I have watched these monsters come for us three times now.
For three mornings in a row these beasts have descended upon our district bringing fire and death. Thousands of us have died already. Our sorrow threatens to overwhelm the will to resist. How can we fight for our families in the face of such hopelessness?
They kill indiscriminately, the damage inflicted upon us as much psychological as it is physical. After a few minutes, when we begin to close in on one of them, he runs like the most worthless of cowards. Each time we have killed one in pursuit, and yet each time more return the following morning. We still do not know how many there are. The villagers are panicked and confused by each assault and offer unclear, contradictory accounts of the attack. Some have reported as many as five men, others have said they’ve only ever seen one at a time.
It is almost as if they goad us with these deaths, as if they allow us our retribution only to spite us, because when they reappear the next morning, we are all reminded of just how futile our resistance is. Right before more of us are culled like diseased cattle.
Our children, their mothers, everyone has become a target. Yesterday they appeared in the school district. We lost nearly two hundred of them before anyone realized something was horribly wrong. Over eight hundred dead children: That was the final cost before one of them was taken down. The rest must have fled afterwards, like they always did.
I cannot see any greater purpose to these murderous rampages. I cannot see any reason, no matter how sinister, in their lust for death. I only feel the fear and despair that they have planted in our hearts. I wonder if that is why they have come here. I wonder if revenge is what brings these monsters out here to the deserts and dust, far from anywhere of significance.
Our lives are ones of quiet worship lived in service to God alone. We serve no other purpose here, and so their presence among us is as revealing as it is terrifying. The villagers have spoken of the ones we have killed. They are Minmatar. They are brothers, even. It suggests, in dark whispers to our souls, that these men have come for their own reasons.
Three times we have sent these demons back to hell, and three times they have returned. Today will be no different. Today we will sit and wait as more suffering is visited upon us, God’s chosen. There will be no school and no markets in the square. Today there will be only Church. Here we will sit and with heads bowed, humbly asking of God, what can drive a man to such things?
As the sirens of border defense systems are tripped for the fourth time, I fear we will get our answer. I fear God will tell us what we already know in our hearts. These are not men: They are the Beast.
For all life is holy, and if a man revels in his own death he is become the Beast,
And that man will come before the Beast after death, and stay at his knees forever.
– Apocryphon, Lost Passages