Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Lost From Sight

The following prompt was used as inspiration for the short fiction work below it. Click the image to be taken to the prompt site where an update on the validity of the actual quote is addressed if interested... I personally find  it fascinating, but would like to remind you before reading that since the answer to the question (my writing) is fiction, it doesn't much matter if the question is too.


What a lot of people fail to realize, or outright reject as a line of rational thought, is that the Earth that we live on isn't merely a physical plane of existence. It is also a spiritual battleground that is filled with billions of smaller individual battlegrounds inhabiting it. There are invisible wars being fought on our larger turf, the landmasses and man-made dwellings we inhabit, as well as ones being fought internally. Inside each and every being that posses a soul (and not all beings do).

These wars, and battles, alliances and for lack of a better term bloodlines all intersect and collide. People, humans, can and do get caught in the crossfire. If that doesn't make your head spin already then take a moment to consider that the nine hundred thousand figure doesn't even begin to take into account the intact bodies still walking amongst us whose souls are pierced with unnameable shrapnel.

You might be wondering right now about the state of your own soul. Wondering just how many wounds it may hold. Or perhaps, like the majority of people who have been simultaneously blessed and burdened with the information I am sharing, your hand found itself nursing an invisible wound as you read. Well I should tell you that it may be a strange sort of comfort (at least temporarily, until new questions open up) that if indeed you have such unseen shrapnel lodged in your spiritual chest, you are already immune to this frightening phenomenon. Unfortunately not to spiritually influenced death... but at least to missing postmortem physicality. No, that is reserved for the shells of untarnished souls when they come to an end at the hands of either angel or demon.

You see uncompromised souls are valuable commodities in the spiritual world... and, well... the extraction of an intact soul is messy. Unrecognizable as human matter messy.

Here is where I would prefer to stop. To let you believe that all of the loved ones and precious strangers lost and unfound, were both wholly innocent (in our world's terms) before their death and are wholly at peace now that their physical bodies have been essentially incinerated by spiritual entities...  but...  souls are not consciousnessless life-forces that are wistfully being sucked away unscathed into some supernatural being. They are not unaware of what they are being used for. And what they are being used for is indeed a dreadful thing. But we will come back to that. First I must go back and make an addendum to your understood definition of two terms I used before. Untarnished and Uncompromised. I am assuming that you are interpreting those words through the commonly accepted worldview in which our freewill and/or individual autonomy... personal agency as it were, implies that we are not ever in a pure state of good, evil or neutrality (a state you would be correct to question the validity of altogether, but nonetheless is important to include for the sake of this illustration). To the spiritual entities that inhabit our earthly domain alongside us however, these terms don't imply goodness, moral purity (in human terms) or any such thing... it means a lack of doubt in said human's loyalties. It means purity in their faith not so much purity in the commonly accepted notions of pure versus unpure being assigned to good and evil respectively.

This simply put means that from a spiritual perspective a human can be pure in their faith in good, their faith in evil... or in their faith that neither exist. Essentially what qualifies a soul as unblemished, and as such makes it valuable to unseen entities is that it is free of both the external shrapnel that comes from being caught in the crossfire (or targeted and wounded by one side or the other) and from the blemish inflicted to the soul internally by conflict against a faith system. Conflict caused by doubt.

It's hard to think of doubt as being something a minimum of  nine hundred thousand people could survive long without given that we all have experienced it is some category or another. It would astound you though how many people accept faith systems without question. Both good and bad ones. True and false ones. Including ones that boldly support evil. Many of the extracted souls however do wind up coming from the very young which is needless to say very disturbing. In this way doubt, and moreso the battlescars it attracts to you are a good thing. That is because while doubting isn't virtuous in itself, it does cause scars that devalue your soul to those supernatural forces that would harvest it for their purposes. Doubting can ultimately also strengthen, give validity to and change the faith system you choose to live by (something I cannot assign for you).

Here again we could stop and leave a little hope left that perhaps we could rest in the knowledge that, while what they are being used for falls somewhere on the scale between slavery and drafted spiritual-war foot soldier status, at least these souls are part of a war they were already entrenched in by virtue of their decided lack of questioning their own beliefs and why they believed them. Not that simple (never that simple). As in human war, prisoners prove useful to opponents.

It should also be noted... quickly while I still have time... that damaged souls aren't entirely safe merely because they can't be harvested intact for the war on this plane. Heaven and Hell don't necessarily have quotas but a soul not able to be extracted intact goes to one of the two and that isn't regarded as a loss either. These kinds of 'wins' aren't as easily won for angels and demons however, as physical deaths brought about directly from one or the other leaves visible markers that tend to raise eyebrows in a morgue. It happens but isn't preferred by either side. The war wages on more easily when humans don't believe it exists. No, they use our own iniquities and weaknesses against us. They let us bring ruination upon ourselves one soul at a time.

The previously mentioned prisoners of war? They come in mighty handy to this end. Haven't you after all heard of ghosts?




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