Work Text:
hallow (v.) - to make holy
Gods, just like men, could inspire worship and obedience with one of two means.
Love, or
fear.
The God of No Man’s Land was one of two faces. The preachers spoke of the love of a savior; of a God so good that He could not tolerate the suffering of His people on this planet, crueler even than the fabled deserts of Exodus.
But others preached of an Angel that viewed humanity not with love but with disgust, for they were all sinners. Why else would God have abandoned them here on this lifeless rock? He had abandoned their entire sorry lot and left the Angel to decide what would become of them in this, the Last of Days.
God hated them so much, they said, that He had left them to be judged by His servant. And they had been found wanting. The only salvation they could hope for was the mercy of a quick end, when it came, which could only be attained by appeasing the Angel.
Give up your home. Give up your lives. Give up your childrens’ lives.
(The last was the most common demand. Fitting, as it was the most cruel.)
But, when the end did come, it left humanity alive. The Angel was defeated by its Twin, miraculously appearing in the final hour, and some believed this to be proof of a benign and merciful God. Not the harsh and demanding deity of the Old Testament but the kind and loving God of the New Testament. He who gave up so much to guide humanity ever towards the light and the good.
Most, however, knew a simple twist of fate when they saw one. Life on No Man’s Land had taught many to not expect help from gods.
Devils, on the other hand, tended to be a lot more reliable.
.o.
Few things in life were meant to last. They flickered into view, an oasis in the desert, only to flit away - a mirage, a ghost, a nothing-that-was-something.
And so it went with lives. And so it went with legends.
Heroes died like all the rest. Villains, too, were mortal. And so as they went, so did the truth of their tales to either be forgotten (God-willing) or become exaggerated, lionized, remembered-but-forgotten legends.
And there were many such legends. The False Angel and his demonic cult that had terrorized the planet, once upon a time. The False Angel’s Twin, masquerading as a common outlaw. The men and women who followed the Twin - principally among them, the Punisher. The Twin brought mercy; the Punisher brought justice. Or so the stories told.
It took only a few short decades for the last veterans of the Almost-Fall to pass away and take the final shreds of truth of that time with them. So the legends grew - names forgotten, deeds misremembered - even as civilization and progress bulldozed over the world those legends had once tread.
Motels, restaurants. A chapel in some no-name town. The remnants of the ancient city of July, humanity’s first foothold on the planet that had been sundered by the False Angel as a warning of the judgment to come.
(An orphanage, that progress never found, shielded by something inexplicable. A tendency for the eye to fall off the building and forget as soon as it was seen. A gravestone standing crooked but proud against the distant horizon, shimmering from view, easily forgotten once the looker looked away.)
A legend was a tall tale hallowed and forged into something that would persist forever. Buildings fell, humans grew old and ill. But the dust-hewn legends of No Man’s Land early years would never die.
.o.
Hundreds of years ago, there had been orphanages. Relics of an old, unstable approach to handling children without parents that had long ago been replaced by the modern system of state care and foster homes.
But there was one such orphanage that remained, truly as a relic, though no one lived there. Not full time, anyway. Still, the good-hearted people of No Man’s Land knew to visit periodically because always, without fail, they would find lost and forgotten children hiding within its abandoned halls.
Those same kind people had started to leave pillows, blankets, and cans of food and water for the children to make use of between their visits. The place had become like a shrine they made pilgrimage to every few weeks. They came and thanked whoever it was that led the children here, brought the children to warm homes and caring families, and returned again to find more waiting for them.
Many of the children were loath to leave, however. They screamed and cried as the adults tried to pull them away. They clung desperately to the walls of the sad, abandoned place. Some hid and at first did so successfully, tucking themselves in places their future caretakers couldn’t figure out how, exactly, they’d managed to find such a hiding spot.
They had learned to start bringing some of the formerly rescued children with them. When asked to, the once-children-now-adults agreed to come along enthusiastically.
(Why did that eagerness seem so eerie? As if the offer was not an invitation to help, but a way to get back to that place, if only for a little while?)
And thus it continued for a century more, until the only samaritans visiting the abandoned orphanage every few days were the children who had once called it their home.
“They go so often,” some would say.
“I wonder if there’s a reason,” some would reply.
And some would venture out, to see what that reason could be. But they would be returned, disoriented and confused, with no memory of striking out; no recollection of what they had seen or heard or how they’d ended up in such a state.
“It must be haunted,” they would say with a tremble in their voice.
“But why can those brought from there go back?”
“The spirits there chose them. They were allowed in once and are allowed to return.”
(And when that confusion turned to violence every few decades, as it always did, that haunted place would call its children home and hide them there for as long as it took for the world to forget. And, much like proud parents, the spirits of that place would bid them go as soon as it was safe. Because Hopeland had always been a place for the lost. On coming there, they had been found. And so, through their own salvation, they would always be turned away in the end.)
“It must be evil,” some would say.
“But the children say the spirits there love them. Whatever they are, they mean no harm.”
And so the world would remember and worship and forget, again and again: a hallowed home in the desert haunted by ghosts of No Man’s Land’s past and the silent saints of its future.