"Laments of a False Messiah"
by Azusa Kuraino
erica.drescher@gte.net


I want what you promised me.

You promised me with sweet guile, promised me the gates of heaven and the keys of hell and of death: you filled me with those flattering words and I swallowed them as if taking milk from a mother's breast, and that sweetness grew bitter and bitter inside me with each passing year. You promised. You promised. And you took everything away.

I want it back.

You made me in the image of your fancy; you kept me ten years a thing in the womb, filling my ears with the words you chose. Only begotten son of the father, ascending to heaven and sitting in glory at his right hand, and I believed, I believed. Who would not? So sweet, so sweet, and I trembled, that little thing half-formed, with the glory of the power that should someday be mine. Yes, I knew, I heard, and you tell me now with a smile dripping with venom that it was never meant to be: but your eyes cannot lie to me.

I want the things which should have been mine.

You gave to me, oh, you gave to me indeed, gifts of fire and hate and blood. That great city is fallen, but you promised me the kingdom, and then gave me a birth in stench and rot and human filth. You gave to me the whore of that great city, the mother and the harlot of all earth, and I lay with her and her filth became mine, and you see now the fruits of that woman's labor: I am untouchable, unlovable, abominable. I am filth. So it was spoken in your prophecy, and so it has come to pass.

I want that which I cannot have.

You gave me all this, and I burned, and burned, and my faith was consumed by the flames, and you devoured the remains of my trust greedily as a burnt offering. There is no heaven or hell save those we fathom for ourselves on earth-- there has never been anything but hell for me! I have no rest day nor night and the flames of my torment consume me still.

I want the love you promised above all else.

You tell me I am not human, and yet you made for me a human form so that I might walk among humans, and a human soul so that I might feel, and see now, oh, you who would be God, that I weep human tears now as full of salt and as bitter as blood! And though you refused me a human birth I can make for myself a human death and in that take comfort, and for me there shall be no more sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be pain when I am passed away.

***

It is said that they who taketh the sword shall perish with the sword. If I cannot have the kingdom of heaven neither shall it be yours, and with the blade given by your hand I shall take your blood, the blood of the whore, and last of all my own.

Perhaps this is a fitting end for me: I could not love if you offered it to me now, for I have had nothing but bitter dregs to chew upon every day of my life.

And in the silence-- oh God, cursed be my hands which slew my makers, and yet cannot lift to take my own life! Where is the strength you gave me, the hate that burned with terrible flame? Heaven and earth, strike me dead where I stand, for I am too much a coward to spill the blood of the most wretched among us!

O my father, why have you forsaken me?

~Fin.~

author's notes:
This story-- or whatever you want to call it-- grew out of a conversation I had with a friend of mine about Biblical allusions in Xenogears. My standpoint was that the allusions were meant to be indirect and not as specific parallels, since the Xenogears world, while similar to our own, wasn't an exact mirror of it. Nonetheless, I decided it might be interesting to see if I could draw any parallels between parts of the Bible and specific events in the game and in the lives of certain characters, and... this was the result. ^^ Granted, I'm not exactly the world's greatest religious scholar, and none of this is intended as an affront to any religious writings or doctrines. Though some of my friends have done stories based upon similar principles, I'd like to think mine is distinctively different in some way or another. ^_^