The Consequence
As the day marched on, the overcast sky gave no indication as to how much time they had actually been searching. Not a single person who had met in the barn the evening before had been able to find rest throughout the night, making the hours searching stretch on for what seemed like an eternity. They were all on their fifth or sixth wind at that point, coming down from yet another adrenaline spike after being spooked by the family of red foxes scurrying away as they approached.
At this point, no one was exactly sure what they were even looking for in the woods. The Reverend Thompson had repeatedly told them they were looking for evil in its most desirous form, but even he couldn’t paint a vivid picture of what that might look like. As the morning stretched on, he was starting to wonder if he would even know evil when he saw it himself.
Without warning, an ominous, chilling set of voices began to swirl around the group in a dizzying dance. They started as a low hum in the distance, quickly approached them, buzzed around their heads like a horsefly in the summer heat, and then left as quickly as they came. It was singing, but these were not songs that they had ever heard before. Some started to chase the song on the wind, only to have it come back toward them and flee in the opposite direction.
A startled gasp from one of the ladies toward the rear of the group turned everyone’s focus in her direction. The glow that had caught her eye was pulsing, almost as if it had a heartbeat. The posse crowded around her and stared in awe at the golden glow coming from the brambles before them. It wasn’t quite obvious from their vantage as to what exactly made up the golden treasure. It was small enough to be held in hand, and was sleek and rounded, but wasn’t a perfect sphere.
The Reverend Thompson pushed his way to the front of the pack, huffing and grumbling at each elbow he encountered. He wasn’t sure if it was his sense of duty that compelled him to the front of the group or if it was his unquenchable sense of entitlement, but he knew that he must be the first to examine their findings up close. As he bound forward into the brambles, he was able to examine his prize more thoroughly and was intrigued to find that it was an apple. Immediately, thoughts of Eve and her original sin rushed to mind, and he hesitated to pursue the apple further. Was this golden apple before him an opportunity for sin to ensnare him? No, he must pursue this at all costs. This was not the garden of perfection that he had read about in Genesis; this was the wilderness that Eve had forced all men to be cast out into. The knowledge of good and evil was the only thing that could save him now. He pushed forward and strained toward the golden apple, which caused the entire thorny tangle to shift, sending the gleaming treasure deeper into the snare. Rather than attempting to push through, Reverend Thompson decided to lead the group around, hoping to retrieve his bounty from the other side.
As they circumnavigated their thorny foe, the group found themselves entering a clearing that left them all unsettled. For hours, they had wandered around with no trace of another soul having ever ventured through that part of the woods; but, suddenly, almost as if by design, they were looking at the remains of a fire that had been recently extinguished. Above them, the canopy of white pine and red oak that had hidden them from the heavens was abruptly absent. Before them, broken branches had been bound together to create an altogether unnerving emblem hanging from a tree above the smoldering embers of the fire below. The sticks formed a hollow triangle with branches forming an ‘x’ crossing through its middle and a woven circle inexplicably hovering below the center of their intersection. It was then that they noticed the emblem itself was also smoldering but did not appear to have been burnt in any way. In their bewilderment and dismay, they all huddled closer and move forward toward the anomaly. Their murmuring and conjecture stopped altogether when they realized that one of the voices on the wind from earlier had returned and was emanating from the now white-hot emblem before them. The voice was hushed at first, as if it were telling them a secret.
“I can be all you need,” it coaxed. “Set me free with the hate you feed.”
