God's Chosen Few

Content Warning: Brief depictions of violence and gore, mentions of suicide and self harm.

God’s Chosen Few

This is what I deserve.

The thought came unbidden but Dante clung to it, let it drive all else away.

This is what I deserve.

He was a tall man, handsome and haunted and too proud of both. He’d been many things in his thirty-five years–scholar, soldier, poet–but he felt now he’d been nothing at all.

This is what I deserve.

It was his fault she was dead. He had left her, and in so doing allowed her to be stolen by another. To be taken where no man would follow.

But he was not like other men. His fate had been tailored from the first, woven for a purpose by Heaven itself. And now, standing before the gates of Hell, Dante Alighieri vowed to fulfill that purpose at last.

She had been taken from him. He would take her back.

#

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” 

The sign was Latin, carved into a cliff of white stone. Dante peered at the words as he passed beneath them and told himself the warning was for others, not God’s chosen few. And he believed it.

The cave’s darkness was implacable. It met the sunlight at the threshold and held it there, letting it disturb no shadow within. The torch flickered in Dante’s hand, tendrils of fire licking futilely at the void. The only sounds were feet scraping on stone – his and others, shuffling about unseen in the dark. Off to his right, someone sobbed. To his left, something screamed. A child wailed behind him – or was it an old man?

He wandered blindly until he saw it at last: a pinprick of light, growing larger with every step. The cacophony swelled as Dante pressed on, running now, gaze locked on his salvation as the sounds around him grew to a deafening roar. And then: silence. Dante had to squeeze his eyes shut against the brilliant light that enveloped him. Slowly, cautiously, he eased them open.

Grass-covered hills rolled like waves under a scarlet sky. In the distance, a great tower stood silhouetted against the misted horizon. Dante scrambled down the sloping gravel and fell to his knees in the long grass. His laughter echoed through the heavy air as he buried his fingers in the mud, remembering the lake he and Beatrice had played in as children.

She’d loved to swim in the autumn months, when others their age were scared away by the cold. Had the idea been anyone else’s, Dante would have mocked it without mercy. But the idea was hers, so he’d found himself escorting her through lamplit streets under a full October moon.

“You insist on splashing around and calling it swimming, someone’s got to be there when you drown,” he told her, grinning.

“You’re coming for the chance to save me?” she asked dryly. She was always the better swimmer, though he’d never admit it.

“I’m coming so I can deliver the speech. A funeral is an excellent place for a young poet to find his patro–”

Then the mud came flying his way, great handfuls that drove him into the dark, frigid water.

#

His eyes rose to the distant tower. The hills were alive with the murmur of wind through grass, though the stalks themselves were motionless. Leaving his torch to gutter and die, Dante set off through Limbo.

When Dante reached the tower’s walls, he found the gates open to him. Inside was a high-ceilinged room full of aging men milling about aimlessly. He eyed them warily but, to his immense relief and mild irritation, none paid him any attention. So he worked his way through the chamber, pushing past men in armor, in togas, in tunics and in robes. In the room’s center, he froze. Leaning on a pillar just beside the great doors was, impossibly, someone Dante recognized. Not from his life, but from his books. As if in a dream, he crossed to greet him.

“Socrates.”

The answering smile was warm.

“Why are you here?” Dante asked.

“Why are any of us here?” Socrates mused.

Dante frowned at the question, thinking it rather open-ended.

#

Shards of bone slid away like sand under Dante’s boots as he picked his way across Lust’s grim landscape. Sleet came down hard and left angry red welts where it hit his skin. Screams whirled around him, or perhaps it was the wind. A man and a woman hit the ground in front of him violently, naked and tangled in each other's grasping limbs. And then they were gone, lost to the wind and the rain. Souls punished for the sin of Lust? Is this their justice? The questions swirled through Dante’s mind as if carried on the same wind that tore at his hair and clothes.

Dante emerged into a swamp that smelled of rot and mold. Mud clung to the soles of his boots and made each step harder than the last. He trudged through ankle-deep water, refusing to look behind him where he knew Lust’s storms still raged, refusing to remember a night spent with Beatrice ten years earlier.

Beyond the swamp’s edge, heavy boulders were rolled in wide circles by the souls of the greedy. Catching his breath atop a barren hill, Dante watched. He knew that this was God’s will. How else could it be at all? Still, he couldn’t shake a nagging dread that sat deep in his chest and threatened to make him sick.

Past Greed’s valley, Dante came upon a wide river. Its water was calm, if a little murkier than he would’ve liked. But there was a boat, too – a small, wooden vessel with a pair of oars inside. This, he decided, was a gift from God, a sign that his quest remained a righteous one.

Pushing off from the black-pebbled shore, Dante vowed that he would doubt no longer. The fates of the souls imprisoned in this place had made him question divinity. But those souls had received God’s judgement, and were now at the mercy of the devil’s consequences.

