??????? ?? ℍ??? (希望の幻想)
| Mid-July, 1918, Heart of Russia - Long Bereft of Compassion |
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I know not how long we have been marched out of our homes, our palaces. The very people we were sworn to protect and watch over, the very people my men died for in the trenches. The people Rasputin loved, and guided into the body of Christ. My children are weeping. My bride, her veil sullied and red, her crown adorned with soot and ash, her bosom which would have only born momentary comfort to the young in the cold, now burst and broken. The wailing has stopped. The walls are echoing with the dark vibrations of their cries. Of my love, of my hate. I see them with their clubs now. I cannot move. I have not been able to move. Legs, long ago broken. Fingers calloused with snapped bone. I cannot stop them. I shout and scream, red as the blood on my face and in the throat of my body. I curse them, I hate them, I spit at them. They do not listen. Pale-eyed devils, cursing my own name. Cursing what I have done for them. Was I not fair? Was I not just? Perhaps they mistrusted Rasputin, perhaps they hated what he represented for us. I do not know. I do not care. I no longer have purpose in guiding them. They have abandoned me. Abandoned what the teachings of our Lord, our Savior, gave us in his last dying moments. No grave, no monument. Even now they are somewhere above burying my children one by one. In the cold. Piece by piece. I do nothing but stare. Is this my punishment? For slaying mortal men with blade and bullet? For leading my men into the courageous and noble heart of battle? I do not know. This is my fate, and I have come to accept it, burning anger in my heart though it may bleed with now. There is a pain in the back of my head. It strikes my neck with a furious heat, and I collapse. I see my bride, my love, the only reason now for my life. She is dead. She is gone, and so too the light of the fleeting moments of existence. I cannot scream any longer. I cannot fight. And so I do what I am able to. I pray. With the blood welling in my stomach, with the boiling and simmering lust for revenge in my gut, with the last shreds of hope that someone will find us and stop this madness clinging to the tears on my cheek, I pray. I forgive this atrocity. I embrace Christ. Even as they drag me against the wall. I do not pray that their own end will come, for that would be selfish. Christ punishes those who do not repent. Their own Hell will come in time. For now, I go into the darkness. Whether I see the light again, only time will tell. |
With the death of the Romanovs came the death of religious freedom in Russia for a time. Heiji had grown to doubt the existence of any sort of God, having been witness to his own comrades-in-arms desecrating Chinese civilians and soldiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the subsequent Japanese occupation of many Chinese areas. That is the primary reason he abandoned his unit, and left them to their fates, obsessing instead after the teachings of the only person he admired at the time. A dead man, but an idol nonetheless.
He met the strange Khlyst sect, and found their practices uncouth and undirected, yet fascinating. Their unabashed love for a distant deity, struck him as odd. Yet upon returning to Japan for the first time, he found that the Shinto Directive treated those worshipers of the Shinto religion just as harshly as similar groups throughout Asia and Russia at the time. Religious freedoms were being oppressed, and in some cases outright destroyed, by a growing Communist imperative directed at abolishing control of spiritual belief.
Heiji himself had very little faith in a 'God', finding the concept obscene and almost as derogatory as the Communist state in of itself. Although he admired Rasputin, he often called into question his unflinching loyalty to the concept of a 'God'. The Khlyst sect, at the time, were unsure of just how little Heiji actually cared about their religion, wanting instead to pursue Rasputin's footsteps already in the sand.
Yet he could not fully do that, not without the spiritual guidance Rasputin possessed. Perhaps this would be why it took him almost fifteen years to achieve what Rasputin did only soon after he had met Tsar Nicholas II.
It became a foundation of Heiji's chaotic and nihilistic beliefs that 'God' was no more than an ideal to strive toward, for those without convictions of their own, and that the soul itself was a manifestation of those convictions. Without them humanity would dissolve and decay. Stagnate. God was not a being meant to be worshiped, but rather something abstract enough for humans to be continually reminded that they were alive, conscious of their own decisions, and that they were responsible for their own fates.
Humanity was humanity, with every flaw and every victory in its genetic code, history, and psyche. It was nothing else. It wasn't God, it wasn't angelic, it wasn't demonic.
It was human, as beautiful and pure, as ugly and cruel as the day it crawled out of the primordial gutter.
It was here to stay, and it needed some form of foundation for its identity to be built upon. Religion, democracy, it didn't matter. So long as it existed, made a statement, and planted its flag. Even if it died beside that flag, then it would be able to say that it stood there and died there for its beliefs. Its convictions.
That is why Heiji became worthy of the Ten Rings.
"Any decision, good or bad, still shapes a person. It is not up to that person to decide when they are finished being made, only that they know that they were made at all."
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