomed to following any orders except those given by The Pan.  The Pan did not share authority unless it served his interests to temporary seem to do so.  Something even the Xarmnians did not know.  Something that would have made the creation of Trolls, like himself pointless in continuing in practice.  There had to be a usefulness to everything serving the greater good.  The fact that the Trolls were given recognition by the Half-men was a useful thing in the eyes of the Xarmnian leadership.  And the Trolls relied on being viewed as useful to the Xarmnians and to the Half-Men to preserve their continued existence and to continually grow in numbers through the propagation and administration of the mysterious elixir.

Shellberd had not returned with these Half-Men, and it did not surprise Grum-Blud in the least.  He was annoying and The Pan and his creatures had probably eaten him in celebration of the opportunity to hunt and fight Surface Worlders.  They had a deep-seated hatred for these peoples, that Grum-Blud, was not quite able to understand.  Something about their ancient past.  Something lost to antiquity, buried as it was in their animal brains, and what passed for their collective memory.

Though the kills had been relatively silent, the Half-men creatures were noisy eaters.  They slurped, grunted and snorted while they ate.  A few of them farted.  Not particularly keen on manners himself, but Grum-Blud was irritated by it, and by how much louder it seemed, when he had warned them not to create noise and attract the attention of the guards within.

Grum-Blud had wondered which of the Half-Men creatures The Pan might send and how much Shellberd had relayed to them concerning the walled city and the challenges needed to surmount the inner wall.  Three days it had taken him.  Three days to find The Pan’s Half-Men and another two to get them to return.  It Shellberd hadn’t been eaten, he was no doubt somewhere outside of the city’s old curtain wall, under a shade tree sleeping.  The Ninny!  If Grum-Blud were to catch him, Shellberd might wish he’d been eaten by the Half-Men.  But that was for later.  This was for now.  Anger focused and determined to get over that wall and cut through those people with tooth, claw, and blade until they surrendered the traitorous, murdering Surface Worlders.  These would not be shown the mercy of dying so quickly.  These would be given over to The Pan, to devise something horrible that he could watch and savor.  Hear their screams as perhaps they were served piecemeal to The Pan’s subjects.  Perhaps he would eat a few pieces of the one who had led and the one who had killed his brother as well.  He licked his fat bloody lips at the thought.  The blood of the goat refreshed him in some odd way.  Perhaps his tastes were already changing to becoming more aligned with those of the Half-Men, rather than those of the Xarmnian peoples that he had once been.  Perhaps, in time, the Xarmnians themselves might be fair game for tasting and slaughter as well.  Perhaps in this way, they might become useful to the greater good of Trolls too.  The dark-eye mind trick did not seem to work on the peoples of the Mid-World, as it did on Surface Worlders.  Perhaps that too might one day change. One never knows.

Of all of the Half-Men types that The Pan could have sent, these kinds seemed the most suited for scaling walls.  Grum-Blud was amazed at their ferocity, even though he was annoyed by their reckless disregard for keeping and maintaining a low profile.

If Captain Jahazah the Crusher were here, he would be pleased with Grum-Blud.  Once the attack was complete, Grum-Blud’s name would be venerated in Xarmnian legends and songs.  His name would bring terror and give him power among the masses, and might even give him a place of his own at the tables and in the meetings of the High Xarmnian Council.  And one day, he might be asked to lead a company into the mountains and at last rid the Mid-Worlds of their traitorous brothers, the Capitalians, living so smugly on the other side of The Great Wall.  They would tear it down, stone by stone, crushing each piece with hammers until they formed a gravel road between the two lands.  And once it was down they would pillage and plunder their arrogance into cowed and mewling submission.  Begging for little scraps to be left to feed their families.  One day.  One day soon.

If Jahazah failed to acknowledge his contributions or dared in any way to take shared credit for his glory of this raid, perhaps someday, he too might be served in pieces on a plate in the great counsel dining hall, and Grum-Blud would savor that taste of revenge as well.  Jahazah had beaten him with a rod for allowing the escape of the traitor Corimanth, to get out of the city, and it had taken Grum-Blud weeks to no longer feel the sting of the bruises across his back and to ride upon a small horse without help and wincing in pain with every jostling step.  Grum-Blud vowed to himself, that he would never allow himself to be beaten in such a way ever again.  If beating were to be meted out, he would be the one holding the end of the rod, and not the one receiving its blows.  But tonight the taste of blood was already in the air, and he wondered to himself, what an Azragothian might taste like.

