V is for Vagenda (Part 23 – Pride & Glory)

V is for Vagenda (Part 23 – Pride & Glory)

"When a man lies he murders some part of the world

These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives

All this I cannot bear to witness any longer

Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home“

    - Cliff Burton

Pride & Glory

Contemporary author Shannon Alder once said “You will never find the real truth among people that are insecure or have egos to protect. Truth over time becomes either guarded or twisted as their perspective changes; it changes with the seasons of their shame, love, hope or pride.”  Natural seasons are easy to predict, with repeatable results, as the dynamic is based upon physics bearing consistent, reliable, repeatable results.  We understand the cycles of our planets orbit around the sun.  What of the seasons within people, then?  Perhaps the cycles of individuals are not so cleanly organized into steady predictably repetitious patterns as is the case with nature, but are the dynamics behind them truly that obscure?

What of those that posit love being nothing more than a chemical reaction designed to encourage members of a species to breed?  What of those that love once and would prefer to honor that love for life even if that means dying alone in this world?  What of those that operate with broken physiological equipment suffering various forms of mental disease and chemical imbalances?  At what point do we really separate that current state, subtext, and context of our present behaviors and obstacles and root out the pure essence of the spirit inside of us?  Does anyone look beyond their self-concern and immediate impact in this modern fast-food, short attention span, ADHD, convenience and self-love driven generation anymore to have the required commitment to do so?  Who is teaching us how to do this skill properly?

If you determine the quality of a person pure in their spirit, you have a clean slate.  Add onto it years of interaction, experience, damage, rejection, coping mechanisms, glitches, compromised biological processes, injuries – you still have the same person underneath it all begging to be appreciated for being that pure state.  At the core, we all do this.

This is where pride comes from in its proper form.

That desire to have oneself seen is the very reason some are tempted to keep secrets or lie.  Some confuse a positive light for a pure one.  One is the truth, the other an ideal.

Or something like that…

I’ve been at the airport for hours when I decide to escape the rows and rows of people sitting patiently through endless streams of departures, arrivals, and announced delays when I decided to log into my laptop.  No new email.  No new Facebook messages.  Millions of computers sharing a significant share of the entire sum knowledge of mankind, a massive ever-expanding text-based search engine trying to make it all easily accessible, and I’m bored to tears.  Never before in history has so much work and effort been invested into such an impressive body of technology yielding such a grossly unproportioned response as is my unimpressed face in this exact moment.

I check out Twitch to see if anything live is actually interesting with almost no expectation of finding anything.  Once in a while I will see a band like King Cobra, or some aspiring young guitarist wishing he was my brother, put on a pretty fun little show in the Creative Art channels. I like to start at the bottom where no one is watching because usually the artist knows that no one is watching, and assumes no one will, so they are more likely to relax and be themselves, rather than putting on a show, a mask, holding up appearances, and editing how they truly feel for the sake of being politically correct and liked.

I’d rather be real and hated, than fake and liked.  I’d rather hate someone for who they are, than like someone for who they are not, as well.

Meanwhile, at Craddock House…

The solemn form of one Gentleman Ghost emerges floating through the hotels front doors with a hesitance as he reflects back on his life having been taken from him on this very street so many years ago.  From petty thief, to one of the most powerful sorcerer’s of any time - yet he is always alone.  Always, save for once.

In the short time it takes him to levitate along from the hotel entrance to the middle of the road, his mind races recounting his childhood, the Gypsy Queen prophesizing his demise at the hands of royal blood, growing up into one of history’s most notable thieves, and meeting Katherine Manser.

Since that time, his ability to travel through dimensions only served to torture his soul further, seeing firsthand the epic destiny that exists between Hawkgirl and Hawkman.  Time is but a dimension, and through an astral tether connecting his soul to any other, he can travel through dimensions following them.  None have a closer tether to his heart than Kate.

He’s had the misfortune to witness their journey, in part resulting from exposure to Thanagarian Nth Metal, where Prince Khufu and Chay-Ara follow each other in pure love as Egyptian royalty, and continually reincarnate finding each other.  The bond existing between them is so strong that they even clearly reclaim memories of former lives, enriching the bond between them.

