Clarissant’s Easter

Recently I have returned to an old manuscript and am reworking it into the first-person present tense. As I celebrate Good Friday and anticipate Easter, part of that story came to mind.

During this scene, the protagonist Clarissant is running from the dictator villain, Jardine, and is desperately hunting for any means of escape. She has heard rumors of a powerful being called the Light and plies one the Light’s allies, Linnae, on how she might acquire the Light’s protection:

“Will it—can it protect from Jardine?”

Linnae settle son the edge of my bed. “I don’t know. That’s the Light’s choice.”

I bite my lower lip, considering whether I should even expend any more time or energy on this pursuit. Yet my chances of survival are already incalculably low. “Can it protect me from the d-dar-dark . . .”

“The darkness?”

I shiver but nod.

“Yes and no. He won’t hide you from it, but enable you to overcome it when you ally with him.”

Ally with the Light? Jardine would be even more furious. But if he finds me now, disposal will occur anyway. Does it matter if I’m disposed for failure to report or an alliance with the enemy? The end is the same. “Can I? Ally with the Light?”

“Depends. The Light can’t abide darkness. He expels it from his presence, even as the lamps expel darkness from this room.”

“But . . .” My words fail, the line of hope I’ve clung to now severed. The Light has no use for me, will never have any use for me. I’m a child of darkness, forever.

Linnae lays a soft, tawny hand over my rough, white one. “The Light didn’t want to expel us, so he hid his light and walked among us.”

“Us?” I lift my head, her words trying to reconnect my broken hope.

“Everyone is born a child of darkness. But the Light became like a child of darkness. He wasn’t of the darkness, but became like it so he could walk among us.”

“But he’s still light—I’m still expelled.”

“That’s why he gathered all the darkness to himself and dispelled it by allowing it to extinguish him.”

I suck in a breath. “He was . . . disposed?”

Linnae nods.

My mind struggles to connect the seemingly incompatible lines. Darkness expelled. The Light like darkness, but not darkness. Darkness extinguishing the Light. I shudder. How dark the world must have been when that happened! “But if the Light is gone, then how. . .?”

“The Creator of light from which the Light had come ignited him again, and now he does the same for all who ally with him.”

Amen. It is so.

(For the first chapter of Clarissant’s story, click here.)