Chapter Six
The Viking and the Princess
“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Lately in our story, stiff-necked Moiety has been getting jerked about quite a bit. Akedah, the Viking, has had to be on his toes to keep up with the amount of rescuing the independent princess has been requiring. She had been in trouble with her mother, an ocean giant, mermaids, and even the generous North Wind.
So far the Viking has been able to keep Moiety alive by using gifts given to him by the gods of Asgard, but when he beached the longboat on a tropical island to make repairs, she wanders off on her own. While in the jungle Moiety encountered the Chameleon, an evil lizard who is building an army of half-living half-dead mechanical-biological automatons. The princess is just what she needs to complete her menagerie of zombie foot soldiers. She has paralyzed the princess and is planning on replacing her flesh heart with a mechanical one made out of loadstone.
Akedah is also deep in the jungle looking for Moiety. He has encountered the natives, ten-thousand-year-old glowworm children whose job it has always been to wrap the newly born stars in a protective casing of silk to preserve their songs as they travel into space. The children bring him to an entrance to the World Tree where he encounters Vision inside, the triune sisters Past-Present-Promise, inside one of the tunnels in the World Tree.
When we left Akedah he had gone through Vision and was nearing the exit point of the tree where the Chameleon’s army was preparing to perform their grisly operation….
And so begins Chapter VI
Moiety was supine in the hollow of the dead tree. She would have noticed that the inside of the tree opened up to a tunnel of considerable length if she had been able to explore, but Moiety was in too much danger. She was conscious but unable to respond to her surroundings. Only her eyes moved, and she watched as the hoard of tiny mechanized beasts swarmed over her body and began the process of slowly boring into the spaces between her ribs. They were tunneling cavities into her chest to her heart, presumably to replace it with something else. Moiety felt the pain, but it was so intense that she also felt that she was outside her body, hovering over it, watching in suspended horror. There was not much blood, but there was the terrible smell of electrocauterized flesh. She vomited. She lay in it.
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Akedah was coming to the end of the tunnel, and he saw what he thought looked like large ants on a dead bear. He balked with abhorrence when he realized what it was. He froze while his brain whirred in an attempt to categorize the abomination. All at once he lurched, laden with emotion, at the horrific scene batting and swatting at the tiny monsters with frenzied effort. He unthinkingly beat at her motionless body. When he was able to get a grip on her drug her out into the acrid red light. The automatons followed slowly, steadily, gripping, and climbing his leg. Then, suddenly, as if a poisonous gas had taken them, they all dropped, lifeless, to the ground.
Akedah assumed that Moiety was gone, but he picked her up to carry her just as he would have carried any battle-fallen warrior: with strength and sorrow and deep conviction. This is the power of flesh. Flesh only yields to a machine in a physical sense, but in a spiritual sense, flesh and spirit are stronger than any machine. Broken human hearts keep beating, pumping right through the greatest spiritual injuries
A strange thing happens when they are broken. A broken heart creates a rift through the realms for God to come near to the brokenhearted. It cuts right through the fortified walls of materialism and... Support this podcast
