Tears and snot pour down my face as I weep, head in my hands as my Brother and Sister in Christ support me on either side, their comforting hands solid on my shaking back. Around me - the masses of my friends, singing praises and promises to God, paying little attention to me. I had been holding it in all evening, ducking into the bathroom to cry and hoping that my friends didn't notice my tear-stained eyes, but here where there was no chance of well-meaning but unwanted comfort I was letting it all out.
"Oh God! Why?! Why? Those arrows, aimed right for my heart, for the deepest oldest wounds. 'You are forgotten. You are so unimportant those you look up to forget about your very presence. You are a child. You know nothing.' They say, they shout to the very rooftops, trumpet to the tops of mountains, proclaiming shame and fear over me. Why?"
"There is a room locked deep in your heart that you haven't given me the key to. Your victories this summer mean nothing if that room is not unlocked and dealt with now. Will you trust me?"
Hesitatingly, "Yes."
"Take my hand"
We approach a plain wooden door, leading to the dungeons of my heart, where all of the deep evil lives. I hand God the key, and watch as he fits it into the lock. It is as he turns it that I realize I had been wrong. It isn't a door to the dungeons, but to the treasury, and rather than being plain and wooden it is made of gold and encrusted with jeweled flowers and birds.
***
'The door slid open. A blast of grief, of the deaths of children, of crippling diseases that took beauty at once but withheld death; of unconsummated love, of love lost or twisted or grown to hate; of noble deeds that proved useless, that broke the hearts of their doers; of betrayal without reason, of guilt without penance, of all the human miseries that have ever occurred; all this struck them, like the breath of a slaughterhouse, of the blow of a murderer... just this she had feared, had half-expected; yet the reality was much worse than what her tired mind had been able to prepare for her.
'Greetings, said Maur's head. I did not think to have the pleasure of seeing you again....
'She opened her mouth to gasp, and despair rushed in, bitter as aloes. Tears filled her eyes, but she pushed herself away from the threshold... "This---is why---we've been---so---tired---all along."
'"Yes." The sibilant hissed in the silence like adders' tongues...
'"We must get rid of Maur's head...." She walked purposefully up to the low platform where Maur's skull lay; the shadows in the eyesockets glinted... She set her shoulder in one of the ridged hollows at the base of the skull and heaved. Nothing happened but that Maur laughed louder; its laughter crashed in her head like thunder, and her vision was stained red...
'You shall not bully me again! Aerin said, and, almost not knowing what she did, pulled Gonturan free of her scabbard and slapped the flat of her across the base of Maur's head where once the backbone had joined. Blue fire leaped up in sharp tongues that lit the entire vault, with its many shelves and cupboards and niches, and doors into further strongrooms. It was a ghostly unhealthy color, but the skull shrieked, and there was a crack like a mountain splitting, and the skull fell of its pedestal to the floor....
'Maur had lost its ascendance once Gonturan had struck it, and while the skull still stank, it seemed almost an organic stench now, under the open sky; no more than the faint rotting smell of ancient carrion.'
~The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley
***
Lies instead of truth, despair instead of hope, darkness instead of beauty, were in the treasure places of my heart. The dragons' heads that I put in places of honor still send out whispers of lies, but it's different now. They are losing their ascendancy in my heart as they are attacked by the Word of God, which is the sword of the spirit. And that gives me hope.
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