In the 19^th century they had just found each other, in that wild west, as gun-slinging law enforcement.  At about that same time, they also were befriended by Gentleman Ghost, who in his actual lifetime was known as Jim Craddock.  

Hold your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Jim knew befriending local authority made his stake as a thief an easier one.  He hadn’t anticipated his raw attraction to Cinnamon – a nickname Kate reluctantly was known by.  He especially hadn’t anticipated how she stole the heart of this master thief.

The fateful day that their love for one another was uncovered, Hawkman (in that incarnation known as Nighthawk) had walked in on them in bed with one another at that very hotel, in room 23.  They scrambled as he entered.  Nighthawk immediately acted on the assumption that this betrayal by a friend was a rape in progress of his one true love.  In truth, Cinnamon stole Jim heart, and Jim had indeed just stolen her virginity.

Hawkman assaulted Jim, dragging him into the streets, and hung him immediately as a public execution – Jim finding his end to the hand of Royal blood just as the Gypsy Queen predicted in his youth.

Cinnamon was horrified helplessly witnessing who she truly loved in this life executed by who she only recently started to know she was “supposed to love”.  She could not live with anyone thinking Jim was a rapist, nor could she fully confess a love that betrayed her destiny and newly emerging memories of past lives.  She cleared Jim’s name to all making sure that all knew that there was no crime of rape at all.  However, her official explanation stopped short of the truth.  She claimed he had merely tried to steal her badge, and Nighthawk merely walked in on a struggle resulting from her awaking to find him try to remove it from her shirt.

Gentleman Ghost, reflecting on this once in a lifetime true love he briefly held with her, came to realize her shared destiny, watching how they continually found each other, life after life, reclaiming the sum of knowledge from each prior existence shortly after fate drew them back together.  It was much more intense a love than anything in the sum of human literature.  Even Romeo and Juliet ended tragically, but theirs was a love that genuinely exists past the grave.  It made Gentleman Ghost feel as though he was somehow inadequate, or inferior.  How can you compare to such an epic fate in a single life?  How can you bear knowing that the very target of your envy was also the very one who had murdered you for committing no crime at all.  In the end, Nighthawk had to live his entire life, and each subsequent one, knowing that in the end he committed murder upon an innocent over jealousy in the end.

Gentleman Ghost, damned to eternity in this form, came to certain powers.  Traversing dimension was sometimes to his advantage, but with the case of Cinnamon, it was also a curse.  In an almost ironic twist, of all the people whom he can touch or harm, he is unable to touch or use powers on virgins.  One thing he could never bring himself to witness was the timeframe within which Cinnamon managed to explain her pregnancy to Jim.  Gentleman Ghost’s entire family grew of this union – did she share that honestly with Nighthawk, or did she take him as a lover and pretend that it was their child she came to bear?

Revenge had largely consumed a lot of Gentleman Ghosts time.  Great care had been taken in the planning therein, as well.  One part of that revenge was to ensure that all future incarnations of Cinnamon would no longer be capable of recalling her former series of lives with Nighthawk.  This left her decidedly less open to his advances each time they were reunited.  This left Hawkman decidedly tortured being alone in the knowledge and history of their love.  The eternal guilt of what Hawkman had done, also, left him very forgiving and compassionate in his handling of all future encounters with Jim, as well.

That very genetic line, forward to present day, takes Gentleman Ghost to his pondering of his descendant – Vagenda.

All of these thoughts are but a few brief moments of personal reflection as Gentleman Ghost now comes to the center of the road.  There is nothing of this world suggesting anyone remembered his tragedy save for the fact that the hotel had been renamed after him.  As he stares at the very place Nighthawk murdered him so long ago, Gentleman Ghost comes to terms with what he has learned from his travels both to the past and to the future.

The world, such as it is, depends on his plan succeeding.

It isn’t that he doesn’t love her.  She is family, after all – even if she is unaware of this.  The timeline depends on the hard truth that Gentleman Ghost must ensure comes to pass.

Vagenda must die.