Manticores.  The Pan had sent him twenty-six Manticores.  Creatures adept at climbing with thick razor-sharp claws and the body of a leopard or lion, as the old books of legend tell were in the Surface World lands of the ancient Persians.  The mystical seers of that land, it was said, worshipped the Manticores when they saw them in dreams and painted images of them with pigments on the walls of their temples and crafted statuary of them to guard their tombs and the entrances to their great halls.  They often embellished these with other animal traits from their own worlds, occasionally giving them wings or the tails of serpents or scorpions, as suited their fancy.  But the ones occupying the Mid-Worlds only consisted of three joined elements.  Half-man, with the human dominating the upper portions of the creature, and animal, lion, leopard or panther, occupying the lower ends of the creature, and an insectile propensity expressed as a menacing, articulated scorpion tail, with a deadly black barb on the tip.  The Manticore’s face was human in part, except for its ability to hyper-extend its lower jaw and unveil a triple row set of jagged teeth.  Manticores were not big on speech and one wondered how they could be made to form their growling low rumbling words around so many teeth.  Their heads were hoary, almost always heavily bearded, as if their facial hair made up for the mane of fur that would have grown had they remained a lion of legend.  Their visage was fierce, their skin dark and reddened like tough leather or blackened with the dried glut of blood from so many kills.  Their eyes clouded and vacillated between human awareness and animal aloofness, subjected only to instinct and primal desires.  Their animal fur varied between the beige-tan of a lion, the black velvet of a panther and the spotted patches of a leopard.  Large ferocious cats.  When these creatures climbed the wall they might as well all have panther fur, because they would be very blackened once they reached the top of the wall.  If they reached it, he knew he should say, though he could not contain his optimism seeing how anxious they were becoming.  They paced beneath the black wall seeking and scanning its surface, looking for a break in the stone that they could not find beneath the thick viscous coating.  They were growing impatient with Grum-Blud’s delay.  There was fresh meat on the other side.  They could smell it.  The kills had only whetted their appetite.  The long run from the marked and scented territory of The Pan had been tiring but their energy was returning will their recent meal.  The meat on the other side had very little hair to have to cough up later.  The one called Grawldo, glared at Grum-Blud and growled in annoyance.  It wore a collar around its neck with the loose end of a rope.  Grum-Blud’s way up and over.  The Manticores were big and powerful, muscular and tawny, their claws oversized and thick, extending and retracting from their giant powerful paws.  It was going to be a massacre inside.  Grum-Blud grinned and raised his hand to give the signal.

Meanwhile above, the soldiers of Azragoth had observed the Troll and its newly gathered beasts for some time now.  They had seen the little squat creature crawl over the battered and twisted portcullis gate beneath the Barbican under the silvery moonlight.  They saw the other three Trolls argue and break camp in the early morning hours.  The two who had arrived on onocentaurs, miserable creatures with the body of a small donkey and the top half of a man.  These had been left outside of the city to forage in the surrounding woods, while the trolls scouted the ruined city.  A company of forest soldiers observed two of the Trolls leave on these creatures and return up through the back trails, joining the main road again and proceeding upwards to the high plains from which they had first come, no doubt to join up and report back to the Xarmnian Protectorate Guards still searching the woods for the lost party.  In so doing, they had narrowly avoided the large, invisible creature that had damaged so much of the backtrail bridgeworks before it finally burrowed into the underground tunnels beneath the city.

The onocentaurs, left to the two Trolls remaining, had been tied to the lower trail forests in a copse.  The onocentaurs argued with them very heatedly, and the bemused Azragothian spies almost laughed aloud and gave their hidden location away when the larger Troll in the lead was overheard telling the onocentaurs that “Asses should not be fitted together with a human mouth!”

Eventually, the other Troll had left the lead Troll as well, grumbling unintelligibly, but soon after rode southward alone, having also received some angry reprimand, coupled with a few kicks from his now blackened counterpart.  The observers correctly surmised that the leader Troll’s initial attempts to get over the inner walls of the city of Azragoth had failed miserably.  It was almost too comical to watch.  That is until the nature of the other beasts were seen a mere five days later as they came into the city the night before and joined the lead Troll, below the walls and leafy canopy.  The situation was no longer comical at all.  It had become extremely dangerous indeed.