#

Something was wrong. The rhythmic splashing of the oars biting the water had lulled Dante into a strained calm, but now he studied the river’s surface. The water was still, the oars… 

The oars. They dipped in and out of the water silently, as if their earlier splashing had been only for his benefit. Then, without warning, the oar was wrenched into the water, and Dante with it. Something had ahold of his shirt, of his hair, of his arms. He forced his eyes open, ignoring the water’s stinging cold, and found himself staring into a face disfigured by rage. Fear lent Dante strength as he tore himself away and fell backwards into the boat. Watching him from just below the water’s surface was a tapestry of bodies, their bloated heads trapped inches from the air they craved.

Gnarled fingers clawed at the boat, and Dante decided they must be jealous of his freedom. A wave of fury blinded him, burned the last of his terror away. How dare they envy me? He kicked out at one of the hands as it gripped the boat’s edge, relishing the crunch of the bones beneath his heel. How dare they touch me at all? He used the surviving oar to work his way across the remaining stretch of river, striking out viciously at the damned whenever they dared emerge from the water.

#

This shore was guarded by high walls under a pallid yellow sky. But, as in Limbo, Dante found the gates were open. A cool wind howled through narrow streets hemmed in by houses and towers, storefronts and taverns – all of them empty. Dante shuddered. Who in this evil place could deserve so beautiful a city?

The answer awaited past the structures, where the cobbled street snaked through rows of stone slabs. It was a cemetery, Dante realized, and remembered the day he had watched them lower his mother into a tomb not unlike these. He had been a child then, too young to understand why his family’s friends avoided him, as though he had inherited her sin.

“She’s in a better place, now.” The voice belonged to a thin girl, only a little older than he.

“She slit her wrists with an eating knife,” he replied flatly.

“She must have been terribly unhappy.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “She was.”

“If God is good,” Beatrice said carefully, “then He will have allowed her some happiness, wherever she’s gone.”

And Dante had fallen in love.

#

Hell’s dead screamed. Dante heard their muffled cries from within their tombs and walked on, leaving them to the fates they had earned and descending into a thick forest. The trees were ancient and, when he stared long enough, he thought he saw faces in their gnarled trunks. He walked faster, focusing instead on the dark birds that picked endlessly at the leaves overhead.

Dante picked his way down a steep hill, feeling the air grow colder. The dirt gave way to ice beneath his feet and snowflakes swirled in flurries around him.

The blizzard was blinding and he didn’t see the dais until he was standing at its base. Stone steps twisted up to a simple chair of frosted iron: the devil’s throne. And it was empty.

“It’s about as comfortable as it looks, I fear.” The voice was behind him. He whirled to stare into the kind eyes of a man no older than twenty.

“Lucifer,” Dante breathed. The devil’s smile was friendly. 

Dante clasped his hands behind his back to stop them shaking. “I’m here for Beatrice.”

The young man looked around pointedly. “She’s not… no, I don’t see her here. Do you?”

“She doesn’t deserve this,” Dante insisted.

“Who does?” said the devil. “Your mother gave her life fleeing misery, and God made her a tree for her troubles. If you’re looking for justice, you’ll not find it here.”

Dante remembered the trees in the forest, picked at by vultures and crows.

“My mother made her choice,” he said, sounding more sure than he felt. “Beatrice–”

“– is a sinner, and enduring God’s mercy. As are we all,” Lucifer cut in sharply.

“This is your kingdom.”

“This is my prison!” the devil snapped.

Dante stepped forward angrily. “This path was prepared for me by God, to take back what is mine by rights.”

“This path was prepared for you by me.”

“You lie,” Dante hissed.

The devil only shrugged. “I cannot give you what you came for.”

“Will not, you mean.”

Lucifer considered this, then nodded. “That is what I mean, yes. I will not.”

Dante glared at the fallen angel.

“Then I’ll do it myself.” He began to climb the stairs, each step slick with ice.

“And when you’ve returned her soul to her body and you remain here, bound to that accursed chair, what then?”

The question pursued him, equal measures mocking and sincere. Dante stopped at the foot of the throne.

“She is mine,” he said grimly. “I will keep the gate open, and she will return to me.”

With that he sank into the iron chair, its metal cold against his back. Where the devil had been was only empty air. Dante – prisoner, warden, and lord of Hell – restored life to his lost love, and he commanded the gates be opened.

#

The kingdoms of Italy were the first to fall under the onslaught the poet had released. From Jerusalem to the British Isles, his name became a curse. 

And Dante waited.

#

Famine ran wild and pestilence abounded. The world whispered that God had abandoned them. 

And Dante waited.

#

Months turned to years and hope turned to ash. Those empires that remained united under the banners of crusade. The armies of man marched into Hell, butchering sinner and demon alike. 

And Dante waited.

#

One thought haunted him, ate at his resolve. He suffocated it, burned it away. And still, in the quiet and the cold, it plagued him.

Is this what I deserve?