ksenija Astra

‘Light. Darkness. Purgatory. Hell? Heaven?’ Lucius does not know where he is. Just this morning he was carefully illuminating the pages of The Rule and now, now he sees his beloved cantor with an arrow wedged right in between his emerald-green eyes. He thinks of God. He is thinking about how his Holy Father must have suffered, seeing his beloved Son on the Cross. He wonders if Jesus has thought of the smell of the wood of the Cross that he has been nailed to. He looks at his Brothers and thinks about what was the last thing they felt. Did the Cantor pick up on the high pitched sound of the arrow that took his life piercing the air with an ungodly speed? Did the Scriptor die while feeling such a familiar touch of paper on his hands? He closes his eyes. He opens them, and he's no longer there. The forest keeps him safe, for now. "But the Devil still lurks." He thinks to himself. Before him, the horrors of that morning stand before his lying eyes. It's too much, and with the last goodbye of his Prior hovering, like a whispered benediction, above his head, he leaves. Lucius hopes to find God again in the world outside the monastery, but is that what awaits for him; the kinship of a needed light, spread out for him to see? Those walls had hardly been left by him before, and one wonders if a man of the cloth can realise himself as a saint or a sinner, a beast or angel, mortal or spirit, where one can only come to find humanity instead.

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