When the signal below was given, the Azragothian soldiers stationed with smoldering torch standing just inside the doorways of the bastions along the inner wall, waited in readiness, to do what their commander The Eagle had instructed them to do.  Nem and his craftsmen had rebuilt and redesigned the inner wall in a very unique way, with characteristics unlike any other city wall in all of the towns and citadels within the Mid-Worlds.  The inner wall had a shelf at its top, called a machicolation, with a V-shaped trough running along the top of the stone shelf filled to the brim with a petroleum-like oil.  The lip-edge of the trough was also coated with tar and pitch, spilling over and down the wall where it ran partially into the horizontal gaps of the murder holes about a foot below.  From the inner-shelf of the Inner wall, about waist high from the battlement walkway, was a slanted grooved-trough in each merlon between the crenellation caps of stone, where hot oil, tar, boiling water or stones and arrows and could be poured, dropped or shot down upon anyone attempting to scale the Inner wall.  A wooden bench lined the inner wall rampart, allowing archers to raise themselves between the crenellations and fire down into the killing fields of the narrow outer courtyards upon any enemy who had successfully breached the outer curtain wall.  Bundles and full quivers of arrows lay at the ready in the dry boxes below the benches, which allowed the archers to always have an ample supply of darts ready to come to both hands and bow should they run out of those in their carried and strung quivers during a protracted battle.

The manticores could not be permitted to enter the city.  Between the torch-bearers and the archers of Azragoth, they would see to it that that never happened.  Manticores were irrepressibly vicious and savage.  They would pursue, maul, kill and give no quarter.  No one would be safe from their fury.  If ever there was a beast that could be compared with a berserker of old, the manticores were those creatures.

With flared claws, the Manticores, spaced out all along the city walls leaped almost as one, though slightly staggered, as they saw the movement of the signaled cats commence their attack.  Ferocious roars struck terror in the men atop the wall as the creatures lunged against the blackness, scrabbling to gain purchase in the buried grooves beneath the coating.  Invariably they slipped and became enmired with blackness, their powerful paws caked with tar, their hides gleaming with the thick, black, glutinous ooze.

The torcher bearers in the bastion doorways looked down upon the horrible spectacle and from one to the other, waiting for their own signal to be given.  A lookout sentry, from higher up on the clockwise running stair within the bastion tower, watched and observed as each of the creatures became more and more enmired and coated with the pitch, but each was still making some degree of progress up the Inner Wall.

The Troll ran from creature to creature as fast as its stocky legs would carry it, loping and bounding from its knuckles in the characteristic Troll gait, urging the beasts onward and upward, each time they slid back downward.  Their broad paws, sweeping away more and more of the viscous tar, with every attempted ascent, exposing the stone wall below, and the mortared grooves.  With persistence, these creatures would soon make it over the wall, and then in anger and frustration, these monsters would tear them apart.

Suddenly the word was given.  Nem and Ezra watched as The Eagle and his attendant soldiers burst forth from the gates of The Keep, and rode off of the galley loader on horseback.

“Light them up!” he shouted, racing his horse at full gallop through the streets, the hooves of his mount pounding into the cobblestone streets as he rode forth.

Instantly, from every corner of every bastion tower located along the city’s inner wall, a wall of flames burst forth with a loud whooshing noise.  So intense was the sudden flash of heat that the men watching along the wall dove for cover, backing away from the edge as flames tore across the outer portion of the machicolation rim and fiery oil spilled down the external side of the Inner wall, igniting the blackened pitch, creating various blue flames whooshing over and around the embattled manticores still attempting to ascend it.  Roars of pain and screams of rage formed a cacophonous dark symphony, a deafening crescendo that caused Azragothians to hold their ears in uncertain terror.  Unsure whether the sounds signified their imminent death or a successful rout and repulsion of the enemies from without.

