The Reward of The Oolyay by Liam Alden Smith

oozing lavender liquid.
    A day later he watched his village burn to the ground. The elders had been tossed from cliffs, the males slaughtered in their fields, the females raped and piked, and the children lined up for slavery. The blur of trauma was too great, too overwhelming for his child-mind to process. Only details that glowed like a candle in the darkness made themselves present. His brother’s death next to his father’s corpse, or the clattering sound of snapping wood as his home burned. Collapse and submission to torment seemed to be the only option, and Inlojem decided that this was his punishment for abandoning his faith.
    Then, a Necrologist stepped out from the smoke and flame and wiped away the vague torturous agony of slaughter and lifted Inlojem into his herculean arms. This behemoth of a Vesh showed the mid-grown boy his village and the enemies of his people, splayed out amidst the buildings; the raider’s army, slaughtered by the Oolyay’s own.
    “You have lost all you love to torment, young child,” confided the Necrologist. “But irony has rewarded you, for their loss is your gain. You will gain phenomenally all your life so long as you keep your faith.”
    The boy looked up into the mammoth’s eyes and asked his name, to which was replied,
    “I am The Master, called Quantelenk.”
    The Seeker, Inlojem, thought of these things as they climbed the path to the origin of his faith. The first time he had lost his faith torment had ensued, and he believed it to be his punishment. The second time he lost his faith he realized that torment was a fact of life; it had surrounded him for as long as he had remembered. The gain that Quantelenk had promised him had come from the experience of a life lived, and from those around him. It came from preserving his society and persevering it against continuous torment.
    The torment had never stopped; he had just ceased to recognize it, to believe it was there. Yet he knew that it was, and had fought to quell such torment for his whole life. Through the tending of plague victims, fighting against the Uyor, and the sacrifices of countless old Vesh that asked him for release. He knew deep inside that torment was still a part of his life. Only once he released his faith did it come crashing down, flooding his soul as though it washed through a breached dam.
    The faithless were not tormented more than those with faith- they just opened their souls and allowed that torment to flow into them directly, to accept the world as it was. The faithless recognized that they were not as important as their faith had led them to believe. He could not reconcile the idea that his one soul’s faithlessness had brought about Armageddon. He was an old man, from a small province in the North. He was not of such great import that without his belief, the world would come to a halt.
    Iquay halted in her tracks and looked back at the others with apprehension contorting her features. They approached her position and helplessly looked where she looked until she extended a hand to show them.
    “There, up ahead. My people are scalped and on pikes,” she said flatly. There was no terror in her voice, because Inlojem suspected there simply was no terror left in her. The old Vesh narrowed his eyes and peered through the thickening fog and snow to spy the narrow black body-sized shapes silhouetted by the distant path torches. Teftek’s young eyes could already tell that they were dead bodies
    “I should have known. I should have known!” Teftek spat, angrily, his constitution starting to break.
    “It may be nothing. Maybe they’re profligates who tried to defect from...“ Inlojem started.
    “Nonsense!” Iquay corrected him. “My people are not savages .”
    “Yes, they were ,” a voice retorted from out of the steadily heavier snow-fall. They raised their weaponry and their eyes darted to and fro. Inlojem’s knife came to his ready; he recognized that voice and knew that it brought