Oleander

## Backstory

*By Chad Ingalls*

I was born again from a womb of earth, deep in a system of caverns, buried in a cairn of hurriedly stacked stones and decorated with the skeletons of decomposed bodies.  The corpses did not bother me.  They, like all memories of my old life, elude my conscious, only grasped fleetingly in the bits of reality between other things.  The moments between sleep and wakefulness; the overheard cry of surprised pain.

What is clear is that I am unlike those to whom I was birthed, which is not to say that they are unlike me.  The Elders told me that I am one of them, that we are bound together somehow.  These words were always whispered hurriedly, carefully, quietly, as if the thought might somehow poison the tongue which uttered them.  I was nurtured, revered, but always with the caution which revealed something fascinating, yet dangerous.  A scorpion, perhaps.  Or a lethal flower.

The Elders took me far from that place, that placenta of stone.  Nursed me to health.  Yet as my strength grew, so too did the darkness inside me.  Grew until I felt I would be immolated in flame and shatter from cold at the same time.  A taint coursed through my veins, desperate to be inflicted on the world.  As this darkness overtook me I could see the fear in the Elders’ eyes grow to near overtaking them.  Then I saw no more.

I woke once again in the tomb of my birth, laid once more among the bones of my cairn.  It was then, lying in this sanctuary, that I was struck by how oddly beautiful the cavern was.  Veins of pyrite flecked with beads of darkness ran and danced along the stalactites which filled the cave.  My blood had calmed, though the Elders’ eyes remained full of fear.

It was in those hills, never more than a day away from that place, where the Elders raised me.  Told me of the demon in us all. Told me of the world, and the Veil.  Told me of other nephilim and the lineage of torment and pain left in their wake.  The Elders led a small band of nephilim they called The Order, those who had forsworn the blood of their fathers, holding instead to a rigid path of discipline and peace, denying the evil in them and hoping to castigate it from their descendants.  They trained me in their ways, though part of me always felt an outsider.  It was not my pale skin, my white hair, or translucent eyes.  Others of our clan had more distinct marks of our lineage than I.  Perhaps it was the way they felt when I looked at them.  As if they knew I looked into their soul.

I spent the days in keen observation of all around me.  I soaked in all I could.  Learned of these people.  Learned of the other peoples of this land who interacted hesitatingly with The Order.  Learned of myself.

Then he came.

He was… like me.  Only dark in all ways which I was pale, radiating poise and certitude.  He dealt death – death so forbidden to the Order -- with equal parts callousness and intimacy.  The smell of sharp decay filled my nostrils, as if generations of rats were boiling in sulfur.  His long coat swept behind him, wind catching in the hairs of its fabric, hairs of the victims of a thousand races and nations.

His dark eyes sought targets at random, like a raptor in a coterie of doves.  He drove them helpless before him, they who armed themselves solely with the iron will to accept what came.  He would pause at times, drawing one instrument or another from the folds of his coat and use it to lift a piece of a victim, ripped steaming from their corpse, holding it to his face and smelling of it deeply.

Desperate to remove me from his sight the Elders herded me deep into my cavern, yet on he came.  He was glorious.  He was revolting.  He seemed to have eyes only for me.

In the heart of the caverns, the mouth of my resting place, he carelessly he swatted an Elder’s head aside, body crumpling where it stood.  The next Elder stepped forward immediately to take his place.  He, too, died wordlessly.  I could not let this continue.  I would not.  My hand reached, almost of its own, beneath the sand near one of the corpses in the cavern.  A gun came up in my hand, pocked with time and rust yet sturdy and oddly comforting, gravitas radiating palpably from it up my arm and through my body.  I swung the barrel to point at this stranger, and fired.

The round merely grazed his neck, barely enough to draw blood.  He smiled.

Time seemed to slow as the round slammed into the rocks of the cave, flakes of pyrite and stone casting shrapnel into the air.  A few of these flecks dirtied the wound on his neck.  His sudden cry of pain matched the wild bewilderment in his eyes.  With a last, riveting gaze at me, he fled.

To the Elders the pain of losing so many of their number seemed trivial next to their pain at my act of violence.  I was now a bloodied one, a traitor, and I was excommunicated.

I wandered for days, mind reeling.  Soon, the fire and ice grew in my veins once more.  I fought it, yet my efforts barely slowed the corruption.  In desperation I crept secretly back into my cave and filled a pouch with the soil of my birth chamber before fleeing again into the wild.  As the darkness grew in me I urgently sifted the material, desperate to find the same bits of shine and darkness which so effected my attacker.  I would do to myself what had been done to him, and be done with it.  I took a knife, opened my veins, and mashed a handful of the compound into the wound.  As I did I was immediately overwhelmed with ice and fire and light.  I lost consciousness.

It was with no little surprise or disappointment that I awoke some time later, alive.  Just as it was a surprise to find the wound I had inflicted healed into a jagged scar.  Just as it was to find that the corruption inside me had faded.

I call myself Oleander.  To my knowledge I had never been given a name.  It suffices, and the irony occasionally causes me to smile – if only externally.  Thrust from all I knew to be home, I drift through the frontier, seeking.  The dark creature thought me prey, but now I am the hunter.  I will follow evil, knowing it will eventually lead me to the incarnation of malevolence I faced that night.

I have… so many questions for it.

And then, by my hand, it will die.