Doused and roiling in engulfed flames the manticores ceased their assault on the fiery Inner wall, their own immolations imminent.  The pitch and oil covering their human and animal bodies licking all over them with painful blue and yellow tongues of fire.  Howling and roaring, they tore through the underbrush, colliding with buried and hidden detritus from times gone by, bouncing painfully off stones half-buried and crumbled from partially collapsed walls.  Blinded with searing hot pain, they raced along the killing fields over and under the vine mats and weaving and bounding in great leaps over obstacles searching for the twisted gate of the Bastion through which they had entered.

The conflagration and the howling and roaring echoed balefully throughout the forests and hills surrounding the cliffside, redounding off the stone peaks, reaching even to the lower valleys and villages beyond.  Truly, the foretold black tongue of the city of Azragoth took a far second place to the city’s angry tongues of fire.

The inevitable effect of this was that for miles and miles around and after twenty years of silence, the city could no longer be quietly hidden among the forests at the foot of the mountain.

From our vantage point in the valley below, we witness those once hidden interior walls suddenly blaze into the night sky and shine through the trees blazing forth in a bright ring of fire.  Flaming balls of fire streaked out from what we assumed could only be the old front gates of the city, and raced in flicker blazes through the smoky forests, setting some of the drier vegetation ablaze as well.  The sight of it was terrible in its fury, the noises of it even worse to behold.

As the evening dusk settled in colored bands upon the distant horizon, Azragoth appeared to have, at long last, awakened from the dead and was stunningly revealed to the surrounding communities below, and to all its friends, and foes alike.

*Scene 07* – 00:00 (Scene Title)

A woodsman armed with a longbow, riding a dappled mare at the edge of the forest, looked up as a flash of light passed through the tree cover, and he heard the terrifying sounds beasts and fowl shriek as smoke and flame billowed upward from somewhere deep in the forest of Kilrane. Monstrous sounds bellowed into the chilled air, echoing off of the canyon rims, burrowing into the cacophony of the crackling trees alive with the sounds of burning and animals fleeing under their flaming bowers.  He gaped as he realized where the sounds were originating from.

“What are they thinking?” he mumbled at first, and then with frustration and conviction, “It is way too soon!  What ARE THEY DOING?!”

With that, he leaned forward in the saddle, made a loud clicking noise with his mouth, and lightly kicked the flanks of the mare signaling her to gallop with all haste, not away from the fiery woods but deeper into the very heart of it.

He hoped there was still time to get to the hidden cache and back out again.  He was taking quite a risk doing so, for he suspected he was being followed by creatures he had not seen in these parts for many years now.  Creatures only partly human.  It had been a mistake telling Tobias anything.  He had long doubted that the man could be trusted, even if he was assisting the resistance movement.  The man had too much love for the coin, and unless he had missed his guess, he suspected that both he and Sanballat were the very ones responsible for the mysterious disappearance of Noadiah.

The flames had come from the last known location of the dead city of Azragoth and whatever was happening there now, would have dire repercussions for them all.

*** End of Part 1 ***

“For evil does not come up from the dust, nor does trouble spring up from the ground, but people are born to trouble, as surely as the sparks fly upward.” [Job 5:6-7 NET]

“If the distance to the nearest city of refuge is too far, an enraged avenger might be able to chase down and kill the person who caused the death. Then the slayer would die unfairly, since he had never shown hostility toward the person who died.” [Deuteronomy 19:6 NLT]

“Never again will you be called “The Forsaken City” or “The Desolate Land.” Your new name will be “The City of God’s Delight” and “The Bride of God,” for the LORD delights in you and will claim you as his bride.” [Isaiah 62:4 NLT]

“I will ransom them from the power of Sheol. I will redeem them from death. Death, where are your barbs? Sheol, where is your sting? Compassion is hidden from my eyes.” [Hosea 13:14 CSB]

“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal [must] put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where [is] thy sting? O grave, where [is] thy victory?” [1 Corinthians 15:53-55 KJV]

“God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” [Romans 6:2 KJV]

Author’s Note:

Azragoth in this story represents many things. On one level, it is a city reborn after judgement in the form of a plague that consumed it, as even the surrounding woods of Kilrane, pronounced “Kill – Reign”, grew thick and dense around it. When judgment comes, death seems to reign.

But rebirth and resurrection comes from The Almighty alone, for he holds the keys to death and destruction. On another level, the parallels to the destruction and rebirth of the ancient city of Jerusalem should also be clear, drawing heavily on the biblical accounts in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, with situations and characters drawn from those accounts as well.

Most of the names I give in the story have hidden significance. Some of those are a conglomeration of word root forms joined together. The Hebrew word Azubah, means “forsaken.” I tend to note similarities in words, while also being cognizant that word means have fluctuated over time and with usage. The seer/prophet Ezra’s name literally means “help” in Hebrew. So, I gravitated toward the phonetics of both words with a nod towards their meanings.

Azragoth /Az-Rah-Gawth/ – In Israeli, the name Azra means – pure. In Israeli, the name Gath means – a wine-press. Hence, Azragoth means, Pure Wine-Press. The New Wine, pressed out of trouble and crushing.

It struck me that the character of Brian/O’Brian was struggling with his own guilt and identity, with the added weight of a calling that he feels neither prepared for nor worthy of. A place of trouble and crushing seemed like a place he might wish to avoid, but it is the very place he needed to go, despite what he might believe. God puts us through trials to refine us. (Isaiah 48:10, Zechariah 13:9, Jeremiah 18:4) O’Brian, at the direction and counsel of Begglar, comes to think of Azragoth as a place of refuge. The kind of place that an accidental murder, like himself, might go to hide from a slayer. But it is the place where he must face up to the reason for his running, and meet the monstrous slayer [Sheol], accept the calling and accountability for his actions, and receive the renewed forgiveness that cleanses him. More importantly, it is there he is compelled to give up trying to be his own savior, for his own sake and for the sake of protecting and serving others.

Truth be told, we are all murderers at heart, guilty of betrayal, and the death of our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ–the only pure and innocent sacrifice, taking our guilt and shame upon Himself as punishment for our sin: past, present and future. But the point of this story goes beyond that initial step of accepting Christ’s completed work to satisfy our past and present guilt.

It leans instead into the ways we forget that, while we walk into the newness of our rebirth, we must remember to cast off our grave clothes, and stop living chain-linked as prisoners under the shadows of our past. As redeemed, we too often forget that God’s payment extends beyond the moment of our first acceptance, but must be carried into a daily acceptance of Him as Savior for each failing that we have in this present new life. This is what Lordship is about–taking up our cross daily. (See Luke 9:23-27) There is no point at which we can become our own savior. Rather, we must be willing to surrender and repent of our guilt in a daily process, until we are completed in Him by His work through us alone.

Mankind was born in the dust, and it was only by the quickening Breath of God that he arose from it to become a living being. (See Genesis 2:7 & 1 Corinthians 15:45-49) From the very begging, we, ‘the man of dust’, were meant to arise from our inert grounding, to find and walk in a restored relationship our Redeemer. That is our primal and defining purpose and calling.

But in the interim of the course through which we walk, in our being conformed to His image, to becoming refined vessels of honor, we must pass through trials and hardships in this land of trouble. (John 16:33) Initially, in our young walk there are some sins we readily take to the cross and ask for forgiveness. But strangely, when we believers live a little more of this new life, and find that we commit a sin that has dire consequences for more than just ourselves, we seek forgiveness from those hurt by our actions, but the hardest one we have trouble accepting forgiveness for is ourselves. Especially, when the cost to another came at the expense of their life.

As an example: The Christian who may have been driving distracted, leading to a car wreck that claims the lives of others, especially those they were charged with protecting will have a tough time forgiving themselves, even if the family of those lost forgive him. Though not entirely the same, O’Brian has a similar struggle leading to debilitating self-doubt. Not only is his character arc centralized on finding forgiveness for himself, but it takes a turn, with him learning to extend forgiveness to an enemy. Something he even unwittingly alludes to concerning the initial discovery of the Cordis Stone.*

(* Chapter 21: Scene 4)

The difficulties ahead of O’Brian and the team he leads will force them to confront past grievances and dispel assumptions that could undermine the stone quests entirely. For as the following verse states, “people are born to trouble, as surely as the sparks fly upward”, trouble will most certainly come.

[Job 5:6-8 NET] “For evil does not come up from the dust, nor does trouble spring up from the ground, but people are born to trouble, as surely as the sparks fly upward. “But as for me, I would seek God, and to God I would set forth my case.”

In the story ahead, they will be both driven by fire and threatened by ice.

Join us to see how that unfolds in Excavatia Book 2: A Swirl of Embers.